A Landing page is simply a web page for capturing the information of visitors that land on the page. It typically does this through a conversion form, also known as a lead-capture form.

A good landing page does the following:

Targets a specific audience

For instance, leads from a pay-per-click ad, traffic from an email campaign, or blog visitors.

Offers the audience something of value

For example, a downloadable informative e-book, a webinar, a free trial, coupons for a product, and so on.

Captures visitors’ information

That’s including who they are, how to reach them, and why they offered you that information.

Convert as many of the visitors as possible into leads

It does this by combining Points 2 and 3 above. This means enticing visitors with a valuable offer (as stated in Point 2) but only giving the offer to them when they have fulfilled Point 3 (that is, offered you their information by filling out a lead-capture form). Example: having visitors sign-up to get your free informative e-book.

A Little Bit About How Landing Pages Work

Problem: John recently bought a horse, but he knows very little about grooming horses. He needs help.

Problem Solver: You groom horses for a living, and you run a blog about owning and taking care of horses. You need clients. So you create a landing page and connect it to your blog or ad campaign using a call to action.

John Seeks a Solution: John searches “how to groom a horse” on Google Search and Google leads him to your blog or ad campaign. He reads your content on grooming horses and at the end finds a call to action prompting him to download your free e-book on grooming horses.

What John Thinks: He needs help grooming his horse, and he thinks your e-book might be helpful. In other words, valuable.

What John Does: John clicks on the call to action and it takes him to your landing page. The landing page asks him to register in order to download the e-book. Now, he has no choice. He needs that e-book (value). So he fills out the form with his information.

Conversion: You now have John’s information. You can now entice him with more offers or perhaps get him to hire you to groom his horse. Chances are that after reading the e-book and noticing your expertise in the field, he would come running back to you to groom his horse.

The above example isn’t the only way a visitor could move from a stranger to a lead. Visitors can also find your landing page through PPC, referral traffic, social media, email, a website, or even directly, perhaps, because you shared the link to the landing page somewhere.

The most important set of things is to set up the landing page and make it easy for your targeted audience to find it.

Difference Between a Landing Page and a Full Website

A website is meant to be informative, to give visitors information about your brand and product/service, to educate your visitors, to establish your expertise in a certain niche topic, and so on. A website can also aim to convert those visitors to leads. However, it’s not focused or concise enough to convert visitors before they get carried away.

A landing page, on the other hand, is meant specifically for driving conversion. It’s succinct, persuasive, and compels visitors to make the decision you want them to make in the shortest time possible. It’s like a funnel through which prospects from a website or a marketing and promotional campaign flows into your leads pool.

Make no mistake, a landing page can’t function alone. It will not convert visitors to leads if no one lands on it or if no one knows it exists.

• First, you need to create it.
• Second, you need to get it noticed. Make it easy to be found.

Therefore, you need to direct visitors to the landing page from one or more of the following places:

• A blog you run.
• Your website.
• Search Engine
• A marketing/promotional campaign.
• Social media.
• Email marketing.
• Referral traffic.
• Forums and online places where you share the link to the landing page.

Fail to do that and your landing page would simply be a fancy web page sitting in oblivion on the internet.

Four Benefits of a Landing Page

Generate More and Better Leads

Of course, a website or blog can generate leads, but a landing page does it better. It captures leads at a much higher rate. That’s why many successful companies that have a website or/and blog also have landing pages. Many even use landing pages as their websites’ home pages. For higher conversion, you might need to have multiple landing pages, each targeting a specific audience demographic by making them an offer unique to them.

Create a Home for Your Marketing Offers

Website visitors looking for informative content typically frown at marketing offers, especially when they are not interested in the offers they are seeing. This makes putting marketing offers on your blog or website dicey. It can piss off your visitors. This is where a landing page comes in. It simply separates those marketing offer from the informative content on your site or blog and gives them a separate home to live.

Also, marketing offers are simply meant to convert users, to motivate them to purchase a product or service. It thus becomes reasonable to put the offers on a page designed specifically for conversion.

Gather Information About Your Audience

Do you know that your marketing and sales team gather valuable demographic information whenever a visitor fills out a conversion form on your landing page? The information can help your team understand the type of people that are converting because of the offer made on the landing page. It gives them a better understanding of the type of people interested in the product or service associated with the offer on the landing page. This will help make your targeting more direct and efficient.

Improve Your SEO

Ask yourself this simple question: when last did you click to the second or subsequent pages of a Google Search result? You probably don’t remember. This suggests that pages that don’t appear on the first page of search results are doomed to be ignored by search engine users. In fact, 68% of the time, search engine users only click on the top five search results on Google’s first page. Therefore, if you truly want organic search traffic, you need to be one of the top five results for search terms relevant to your brand. By creating multiple landing pages, you get multiple chances to rank high in relevant searches.

And when you rank high, your landing pages attract more visitors, and more visitors translate to higher conversion.

Now that you have the benefits of landing pages at your fingertips, don’t dawdle further. Go and develop your own landing pages and start converting more leads.

This article also appeared in Macaulay Gidado’s Medium Publication.