Landing pages are increasingly becoming a go-to resource for strategic content marketing campaigns.
But what exactly is a landing page?
Essentially, a landing page is a single page on a website where traffic is directed specifically to prompt a certain action.
So by definition, a landing page has to be singularly focused and the desired response must be clearly articulated with a pointed and meaningful call-to-action.
You might use a landing page to:
- Drive subscribers to your blog (via email) to make a particular purchase
- Encourage your existing customers to participate in a webinar
- Solicit survey responses from a targeted stakeholder group
- Segment your readership by consolidating multiple themes under one banner
- Promote a specific product or service with a discount or special offer
Regardless of your goal, landing page success, much like all other types of online marketing, is ultimately fuelled by meaningful and well crafted content.
Since content is our specialty at MarketingWise, we’ve designed an infographic that details 10 content marketing best practices that you can embrace for landing page success.
It’s easy to share the infographic; just use the embed-able code. And feel free to tweet, like and spread the love.
Of course we are always interested in your feedback – do you use landing pages? How do they work for you? Leave your comments and questions in the section below.
Embed This Image On Your Site (copy code below):
Twitter: feldmancreative
says:
Hoo-hoo-hoo came up with that? Fantabulisticoso! Embed it I shall. Thanks MarketingWise. Wow.
The brilliant minds at MarketingWise
. Collaborative effort. Share away Barry and thanks for urging me to add the Pinterest share. I’m a bit Pin-phobic.
Ruth Zive recently posted..4 Reasons Why Your Website MUST be Responsive to Mobile
Twitter: 3paysmembers
says:
As members of Solavei, the landing page is created for each of our members, and many points in this article have confirmed Solavei’s approach. It’s great to know. We just do our part by sharing the service and spread the brand. Thank you.
Twitter: 3paysmembers
says:
Actually if the author would critique this landing page link, that would be great.
http://www.solavei.com/tpmhueydinh
Many thanks.
I would call this a landing page. It’s a home page. Different goals entirely. As far as home pages go, you have prominent calls to action (Get Started, Watch Now), but i don’t see anything that is encouraging lead capture. I also don’t think your value proposition is very clear on that page – what exactly are you offering that provides value? How are you different from the competition? What problems are you solving for your target customer? Off the top of my head…those are my comments
. Thanks for stopping by, and feel free to be in touch if you want MarketingWise to help you out some more.
Twitter: nmnthqld
says:
Hi Ruth – thank you for the very useful infographic.
In a sense, what you are really saying is that a well structured business website should not have a single be-all-and-end-all Home page but should have a series of “home” pages (i.e. landing pages) directed at each key target. This way you can land each segment on a page that has keywords and messages tailored to that target to more effectively persuade them that they have found just what they are looking for. Finding the segments is the hardest bit for us. We rent out holiday homes. We know that our customers like our holiday homes because they leave nice messages, refer others etc but following up with thank you letters and asking for feedback gets about a one in five/six response. Being holiday homes with at best about 35 booked weeks per year (because of out of season periods and small booking gaps), the number of customers for each holiday home over a year is not that high. Consequently, we don’t have a great number of responses to draw strong conclusions from. So we have to make best guesses.
Nick Marshall recently posted..Benefits of renting a holiday home
Hi Nick. I think that a landing page strategy supports your primary website, but ISN’T your website. Does that make sense? So you would have navigation on your website for your different segments and target markets, and then a landing page effort would support specific campaigns to those target groups? Usually landing pages are driven by campaigns (email, social media, etc.). They aren’t a primary part of your website. And good landing pages generally don’t have their own distinct navigation.
Are you using analytics to assess your visitors? Do you have calls to action on your website that you can track? Sometimes using your visitor behaviour as an assessment tool can provide really important insights. For instance – if you have a call to action that says “Download our exclusive report on caribbean homes”, then you can probably assume that the folks who download that report (and opt-in to that list) are more interested in Caribbean homes than European homes. Now, I’m not in your industry, so I don’t know the appropriate segments, but I would test out the right targets, use messaging that will encourage segmentation, and see how that goes.
Good luck!
Ruth Zive recently posted..Stop Making Excuses – Here’s Your Simple B2B Blogging Roadmap
Twitter: bdorman264
says:
Well done, I do believe this tells it all………..
Bill Dorman recently posted..Please retweet this post at 7:34 am EST
Thanks Bill
. We work hard to ‘tell it all’….
Ruth Zive recently posted..5 Reasons Your Business Needs a Strategic Marketing Plan
Twitter: timbo1973
says:
Hey Ruth
I’m just in the process of testing a new optin plugin so this infographic has been really helpful.
Thanks to MarketingWise for creating it!
Tim Bonner recently posted..Positive Change Is Just A Moment Away
That’s great Tim! Feel free to reuse the infographic if you want to share it with your networks. You can grab the code below.
Twitter: adriennesmith40
says:
Live this infographic Ruth and your team is awesome. Wow, must be nice to have an inhouse group that can throw this stuff together. First off, I love infographics when what they share is easy to follow and you are always spot on with helping us improve how we should put things together.
Great tips for what we should be sharing on our landing page and these will come in very handy for me in the very near future.
Thank you again, job well done.
~Adrienne
Adrienne recently posted..Thankful Thursday – Facebook, Debt, Plagiarism & Tech
Thanks Adrienne. I am indeed very blessed with an incredible team! Our graphic designer is genius! I have a feeling you already knew most of these best practices, but perhaps I’ve left you with a pretty little ‘cheat sheet’ that you can keep handy
. Thanks, as always, for stopping by!
Ruth Zive recently posted..Stop Making Excuses – Here’s Your Simple B2B Blogging Roadmap
Great ideas and graphics! The graphics alone are inspiring me to do another reset on a few pages. Not sure why exactly, but graphics or pictures always amplify the message more than you’d think.
Particularly the suggestions, 2, 7 and 9, which seem to go together but sometimes can be forgotten when so much focus is on the describing the product or feature.
hey there) thanks, how come I lost this post in my rss? Tha’s cool infographics! Love when the info is structured such way!
Evan recently posted..Top 50 Corporate WordPress Themes best of 2013
Hmmm…don’t know!? That’s strange – glad you found us and glad you enjoyed the info graphic.
Ruth Zive recently posted..7 Social Media Myths & B2B Marketing
Twitter: richmac
says:
Nicely done infographic Ruth. I find myself spending a fair amount of time explaining how landing pages fit into the conversion process and this visual conveys their essence well. #1 and #6 stand out for me – getting into the mind of a prospect is such a critical step in successfully framing the value offered – and mapping the landing page to a particular stage in the sales process can drive conversion up significantly.
This will be put to use today!
Rich McElaney recently posted..Is Blogging All I Need for My Content Marketing Efforts?
#1 is our starting point with any client – it is the MOST critical step in any marketing initiative, not just landing pages. And #6 is arguably the most overlooked step; too often companies fail to capitalize on seasonal considerations or sales cycle interests when it comes to their marketing efforts.
Glad you found the infographic useful Rich – share away
!
Twitter: gonzogonzo
says:
Well done, Ruth!
These are all solid ways to use content marketing and wise tactics to get landing pages to work. I particularly like the “A/B testing” advice, specially considering only 33% of marketers surveyed in 2011 by MarketingSherpa said they had tested their email campaigns in the previous year! In other words, 67% of marketers don’t bother testing things, they just “assume” what works, as if we knew it all – yeah, that’s right, I used “we” since I am a marketer as well…
Cheers from Quebec City,
Frederic
Frederic Gonzalo recently posted..Seven Steps To Manage Your E-Reputation
Testing allows for better accountability and more solid and strategic decision making. People are always belly aching that marketing results are so ‘unmeasurable’. But new technologies are challenging that presumption, and I feel strongly that as marketing professionals, we have a responsibility to measure our efforts and hold ourselves accountable to the results. Greater visibility can only help to enhance our impact. Thanks for your comment Frederic.
Ruth Zive recently posted..The #1 Overlooked Social Media Opportunity for B2B Growth
I would also mention here that landing pages for regular Internet and mobile Internet should be different as it seriously influence conversion rates.
Good point Elise; thanks for adding!
Twitter: carollynnrivera
says:
Be simple! Lots of people need help with that one
I mean have you SEEN some of those landing pages? They are crammed edge to edge and they go on foreeeeever. I get it, they have to make the sale in one page. But it’s like they took a whole website and put it on one page just so they could call it a landing page! If you’re making a compelling offer and supporting it with benefits and facts, you can do that pretty quickly. Good advice!
Carol Lynn recently posted..The Art Of Writing For The Web
I never understood those endlessly scrolling landing pages. I’d love to know if those things actually convert?! What proportion of readers actually has the patience to read through all of that nonsense? I agree with you Carol Lynn, if it’s done properly, a landing page doesn’t have to be a novel.
Ruth Zive recently posted..The #1 Overlooked Social Media Opportunity for B2B Growth
Twitter: pianolessongirl
says:
Hi Ruth,
Well, I definitely have a better attention span when things have pictures and pretty colors
. Thanks so much for the graphics.
Great advice, I LOVE the points, #10 makes so much sense, and that’s actually something I have never thought of! I knew that you have to get their attention quickly and hold it, but I realized that even I scan when I’m looking for products or services!
Thanks so much for the advice and tips.
~Dakota,
Pianolessongirl
Hi Dakota, welcome to our blog!
#10 is a tip that you can integrate into all of your online content – not just landing pages. Short paragraphs, bullets, subheads, compelling graphics….Studies show that this type of content is consumed more quickly and readily online compared to lengthy paragraphs.
Thanks for sharing your comment, and hope to see you back!
Ruth Zive recently posted..7 Social Media Myths & B2B Marketing
These are very useful, and easily to follow suggestions when you want to use content marketing to make your way to landing page. Thanks very much for sharing this very informative post. Good luck on your future articles.
I enjoyed reading your piece it’s definitely enticing and says a lot of you and your goal to educate us on marketing. Thanks for the great share!
Thanks for the tips and I really loved the way you presented your ideas to us. It’s entertaining and not at all boring to read. Good job!
Thanks for the tips. I love the presentation of your idea, proves to show how effective you are at what you do.
Enlightening share .
Being original , strategic and meaningful are indeed keywords to success. Content is the king and plays an important role to entice readers and to build up a loyal audience over a period of time.
A captivating post!!! You are indeed a great writer, as you know how to charm your readers with a great content. The infographic is done in such a brilliant manner, that I stuck to my chair to read the post from top to toe. This post is of great value to me,as it provided me with some vital learning. Thanks for sharing the rich content.
Nothing is more appealing than originality because that is always unique. Thanks for sharing the info graphic with such valuable information.
Hey ruth great Infographic!!
These tips will be really helpful to promote your page using quality content.
Vincent Armstead recently posted..Blackberry Z10 Smartphone Gets an Order of a Million
Thanks Vincent – glad you liked it!