What Is A Landing Page And Why You Need One

According to Wikipedia, a landing page 'is a single web page that appears in response to clicking an advertisement. The landing page will usually display directed sales copy that is a logical extension of the advertisement or link.' Allow me to translate'

A landing page is a single web page that appears in response to clicking an advertisement with these specific features:

• Same look and feel of your main school website which reinforces your school's visual brand.
• Employs minimal navigation which focuses user to complete your call-to-action.
• Has one or two calls-to-action.
• Content is geared toward the content of the advertisement to keep things consistent.

We've employed landing pages for over a year now, as part of our inbound marketing strategy, with the sole purpose of generating new inquiries. We primarily use landing pages as part of our search engine marketing (SEM) campaign with Google Adwords and Facebook Ads. Here's how it works for us:

A person views our Google Ad about small class sizes. See below:

When they click on the ad they are directed to our landing page about small classes which is on the left. The image on the right is the About page from our official school website.

Our hope is that the prospective parent will then complete the inquiry form which will begin the admission process. After the parent completes the inquiry form they are directed to the admission section of our official website.

I'd like to point out a few important details regarding the landing page vs. the web page. As I mentioned above, the landing page is devoid of navigation except for a few options in the top right hand corner. This fact forces the user to focus on our call-to-action which, on this page, is to complete the inquiry form to learn more about the school. The landing page's content speaks about my school's small class sizes and talks about the 'big difference' mentioned in our Google Ad helping to connect the ad with the page.

The reason we use a landing page is four-fold:

1. They help parents find information about what matters most to them. For example, the prospective parent in the above scenario was interested in small class sizes which we can glean from the fact that they clicked on our Google Ad about small class sizes. Therefore, it makes more sense to give them information about what interests them as opposed to sending them to our homepage which would be very general.
2. Landing pages limit the number of options a prospective parent has when viewing the page. We want them to fill out the inquiry form and make it very easy for them to do just that. If we had sent them to our homepage they would have many options and none of those options would include filling out our inquiry form.
3. They decrease the amount of money we spend on SEM (Google and Facebook Ads) because we have achieved a higher conversation rate using landing pages. Our conversation rate is the number of people who fill out our inquiry form divided by the number of people who click our ads.
4. We now have the ability to track the success, or failure, of our online ads, our landing pages, and our marketing email messages. This data helps us to manage our budget, test versions of content, and see what prospective families value most when making an admission decision.

Why You Need A Landing Page

Quite simply, if you are serious about inbound marketing for your school, you need to employ landing pages. Landing pages have helped us to increase our conversation rates, increase our inquiries, and decrease the amount of money spent on SEM. A word of caution though ' these positive effects didn't happen overnight and have taken time and effort.

If you're sold on using landing pages I would encourage you to check out Unbounce.com and here are 6 reasons iLove Unbounce.