7 steps to targeting the right people: introduction to Landing Pages

1. What is a Landing Page?

A Landing Page is a door to enter your website.

The most popular Landing Page is the one all websites have: the homepage. But you will discover through this article (if you don't know it yet!) that there are many other pages that can (should!) become doors to your site.

2. Where do I find the Landing Pages?

Don't look in the menu, they are most probably not there!

Most Landing Pages are not shown in menu because those are only "doors": their purpose is to welcome visitors on the website, not for people already on the website to visit them.

Usually, you find Landing Pages by clicking on external links from search engines, banners, Social Media, etc.

3. Why do you need Landing Pages?

Who are your visitors? Are they all similar?

Chances are that you got a pretty large panel of visitors. Some might be young, some older, some interested in marketing while others might be cinema lovers.

The thing is, you visitors are all different. Why treating them all the same with a single homepage?

That is the key to Landing Pages: as all visitors are different, they must all be treated differently with specific texts and arguments.

For example, if you are working in the hospitality industry, you might want to design a page welcoming families on holiday and another one for business travelers. Those two segments have very different perspectives on what a hotel should provide as service: if you welcome those two types of people on the same page you won't be able to find a "message-fits-all" to convince them. Instead, if you design one specific Landing Page for business travelers and another one for families, you might customize your message and therefore convince both with relevant arguments.

The first step is indeed to define your segments! To achieve that I encourage you to build your Buyer Personas.

4. What is the great advantage of Landing Pages?

Landing Pages are very efficient because they are customized. Each page addresses a single segment of your market and therefore brings the right piece of information to the right person without bombarding him with irrelevant information.

This is also the best way to make sure your visitor does not get lost looking for something specific on your website: information has to come to him, not the other way round!

5. Why not using a single homepage gathering information for everyone?

Because you must be catchy!

With a "one-fits-all" homepage, you provide information that might or might not be of some use for your visitor.

Landing pages are good for both your visitors and yourself: for them because they find immediately what they are looking for and for you because you increase your conversion rate by reducing your bouncing rate (number of people who leave your page immediately because they can't find what they are looking for).

Focus the flow of visitors to your conversion page using the right arguments.

6. How do Landing Pages work?

Now you have created a few Landing Pages. The problem is "how to attract the right people to the right page"?

You will always have ONE homepage only, so how would you make sure people go to the right Landing Page designed for them?

There are a few tricks to achieve that!

Geo located pages

If your different segments are using different languages or coming from different countries, you might simply code your page in such a way that it will detect either the language or the country (with the IP address) and redirect the user to the right Landing Page. This tutorial explains very well how to proceed with PHP.

Initial question

Some websites do it very well and very simply. An efficient way to identify the segment each customer belongs to is... to ask! Those websites will pop a question when arriving on their homepage such as "I am male / female", "I am professional / individual", etc. Based on the answer the visitor is automatically redirected to the corresponding page.

The problem with this method however is that it requires an additional click to access the content. As we have seen in several articles in the past, the more clicks are required to reach a conversion, the higher the risk of having your visitor giving up.

The keywords strategy

A Landing Page must be customized for a specific segment of the market. Therefore, you will use arguments that "talk" to this specific segment and consequently use keywords related to those arguments.

Here is the key. Use keywords and key phrases that this segment of the population is likely to type in search engines. For example, if you wish to address people looking for group buying or cheap deals, you might use keywords such as "good deal", "group buying" or "cheap" within your text. Using those keywords will help your Landing Page being indexed for such keywords and therefore redirect specific visitors to that page.

The redirection strategy

The most efficient way to make sure the right people go to the right page is to bring them!

Through your SEM and SMM strategies you have the possibility to achieve it.

For example, for each marketing promotion you organize (be it Social Media campaign, banners, ads on LinkedIn or Google, etc.) do not redirect people to your homepage but send them to a specifically tailored Landing Page that will answer the questions of those people clicking the link and encourage them to continue to next page.

7. How does Google find my page?

As said earlier, your Landing Pages (usually) have no reason to appear in the menu. In this case, how does Google find them?

That is the role of the sitemap! XML-Sitemaps is quite efficient to build a simple sitemap to provide Google with. By slightly modifying this map and adding missing pages you will be able to tell Google what it should index.

Now that you have a better overview of what Landing Pages are and how they can help your business, it is time to create your own ones!

Julien Rio.