The short answer is, probably yes, every website can benefit from a landing page. It depends on your marketing strategy and your marketing budget as to how you'll approach it. Read on to find out more.

What is a landing page?

A landing page is a page (or sequence of pages) on your website that is not ordinarily your home page. It is designed to convert a real person, your website visitor, into a lead or customer.

You direct web traffic here from an ad campaign, social media, or an email link rather than to your homepage, hence your customer “landing” here.

It's designed to collect their contact details in exchange for something of value to them or to increase the sales value with an initial low-cost offer.

A landing page is an ideal opportunity to make a good impression, without the informative but distracting main pages of your website pulling them away from your call to action.

What does a landing page do?

A landing page works in different ways, depending upon what you want to achieve.

For instance, you might wish to maximise your sales opportunity in that immediate moment for a transactional sales opportunity. Or you may wish to gather customer data and warm up your leads to move them through your ‘sales funnel' over time, for a longer-term customer relationship, or larger purchase.

You may want to use it as a start of a sales funnel with a free, or low priced product, that can then during the purchase process offer other products (order bumps/upsells/downsells). The aim here is to maximise the sales opportunity of the desire to purchase.

The key is to capture the customer's email address in a friendly and engaging way so that you can market to them in future, whether or not you made a sale in the initial instance.

What do landing pages include?

• An enticing headline
• A sub-heading
• Succinct breakdown of your offer, you have around a 3 second decision window
• A clear Call to Action (CTA), tell them the action you want them to take
• An email field, possibly a name field
• A button to send their email address
• A captivating image both representing the offer, and in line with your brand
• Clear instructions on next steps
• Social sharing icons (maximise your return on the cost of your lead!)
• Some include testimonials, depending on their strategy
• Some include videos talking through the offer

Less is More

Don't fill your landing pages with lots of information. To draw attention, they should be simple, geometric, and have a clean look and feel. Try to keep key information and the CTA ‘above the fold'.

Choose only one offer per page, don't distract your customer. Remove all distractions, good landing pages even remove their menus so that customers don't navigate away.

Minimise your form usage, try to make things clickable rather than form-filling. Only ask for the most essential information. The more formidable the forms look, the more likely a customer will navigate away.

An uncluttered page is easier on the eye and easier to understand, but most importantly, it will load much faster. You’ve only got a few seconds to make a good first impression.

Make it personal

Think about the specific customer type your advertising will appeal to, and make a ‘persona' of that customer. Speak directly to that persona on your landing page. Create other slightly different landing pages if you need to target more than one persona.

Closer up images of people rather than objects are more relatable. Make sure to use your own face when offering services, those of your team, and those of happy customers.

Use strongly contrasting colours to keep attention on your message. Custom illustrations also work well rather than stock images.

If you can design your page to refer to your customer by name, then do! Otherwise, try to include something that mentions customers in their home town/country/state (or Apple/Microsoft users, etc.) depending on the data which you can see about them at page load that they can relate to.

How can I get a landing page?

If you are fairly capable in terms of marketing and sales process principles then you can of course build your landing page and follow-on pages, maybe your theme has a template for you. However, it might be best to use a professional tool/plugin to better optimise and reduce lost opportunities to sell your products (funnel leaks), the professionals use these tools too.

Landing page tools and plugins

Possibly the biggest name in landing pages and sales funnels is Clickfunnels, which is very much an all-singing all-dancing ‘salesy' solution, this link is a good example of one of their funnels. The pricing of course reflects this (basic package $97/month, platinum $297/month), it does include plenty of training, which could be worth the money if your products and market are suited to it. Their templates can be perceived to be a little aggressive, which you may want to tone down. Clickfunnels themselves host your funnel, it's not a plugin.

If you want to be more in charge of your own destiny, then a WordPress website with either one page focussed purely on sales (a typical funnel concept), or a multipage website with one or more landing page is a sound option. A getting started guide is available here (pro tip, I love the Divi theme!).

At the more affordable end of the market, worth considering, are Hubspot or Mailchimp, especially if you are going to use a CRM anyway. You may as well take advantage of their landing page design and functionality. Either of these combined with WooCommerce (free) and good analytics can go a long way to meeting the needs of a small business owner. It is worth keeping in mind that as you increase the number of email contacts with both of these, then a monthly fee becomes essential. Mailchimp is the more affordable option here for a small business owner.

My best-of-both choice, in terms of simplicity of use and functionality, as well as all the extra tools and data analysis, would be CartFlows. It has a free version that you can get started with, and the Pro version (currently $239 per year) gives you incredible functionality for things like A/B testing, cart abandonment recovery and one-click upsells. It also has its own clean checkout process, built on WooCommerce.

Conclusion

Once you have decided your marketing strategy, it becomes essential that you maximise your marketing budget. A landing page does just that (with plenty of market testing). If you have a limited budget, then you do need to maximise and optimise.

With zero advertising budget, then you need to look for more organic traffic, word of mouth, heavy social media engagement, traditional marketing techniques etc. and a landing page can still be of significant benefit. It's harder work, but it can be done.

Consider all the above information, and research which approach is best for your small business. Understand your cost of acquisition for each sale you make, how much word of mouth works for you, and what your growth strategy is.

Make sure to A/B test what works and what doesn't, so that you are getting the most out of your advertising budget. Chat with those that didn't convert to understand why. This can often give you great understading about your customers and your business.