The power of landing pages

The power of landing pages

Do you know what the difference is between a landing page and the home page of your website? Do you know why you should use landing pages? This article explores the power of focusing on a specific goal and creating a landing page for it.

Step one: Focus

Recently, I’ve been thinking about how Web Wise can attract more customers and my mind turned to using landing pages. I started by thinking about the sorts of projects we’ve done in the past that were really successful. It’s a really good idea to keep each landing page you create super-focused. Two main strengths emerged for me:

  • We’re really good at e-commerce. Particularly, moving customers from their old systems to the wonderful Shopify platform. I’ll call this strength; “Shopify Migration”
  • Secondly, for some random reason we’ve worked with a lot of gourmet or luxury food brands. For example: cold-press juices, luxury chocolate and gourmet popcorn to name a few.

So I’ve decided that a possible marketing strategy for Web Wise is to create a landing page for something like “Shopify for Food & Drink Businesses” or simply “Move your store to Shopify”.

We’ll get into the details of what should be on the landing page shortly, but by focusing in this way it makes it a lot easier for me to send very specific, targeted traffic to the page. For example, I could advertise on Google to anyone searching for:

  • “Shopify for food businesses”
  • “eCommerce for meat businesses” – I can be really specific and pick some niche terms. Of course, I’d need to research what terms are useful first.
  • “Move my food brand to Shopify”

Anyone clicking on these adverts will be 100% looking for what I have to offer because of the super-focused targeting.

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Step two: Design

The image below is a wonderful explanation of the difference between a home page (left) and a landing page (right).

homepage vs landing page

Credit: https://unbounce.com

The orange parts of the image represent links. Do you see how many more links are on the home page compared with the landing page? The landing page is so specific that there should be only one action your visitor needs to take. They do not need to explore the rest of your site because you know who they are and have provided everything they need to convert for you.

You could offer them a free download, you could get them to subscribe to something or sign-up to your service or you could simply give them a contact form to fill out – but the sole purpose of your landing page is to get them to take that one single action.

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Step 3: How?

So once you know who you’re targeting, and you know what you want to say on your landing page – it’s time to build it…

You can do it yourself. There are a number of paid services out there that let you create landing pages – do a Google search and you’ll find plenty. Or you can work with a web design company (like us). Chances are, adding a new bespoke page costs a lot less than you think since the rest of your website’s styles and design work already exists!

Web Wise customers have access to a Page Builder system that lets you drag and drop page elements to create interesting layouts too!

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Step 4: Marketing

Once you’ve published your landing page, all you need to do is promote it. Of course there are hundreds of ways to do this which I won’t go into here, but if you’re interested in marketing services, get in touch.

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About the author

Dan Wiseman

Founder & director of Web Wise. He writes about web design, marketing, entrepreneurship, investing and games. Dan regularly speaks on these subjects and is available for coaching and consultancy.


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