1300 71 61 41The life of a marketer is no easy feat - while we might have some fun here and there with fancy graphics, trying out cool new tech or playing with the office Frenchie, the very essence of our job is to convert visitors into leads. And what's the best way to get them to convert? (Shout if you know it!) - Landing pages!
Despite knowing the answer, there is a huge disconnect between the importance of landing pages and their use by marketers, with 44% of clicks for B2B companies being directed from CTA's to the business homepage, rather than to a special landing page. Let me put it this way, directing a lead to your homepage instead of a landing page is like finally plucking up the courage to ask that dreamy barista with the nose ring out for a drink, and then purposely going to the wrong bar. You started so strong but then shot yourself in the foot when it came time to close the deal.
I know what you must be thinking, "Hold up Liv, if landing pages are as important as you say they are, then why are they so under-utilised?" Touchè. Look, the real reason is that marketing departments don’t know the tips and tricks for making their landing pages sleek, optimised lead-gen machines!
As they're the heart and soul of an inbound marketers lead generation efforts, I'd say it's definitely time for a quick refresher on why landing pages are so important, so that by the end of this blog you'll be itching to create more for your business (oh and for your bottom line!).
So, what is a landing page?
Glad you asked - a landing page is a standalone web page which allows you to collect a visitors information through a lead capture form. It's where a visitor 'lands' (curse my riddles, right?) after clicking on something like an email promoting an eBook or even on a PPC ad promoting YouTube videos. Unlike web pages, which typically have many goals and encourage extensive exploration to other pages, landing pages are designed with a single focus or goal - known as a Call-to-Action. It's this focus that makes landing pages so freakin' good at converting a higher percentage of your visitors into leads, whilst capturing information about who they are and what their history with your business has been like.
Why you need landing pages
1. Easily generate leads
As I made abundantly clear earlier on, too many companies send their traffic from email, social media and search to their homepage, which (while on the right track) is a far too distracting environment to get them to focus on your offering! So do yourself a favour, and send your traffic to targeted landing pages so you can then easily segment, nurture or distribute them to your sales team.
2. Give a home to your offers
Like cheese and crackers or Sundays and Netflix, marketing offers and landing pages go hand-in-hand. Without being gated behind landing pages, your offers will do nothing to support your lead generation efforts. Think of your landing page like a collection tool - requiring your visitors to pay you in contact information for the valuable content you've provided.
3. Collect information about your prospects
Every time a lead completes a conversion form on a landing page, your marketing and sales team can collect valuable information about them. This then allows marketing to suss out what types of visitors or buyer personas are converting, and gives sales some baseline information before they reach out to a lead.
4. Understand which prospects are more engaged
Not only do they enable you to generate new leads, oh no! These bad boys also allow you to track reconversions of existing leads, so you can identify which prospects are more engaged with your business than others, and gain some smarts around your leads' behaviour and their activity on your website to help out your sales team later on!
5. Integrate with other marketing channels
A successfully wholesome inbound marketing strategy is dependent on content to keep it ticking over nicely. Landing pages are a great addition to your marketing tool-belt, ready to be used as the focus of an email, social media post or even linked to in PPC ads!
6. Improve your SEO
It's simple maths - more landing pages = better SEO. While your landing pages are designed to convert, you can bring organic traffic to your sales funnel by hosting an abundance of outbound links, a healthy keyword density, a word count slightly on the lengthier side, a low bounce rate and a fast loading time.
Helping to increase your conversion rates and lower your cost-per-acquistion, implementing landing pages as part of your inbound marketing strategy is a no-brainer - so even if you don't want to, do it for your old Liv (I need to sleep at night!).
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