Landing pages are standalone web pages that are created for digital marketing or advertising and is where a visitor lands when they click on an link in email or an add on social media. Unlike web pages, which have many different exploratory options, landing pages are created with a particular focus or goal in mind, also known as a call to action. This singular goal is what makes landing pages the best for increasing site traffic of your marketing campaign and lower your cost.

Landing pages are different from homepages in terms of number of interactions where homepages have many different potential distractions. Landing pages contain fewer links that will carry the visitor away from the call to action and are more likely lead to purchase or subscription.

Types of Landing Pages

There are many variations of landing pages but their are two archetypal types: Lead generation page and clickthrough page.

Lead generation landing pages (lead gen or lead capture) use forms as their call to action to collect lead data, like names and email addresses of visitors. B2B marketers selling high ticket items commonly use this type of landing page to build lists of potential customers. Ecommerce brands also use these pages for the same reason, offering free shipping or special offers.

Clickthrough landing pages Ecommerce sites more commonly use this type of landing page as they go straight for sales or subscriptions. Usually, they have a simple call to action like a button that directs the visitor to a checkout such as app store, or completes a transaction.

Sources of Traffic

There are a number of options to funnel visitors to the landing page such as paid search traffic which involves paid advertising on search engines such as Google. You see this when you type something into  Google and the first few results come up as adds related to your search.

Paid social traffic consists of running ads on social media sites such at Instagram or Facebook and is a particularly good way to target communities or people that will be interesting in your product or brand, even if they haven’t sought it out yet. This way you can connect with customers before they start to look for your product or before they want it. Each social media has its own type of market to target. For instance, Instagram is a good place to advertise products and lifestyle brands with a strong visual appeal.

Email campaigns are arguably the most effective form of marketing due to its enormous reach and low costs, in comparison to the rest. As of April 2022, there are over 4.26 billion email users world wide, which is more than half of the global population. The use of landing pages with email campaigns can be used to acquire new customers as well as nurture the relationships with existing ones.

Organic search traffic are visitors that come from an unpaid source, like below the paid ads on google pages. By creating compelling and useful content on your landing page, you can ensure that your brand will have a higher rank and appear more frequently in related searches. This ultimately leads to more organic search traffic.

Creating a Landing Page

There are many elements to consider to create a top notch landing page and ensuring you stand out against the crowd is more important ever in the ever crowded digital market.

Shopify 

Shopify’s landing page offers a free trial when you sign up, making this the call to action. The interface is very minimal, quickly and effectively conveying the necessary information to the visitor accompanied with simple graphics.

Great Jones 

Great Jones, a brand popular for their Dutch ovens, is another sign up landing page which offers $100 off and this is hieratically the first thing you look at when the page loads making it the call the action. The bold colours adjacent to the imagery makes the products stand out even more.

Wise

Wise is an online banking service that allows you to send and receive money in different currencies and countries. The landing page initially asks if you are interested in a personal or business account to only provide you with the information that applies as not to overload the visitor. Their landing page highlights the security that comes with using wise, that it is a safe service and this is the main selling point on their call to action.

Wag!

Wag! is an online service that connects dog walkers and sitters with dog owners. The landing page gets straight to the point with large font encouraging to join the community and also is the only one I’ve looked at so far to feature a QR code enabling visitors to quickly download the app. Leaving the form field open on the page means visitors don’t even have to click on the CTA.

 

I would like to create a landing page with small amounts of information on each section and for the whole thing to run slightly longer down the page than the above examples.

Landing Page Wireframe

After researching existing landing pages for ideas I began sketching out ideas before take to developing it digitally.  I experimented with the idea of having boxes or circles with the Mountain logo contained within or bullet points.

Webflow

I had a little bit experience using Webflow previously but not so much that I create something with ease. I do feel like it was a lot easier to build than using HTML coding like we did with our last unit, which I found terribly difficult.

I chose a hero image of mountain ranges and some water, as per the brand guidelines. I felt this tied in really well for the summer colour scheme with the lens flare at the bottom left matched the colours of the Mountain logo I have centred on top of the image, as to make it main stage of what a visitor will see as soon as the page load. Each section features just a little bit of information, accompanied with a graphic and is then separated by images. The main selling proposition of my landing page is to sign up to the Mountain service that’s why the only buttons available are sign up or login. The final product turned out differently than my sketches but I feel what I created is more appropriate and has a more simple feel reduced down to basic elements, conveying one of my core values. A major issue I faced was that Webflow didn’t support my chosen font. The closest resolution I could find was to replace the font with Montserrat at which is the font most like Futura available on Webflow. I was really disappointed about this as it didn’t feel like it matched with my branding and also didn’t follow my brand guidelines I had just created. My general experience otherwise was quite good, I think its a really good inbetween for designers that are just starting to design websites and with more practice and gaining of knowledge I would like to make a more interactive website.

 

 

 

 

Link to webflow landing page: https://mountain-landing-page.webflow.io/

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References

https://www.shopify.com/free-trial

https://greatjonesgoods.com/

https://99firms.com/blog/how-many-email-users-are-there/#:~:text=There%20are%20nearly%204.26%20billion%20email%20users%20worldwide.,-Since%20the%20invention&text=The%20latest%20reported%20number%20in%202022%20is%20close%20to%204.26%20billion.

https://unbounce.com/landing-page-articles/what-is-a-landing-page/

https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/landing-page-examples-list

https://www.wix.com/blog/2019/05/best-landing-page-examples/