Setting up for Conversion: from Web-Page to Landing Page

With an understanding of the basics of lead generation, lead nurturing, and lead scoring, in this section, we would cover how these efforts culminate into action for the marketer in terms of conversion across each of the funnel stages with the final conversion being the product or service purchase.

Any marketing activity typically needs an anchor where marketers can bring in all of their targets and qualified leads for conversion. In case of traditional marketing, the place for conversion was typically a physical store where consumers would come in for a purchase after they had been exposed to marketing, or it would be a phone number which they would use to call to get in touch with a representative who would support them in accomplishing the sale.

Similarly, in the digital world, marketers need to bring in all their activated leads from different sources to a place where they can achieve the desired marketing objectives. Traditionally, that conversion point has been the homepage of the firm’s website. The website has been in most cases, the primary conversion destination for digital marketing with other secondary conversion points like marketing apps also growing.

A website, which is the primary conversion tool for marketers, typically consists of web pages of which the homepage has always been the most crucial, not only because it is the first page which visitors look at but also because it is the backbone for overall page navigation on the site. In the initial days of marketing, when most of the sites were static with limited functionality, the homepage used to be the one where visitors would mostly land and from where they would navigate to other pages based on interest and need.

But as marketing started to grow more complex with multiple target consumer groups and a variety of lead-nurturing techniques, it became important that marketers use their main conversion tool (the web pages) to customize and deploy them for multiple conversion objectives. It was then that the concept of landing pages emerged.

A landing page, known as a ‘lead-capture’ page or a ‘lander,’ is a single web page which has been customized to receive and convert visitors on specific objectives from multiple other media channels like search campaigns, social media, e-mail campaigns, etc. Typically, a landing page should be developed as a natural extension of advertisement or link from which it is directed. The key differences between a website’s homepage and its landing pages include:

1. Homepage is proactively visited by individuals while landing pages are typically customized pages within the website where nurtured leads are redirected for specific conversion activities.
2. Visitors to a landing page would need to be convinced and provided with some takeaway or positive experience for them to convert or visit the website again. This is not the case with regular homepage visitors who have visited the homepage out of personal discovery, through word-of-mouth, or from other sources.

With the evolution of marketing, landing pages are giving way to marketing applications (generally referred to as ‘marketing apps’), which are more interactive than landing pages. Let us first understand the basics of landing pages and how they are optimized for conversion, following which we would also briefly touch upon the emerging area of marketing apps.

From our discussion on conversion marketing in the last section, we understood that each of the funnel stages have different objectives and need different kinds of conversion techniques. Landing pages are typically designed to help marketers with conversions across each of these stages. This can be achieved in multiple ways like: developing a form for registration, creating a hosting page for a webinar registration, developing a downloading page for an e-book, survey or contest, or just designing ‘Contact Us’ page. Each of these would be considered as stand-alone and distinct landing pages.