Landing Page Vs. Interior Page: A Guide to Strategic and Effective Use

So you’ve decided it’s time to launch a new targeted ad campaign. You’ve done the research, worked with experts and produced an ad all-but-guaranteed to see results. Fantastic! All that’s left is to launch the campaign, and sit back and watch your website traffic head into the stratosphere. So exciting! One quick question, though: where is the ad sending all your new traffic? Hopefully, you’re answering with a landing page, not an existing interior website page. But, If you read that sentence and responded with some variation of “....there’s a difference?”, this is the blog post for you. Landing pages and interior website pages are equally valuable but have very different purposes. Using them interchangeably will needlessly handicap your digital marketing efforts.

Interior Website Pages:

Interior website pages are the building blocks of your website, and are probably what you think of when you think “web page”. They provide all the information site visitors need to learn about what your organization does, how you’re different from your competitors, how customers can get in touch with you, and display clear calls-to-action to direct customers to their next steps. If your website were a book, your web pages would be the pages telling the story. The design, content, and images combine to create the definitive explanation of who you are and what you do. And a good website is essential if you want to transform site visitors into clients.

But while a good interior website page tells a great story, it is a less-than-ideal avenue to stand alone and close a deal. There are too many opportunities for visitors to navigate away, get distracted, and forget why they were looking at your website in the first place. For example, let’s say the goal of your targeted ad campaign is to collect email addresses from users who meet a specific set of criteria (for example: have visited your website once before, but left without signing up for more information). It makes sense to send them to your contact us page, right? Wrong! They’re too likely to navigate away from your contact page to remind themselves of who your organization is and why they should care about hearing from you. Then the phone rings, or their 10:00 meeting arrives early, and it’s game-over.

So what you really need in this situation is a unique page that contains enough information to convince the visitor that they need to receive your monthly emails, and can provide their information right away. No additional clicks, no complicated forms, nothing that stands between the visitor and accomplishing their goal.

If only there were such a thing! Oh, wait…

Landing Pages

Landing pages do exactly that! A landing page is a stand-alone web page with only one purpose: to drive traffic for a strategic goal. While it’s probably housed on your domain, it doesn’t connect to your website in any other way. When used correctly, landing pages provide almost endless opportunities for customization, and function as a method to individually “greet” site visitors. In the earlier example, a landing page for your targeted ad campaign might include some content about your organization along with a few compelling reasons for signing up for your email list, and then a simple form for the visitor to enter in their information. And that’s it. No links to your website (put those in your follow-up email instead!), no unrelated content - just the information necessary to advance your specific goal.

The best part: there’s almost no limit to how many landing pages you can have at one time, and there’s plenty of services out there to help you manage them (I love Unless). Do you want to greet customers visiting from specific regions in different ways? Sounds like a job for a landing page. Think you’ve created the perfect lead magnet, and want to send it out into the world? Time for a landing page. Trying to build an email list from scratch? A landing page will be your best friend.

If you’re already thinking about how you’d use landing pages, but aren’t sure what comes next, the marketing experts at Spring Insight are here to help. Get in touch, and we can discuss how landing pages can fit into your online marketing efforts, and make sure your digital marketing strategy is primed for success.