If you've never worked with landing pages before you may be wondering, what's the big deal? Why bother? Well simply put, you need a landing page because your website has too much going on. Since landing page are generally covered with the idea of selling something, I've crafted this post around a category which rarely gets attention from the landing page community -- the forum world -- as a way of showing how they truly are necessary for everyone.
Lets begin and remember, in this post image you run a forum. I'll cover how this translates to other sites at the end.
So you own a forum or other web community and have spent hours and hours on getting your design dead on, bringing in early contributors and building a base of loyal traffic but now you're looking to advertise or maybe you're already advertising but not getting the results you should be. Before I go any further, when I say advertise what I really mean is promote... you could be paying for advertisements in the form of banners, search listings, or affiliate campaigns but you could also be driving people in organically through a partnership like a link exchange, a promotion like a contest or virally through a tell a friend campaign.
Here's how your campaign would look without a landing page:
A visitor would come across your marketing message wherever it lives. Maybe they see a banner; maybe they get a link on a user generated content site, perhaps even see you at another forum. Whatever the case may be they get an initial impression of what you offer but not a whole lot. It could be a few words, a couple pictures, if you're lucky a sentence or two. So they decide to click on in and now what? They end up on a page - maybe your homepage or if you're a little more sophisticated, a specific forum or thread page. But now what? That's exactly the problem... Now what? Do they go on and read more content? Do they respond right away? Can they respond? Can they engage? Where are they now? Where do they go? They don't know and you haven't told them, thats why you need a landing page.
Let's extend the example a little further and assume you're trying to promote a contest designed to get new visitors to register so you can market to them later and hopefully get them to post / participate. In this case your campaign creative probably says something about the contest so people know why they should come to your site. They know the opportunity but when they click where do you send them? To the homepage? Well that could work except the homepage has to serve everyone... It has to tell a member who hasn't logged in to do so, it has to jump people to the forums, to your articles, photo galleries and whatever other content it has. At best this leaves you room to put a promotion to the contest again. If you're doing things right that promotion might even be targeted to only show up to guest visitors but even then, it's another click for the visitor to get to the contest, another distraction opportunity. So let's say you don't send them to the homepage, instead you send them to a thread explaining the contest or better yet, right to the contest page with an explanation of the benefits and a call to enter specifically designed for a new visitor... Well there you have it; they've hit a landing page. Not a great one since there's other ways to hit it and it probably has your normal navigation but they're still there, still focused on a next step.
With that in mind, here's how your campaign would look if you used landing pages:
The visitor would see your creative just like they did in the previous examples but when they clicked they'd end up on a page that matched the creative, a page just for them. If you were promoting a contest that's what the page would talk about: The contest prize, the reason to enter, the benefits and a way to get started. If the page was about a specific topic or even your forum in general they'd still end up on a landing page, one that spoke to that topic or to your site in general. A page that outlines what you offer, highlights what they can do (register to post, share, buy, sell, or whatever else), how long the process takes and what happens when it's done. You might link them off to a few relevant forums or features; you may offer them highlights about something you're offering. The point is the visitor gets a relevant message that tells them options they have; things are spelled out and when you're visiting a site that likely has thousands of pages, dozens or hundreds of distinct choices from multiple forums to different features, without having an idea of where to go next you're lost.
Remember, your goal was to get the visitor registered and with the landing page that's clear. With the landing page they know why to register and what will happen if they do. Without a landing page, well, maybe they'll click register and if they do, maybe you'll even tell them the benefits. But then again, maybe they won't know they can register or maybe they'll just click a few other items, float around and take off never knowing what the appropriate next step is.
Ok so forget the forum and think back to whatever it is you do...
Want to collect leads for marketing? A landing page sells the benefits of why someone should enter their information and what they'll get. Trying to sell products? A landing page can talk to the specific product, examine the benefits, list the cost and explain any value adds or offers without having to show the clutter and navigation options of a standard page. Even if all you want to do is get people to read information a landing page can still deliver more of it with less distraction and a better focus on getting people to continue on into the site to the next logical page, not the first tab on your navigation bar.
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