What is a landing page?
Landing pages are the first pages of users ‘lands’ when they visit your website. It is the first page they see before doing anything else on your site.
That explains it in a layman’s language.
When it comes to digital marketing, a landing page is a special web page you’ve designed to work hand in hand with your advertising campaigns to achieve goals.
Let me explain using an example.
Let’s say you want people to sign up for your upcoming webinar and you are promoting this upcoming event using Facebook ads.
Typically, for one to attend a webinar, they need a name and email address.
So, how will you get this vital information?
Create a dedicated web page where people will do nothing else but input their name and email address.
And that is what landing page is; works as a one-goal-only web page. So, when someone clicks on your ad on Facebook, they are taken directly to this special page you’ve created.
Here, they do only one thing; provide their name and email.
That is a landing page.
What is the difference between a landing page and other web pages?
I know this is confusing especially if you are new to this stuff. Continue reading to get a better understanding.
Unlike other web pages, the landing page has only one goal, commonly known as Call To Action (CTA in short).
Think about this for a second.
When someone lands on your home page, there is more than one thing they can do. Either go to the shop section, click the contact button, read terms and conditions, among other ton of actions.
On the flip side, a landing page has only one goal. When a visitor comes in, they are not distracted and almost instantly know what to do next.
That brings us to next thing:
Types of landing pages
Out there, you may come across several variations of landing pages. But they all come down to only two:
- Landing pages used for lead generation
Also commonly known as ‘led gen’ or ‘lead capture’ pages, they work by asking the visitors to fill a form. Their CTA is a form.
The form could be collecting information such as names, email addresses, phone numbers. There is no limit here by the way.
Lead generation landing pages can be used to gather information about your target market.
In fact, this is the darling to B2B marketers selling high-ticket products or services. They use it to build an email list of their target customers.
And even take it to the next level; offering something valuable like an eBook, a course, or webinar for free in exchange for the email address.
On the other side, online shops use this type of LP to build lists by offering things like free shipping or exclusive deals.
- Clickthrough landing page
Unlike the lead generation landing page, clickthrough LP’s goal is to get straight to sales or subscriptions.
It is very common with eCommerce websites and Software as a service (SaaS) brands.
Usually, the page contains only one simple button with CTA like, ‘buy now,’ ‘Start Free Trial’ and such.
These buttons are designed to introduce the visitor directly to the checkout.
For example:
If you have a subscription software, you can create a clickthrough landing page with a button asking visitors to start a 13-day free trial. The button should link directly to the checkout.
As you can see, landing pages has a pivotal role in your digital marketing campaigns.
But what exactly can you do with an LP?
What are the uses of landing pages?
As we’ve already mentioned, LP had only one goal, and that is to eliminate distractions and get the user focussed on completing one action.
That ‘one action’ could be anything you can determine what it is depending on your marketing campaign goals.
8 ways you can use a landing page
Here are 8 ways fellow marketers use LP
- Used along with ad campaigns such as PPC (pay per click), Facebook ads, Twitter, and other online ads or offline, to direct visitors to a page where you can get their info
- To drive people to your online events like a webinar, Livestream, etc.
- Build your email list/newsletter
- Promote your new product launch
- Use it to market your free eBook
- Give away a free printable guest pass to an event in your offline store or printable coupon
- Build a landing page as a personalized destination in the resource box from a guest blog post
- Use LP to personalize your social media profile links
Now, don’t get it wrong; this is not an exhaustive list of what you can do. Remember, if you want your conversion rate to increase, landing pages are the best.
Having said that, there is one huge challenge when it comes to using LP to increase conversions: how to make sure that your page is actually maximizing all the traffic coming in.
The answer to this question is ensuring that you are building the page that is aimed at increasing conversion.
This brings us to this:
What does a good landing page look like?
Qualities of a good landing page
Here are 5 things that a good landing page should have.
- Should have a clear call-to-action – the page should make it clear what the visitor should do next. To do that, make sure the page has fewer distractions and only one button. If the page is about for encouraging users to download a file, only include the download button and nothing else
- Clean and straight forward text – use simple language and readable fonts. The easier to read, the better. It should also be relatable to the audience
- Use quality images – apart from short and sweet texts, use high-quality images to complement the message. This could be products’ images, infographics among others
- Use color schemes wisely
- Build trust – use trust signals more, stuff like testimonials and anything that shows you are a trustworthy brand
Once you have a quality landing page, the next thing is to drive traffic to it.
Here is the thing:
Without traffic, it doesn’t matter how pretty your LP is because it will be useless. It doesn’t matter how valuable your offer is, no one will see it. Don’t worry because I will show you two effective ways to get them.
How to drive traffic to the landing pages
There are two ways you can do that, either use paid traffic or use free traffic. Let’s look at each further.
Using paid traffic
As the name suggests, here, you are spending money to drive people to the page. The most popular and effective ways of getting paid traffic are using ads such as:
- Social media ads (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn)
- Paid search traffic – targeting keywords on search engines and pay every time someone clicks on your ad (also known as PPC ads) and display ads
- Sponsored posts on websites
If you do not have a budget to get the paid traffic, the next source of traffic is your best bet.
Using Free traffic
Instead of paying for traffic, you are leveraging free sources to drive traffic to your landing pages. Here is what you can do:
- Using email campaigns
- Posting links to the landing page on social media profiles
- Visiting forums where your target audience congregates and posting the links to the LP
- Leverage organic traffic from search engines
Where can you build a landing page?
Free landing page builders
Here are 4 popular landing page builders you can use now to design and publish your landing pages within 30 minutes:
- WIX – it is a free page builder and comes with a library of landing page templates you can use
- Site123 – has a professional-looking collection of templates you can choose and it also free
- Elementor page builder – it’s a free drag-and-drop page builder. You don’t need to know to code to use it.
- OLITT– besides building websites in under 3 minutes, you can also launch landing pages
Are you ready to build your first squeeze page or still have questions? Look at the FAQ section below.
Frequently Asked Questions about landing pages
- What is the landing page in WordPress?
A landing page is a special web page used to encourage visitors to complete a specific action, like download a file, start a free trial, fill a form, etc. Now, this page can be build using different tools such as OLITT page builder, Elementor, and even WordPress. To use the latter, you need to install special plugins. So, the landing page in WordPress means a landing page build on WP.
- How to create a landing page
Creating a landing page takes less than 3 minutes with the OLITT page builder.
- Go to Olitt.com and create an account
- Name your page
- Choose a template
- Start editing to completely customize the page
That is how to create a landing page
- How does landing page work?
Landing page work by encouraging visitors to take action. If you are trying to sell something, your landing pages will be helping to achieve that. How? Include testimonials of your happy customers, build trust, and show credibility.
- What should be on a landing page?
A landing page should contain the following:
- A call-to-action
- Quality images to compliment the message
- Clear and straight to the point texts
- Color schemes
- A headline to grab attention and communicate the page value
- Testimonials