Don't Forget About Landing Pages

Coming from the media world, particularly agency life, I know that’s is easy to get caught up in media planning only to relegate landing pages to an afterthought. I’ve seen teams put time and effort into creating thoughtfully designed ads, audiences, and campaign structures, only to send users to the “best” available page on the website.

Landing page development can often fall outside of the scope of a media partner, and I’ve seen this happen for a variety of reasons. Sometimes it’s the SOW in place, sometimes this is the result of limited resources, or sometimes this happens because the brand has dedicated creative/web team members. In my experience navigating scenarios like these, I’ve seen teams work in parallel to deliver ads, media plans, and landing pages separately. Everything is brought together quickly, and set live.

I’ve shared plenty of thoughts in the past regarding the benefits of closer collaboration between teams, but the point I’d like to highlight here is that if media partners/agencies/teams are responsible for performance, they should be involved in landing page development to some extent.

Paid media is a method of communicating with potential customers to begin building a relationship. A brand introduces itself with an ad, but a lot of the actual relationship building occurs on the landing page. By design, ads can only convey a limited amount of information (unless a brand is running unusually long video ads). However, landing pages have the potential to be robust in design, and thorough in the information that they provide. Landing pages are where a business can:

• Explain the problem(s) that it solves

• Identify the logistical and emotional benefits of its product/service

• Address potential objections

• Share success stories from other customers

• Outline additional features and information

• And much more

Ignoring thoughtful and relevant landing page development can severely limit the potential performance of an ad campaign. The visual design and format of a page is one thing, but the teams that have an understanding of a campaign’s target audience & corresponding messaging should contribute to the content of a landing page at the bare minimum. Paid media professionals often have a great vantage point across some of these different campaign components, so they’re uniquely suited to weigh in on landing page messaging.

Building a campaign requires an understanding of who the campaign is targeting, and what a brand wants to say to that audience. In order to craft a cohesive user experience, that message should remain consistent across touch points. Advertisers often sit at the intersection of multiple disciplines such as graphic design, copywriting, ad platform expertise, data analytics and more. This provides advertisers with the opportunity to consult on the deliverables coming out of these individual disciplines to ensure that the individual pieces work well together when contributing to holistic campaign goals. Landing page messaging is no exception here.

With the insight gained from the media planning process, advertisers can work with the team members responsible for landing pages to ensure that:

• The same problem is being addressed in both the ad and the page content

• Similar phrasing, verbiage, and/or tone is being used across mediums

• Brand design elements like color schemes are consistent

• The page speaks to the target audience by using the correct demographic, firmographic, or psychographic identifiers

• Include the relevant examples of social proof and objection handling

By aligning many of these elements, a landing page can connect with a potential customer on a more emotional level, and begin to build trust between the brand and that customer. As with all other components of the marketing process, context is king, and this can’t be completed in a vacuum.

With that said, I’m not insisting that advertisers need to become a jack of all trades. Mastering many of these related skills would be quite time consuming, and difficult. However, recent advancements in technology have made landing page development more accessible than ever.

There are tools like Unbounce which provide user-friendly interfaces for creating landing pages without any coding necessary. Unbounce even has an AI-powered page builder that uses the platform’s own proprietary data to create a page predicted to perform well based on a brand’s given goal and industry.

While still in their infancy, AI tools will only continue to make creating web pages cheaper and easier. By solving for some of the common roadblocks faced when developing landing pages (costs and resources), marketing teams will have the opportunity to optimize this critical component of their customers’ journey. I expect that the entire CRO (conversion rate optimization) skill set will change, and become more popular as it becomes more attainable for smaller organizations.

The different components of marketing can’t live in a silo. The best ad creative in the world won’t solve all of a brand’s performance issues, and neither will the best landing page. But if a team can put together a few decent assets that are aligned to the greater goal and context of a campaign, that’s where they can begin to unlock profitable performance that scales.

Have questions, considerations, or critiques? I’d love to hear them! If you’re reading this via email, just hit respond. Otherwise, you can find me on LinkedIn and X (Twitter).