Why do you need a Landing page and what are your options?
A sales funnel is a visual representation of the customer journey, describing the sales process from awareness to purchase. It sounds complicated but it is a fairly simple concept. You need to comprehend what it means before you can utilise a sales funnel properly in your business. Otherwise, it will be one of those tools that sit in the corner of your to-do list and stresses you out day in and day out.
To put things in perspective, let’s start with an example. Let’s say you want to buy a pingpong table. The first logical step for anyone is to google pingpong table and as a result, you will get a list of nearby suppliers in your local area including physical shops and online retailers. Once you click on one of them and find the product that you want on their website, you are at the awareness stage in their sales funnel. You as a customer, start your journey from there to conversion and during that process, you can and will change direction many times depending on what you learn along the way. But if the retailer has a defined sales funnel landing page for the product, instead of a full-on website, you are very likely to go through with it and get converted without looking elsewhere as you get all your answers along the way without too much effort and diversions. On the other hand, a bad sales funnel or worst no sales funnel can drive you away from the retailer’s website to other vendors. That is just a statistical fact well-known throughout the industry by those who know what they are doing.
Every one of us experienced this while shopping online but rarely think about the genius behind the conversion funnel we just experienced. I buy stuff from Amazon every week, just because I love their little slide-to-purchase feature. Once you are an Amazon customer, you can find the product you want, click on buy now, and just slide the screen with your finger. That is all, you will have your product the next day with a slide of a finger. Can it get any easier? This is a simple and effective example of a great sales feature on a great and simple landing page that drives me to a decision every single time without looking elsewhere and a fantastic conversion tool to complete the process. I know that and I still fall for it every time.
Now not all of us have access to Amazon’s amazing team of developers or the money to back up a multi-billion dollar website or millions of products. Hence as small business owners, we tend to focus on one product at a time for the best result and that is where landing pages shine.
What is the difference between a Landing page and a website?
A business website is commonly used as an online representation of a business. It usually offers information about who you are and what you do. You can also present your products or services online on your website but it is not as effective as it once was. Ten years ago, websites were the ultimate online selling machines and businesses tend to allocate all of their online marketing budgets to develop and advertise their websites as much as they possibly could. Back then, the more was better. People tend to flood their websites with keywords about their products and it was paying off. That all changed and today is a different world. SEO standards have changed many times since then and now flooding your website is marketing suicide. I do miss those days as a business developer since my life was so much easier but I do get the logic behind the changes.
You have to work for the organic traffic your website gets in a legitimate way.
Nowadays you need to be specialised in what you do and provide quality content relevant to the topic, instead of a high quantity of duplicated materials flooded with misplaced keywords. In other words, you need to make sense and talk about what you are good at instead of being the jack of all trades. That is when the landing pages were invented (technically by the Microsoft Office marketing team in 2003). Landing pages are single-page websites dedicated to one product or service. They are commonly developed in a responsive free-flowing style that is designed to drive the customer from inquiry to conversion. All the content on a landing page is dedicated to the subject matter whether it’s a product or service and it does one thing and one thing only – sell that product! Now it is only logical to assume that focusing on and selling one product is a lot easier than ten at a time, consequently, if you do have ten products, then you do need 10 landing pages aside from your business website for the optimum result.
The good news is that the landing page can be developed within your existing website and does not have to have a dedicated domain. So it is not as disconnected as you would think. but it does make the SEO process ten times easier and it is a hundred times more effective.
Now let’s talk about sales funnels and how they fit in.
Sales funnel and Landing pages
Landing pages started in 2003 with standard layouts which mainly were about the product rather than selling the product. With sales funnel integration and the new responsive web design technologies, landing pages can engage customers as well as sell goods. It usually consists of six critical steps which need to be incorporated into the design of the landing page for the best result.
Below I have listed the six steps of a sales funnel and explained briefly what they are,
- Awareness – this is the stage where your product catches the eye of the audience or visitor. This is usually encouraged through well-presented content or an offer (lead magnet).
- Interest – At this stage, the visitors start to relate to your product and service, and attempt to understand if the solution you are providing is going to fix their problem. (Pain Point)
- Consideration – At this point, the customer is weighing their option and considering how relevant, affordable, and easy to implement your solution is vs competitors ( Depending on the market and the customers).
- Intent – Many consider this stage the same as the last and in a way, they are the same. However, to cover all basis discussed in the literature, we have tried to discuss all steps individually. At this stage, the customer is engaged and interested – they need a good conversion tool to give them the little push they need to make that decision. A good conversion tool is essential in this step.
- Evaluation – or desire is the stage where the customer is sure (has the desire) but still weighing up some valid options – commonly from external factors such as a friend or an ad they have seen earlier. If you are selling a unique product, you probably won’t see your customer stuck at this stage. But if you are selling a “must have” such as shoes then you lose 80% of your conversion right at this critical step. At this stage, your landing page should be able to either convert the customer using some easy-to-use Purchase Now features (like the earlier example about Amazon) or get your customer engaged with an online rep to answer their outstanding questions and walk them to conversion – an online chat is a handy feature at this point.
- Purchase – This is when you convert. it is also commonly known as the “action” stage since all you do comes down to this point. A good checkout page or a call to action form (for service) is essential as the last touch of the process.
Conclusion
As simple as it sounds, designing an effective sales funnel Landing page is a skill that requires years of experience, a good understanding of the target market, and design expertise. You can always try to build one yourself using template base online builders such as Wix or clickFunnel but at the end of the day, it comes down to one question.
What would you do to sell your product? isn’t that the ultimate goal of your marketing campaign?
Then I recommend you invest part of your marketing capital and get the local expert agencies to develop your landing pages. They have years of experience in the local market and they do this for a living. That way you have experts running your campaign effectively, right from the get-go. My advise is don’t take the ” see what happens” approach to save a small amount of capital – Think big and aim for the star.
Webcheetah is our development team locally in Brisbane and one of the local agencies that have been successfully developing sale funnel landing pages since early 2020. Webcheetah offers are easy to understand, designed for small businesses, and very affordable.
