Landing Pages
Your homepage doesn’t have to do everything. A lot of businesses, especially those without the resources to hire dedicated marketing teams, default to sending all their traffic to the homepage. A landing page is a valuable, and underutilized tool—understanding the difference and the different strengths it offers can change your entire online process.
What is a landing page
A landing page is, typically, a standalone page built around a single goal (often referred to as a campaign) and a single audience. Landing pages are so goal oriented they oftentimes go so far as removing the standard site navigation—eliminating distractions so the user is focused on the single action you want them to take.
How a landing page is different than your homepage
A homepage is meant to introduce your entire brand and business; it is representative of multiple goals and needs to serve multiple objectives depending on the individual user or specific audience.
By contrast, a landing page cuts out the noise and speaks to a specific set of users about one single, specific, relevant-to-them thing.
When you send everyone to the same homepage, you make every visitor do the work to determine what’s relevant to them, or to hunt for the offer that brought them to the site.
The anatomy of a landing page
The necessary components of a landing page come down to three items: a clear headline, a tailored message, and a single call to action.
You can add supportive content such as a hero image, demo video, supporting sub-headings and copy, social proof, features, and benefits. Whatever you add however should be hyper relevant to your target audience and the specific goal of that landing page—if you dilute this focus you’ll weaken its impact.
When a landing page makes sense
Landing pages are often used by bigger brands during partnerships or ad campaigns. Even small businesses can get value from strategically using landing pages.
While there is still value in sending general traffic to your homepage you might want to consider using a landing page in the following scenarios:
- Running paid advertising such as google or meta ads on specific demographics
- Promoting any kind of specific offer, special deal, or event.
- Capturing email signups or leads for a specific audience.
- Following up on a referall, lead, or potential partnership with a tailored message.
- Any scenario where you can identify a visitor will be arriving on your site with a specific intent.
Common mistakes
1. Sending ad traffic to the homepage
Directing ad traffic to your homepage is likely to result in low conversions. Instead, try to setup dedicated landing pages for your campaigns that reinforce and back up its key message.
2. Showing your full site navigation on a landing page
Remember, the purpose of a landing page is to focus the user on the singular, isolated objective that led them there in the first place.
Retaining your full navigation gives your user an opening to distraction—and invites them to go off of this primary path.
3. Writing the page for everyone, instead of a specific individual
Your landing page isn’t meant to be relevant to everyone and it shouldn’t try to be—that’s what your homepage is for. By trying to appeal to too many people at once you’re diluting the impact of its message for the audience it was meant for.
4. Measuring success by traffic instead of conversion
There’s value in both metrics, and the number of how many people you are driving to a landing page can be indicative of the success in your referring ad campaign, email, or post. At the end of the day however, the number of people who seeyour offer doesn’t really matter, the number of people who convert does.
Your conversion rate is the number of people who actually take the action your landing page is pushing them to take—be it singing up, or buying your product.