The Difference Between Your Website Home Page and Your Landing Pages – Why You Need Both

If you’re like most business owners you’re probably doing a lot of your own marketing or maybe you have a couple of venders providing services but if you don’t understanding the changing world of marketing you’re going to struggle to drive leads for your business.

Marketing has only one objective—to generate leads. If your marketing effort isn’t generating leads… stop it and look for a new direction.

One of those directions might be inbound marketing. When you practice inbound marketing you have to understand that your prospects won’t all be landing on your website home page and driving people to your home page isn’t the right approach.

In a recent study from HubSpot, the leader in inbound marketing software, reported that businesses with 10 or more landing pages see a 55% increase in leads generated from their website.

Marketing your business on the internet hasn’t become any easier, in fact most marketing pros who follow the changes going on in the industry will tell you it has become much, much more complicated.

The major difference between what you need from your website home page design and your landing page design are dramatic.

People landing on your home page probably don’t know you yet. Or if they do it’s through a referral or a more casual pass with your company. Here are a few examples. If I heard about a company and was interested in learning more, I would type in their address and visit their home page.

That means your home page needs to give them a message that connects with their challenges in just 10 seconds. That message needs to be emotional, direct and easy to understand. They need to see what makes your business special, or remarkable and they need to feel like you work with other people, just like them. The feeling is important and its true—you only have 10 seconds to get their attention.

People who end up on a landing page probably know you better. If they are on a landing page, our goals are different. We don’t want to give them the overview story, like we do on the home page; we want to turn them into a lead. That’s why this page needs to have the following features.

Remove the navigation. You don’t want them leaving this page. You want them converting from anonymous visitors into lead for your business. Make sure there is a compelling image on the page that shows them exactly what they will be getting if they fill out your form.

Make sure the copy on that page is direct and focused on the value associated with the content they are about to download, view or interact with. Make sure this page is about them and not about you. Use phrases like; you will learn, you will discover, find the secrets, gain knowledge and improve your performance.

Use bulleted lists and make sure the next steps are clearly articulated. Directions are critical on this page; most people need to be clearly led through your process. If you want them to fill out a form tell them that, tell them where the form is, even if it’s obvious and tell them what’s going to happen after they fill out the form.

Finally, don’t forget the form. Please don’t be crazy greedy on the info you want to collect. Remember the more you ask for the less leads you are going to get for your business. If you don’t need the info or don’t plan on using it for segmentation, don’t ask for it.

Make sure you track the performance of your home page and your landing pages. Overall your conversion rate should be between 1% and 3% across your site. But your landing pages should be performing between 20% and 40%. Now you should see why you want to drive visitors to landing pages directly. This is why we recommend clients running pay per click campaigns to create landing pages specific to those campaigns instead of driving visitors to your more general home page.

The improvement in lead generation when you implement even small changes to your overall website and conversion strategy are often dramatic.

To learn more about how to get more leads from your website, click on our Free Report titled, Website Design That Turns Heads and Drives Leads or click the image to see our landing page.

Mike Lieberman is one of the founding partners, president and chief marketing scientist at Square 2 Marketing. He is s a regular contributor to Vistage’s Executive Street, a speaker and co-author of the bestselling book on marketing, Fire Your Sales Team Today! You can follow him @Mike2Marketing. To follow Square 2 Marketing use @Square 2.

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