The landing page is an often misunderstood tool. Many marketers misunderstand a landing page to be the home page of their business website. But a landing page in the terms we are about to apply, is a strategic sales funnel which typically has little to do with a larger website.
Funnel = Landing Page
Armed with the image of a simple kitchen funnel, it’s so much easier to understand the purpose of a landing page as it’s used for driving customers to your online business.
Features of a simple funnel:
- wide top or mouth into which substances may be poured or dumped
- smooth (low-friction) sharply sloping sides
- narrow bottom spout or channel used to control or direct the flow of substances
- manufactured from aluminum, glass
- utilitarian invention
- simple and without ornament
Applying these funnel features to a landing page:
- The function of the landing page is as that of the wide mouth of our imaginary funnel; it’s the catch basin for a large volume of something – in this case, web traffic.
- The design of the landing page, including visual layout, the web content, web copy is akin to the sloping sides of the funnel; these components like the smooth funnel basin, lead or direct traffic through the landing page. How the page is designed and presented determines the effectiveness of controlling visitor intent. Imagine the smooth sides of the funnel with liquid running through, friction-less.
- The call to action (CTA) is akin to the funnel’s narrow bottom spout or channel. whether it’s a “buy” button, a piece of link text, a survey or form, the CTA is the narrow, single-minded channel to which the rest of the page funnels traffic.
Where does landing page traffic come from?
Landing pages typically are built to capture traffic coming from various forms of online advertising, such as PPC ads, banner ads, calls to action from a website. And the best landing pages have one thing in common: they have a solitary goal or one CTA.
Reducing Landing Page Friction
Exactly how a landing page is laid out visually is anyone’s guess; it’s based on a wide variety of factors: the market, the target audience demographic, the goal of the landing page, and other more nebulous factors that could wax and wane with the seasons, time of day, trends, etc. For this reason a savvy marketer creates multiple variations of a landing page and tests them to determine which outperforms the others. This is commonly called, A/B testing.
Testing aside, there are some absolute and proven techniques for building the bones of a strong landing page…
- Disable or omit additional page navigation: if you’re using a page from a website as a landing page, for example, make sure to disable the navigation and any other links that may distract visitors from your goal or call-to-action.
- Keep the message simple, keep text as brief as possible.
- Integrate images and video, if relevant, to create a more visually stimulating experience.
- Using a form to collect visitor information? Keep it as short as possible.
- Use a big button or very clear link text for your call-to-action.
- Decide one goal for the page.
- Run a simple A/B test on a few variations of your landing page.
