Effective Landing Pages

Effective Landing Pages Will Increase Lead Generation

Hubspot recently posted 7 Habits of a Highly Effective Landing Page.  As a read through this really good post I was thinking about a lot of the conversations we’ve had over the last couple of years with small organizations about their web sites.  Just last week we were asked to evaluate a site and see if we could help with SEO.  He had a simple template based site, typical of many small organizations, and couldn’t understand why it was performing so poorly.  Unfortunately we had to explain that SEO on this particular site would be like painting a car with a bad engine.  Another words, rebuild the site in a CMS system, start adding valuable content, and yes create landing pages.  This is never a fun conversation, and the concept of a landing page was foreign to him.

Landing pages, as defined by wikipedia for online marketers, are ” the page that appears when a potential customer clicks on an advertisement. The page will usually display sales copy that is a logical extension of the advertisement or link.” For us a landing page is just where you want people to land on your site, that may or may not be the homepage.  It could be that you are promoting an event, the page where people can donate or volunteer, or just where the information is that you want them to see.

There are two different types of landing pages, reference and transactional.  From wikipedia:

• “A reference landing page presents information that is relevant to the visitor. These can display text, images, dynamic compilations of relevant links, or other elements. Reference landing pages are effective if they meet the objectives of their publishers, which may be associations, organizations or public service entities. For many reference landing pages, effectiveness can be measured by the revenue value of the advertising that is displayed on them.”
• “A transactional landing page seeks to persuade a visitor to complete a transaction such as filling out a form or interacting with advertisements or other objects on the landing page, with the goal being the immediate or eventual sale of a product or service. If information is to be captured, the page will usually withhold information until some minimal amount of visitor information is provided, typically an email address and perhaps a name and telephone number as well – enough to “capture the lead” and add the prospect to a mailing list.”

The post from Hubspot is great and will help you create effective landing pages.  Hopefully this post will help you understand what they are.