Landing Page: what it is and 7 tools to create one

A landing page is a word you may have come across when reading a marketing book, or perhaps when evaluating the quote from the agency that is supporting you in the online promotion of your business. It is a web page that aims to lead users to perform a certain action.

The first thing you need to know is that creating successful landing pages will enable you to convert more easily and get more customers to buy your products or services.

How can this be achieved? Very simple: read this article and take a look at the Master Web Marketing, a training course that will provide you with all the tools to promote your business on the web in a professional manner.

Continue reading and I will explain:

• What is meant by a landing page;
• What should not be missing from a landing page to achieve the goal of increasing sales;
• How to write an effective landing page and what features it should have;
• Which tools to use to create landing pages;
• Some examples of page landings;
• How to test landing pages.

What is a landing page and what is it for?

The translation of the landing page is literally a landing page, a completely self-contained and structured web page where users land following a click on a link or advertisement. Its purpose is to persuade potential customers to take a conversion action via a specific Call To Action (CTA).

You should know the difference between a website and a landing page.

Certainly, the main difference lies in the format of the landing page, which is completely different:

• It has no menu as it relies on the fact that visitors can only navigate within it without “escape routes”;
• It is more specific and incisive in content;
• The only links present are those that lead to the desired action;
• Graphically, it is more polished than a normal page on the site;
• It may use different /tools/hosting technologies.

All these choices apply in order to increase the conversion rate so that users follow the exact path that leads them to perform a specific action, without distraction.

If you have a website or blog, you can make the choice of setting the landing page as the homepage, or you could consider using it as a one-page site.

Creating a landing page serves to meet a potential customer who is on target with your product or service and so that a significant action towards your business occurs, such as:

• Generate contacts (lead generation);
• Acquiring new customers;
• Obtaining a registration for a webinar or event;
• Pre-order or buy a product.

Landing pages are used for advertising campaigns on Google, YouTube, and various social channels. Being a large investment for a company, one must act in such a way that these conversion pages perform at their best. Therefore, a smart strategy must be devised, well-structured copywriting must be thought out and simple tools must be used for implementation.

Online promotion is a team game, so I recommend using a marketing plan in which different types of content and various promotion channels interact. All this should be preceded by an analysis of your target market, and your competitors and the creation of a sketch of your possible customer.

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Exploiting the landing page to sell online

Landing pages are very important tools to be able to sell online, but the important thing to consider when structuring them is to make them efficient and effective. We are talking about landing pages that can be accessed by clicking on advertisements received by e-mail, or viewed on Google, banners, or social networks.

You are intercepted and captured online by companies trying to draw your attention to what they want to sell you. This is a practice that is used to a great extent by companies, E-commerce, and start-ups today. Unlike a few years ago, there is more competition today.

We live in an era where the cost of advertising is increasing and increasingly competitive, making it difficult to make a profitable advertising investment on Google Ads, Facebook Ads, YouTube, and so on. Today, if a company does not do the right things, it is easily at a loss, investing more in advertising than it brings back in turnover.

What can you do to change this situation and improve your business sales? Understand the importance of advertising through digital pages done well and that work.

I will now try to get you more involved with an example: you run a campaign on Facebook Ads for which each click on your landing page costs you $1; if you get 10 clicks you actually spend $10 and these ten clicks bring home one customer. In fact that customer cost you $10 to acquire!

To improve and make a landing page that converts more, i.e., turns traffic into more customers than before, you have to work on the message, the graphics, the content, or the platform on which you make them.

This improvement on your page led you to acquire more customers, for every 10 clicks, you were able to take home two customers and not one, so you doubled your sales and lowered your costs. Your new customers now cost you $5, and your advertising has a lower cost impact.

How to create professional landing pages? I can assure you that it takes a number of ingredients, each of which contributes to making your dish special!

I want to help you make perfect pages by revealing the 3 principles that will make you create landing pages to sell more:

1. Take care of the copy: The first action to take care of in your page landing is the copy. Carefully writing the title and text on the page is essential. The title is of great value in capturing the user’s attention and leading them to click on your page. The body of the text, on the other hand, must be well-edited, so that the desired customer stays and is induced to purchase. How to do this? By using the right persuasive copywriting technique that convinces him that the product you are selling is exactly what he was looking for. Making and keeping promises with writing can make all the difference.
2. Improve speed and usability: An equally important second principle is to optimize the performance of your site, from the point of view of speed. It often happens that you lose customers on web pages that are very slow in loading. It amounts to a complete loss of money. You must therefore analyze your pages and understand what makes them so slow and how you can improve usability and speed by taking care of images and layout.
3. Focus on call to action: The third aspect you need to focus on is CTA. A call to action on a page makes all the difference, even leading you to triple your sales. Users who land on your site do not always buy the first time. You could, for example, realize calls to action in which you offer free samples, trial demos, or free packages! These can induce the potential customer to follow you, try out your article or service, and then convince them to buy. In this way, you have not directly conducted the engagement, but you have induced action and satisfied the end user.

If you want to improve your sales and attract more users to your site, today you should certainly focus on creating perfect landing pages. My tips are three essential aspects from which to start in order to have a winning landing page and optimize sales, but now let us look in detail at how to structure it correctly.

Landing Page Structure

Before you understand how to compose a successful landing page, you need to know the elements that make it stand out. Below I will explain six of them, broken down by:

• Typology,
• Structure,
• Content,
• Social proof,
• CTA,
• UX-UI.

1. Typology

The typology is the first feature you will have to choose, it is indeed important to ask yourself what the goals of the landing page are! There are different types depending on the intended purpose:

• Landing pages for the promotion of a brand: the objective is precisely the dissemination and sharing of the brand on other channels. For this, they are pages characterized by the presence of several action buttons, so as to make sharing more immediate and easier.
• Squeeze page: the purpose is to get the user to leave personal data via a contact form, usually first name, last name, and e-mail address. Remember that the longer the list of data to be entered, the more likely it is that the user will abandon the page!
• Click Through Landing Page: in this case, the purpose is to convince users to proceed with the purchase, through copy that leaves no room for doubt or hindrance, but on the contrary, shows the advantages and usefulness of the product/service.
• Sales page: the desired target is to sell the product presented on the same page. They normally have a very long text accompanied by images, videos, and anything else that can lead to the achievement of the target.

2. Structure

For any landing page to be considered as such, internally it must have no menu, header, or footer. This is important on a strategic level because, if the aim is to convert, the presence of these elements could distract the user and make him leave the page.

Rather, I advise you to focus on the title and subtitle: these are the first things the final recipient reads and allow them to understand what the page will be about. They should therefore be clear, attractive, and clearly visible.

3. Content

Having defined the title and subtitle, you must move on to writing the content of the landing page, which must therefore be clear and explanatory. An important aspect is to be consistent with what is written in the ad and what the consumer will read when clicking on it.

Finally, remember to give as much accurate information as possible to prompt the user to take the desired action through good persuasive copywriting.

4. Social Proof

Do you want to prove the benefits you promise to customers with the products and services you offer? The best way to do this is to include real, tangible evidence by writing real reviews and comments on your landing page from people who have tried the brand and been satisfied with it.

Social proof can help you reassure those who land on your content for the first time and increase the likelihood that the user will become your customer.

5. CTA

As mentioned above, I am talking to you about the calls to action on which to focus in order to convert traffic, they therefore represent the goal of the landing page. Consequently, they must clearly describe the action and must be enclosed in highly visible graphics.

Landing pages can also contain several CTAs, as long as they all lead to the same goal, i.e. conversion. There are various examples of calls to action, each one suitable for every need!

6. UX-UI

A winning landing page must also be easy to navigate, but above all responsive, in order to be viewed correctly from any device, its design must adapt to any device from which it is viewed. Mobile first! This is why it is so important to take the user experience into account, through an appropriate and high-performance user interface.

These elements also contribute to the conversion rate. This is why it is important to understand what characteristics a mobile landing page must have.

How to write a landing page

Let us now see how to write a landing page. There are three basic elements to be realized: headline, body, and CTA.

• HEADLINE (title): first element that catches the attention of the likely customer. It must be short, clear, original, and memorable. A good title will be able to stimulate his curiosity so that he will read the content of the landing page with the aim of converting. Writing a convincing headline often means you have already made a first sale. Remember that you should create it from an SEO perspective and contain keywords in line with what users are looking for. You could also use a subtitle, creating a small extension in which you go on to explain more specifically the advantages of the offer.
• BODY: its protagonists are text and images. The former goes on to describe why the offer being made is advantageous. It is a good idea to make the text light in the first part of the page and possibly add more explanatory text blocks in the part below. Before publishing, make sure that all the formatting of what you have written is nice and consistent with the theme of the page. Images are the visual power of the landing page. They must represent and be consistent with both the identity of the service product and the user profile you want to attract. Remember that your prospective customer’s eyes will rarely fall on every single text you write, they will usually jump from one point to another based on what attracts them the most. This is why headlines and images are so important to allow your message to be captured accurately at first glance.
• CTA: this is probably the cornerstone of any landing page. You must know that the customer does not know what to do once he lands on the page: it is you who must guide him to the action to be taken, whether it is a purchase or filling in the contact form. Therefore the call to action must be as incisive and impactful as possible, but above all, it must occupy a strategic position within the page, preferably above the fold, i.e. at the top visible without scrolling. Finally, choose carefully the text, color, and size of the button to make it immediately recognizable to the user, prompting them to take action.

Effective landing pages through optimization

Sorry to disappoint you, but there are no perfect landing pages the first time around. Like any other online content, they must be optimized in terms of conversion rates, through CRO, conversion rate optimization. Often, digital marketing strategies are ineffective.

But why does this happen? Because the right emphasis is not placed on where online users will end up after clicking on the link.

Landing pages are a crucial node in the marketing funnel or customer journey, i.e. the user path created specifically for the target segment a company wants to reach with its products or services.

This is why every element of the landing page must be balanced: nothing can be left to chance. Every word, button, CTA, image, or video, must be meticulously designed because if just one element of these changes, the conversion could change substantially.

This is also why, in A/B testing, it is advisable to change one thing at a time, to understand what works and what does not, which element cannot be missing, and which performs better than another on a landing page.

Before you start doing A/B tests (or split tests) in your digital lab, you must remember that each element of a landing page has a very high specific weight, precisely because the components are few and carefully chosen. The slightest variation in one of them could correspond to a very big difference in the conversion rate.

This testing methodology can be summarised in 3 steps:

1. Create two versions of the landing page: variants A and B, which differ in one detail;
2. Splitting: i.e. dividing the traffic so as to direct it to the two different editorial offices;
3. Collect data: that is, understand what can increase or decrease the conversion rate.

7 Tools for Creating a Landing Page

Once you have understood the importance of a landing page, and defined your target, objectives, and promotion channel, it is time to create it. How much it costs to create a landing page depends on the route you choose to take

In fact, there are two paths you can take: on the one hand, you can choose to create it from scratch, but this entails time and high costs; on the other hand, you can download landing page templates for free or with subscriptions that drastically reduce the time needed to create it, even without graphic and programming skills.

Before listing these programs, I would like to clarify a few important aspects in the creation of the page:

• Domain: to be bought if you do not have one, or if you already have one, simply add a new page to your website unlinked from the menu;
• Cookie and privacy policies: create them by making them compliant with the new GDPR rules. If you use an IT law consultant well, otherwise you could subscribe to an online plugin, such as Iubenda.

Having clarified these points, here is where to create free or paid landing pages.

1. Mailchimp

This fantastic e-mail marketing tool not only possesses a convenient and intuitive newsletter editor but also makes landing page templates available and provides the possibility of testing pages.

The decision to introduce this additional service is due to the fact that e-mails and landing pages are closely linked, precisely because the latter are landing pages where hypothetical customers are referred to, e.g. after selecting a promotional e-mail link.

Once your landing page is published, you can share it on the web or integrate it with other active Mailchimp campaigns to increase traffic to your site. There are free and premium paid subscriptions and up to 2000 contacts in the list, the tool is completely free. In addition, this service also offers a native data analysis tool for analyzing performance.

2. WordPress

It is currently the most popular CMS in the digital world, after it, in terms of the number of users, there is Joomla, an equally valid but less intuitive medium. It offers free and customizable designs for creating sites in WordPress (WP).

In this content management system, you can install several plugins that will help you in this task, I will give you a few examples:

• OptimizePress: is one of the most popular solutions for companies and is easy and intuitive to use thanks to its visual editor. The plug-in offers a large Marketplace section where you can find the perfect template for your needs.
• Elementor: is considered one of the best plugins on the market. Its functionality is manifold and it has an interface that allows you to have full control over what you are creating, without having to put your hand to the code.
• Thrive Architect: this is not a simple landing page tool, but a very powerful page builder for WordPress. The main goal of this plugin is to make it as easy and fast as possible to create and edit your landing pages.
• Divi Builder: is a major paid visual editor. One of the most appreciated elements of Divi is the elegance of the pages within which you can build your content.

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3. Unbounce

Unbounce is the king of landing pages, with more than 15,000 users. If you go to its homepage, you will immediately find an example of how to make landing pages and you can see that among the brands using it are big players such as Vimeo and Hootsuite.

Unbounce has a really easy-to-use drag-and-drop page builder, you can do as many tests as you like and use one of the 85 templates available. There is a free version with restricted content, but no time limit: you can only buy it when you want.

4. WIX

How to create landing pages with Wix? Wix is also a valid CMS that you can choose to produce your page.

This platform provides various templates and templates, both free and paid. In addition, it has a help center that provides several guides on how to make landing pages, explaining for instance how to induce visitors to action.

5. Leadpages

Leadpages is one of the most widely used software for making marketing landing pages. Through a Plugin, it integrates perfectly with websites created with WordPress. It has a simple editor, which allows you to work with it even if you know nothing about HTML and CSS.

Lead pages can get your content up and running quickly and also allows you to collect leads for your database. You can try it free for 14 days with limitations, and after the trial, you can decide whether to buy it and which of the paid plans to choose.

6. Facebook landing page

I would now like to explain how to create a landing page on Facebook.

Facebook Ads, among its advertising formats, has implemented Canvas, full-screen experiences. It means that within social ad campaigns, you can create a landing page for free without being forced to have a site or buy a domain.

This template works in effect as a landing page, only it is inside Facebook and not on a server. Therefore, you will have all the constituent elements, such as title, copy, and visuals, but the work to be done will certainly be quicker because you can start from ready-made templates and do not have to activate special monitoring.

7. Instapage

For less than $30 per month as a subscription, you could have another really user-friendly tool. Instapage boasts over 1 million web pages created and an average conversion rate of 22%. You can put your project online and work on it with your team, do a/b testing, and integrate it with DEM software and social channels.

5 Landing Page Examples

Have you already got ideas for making landing pages? If you are looking for inspiration, you could take a look at the online templates and templates. Below, you will see examples of landing pages for each type listed.

Squeeze page or lead page for lead generation.

Sales Page dedicated to direct sales.

Landing countdown for events

Click-through page to inform the target audience and take them to the purchase page

Thank you page to thank new leads or customers

Conclusions and free advice for successful landing pages

Here you are at the end of this article. I hope I have given you useful insights and information on why making landing pages and why is such an important tool for businesses. If you are planning to make landing pages for your business and want to learn more, don’t wait!

Book your free coaching session where one of our experts will be at your complete disposal, answer all your questions, and guide you step by step through the implementation of your landing page, thus improving your revenues!

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