Most businesses direct prospects to homepages. While that’s a safe place to send potential customers, it’s not always the best place. Try a landing page instead.
Email marketing and social media posts. Ads and search engine results. These are common marketing tools in the digital age, but none of these tactics is an end in itself.
Every email should include a call to action (CTA) that guides interested parties into the sales funnel. Every social media post and online ad should include a link that immerses the target audience more deeply into your world.
But what’s the ideal destination for those links?
Most businesses direct prospects to their homepage. While that’s a safe place to send potential customers, it’s not always the best place.
After all, your homepage is the face of your brand. It’s the gateway to navigating the breadth of your company. As such, it’s a broad canvas that can lead visitors in any number of directions—and they may not know where they want to go.
Try pointing them to a landing page instead.
Homepage vs. Landing Page
Instead of your homepage, it’s often a better idea to send prospects to a landing page: a single page that acts as a targeted destination, specifically created to immerse prospective customers in your marketing messaging and drive them to take a desired action.
Let’s consider an example. If the purpose of an ad or social media post is simply to encourage prospects to learn more about you, then sending them to your homepage is a great idea. But what if you attracted their attention by referencing a specific product, plan, offer, or service? In those instances, it’s smart to send your prospect to a landing page that speaks to their interests, needs, or expectations and helps you capture their contact information.
Let’s say you create a whitepaper about the power of digital signage, and you want to use it to generate sales leads. Here’s what you can do to generate high-potential leads:
- Write a LinkedIn post about the whitepaper or create an ad that offers it as a free download.
- Send interested parties to a landing page that expands on the value of the whitepaper’s contents.
- On this page, ask these parties to provide their email address in exchange for this valuable piece of content so you can connect directly to your sales lead.
Landing pages can also help generate significant site traffic and improve your SEO (search engine optimization). They’re a powerful way to track the effectiveness of your marketing messages, too.
An Industry Landing Page in Action
In Spring 2023, Supervox worked with The Farm to give this California-based enterprise AV services provider a new website.
To create engagement and excitement, and to give interested readers a reason to visit the site, we played off the company’s distinctive chicken logo and launched a “Name That Chicken” contest. Social media posts carried messaging that drove the audience to a branded landing page. This page highlighted the company and directed interested contestants to share their contact information.
The landing page accomplished exactly what it intended to do: It increased web traffic to The Farm’s website by 220% during the contest and provided The Farm with 219 leads on the first day of the two-week contest alone.
Connect Potential Customers with What You Offer
Here are few more important attributes of landing pages to consider:
- They’re quick, easy, and economical to build.
- They’re simple for your social media people to work with.
- They’re a breeze to integrate with your email marketing platform.
- They’re simple and to the point for customers. There’s no confusion and no wasted time.
You offer something, and a landing page makes sure people understand it. They’re that simple—and that effective. After all, the faster and more directly you engage a prospect, the likelier you are to convert them to a customer.
Tim Alevizos is a partner at Minneapolis-based Supervox Agency, an NSCA Member Advisory Councilmember. He also serves on the SAVe board as co-chair of the Education Committee.
