Are Landing Pages Dead or Have They Just Evolved?

Take a walk with me – starting at the search bar of your customers favorite browser. Your customer or prospect knows they need to solve a problem. No matter the need, large or small,  health insurance or a new pair of pants, most American’s hit Google to find what they are looking for.

Let’s break it down by numbers… 3.5 billion search queries are entered into Google every day – 40,000 every second or 1.2 trillion searches per year, worldwide.

While some of the Google search queries are just plain silly, most offer businesses with the opportunity to send customers and prospects content that is not only valuable but also relevant to their needs. Even the most hopeless of Google searches may actually have value… If you offer a product that can solve a problem. Yes, even this silly query…

But, the value your product ads needs to be showcased in an effective way, otherwise your customer will move on to the next result. Marketing copy that shows up in Google is extremely important – page titles, descriptions, and banner imagery will encourage users to click on your result over another. But what happens next? Most search queries will lead the user directly to a product page where they can get the meat of information – price, images, description, and reviews but others lead to something else, something that some marketers are abandoning – the landing page.

Over the last few years several marketers have declared the age of landing pages is over. According to most marketers, this can be blamed in part on social media and content marketing. Every potential customer has access to so much information about products and services, ours and our competitors. Traditional landing pages are not dead but they definitely need to evolve. What is a traditional landing page? Well, check out this wireframe below.

A traditional landing page is simple – it includes a little bit of information about the product or service and has a form at the top. But there are not much engagement opportunities for our users on a traditional landing page. Nothing really personalized, nothing to give them something that solves their pain points, it’s just a simple page with simple information.

Landing Pages Need to Evolve to be More Engaging

November is the month we show you how to optimize your landing pages for the next generation. Weaving interactivity into your traditional landing pages will not only increase engagement with prospects but also encourage more conversions. And really, that’s the point of a landing page, right? We want more conversions but we also want qualified conversions. Most landing pages don’t have a purchase button on them, instead they aim to move customers through the funnel to a piece of content or to be contacted by a salesperson. A conversion or completed form is great but a highly qualified lead is even better.

And how do you get a highly qualified lead? Well, it can start with targeting the right keywords – the ones that your prospect will actually type in and the ones that mean something to your brand or service. And after they end up on your landing page, there should be solid message match in order to disrupt or confuse them. 

But when the user gets to your page and you have fine tuned the copy and imagery to create a seamless journey – what are you providing that is personal? Quiz questions are showing up in next gen landing pages as a way to display dynamic content to user’s based on their choices. It’s a great way to show the right product to a user rather than forcing them to look at a product sheet or browse through dozens of products to find the right one. 

So, to sum this post up, landing pages are not dead, they are just evolving… and we are looking forward to spending the next month sharing tips on how you can evolve yours into next generation landing pages.