What Is a Landing Page?

In digital marketing, a landing page is a standalone web page, created specifically for a
marketing or advertising campaign. It’s where a visitor “lands” after they click on a link in
an email, or ads from Google, Bing, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or similar
places on the web.

Unlike web pages, which typically have many goals and encourage exploration, landing
pages are designed with a single focus or goal, known as a call to action (or CTA, for
short).

It’s this focus that makes landing pages the best option for increasing the conversion
rates of your marketing campaigns and lowering your cost of acquiring a lead or
sale.

Types of Landing Pages

You’ll see a lot of variation out there, depending on the specifics of the business, but
there are really two archetypal landing page (defined by their goals):

Lead Generation Landing Pages: Also called “lead gen” or “lead capture” pages,
these use a form as their call to action. This form almost always collects lead data, like
the names and email addresses of visitors. (You can read some expert-certified lead
gen strategies here.)

B2B marketers and companies selling high-ticket items use this type of landing page to
build a list of prospective customers. They sometimes offering something free, like an
ebook or webinar, in exchange for contact info. Ecommerce brands can also use these
pages for list-building, or offering free shipping or special deals, too.

Clickthrough Landing Pages: Frequently used by ecommerce and SaaS (software-as-

a-service) marketers, clickthrough pages go straight for sales or subscription. Usually,
they have a simple button as the call to action that sends the visitor into the checkout
flow (like the app store) or completes a transaction.
Why is a landing page important? You might be wondering why you need to
create separate, distinct pages that web visitors will be redirected to when
they click on calls to action. After all, landing pages are time consuming to
create, and you need a lot of them. You might be hoping that you can get
away with not using them.

But the fact is the landing page is an indispensable part of inbound

marketing, and specifically, of your lead generation efforts.

Why is a landing page important? We’ve detailed a few reasons that you
should consider.

1. Generate Leads
At its core, your website really only has two purposes: to generate traffic and
to convert. Landing pages are critical in helping you to generate leads and
convert them into prospects and customers.

Studies show that marketers capture leads at a higher rate by sending them to
dedicated landing pages, rather than sending traffic to the home page. The
landing page is the simplest, most effective way to generate more leads for
your sales team.

2. Collect Prospect Demographics

The idea of the landing page is that your visitors must “pay” you in information
in order to get access to an offer. On the landing page, visitors must fill out a
form. Though the information you request will vary, most of it will encompass
contact information and demographics. Of course, contact information gives
you the info you need to start contacting leads.

But the demographics information is just as important. It gives you the data
you need to understand your new leads and segment them more effectively in
order to better target their needs, desires, and pain points. It also helps your
sales team have more valuable conversations. And ultimately, this will
improve sales.

3. Track Data
Data from landing pages can be tracked, and this can help you understand
just how engaged your prospects are. You’ll get to know if a prospect has
downloaded multiple offers and signed up for several webinars, for example.
This indicates the prospect is highly engaged and ready to purchase soon.

In addition, you can track and analyze landing page data to better understand
how well your marketing offers are performing. You can compare data from
various offers to see what’s working and what isn’t, so you can optimize your
marketing.

4. Remove Distractions
Why is a landing page important? Because it inspires specific consumer
action. If you were to send your visitors to your website’s home page, they
could take a wide variety of actions, from checking out your blog to reading
about your history. Though this engagement is also good, it’s not what you
actually wanted to happen. And it can delay consumer action.

A landing page removes all of the distractions, such as the site map, links,
and navigation options, so your visitors can focus on the one thing you want
them to do: convert.