The interest in and demand for landing pages has grown substantially over the past decade. The reason for this growth is simple: Landing pages are the best solution to optimize paid advertising campaigns and provide a personalized experience for the search user.
That’s because they help marketers target specific audiences and collect valuable user information — like email address and phone number. We don’t only use landing pages for paid advertising, though.
Before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s start with a quick reminder…
What is a landing page?
A landing page is a standalone web page that a visitor lands on after clicking an ad or search result. Its sole purpose is to get that visitor to take action (to sign up, register, download, buy, etc.).
Landing pages contain persuasive elements such as compelling headlines, a short form, social proof, explanatory videos, and a strong call-to-action that gets prospects to convert.
One of the greatest benefits about landing pages is their versatility. They aren’t exclusive to any type of business or industry. With many industries conducting business online, landing pages are essential pieces to every marketing campaign puzzle.
At Instapage, our motto is that “every ad and promotion needs a landing page” and we encourage all marketers to create landing pages for each and every one of their campaigns.
“Every ad and promotion needs a landing page.” – @Instapage
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We have a comprehensive marketing program that includes multiple team members — each requiring landing pages for their respective tasks. Because of this, it only makes sense that we use our own software to create landing pages to maximize conversions.
Creating a fully optimized landing page can be challenging if you’re new to the process. But with software like Instapage, it doesn’t have to be difficult. Take a look at some of these landing page examples and continue reading below to learn how Instapage effectively uses landing pages.
(All examples below are being A/B tested with an alternate version, so when you click through to the page, you may not see the variation displayed in this article.)
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How Instapage uses landing pages
1. Paid advertising
Paid advertising on Google AdWords is one of our biggest traffic sources. We like to determine which page variations perform best so we’re big proponents of A/B testing. Our landing page platform is home to the most advanced analytics in the industry, so it only makes sense for us to advertise on A/B testing related search phrases terms — and have a dedicated landing page for them.
For example, we bid on search phrases such as A/B test landing page, landing page testing, and split test landing pages, of which an ad like the one below appears at the top of search results:
When prospects click-through on the ad, they’re sent to this landing page (notice how “test,” “landing pages,” and “A/B test” are strategically placed in the headline and subheadline):
By keyword matching a personalized landing page to the search phrase, we are able to target people looking for landing page A/B testing and get them to sign up for service.
2. Sign up for services
As a SaaS business, our ultimate objective is to generate sign ups for our service.
The sign up page here highlights our landing page builder, custom design capabilities, and publishing options. In fact, it’s one of the most common Instapage landing pages we link to in our blog posts:
3. Webinars
Webinars can be used in different funnel stages, depending on their content.
A product demo, for example, is considered to be bottom of the funnel because prospects are aware of the problem they have, are considering a few options, and are in decision mode. On the other hand, a middle of the funnel webinar could be a brand demonstrating their expertise in a particular subject, like personalized advertising and landing pages.
At Instapage, we provide both types of webinars to our audience. Each week our Lead Marketing Educator, Ander Frischer, presents a live product demo. We also host webinars on personalized advertising and landing page strategy, sometimes with external guests. To generate traffic for each presentation, we use in-app popup messages, email marketing, and paid advertising channels.
Let’s look at our middle of the funnel webinar to learn how we persuade visitors to register. Once prospects arrive at our personalized advertising webinar page (below), we take advantage of personalized CTAs relevant to the offer, a countdown timer, bulleted copy, and a hero image of Ander:
At the conclusion of this webinar, we frequently help push attendees further down the funnel with an incentivized offer. Specifically, in the past, we’ve offered a 50% discount on the first month of our Premium Instapage plan.
4. Promotions
Since our company motto is “every ad and promotion needs a landing page,” this section should come as no surprise.
Frequently, when we announce a new product feature that is only made available to certain customer plans, we offer customers the chance to upgrade (at a discount) to have access to the feature. To do this, we use a token-based promotional system where the discount expires after a short time.
For other special deals, we use a dedicated landing page for that specific promotion.
Just recently, we designed the following landing page to promote our 2016 Black Friday and Cyber Monday deal for customers. When customers converted, they would save 30% on their first three months when upgrading to a Pro or Premium Instapage account:
You’ll notice we use a countdown timer and two CTA buttons above the fold to encourage visitors to upgrade. What you won’t find anywhere on the page are exit links or any unrelated content. The goal for this page is to persuade visitors to upgrade. That’s exactly what it accomplished.
5. Offer gated content
At Instapage, we offer a variety of content that is not gated behind a form, like this list of landing page and marketing terms. For content that we do gate, it’s used to demonstrate our expertise and enter prospects into our marketing funnel.
For example, we encourage all marketers to always A/B test because this takes the guesswork out of landing page conversion optimization. Since we emphasize split testing so much, we offer our top 10 A/B testing tips for other marketers as a gated piece of content:
Once someone converts, they’re sent to a thank you page which notifies them to check their email for the A/B testing tips. They are also entered into our lead nurturing campaigns that push them further down our marketing funnel with related content — ultimately offering an Instapage product demo and to sign up for a 30-day trial.
6. Highlight a specific product feature
Brands often use landing pages to introduce a new product or to highlight a feature of an already-existing product to its customers. The example below shows how we use a landing page to highlight the importance of, and encourage the creation of, mobile responsive landing pages:
7. Affiliate program
This last example is a bit different than the previous pages. It’s not about signing up for Instapage, downloading our content, promoting a webinar, or any special feature. It’s about getting marketers to promote the Instapage software.
This Instapage landing page simply encourages visitors to become an Instapage affiliate, by providing an entire list of compelling reasons to partner with us:
To promote our affiliate program, it wouldn’t make any sense to use the previous landing page examples. That’s why we created this dedicated page for our affiliate program. Remember, it all comes back to our motto: “every ad and promotion needs a landing page.”
Some final words
In every landing page example above, notice that each one contains a strong and compelling headline, persuasive copy, cooperative CTA buttons, as well as several trust signals, including statistics and customer testimonials. These are all key components we’re sure to incorporate each time we create an Instapage landing page.
Now that we’ve showed you ours, how does your company use landing pages?
The post How Instapage Uses Landing Pages for Content Marketing appeared first on The Mention Blog.