Landing Pages: The Rest of the Story

Landing pages. They are those magical pages on your website that pave the path for a potential customer allured by your digital advertising message to learn more about what you have to offer. In the words of broadcaster Paul Harvey, landing pages offer The Rest of the Story.

Through an online video or banner ad, you set potential customers up for excitement. You are offering them the newest. The best. The cheapest. The sale of the century. Or whatever it is that you have to make their lives wonderful. Those messages draw attention.

However, even if you have a ginormous ad budget, you still likely can’t communicate all the wonders of your offer, product, or service within the confines of your ad. That’s where a landing page comes in to tell the rest of the story.

What About Using the Home Page as a Landing Page for Ads?

You may be asking, why not just link your ad to your website’s home page? It’s typically the highlight of a website and the usual starting page for pretty much most of the traffic to the site. And then people can use the site navigation to figure out where to go from there. Right?

The problem is, the attention span of an average web surfer is pretty short – about seven seconds. If you make it too difficult for your site visitors to find information (as in, it’s not completely obvious), they’re going to bounce right off your site in search of the next shiny object.

And visitors to your site aren’t going to just dive into the content and read it word for word, searching for relevance to your ad. They’re going to scan it, looking for obvious signs that it fulfills the promise that was made to them to get them there in the first place. If your enticing offer isn’t immediately available loud and clear, your viewers will quickly lose interest.

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Got your attention, right? (If you have no idea what we’re talking about, go back up a few paragraphs and start reading. It will make sense.)

Three Great Reasons to Use Unique Landing Pages

1. Use Your Available Website Real Estate. The typical digital ad is pretty small. You may have room for a few words and images, but that’s it. However, your website has lots of room to tell the rest of the story using words, images, video – you name it. So take advantage of it. If your ad is promoting Great Deals on Backpacking Tents, your landing page should continue the story. Tell your visitors about the specifics of your great deals and the tents to which the deals apply. From there, you could provide links to individual product pages or keep your visitors right there on the landing page, giving them the photos, specs, and other information they need to make a purchase without making them click to any other page.
2. Make it Easy to Communicate. A landing page can include an ad-specific contact form that may be better targeted than the all-purpose form on your contact page. If you don’t offer e-commerce capabilities on your website, the landing page contact form provides a great opportunity for prospective customers to request more information about your offer there on the spot. You can hear what’s on their minds as well as capture their valuable contact information.
3. Let Customers Buy Right Now. A landing page linked to your e-commerce system creates an easy opportunity for website visitors to make a purchase. If the call to action on your ad is BUY NOW, make it easy for customers to start the buying process right from the landing page without making them go any place else.

Offer-specific landing pages on your website provide the best opportunity to connect your digital ads to the rest of the story. They arm site visitors who clicked on an ad with the details on what you have to offer and give them an easy opportunity to make a purchase or ask for more information. If you need help creating landing pages for your site or even developing a digital campaign from beginning to end, give us a shout. And now you know the rest of the story.