Landing pages help your measure results and track interactions
By now, most business owners and marketing managers understand the basics of marketing online. Tools like social media, business blogs, online advertising and e-mail allow you to reach a target audience. But once you’ve reached that audience, and maybe even encouraged people to visit your website, then how do you track those interactions? How do you measure the return on your investment in online marketing?
Landing pages are on key tool for quantifying your online marketing efforts, and also for building a marketing list for future promotions.
So, what exactly is a landing page? A landing page is a web page that lives on your website but usually sits outside the main navigation, meaning people generally only visit the page when they link to it directly from an outside source. Landing pages can include forms to gather contact info from prospects. They can have links for direct purchase from an online store (e-commerce). They can include links to free downloads, such as an e-book or instructional video. Typically, they also contain written copy related to the promotion and optimized for specific keywords.
Landing pages are created for a specific promotion or purpose. For example, you might have an ad running on Google, and everyone who clicks that ad gets sent to a specific landing page that explains your promotion and then links them to the next step in the buying process. Or maybe you’ve sent out an e-mail promo and want people go to a specific page to measure the results. That’s a landing page. You can even combine landing pages with traditional marketing, such as post card promotions or print ads. You can create a new landing page for each print promotion, allowing you to measure the return on investment for each of those campaigns. In online marketing, marketers use social media, email campaigns or search engine marketing (SEM) campaigns to link to landing pages.
There are two main goals for landing pages:
- Gather information about a prospect to use in future marketing campaigns (e-mail address, phone number, buyer persona information)
- Convert visitors into customers.
1. Gathering information
One of the primary goals of any online marketing campaign is to gather information from potential customers so you can communicate with them in the future. Landing pages with embedded forms are a great way to do that. Often, you’ll want to offer people something in exchange for giving you their information. For example, a free webinar on your area of expertise, and to sign up they just need to provide a name, e-mail address and maybe answer a couple distinguishing questions to help you categorize them.
2. Converting site visitors to customers
Landing pages should be clear, concise and inviting enough for the site visitor to click on it. Once your site visitor gets onto your landing page, you’ll want to provide calls-to-action telling the visitor exactly what you want them to do. If the page is set up as a sales vehicle, make that sales call to action clear, like “CLICK HERE TO BUY NOW.” Bold, graphical buttons work best. Then you can link from that button to your e-commerce system, online store, payment form or whatever purchase vehicle you have set up.
Don’t forget to measure your results
The great thing about landing pages is that you can analyze click-through rates and conversions to see how well each page performs. You can use tools like Google Analytics to dive deeper, proprietary marketing software like Hubspot or, if your website is built on WordPress, built-in WordPress plugins. Being able to analyze the different metrics for each landing page will help you make more informed decisions on how to structure your page, and how to create future landing pages. You could even set up multiple pages for the same campaign and perform A/B tests to determine which copywriting styles work for you, whether you should include videos or photos, and test other variables.
Want to learn more about online marketing? Check our some of our free resources on social media marketing and online marketing 101.
