The inbound marketing funnel is made up of a complex combination of digital marketing assets. By definition, marketing funnels are designed to attract potential customers to your business, guide those leads through the bulk of the customer journey, and filter as many of those leads as possible onto targeted landing pages.
These landing pages act as anchor points for external marketing efforts such as social media campaigns, public relations initiatives, blogs, and other top-of-funnel campaigns.
Lead generation and conversion rate optimization are among the biggest challenges small business owners face in the highly competitive eCommerce market. All this adds up to make the landing page one of the most powerful and critical components in inbound marketing, but understanding how to best leverage landing pages in your digital marketing playbook can be tricky.
To demystify landing pages, we asked our community of digital marketing experts to weigh in on everything landing pages, from best practices to mistakes to avoid.
What are landing pages?
Landing pages are distinct pages that serve the specific marketing purpose of gathering data and converting leads. Landing pages exist within the framework of your company’s homepage, but are typically created as stand-alone experiences reachable through external links.
Common types of landing pages
Landing pages come in a number of different configurations, all designed to collect very specific types of data for your business.
- Squeeze pages are considered one of the most important types of landing pages, as their primary goal is to collect visitor’s email addresses, a crucial step in the lead nurturing process.
- Lead capture pages come in several forms and are often designed for customers at different parts of the customer journey. Depending on whether customers are at the top of the funnel or have already shown an interest in your offerings, these pages can capture more than just email addresses and can then redirect to the appropriate product or service page.
- Long-form sales pages are designed to help customers make a purchasing decision by providing answers to any questions they might have at their stage in the buying journey. Long-form sales pages generally end with a call to action (CTA) inviting the visitor to make a purchase.
Other landing page formats–each with unique goals and strategies–include pricing-focused pages, product announcement pages, and click-through-focused advertising pages.[1]
Now that we know a little more about landing pages, let’s take a closer look at why they’re so important for small businesses.
Why are landing pages important for small businesses?
The key to an effective small business marketing strategy is to understand where your efforts have the greatest potential to positively impact your return on investment. Landing pages are an extremely ROI-friendly strategy for gathering data and leads affordably, while also gathering data on where best to focus future marketing efforts.[2]
Landing pages exist alongside your core website, providing a much-needed source of data acquisition.
“Landing pages are essential for small businesses that have dedicated time, money, and additional staff resources to tracking where their traffic and leads are coming from. With a proper landing page, it becomes extremely easy to know where to focus more resources.” —Zack Flanagan, CEO, Hive Marketing
Once you’ve come to understand where to spend your marketing dollars and resources, landing pages become a time-saving method for engaging with customers and gathering their data in order to free up resources elsewhere.
“Landing pages act as digital brochures for your business. Leveraging a well-structured landing page can take a lot of the legwork off your plate in guiding customers toward the steps you want them to take.” —Justine Wan, Founder and Lead Strategist, Sidewalk Marketing Co.
Aside from acting as a pathway that guides the customer experience, landing pages can also help direct specific information to curated customer segments. But in addition to messaging, how you build your landing page also has a big impact on its effectiveness.
“When combined with digital ads, landing pages offer a cost-effective marketing approach, ensuring businesses maximize their advertising spend. Their design also allows for easy tracking and flexibility, permitting customization for various campaigns. However, to reap these benefits, it’s imperative for businesses to prioritize well-designed, relevant, and user-friendly pages” —Tomas Henkenhaf, Chief Marketing Officer, Yesterday Design Co. Ltd.
Paid advertising and pay-per-click advertising are often woven into marketing campaigns at different levels. The experts we reached out to talked about how landing pages can be combined with paid advertising to support later remarketing efforts.
“If you are running paid media, then landing pages are super important. You do not want to pay for a click and then have visitors meander around your site and never give you information. This all depends on your media budget; larger SMBs may be practicing Account Based Marketing (ABM) and might provide ungated content on a landing page, but make sure they have installed tracking pixels. That way, you will be able to retarget them with remarketing campaigns.” —Peter Berson, Marketing Consultant, Aveli By WSI
While enhancing paid media campaign effectiveness, landing pages can also help your business stand out from competitors on certain platforms.
“Landing pages are essential for businesses of all sizes and I would say that they are even more essential for SMBs because it creates a differentiator between you and competitors. Most SMBs don’t bother creating funnel-based landing pages that convert at higher rates. If you are able to implement these pages then that can give you a leg up on the competition.” —Robb Fahrion, Partner and Co-Founder, Flying V Group
What elements of landing pages should small businesses focus on?
Because landing pages serve different purposes, they come in a variety of formats. But because they also serve a central common goal of driving customer engagement, there are several things all good landing pages should include.
Quickly capturing a visitor’s attention on a landing page is just as important as it is on your social posts and other digital content assets. It’s important to recognize that time is precious to your visitors, and you must make an impact quickly if you hope to make any impact at all.
“It’s crucial to capture attention above the fold. Research suggests that you have around 8 seconds to capture attention here, so a compelling headline and supporting imagery is crucial. Think about your customers’ core pain points and how you can alleviate them.” —John Hargan, Founder/Director, Velocity
One of the best ways to capture and maintain a reader’s attention is to use compelling copy on the page. Copy that is well written, on-topic, and keeps the reader’s focus should have a positive impact on their response to your CTA.
“The most important element of a landing page is the copy. Make sure you are speaking directly to your customer’s needs, wants, problems, and desires. This makes landing pages essential for small businesses because you can address the exact concerns that your lead may have while highlighting the benefits. Laser target your content and see your conversions go way up!” —Jesse Brede, Founder, Lion’s Share Digital
Every page should focus on delivering the best results. This means that sometimes you’ll have to tweak the call to action to better speak to different audiences.
“The most important element of a landing page is the CTA (call to action). This is a specific action you want the user to take on your page. The idea is you want to motivate them to take this action by making an enticing offer. Landing pages make it easy to test their effectiveness by allowing you to A/B test, meaning test different variations of your CTA and see what gets the best results.” —Max Karren, President, Chuckwalla Design
As important as the content on the page is, the technical details and visuals are just as important. A poorly designed landing page that isn’t optimized for multiple screens and fast load times will lose you more customers than not.
“Give visitors a genuine glimpse into your operations by removing all stock photos in favor of original, high-resolution images. This not only creates trust but also forces a personalized connection with potential customers. However, one of the biggest mistakes small businesses often make is using large, non-resized images. This not only makes it very easy for potential customers to close the page before it loads, but signals to Google that your page is simply not good enough due to the high bounce rate. Google knows which websites are fast and rewards them accordingly.” —Munir Alsafi, Co-founder, VixelStudio
Before the CTA, however, your page should really be built around the problem that it’s trying to solve for your customer. Landing pages should always be focused on educating visitors on how your products or services address their specific pain points.
“The most critical element for small businesses to prioritize on a landing page is a clear and compelling value proposition. Your visitors should instantly understand what you offer and how it benefits them. This ensures their immediate interest and engagement, increasing the likelihood of conversions. Remember, it’s all about answering the question: ‘What’s in it for me?’” —Paul Bies, President, Mystique Brand Communications
What are the biggest challenges of small business landing pages?
Executing multifaceted marketing campaigns across multiple channels and using a variety of tactics and strategies is a difficult undertaking for even the most seasoned marketing teams. The experts from the UpCity community operate across a diverse range of industries and disciplines. But when asked about the challenges they faced in creating landing pages, these small business professionals were fairly united in what they struggled with the most.
Landing page mistakes to avoid
There are many pitfalls web designers face when building out a company website. When it comes to landing pages, the struggle to hone in on a unified theme was highlighted by a number of experts.
Keeping focused on the goals and objectives of a campaign allows your marketing team to deploy a number of versatile types of landing pages, each designed to support a different conversion goal.
“The biggest mistake small businesses should avoid when it comes to landing pages is a lack of focus. While they can be highly beneficial for specific marketing campaigns, lead generation, and customer conversion goals, many small businesses try to accomplish too many things with a single landing page, leading to a confusing user experience that dilutes the main message and call to action.” —Oleksiy Melnyk, Marketing Ops, Fingercheck
As with other forms of marketing copy, the information on your landing pages should be short, concise, and to the point, making it easier for visitors to understand what’s at stake and to act accordingly.
“Too often, landing pages are busy, long, and confusing. Marketing experts need to better focus on the call to action. Make it clear what the point of the page is upfront. Then in your copy, explain why they should take the action you want them to take, and provide clear next steps.” —Jake Lett, Marketing Consultant, Bootstrap Creative
When pages aren’t short, concise, and on-topic, readers can be overwhelmed with information, and easily fall out of the customer buying journey as you’ve built it. Don’t build one landing page that does multiple things poorly, but rather multiple well-executed pages that each focus on a single goal.
“One common pitfall we’ve observed is overwhelming visitors with too much information. A landing page should be focused and concise, guiding users to a specific action. Small businesses should resist the urge to include everything and prioritize clarity over quantity, ensuring a streamlined user journey.” —Josh Worden, Principal, Trajectory Web Design
In order to avoid pages that are unclear or overly cluttered, our experts underscore the importance of ensuring that the CTA matches the intended goals.
“Remember that these pages should serve as focused tools to persuade users to take specific actions, such as signing up for a newsletter or making a purchase. Landing pages can help small businesses convert visitors into customers, making them a valuable asset for driving growth and achieving marketing objectives. Additionally, they are adaptable and can be used in conjunction with various online marketing strategies to reach a broader audience.” —Dan Brag, Owner, BragDeal Inc.
Tips for using landing pages as part of a digital marketing strategy
In outlining what works with landing pages and what doesn’t, our experts surfaced several trends around tools and best practices.
How to create a basic landing page
Landing pages are, at their core, a form of content marketing. As such, they should meet the same standards for quality and functionality as the rest of your website.
- Messaging on landing pages should be consistent with the campaigns they support. This helps boost brand awareness and brand recognition, and improves the effectiveness of your landing pages as well as your inbound marketing that leads customers to the page.
- A landing page without a call to action (CTA) accomplishes nothing. Landing pages should always serve a purpose in your marketing strategy.
- As with the rest of your company website, landing pages need to be designed with ADA compliance in mind.
- Minimize or remove navigation to other parts of your website. Let the CTA serve its purpose before the visitor can easily move away from the page. Once the CTA has been fulfilled, lead the visitor to a Thank You page, where you can further engage with them.
- Remember that a large percentage of visitors will be on mobile devices, so ensure that your landing pages are built to be responsive.
- Landing pages cannot exist in a vacuum. They must be supported by your inbound marketing funnel through a clear and established path. This path can be in the form of paid ads, social media posts, email marketing, paid or organic search, and ads placed across other platforms.
Tools needed for creating a landing page
While you might be using a content management system (CMS) to build and maintain your website, you’re likely going to need a plugin or software app for creating your landing pages.[3]
The goal of many of these tools is to ensure that your content is not only optimized, but that it’s engaging enough to keep visitors on the page long enough to execute the full scope of your CTA.
Landing page builders are also built into many of the popular multi-functional platforms on the market, and you should search the catalog of plug-in and add-on products for your chosen CMS when looking to expand your usage of landing pages.
Stick your landing pages and maximize lead conversion
With the guidance and insights that we’ve shared with you here, your marketing team should have a better understanding of the role landing pages play in your overall marketing efforts. However, if you’re looking for a service provider to partner with in order to expand and improve your use of landing pages, look no further than the UpCity marketplace, where you can find web design professionals who are waiting for your team to reach out.
Get the digital marketing support you need to more effectively engage with inbound leads and grow your business in the coming year by improving your conversion rates with powerful landing pages.