A Crash Course in Landing Pages

Landing pages come in all shapes and sizes. Their goal is to focus websites visitors on one call to action. In this post, we’re going to look at different types of landing pages you can create and how to make them successful.

Types of Landing Pages

First of all, let’s look at the common types of landing pages that businesses create.

Product & Service Sales Pages

Got a new or popular product or service you want to highlight? A landing page dedicated to it is the perfect choice. You can make a single landing page that focuses on a product or service, or make multiple landing pages that target specific types of people, explaining how your product or service can work for them. We covered the latter types of landing pages in a previous post about how Shopify uses landing pages to market their e-commerce solution to different industries.

Lead Generation Opt-Ins

Landing pages known as squeeze pages are created specifically to increase business leads and mailing list subscriptions. Usually they offer the subscriber something in exchange for submission of the lead form like an exclusive discount, free eBook, whitepaper, report, or other valuable item.

PPC & SEO Landing Pages

If you are targeting specific keywords for your pay per click or organic search campaign, you may want to create custom landing pages for those keywords to increase your conversions. For example, if you are focusing a PPC campaign on summer dresses, you would want the visitor to arrive on a page specifically about summer dresses. Some businesses would just drop visitors on their homepage, but if the visitor can’t find what they want quickly, they will leave. This leads to a wasted marketing budget because of the loss of conversions.

Elements of Successful Landing Pages

There are lots of studies and guides to what makes a successful landing page including The Complete Guide to Successful Landing Pages, Key Components of a Successful Landing Page (which is also an example of a great lead generation opt-in landing page), 7 Tips for Landing Page Greatness, and (if you need more) 23 of the Best Landing Page Optimization Posts.

If you go through all of these posts, they’ll boil down to these suggestions for creating a successful landing page.

• Your text, video, etc. should show a problem that your target audiences has and how you can solve that problem with your free content download, product, or service.

• The page should have minimal navigation as not to distract the visitor from completing the on-page goal.

• The calls to action should be clear and, depending on the length of the page, repeated frequently through the page.

• Include testimonials from real people - adding names, photos, website URLs (unlinked) can make your testimonials more trustworthy.

• Design is everything.

Landing Page Software & Templates

When it comes to actually building your landing page, there’s a plethora of great options out there to choose from. Top recommended resources include:

• Unbounce - Unbounce lets marketers build high-converting landing pages without I.T. 1-click publishing, A/B testing and a suite of best-practice landing page tem

• Premise for WordPress - Point and click landing pages and membership sites for WordPress users.

• Optimize Press - OptimizePress is a unique WordPress theme that gives you the ability to create conversion optimized Squeeze Pages, Sales Letters, launch pages & more.

Measuring Your Results

Whenever you create a new landing page, whether it is to boost sales, generate leads, or increase conversions for your search marketing campaigns, be sure that you are monitoring your analytics. Because after all, if you can’t gauge how your content resonates with customers, you ultimately won’t be able to decipher what impacts their buying decisions either.

Kristi Hines is a freelance writer, professional blogger, and social media enthusiast. You can follow her on Twitter and Google+.