First up, what are landing pages anyway?

You’ve probably heard the term “landing page” but perhaps you’re not exactly sure what it means.

It doesn’t seem that big of a deal if it’s just a page people land on when they come to your website, in response to your advertising, right?

But yes, that’s really what it is!

Except the trick is to send different people to different landing pages, which are separate from your main website home page.

Why? Because a landing page is designed to get visitors to take one very specific action. It might be subscribing to your email list, signing up for an educational webinar, booking a free demonstration, or purchasing a limited offer product.

Work with me, here. Imagine you’re a widget business and you sell widgets in various colors – say blue, white and red. You have a website called widgets.com.

However, your market is segmented. The blue widgets are designed for men, white widgets appeal to women, and red widgets are for senior citizens.

This would make advertising for widgets.com very difficult, because you’d be trying to put a bunch of different propositions into your advertising message.

Back in the day, when I ran training seminars for the clients of radio, television and newspaper companies, I said this is like trying to toss a bucket of tennis balls to your prospect. They’re not likely to catch any!

It’s better to gently lob a basketball, so they can catch it.

The basketball is a metaphor for your message.

Each basketball would be a single message which is easy to understand. So you’d have a basketball just for men, talking about blue widgets.

Then one for women, describing the benefits of white widgets and, lastly, a basketball you could toss to senior citizens, about the red widgets.

And because it’s specifically written for a single market niche, then now you can target your message to those markets, with laser precision.

Your advertising for blue widgets (men) might appear in hunting, fishing and motorcycle magazines or websites. For women you could use lifestyle, cooking and parenting channels.

Senior citizens? I guess you’d consider retirement and travel sites.

But where will you send them?

OK, so now you’ve created campaigns for the different target markets and you have traffic for each of your widget offers. But if you send all these prospects to your website home page, then you’re back with the basketball vs tennis ball dilemma.

So here’s the KEY POINT: no matter how or where you advertise, your landing page must match your message.

Prospects arrive with expectations, based on your advertising. So it’s vitally important you capture their attention and interest by meeting those expectations.

If your landing page doesn’t have images and information matching the promise of your ads, then your prospects won’t stick around to learn more.

But with a targeted lead page, focused on the needs of a specific target customer, your conversion rate can be as high as 60% to 80%, or more!

How do you build a landing page?

Well, unless you manage your own website you have a couple of choices. One is to pay a developer and the other is to use one of the online landing page building services and link to it from your advertising.

Remember, the key to better conversions is to make sure your landing page reflects the promises made in your advertising.

But what happens when your landing page becomes ‘stale’ because the offer expires or your webinar is over? The traffic from your ad will continue long after you stop running your ad (because of bookmarks, for example.)

Easy. Set up a redirect to a related page on your site. You can even use an exact match domain for your landing page then redirect it back to your website!

Learn how, here.

Was this helpful?
Please leave a comment below.

. . . and get onto my ‘Insiders’ List
Be notified when I publish new posts with valuable information
you can use in your business. Just enter your details, here:

(You can unsubscribe at any time.)