What Is a Landing Page?
At its most basic, a landing page is a website page that is designed specifically for conversion. The two primary conversion events that business owners and marketers strive for are lead generation and sales.
Traditional Web Pages are created to fulfill many purposes – information, brand exposure, service explanations, internal administration etc. These elements of a web site are necessary for many reasons both overt and covert.
But, such a format and experience is not always ideal for generating leads and inspiring sales. Because visitors are coming with such a broad level of intent and referral sources it is not feasible to create your main site pages purely around conversion goals.
Building dedicated landing pages can open a whole new level of lead generation and sales and provide invaluable data and intelligence about what works for YOUR visitors.
No two audiences are exactly alike, and the flexibility of landing page environments allows your business to quickly adapt your visitors experience based on real data and targeted traffic analysis.
Approaching Specific Markets
It is not uncommon for a business to provide products or services that have very varied and distinct uses and markets. A great web page is designed to speak to and be accessible to your customers. When a product or service has multiple demographics a smart business builds an environment that speaks to each group in a strategic focused manner.
For Example ...
Many businesses service more than one geographic area. For best placement in the search indexes and to limit friction or confusion to customers it is ideal to create specific environments for each geographic area.
Some businesses provide distinct services for commercial and residential clients – creating environments that speak differently to these distinct audiences will do wonders for your conversion rates.
Utilizing your Advertising Budget
The global online marketplace includes many opportunities for effective paid advertising. The primary tool every business should utilize is the Adwords program from Google. Google Adwords allows businesses to bid on specific keyword terms and target your audience by region and device. 
This is very important and very powerful.
We can use Adwords to target an exact person performing an exact search in an exact location. Unlike organic search, with paid advertising we know exactly who we are sending to the page and exactly how much we are investing in generating these pre-qualified leads.
This targeting process allows us to pre-qualify visitors.
Is your primary business in Syracuse but you have a satellite office in Albany?
Do you work primarily in Liverpool but are willing to travel up to 60 miles for the right type of jobs?
Using a strategic combination of Adwords and carefully designed landing pages a business can control exactly who sees an environment, what they see and most importantly knows what expense the advertising is and with proper configuration can measure exactly what the return on this investment is.
Many might attempt to “just” send Adwords traffic to any existing page on a website, but that is often a frivolous use of an Adverting budget as the experience is not properly crafted and too many potential “leaks” exist on a traditional web page to best encourage conversions of sales and leads.
Adwords rewards focused and properly constructed landing pages with a higher Quality Score which in turn lessens your Advertising spend.
Tracking Your Current Marketing Strategies
Many businesses utilize multiple marketing strategies offline and on. From display ads in regional publications, large image ads in the phone book to listings in online directories like Syracuse.com, YellowPages and Angies List. It is uncommon for the purveyors of these ad “opportunities” to be able to prove any effectiveness of their “opportunity” and even less common for business owners to be able to track how effective these expenditures are on their businesses bottom line.
In truth, most of these opportunities, when they are properly tracked, prove to be ineffective and not worth the expenditure that businesses put into them. But, when you work custom landing pages into your advertising system and utilize advanced analytics through an experienced company or service – your advertising spend can be evaluated for effectiveness and modified to fit the unique audience that each “opportunity” purports to influence.
Are you advertising in the local yellow pages? Why not build a landing page that speaks directly to the audience that still uses a phone book and track how many web leads you are getting by using a distinct page that we can track?
Optimizing for Your Demographic
Some varieties of services appeal to a younger crowd that tends to use mobile devices for web browsing, some services appeal to a demographic that has trouble reading small print on a screen. Some services and products attract an audience that appreciates locally produced / owned businesses and products. By utilizing the flexibility that landing pages create, one can build and modify experiences around actual demographics and not be limited by a general aesthetic or design that attempts to speak to ALL people at once.
Testing the Waters – Clean Statistics
Are you launching a new product? Building an offshoot of your main company? Opening up to new regions?
Before jumping into a full scale development and marketing campaign on and offline, use a landing page or “microsite” environment combined with guaranteed traffic from Adwords to test out how your clients and customers respond to your new offerings. Amazing levels of data about how many people are interested in such a service, how they respond to your design and copy and what questions they ask on your forms is invaluable in preparing you for building and designing a full web site or offline marketing campaigns.
Flexible, Agile and Responsive Modifications
Landing Pages allow for an amazingly agile response to how your audience interacts with your sales material and offerings. The “smallest” details such as legibility of text or contrast of headlines can do wonders towards encouraging your visitors to stay on site long enough to convert online or pick up a phone. Experienced Web Developers and Analysts can predict many factors and use best practices to provide a great initial product, but the flexibility that landing page use provides allows for a level of testing that truly allows your customers to dictate what formats, information and layouts best work for them.
A/B Testing – It’s a Science
Landing Pages allow us to use actual measured statistics and science to increase your conversions and visibility. By using advanced A/B testing we can display varied versions of any single landing page template and test and measure how your audience responds. Incorporated with Adwords we can build conversion funnels that can be adapted quickly to always ensure a favorable return on investment. Most campaigns once dialed in will continue to create returns for years.
The traffic data and intelligence we gain from the focused experience that landing pages create can be utilized to add better converting aspects to additional main websites, used with modification to approach new demographics or even influence offline print campaigns.
SEO Intelligence
The Intelligence and data we acquire via configuring, creating and experimenting with your landing pages provides knowledge that our SEO’s can use to improve your performance in the organic search results and can be utilized across your entire web presence for years to come.
ACS – Uniquely suited to developing the perfect experience
With over 13 years of developing and maintaining hundreds of web sites we have uncommon insights into how to best match the interests of the internet and the offerings of your websites.
See more Landing Page examples in our Portfolio or Contact Us today to begin a conversation.