Landing Page Strategy: A Primer

This primer presents a high-level overview on landing page strategy. In it, we’ll first review the purpose of landing pages, then discuss the different types of landing pages businesses should create for their websites. This guide does not cover how to build and optimize landing pages—for those topics, please refer to our guides on landing page best practices and landing page conversion optimization.

An effective landing page strategy begins with understanding the marketing goals of your website, and how landing pages fit into that goal.

But first, a definition:

A landing page is a sales-focused page on a website describing a company’s products or services through a particular lens such as industry, specialty, location, or application.

Here is an example.

The Purpose of Landing Pages

Before describing the purpose of landing pages, let’s back up and state the purpose of a website: to bring in new customers. Customers begin as visitors, who typically land on a website from another source on the web, such as the Google search results, an advertisement, or an e-mail. Once on the website, they experience the site and either leave or continue to another page. A website aims to

(a) attract visitors within their target audience

(b) entice those visitors onto other pages, thereby warming them up to the brand

(c) cause them to “convert” into a sales lead by submitting their contact information.

Landing pages are one of the steps in this process. If a visitor comes to a website with a transactional mindset, for instance searching Google for something like “best marketing automation system”, they’ll probably visit a landing page right away.

However, if instead they have a research mindset, searching Google for something like “compare marketing automation systems”, they’ll likely hit a blog article or other educational web page before clicking through to a sales-focused landing page.

The images below show these two common visitor conversion paths:

While the first visitor path has a fully transactional mindset and the second a more research-oriented mindset, both are quite transactional when you consider the entire spectrum of ways people search the web. We often use the following scale of transactionality to judge how close to purchasing a visitor is.

The first visitor would be entering the website all the way on the left on the Buy section, while the second would enter on the Evaluate section.

This concept is most often used in the context of the two search-related channels, SEO and PPC, but is just as applicable to other visitor sources. For example, people that visit social media ads may click through to your website when they’re already in the market for your product, when they’re researching, or even if they don’t know they need your product and are merely open to the idea.

You should now see that landing pages play the same conversion-focused role for a variety of visitor mindsets. With that in mind, we’ll explore how to decide which landing pages your website needs.

Landing Page Strategy

Prospective customers who arrive at your website in different mindsets – some ready to buy, some doing research, some simply open to the idea of buying – will require different landing pages. There are several dimensions through which visitors approach your website:

• Product/Service. These visitors are in the market for a specific product or service.
  • Hypothetical: An admin at a midsized company is looking for video conferencing hardware to populate their meeting rooms.
  • Example Landing Page: Logitech Video Conferencing
• Industry. These visitors see themselves as having specific problems and needs because of the field their company is in.
  • Hypothetical: a board member at a major healthcare system seeking a design-build firm with experience in hospital construction.

• Example Landing Page: WG Healthcare Construction

• Example Landing Page: Semper Solaris Best Solar Panel Company in San Diego

As a marketer, it’s your job to figure out which landing pages your website needs based on your knowledge of how your customers think. For instance, do they think of themselves as members of an industry? People with specific problems? People in need of a specific solution? With this understanding, you can now choose from the list of landing page types above.

To help with your decision, we have made recommendations below about the types of landing pages your business likely needs based on your industry.

Landing Pages by Company Type

Company Type	Product	Service	Industry	Location	Customer Type	Application
B2B SaaS	✅		✅		✅	✅
B2C eCommerce	✅					✅
Biotech	✅	✅	✅		✅	✅
Business Insurance	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅
Construction		✅	✅	✅	✅	✅
Business Consulting		✅	✅	✅	✅	✅
Engineering	✅	✅	✅			✅
Environmental Services		✅	✅	✅		✅
Financial Services		✅	✅	✅	✅
Fintech	✅	✅	✅		✅	✅
Healthcare	✅	✅		✅	✅	✅
Higher Education			✅	✅	✅	✅
Home Services		✅		✅	✅
Hospitality		✅		✅	✅
Industrial IoT	✅	✅	✅		✅	✅
Managed Services	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅
Manufacturing		✅	✅	✅	✅	✅
Legal Services		✅	✅	✅	✅	✅
Oil & Gas	✅	✅		✅	✅	✅
Pharmaceutical	✅				✅	✅
Real Estate	✅	✅		✅	✅
Recycling & Waste Management		✅	✅	✅	✅	✅
Security		✅	✅	✅	✅	✅
Software Development		✅	✅		✅	✅
Solar	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅
Staffing & Recruiting		✅	✅	✅	✅	✅
Transportation & Logistics		✅	✅	✅	✅	✅

Creating a Landing Page Roadmap

Once you know which landing pages your website needs, the next step is to build a roadmap that includes all the landing pages you plan to create, each one’s overall value to your website (to determine order of creation), and where they live on your website. You would also want to add an SEO keyword to assign to each landing page, as SEO is a natural complement to landing pages.

When complete, this roadmap would be passed on to your content creation team.

Here’s how the start of a landing page roadmap might look:

Note that we include blogs in this content roadmap, as they are often a research-minded visitor’s first experience with a website.

Executing on Landing Page Strategy

After identifying the dimensions through which each visitor approaches your website, you’re left with the final task: crafting content to go on your landing pages. To help you do that, we’ve published the following guides:

• B2B Landing Page Best Practices
• Landing Page Conversion Optimization
• Creating B2B SaaS Landing Pages: A Breakdown With Examples
• Conversion Rate Optimization Best Practices

If the task of creating a landing page strategy is daunting, know that you’re not alone. Many companies choose to outsource landing page strategy, as well as content creation, to a partner. Our agency has over 12 years of experience building custom strategies and executing on them for a variety of clients, in particular B2B companies with highly complex products or services. You can contact us here if you’re interested in discussing a partnership.