I have a pet hate amongst online agencies and it’s the words “Landing Page Design”
I hate it because talking about “landing pages” is about as useful as calling yourself a Digital Agency” in 2023.
It’s way too vague. It needs more specificity to be useful.
A landing page can be literally any page on your site. It’s just the first page someone arrives at.
With the weird long tail stuff that people search Google for, that could be anything. It could be your privacy policy.
What we WANT is the pages that we can direct people to intentionally.
There’s four things that can happen on a “landing page”
The reader gets the information they want and goes away again.
This is generally a pretty bad objective.
We want to be advancing the reader towards a sale at any step we can. It can have a role in brand building, but usually the cost of getting someone to a web page means the economics of using a website don’t work out well.
Even businesses that are driven by ads will do everything they can to keep you on the site longer, so they can serve more ads.
The reader gets some information, and clicks through to explore more.
This is where longer form content tends to have a role.
Blog posts and advertorials that lead at least to another click. This is the backbone of most information business’ SEO strategy.
They reader signs up for an email list to get some more information.
Often the same information as above, but “gating” it implies that we’re trading something a bit more valuable. In return they give us something a bit more valuable than attention – an email address.
The reader buys something.
Making a sale on the first page on your site to your site isn’t that implausible.
You just need to recognise that this won’t be their first touchpoint with you.
It’s likely that all the touch points above have already happened, or that there’s been a lot going on on other platforms before they get to you. The more that happens before they get to the site, the more likely the sale is.
That’s why 30 minute infomercials still crush sales at 2am.
