There seems to be a lot of talk these days about landing pages. If you are new to the concept, you are probably wondering what the heck they are, and what makes them different from any other page on your site. So let’s start from the beginning!

The pure definition of a landing page is just what it sounds like: it’s the page your website visitors arrive at after clicking on a link. It could be your home page, or any other page in your site.

What a Landing Page should be:

The best use of a landing page is not what it is, but what it can do. Landing pages should provide a customized sales pitch for the visitor. The best way to do this is to consider where visitors will come from, and who they are. By providing content that is a good match, the chances of engaging the visitor go up, as will your conversion rate!

Well crafted landing pages almost always produce better conversion rates than just dumping people onto a home page. It makes sense. When you drop people into the homepage of your site, your visitors must "figure out" how to use your site. They arrive and spend a couple seconds before giving up and hitting their back button to move on to your competition.

Give the same visitors exactly what they were looking for and you will have a captive audience. Be careful not to provide too many distractions in the form of links, or you are likely to lose them before they read your entire message.

When to use a Landing Page:

Create targeted landing pages anytime you can control where people will be coming from, and your goal is a specific transaction such as sales, registrations, sign-ups, etc. This is particularly true if you are paying for the traffic, with banner ads, sponsor links, or pay-per-click.

Companies see a 55% increase in leads when increasing the number of landing pages from 10 to 15, according to a 2012 Report. Here's some more food for thought: According to MarketingSherpa's Landing Page Optimization Benchmarks Report, layout is a major factor in website performance.

Landing pages are a critically important part of a sucessful inbound marketing strategy. They are the hub of lead generation efforts, and that's why every campaign you run and offer you create should be tied to a custom landing page -- as opposed to an ambigious homepage where visitors must  guess what to do next. While more landing pages can have a huge positive impact on lead generation, data shows that your landing pages also need to look good to perform well.

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