November 16th, 2006

Landing Pages – One of the Keys to an Effective Campaign

I was having a chat the other day with someone who was befuddled by the fact that their past in house marketing campaigns resulted in increased traffic to their site, but not increased sales.

My first question to her was “what did your landing page look like?”

“Landing page?”

This response identified for me a frequently overlooked component of successful marketing campaigns, the landing page.

The concept of a landing page is quite straight forward, and when you think about it a logical and necessary piece of your marketing strategy. A landing page is simply the page that the visitor is sent to after they click on one of your ads. To maximise conversions, the landing page should be separate from your main website and be tied to a particular advertising campaign.

The visitor was motivated enough by your ad to take the action of clicking on it. The primary purpose of the landing page should be to make it as easy as possible for the visitor to follow through on their interest, take a particular action. This action could be to make a purchase, subscribe to an enewsletter or download a document. Whatever the action is, make it as easy as possible for the visitor to complete and minimize distractions.

If your ads send the visitor to your main website, then this could dilute your marketing message and run the risk having the visitor getting distracted or ‘lost’ in your website, never completing the action, or following through on the interest that motivated them to click on your ad in the first place.