It’s important that you utilise your ad spend to make sure that you are sending your precious traffic to the right location. There’s no point spending hours of time and effort crafting, targeting, and optimising your ads if the landing page is bland and boring - you may as well be burning money. As we all know there’s seldom a one-size-fits-all solution in marketing, so we’re going to give you 5 varieties of landing pages that you can test to find which works best for your brand.

First things first, what actually is a landing page? A landing page is a bespoke page that a customer ‘lands’ on when they have clicked on your ad. Okay, but you already have a website homepage so why not just send them there? The home page doesn't necessarily take into account where the customer is on their journey. Sure, your website should have all the relevant information about your brand as well as the features and benefits of your product, but it doesn't educate a prospect on why they NEED your product or always get them emotionally invested in your brand. If you just want to acquire a customer or sell a product, product display pages can work. But if you want to use paid media to help build your brand and acquire lifelong customers, there might be a better way, by providing customers with an unbeatable experience that doesn't just optimise for CPA.

Product detail page (PDP)

This is where the majority of marketers send traffic. It's a standard, single product page. It should have a great headline, be modest in length, and list all the features and benefits of your product whilst maintaining the same visual style as the rest of the product branding. You need to provide the potential customer with as much information as you can about the product which is going to make them want to buy it. After all, they’ve got this far, the ad has been seen, it generated enough interest for them to click through to the PDP - now you need to make sure the experience is as frictionless as possible in order for them to pull the trigger and buy the product.

Building trust will drive conversions. One tried and tested way to build trust would be using social proof, think reviews, or UGC content to show that customers have received your product and they love it! Use psychological cues, triggers, and calls to action on your page and in your copy to drive conversions.

The hoax homepage

Also known as a ‘fake homepage’ or a ‘spoof homepage’. But it’s not as bad as it sounds! This example looks like a regular homepage to the casual observer. However, on closer inspection, it’s clear that it's fundamentally different.

The page is tailored specifically to cater to the potential customer’s needs in that moment while maintaining the look and feel of any regular website homepage. The copy should be curated perfectly to be relevant for somebody being acquired through paid traffic. It has all the elements of a proper direct response style landing page:

• Strong, attention-grabbing headline.
• Social proof from customers and third-party press.
• Answers "what makes you different and why should I care?"
• Shows how you stand out and go above and beyond compared to your competitors.
• Introduces the problem but also provides the solution.

Top tip - make sure there are no unnecessary navigation links to allow your customer to get lost, confused, and bounce.

Advertorial landing page

This is the handheld approach to taking your customer through their journey. The advertorial landing page is designed to look like a news article. Having the landing page in this format drives confidence in the product while encouraging authority, due to the connotations of the page appearing to look like a news story.

The advertorial guides your customers on the right path by taking them on a journey to discover what makes your product and brand unique without feeling like they're being hard sold to. It provides all the necessary features, benefits, value propositions, and gets objections out of the way. You can weave in your brand pillars here to help tell the brand story, which is great for driving higher brand equity.

Advertorials can by nature be quite long so there is a real risk that customers might see a lot of text and decide that they don’t want to stay on the page. If you want to keep them around, the headline of the page needs to be attention-grabbing and hook in the reader making them want to read more. Including pictures as well as an interesting layout are tactics that can be employed to keep customers sticking around on the page - as well as convert.

Quiz landing page

This one is pretty self-explanatory. Traffic is directed to a landing page featuring a quiz and based on the answers to the quiz, the page will recommend products suitable to them. The quiz would also collect all important data which is vital in a post iOS world. Consumers would feel more inclined to provide their data when you have provided something for them. This is a transactional relationship that benefits both parties.

By providing a quiz for the customer you are gamifying the buying experience. This encourages engagement and interaction with your product or brand which aids the customer in forming a relationship with the brand. Providing a positive digital experience builds brand awareness, customer loyalty, and profitability.

Squeeze landing page

A squeeze landing page is a page that is designed specifically to gather email addresses for potential customers. You persuade or “squeeze” the visitors to provide their emails, usually by using special offers for email sign-ups, gating off valuable content, or restricting access. The aim of the squeeze page isn’t to coerce people into doing something they don’t want to do, much like the quiz landing page - you are letting people know that you have something really valuable that is going to be beneficial for them, but in return, we’re going to want an email.

What’s so important about that email anyway? If you didn’t know, email marketing is one of the most successful marketing channels your brand can utilise. Once you have captured those emails you can use these leads for future campaigns. Here are some quickfire email marketing stats just in case you didn’t believe me:

• There are 4 billion daily email users.
• 99% of email users check their inbox every day.
• 78% of marketers have been an increase in email engagement over the last 12 months.
• 64% of small businesses use email marketing to reach customers.

Here’s a little bonus tip for you. Have you tried running whitelisted ads?

Whitelisting is the process of an influencer granting a brand permission to run advertisements on their social media accounts, using their handle. It also gives advertisers the ability to run dark posts from an influencer’s account. This is where you can send out a post, but it doesn’t show up on the influencer’s feed, on their timeline, or on their stories. The ads won’t show up to their followers unless specifically targeted. You can get a whole range of ad content without making the influencers crowd up their feed.

When running whitelisted ads, as with all ads, you should make sure that you are testing variables to optimise the perfect content that your target audience will love. You should try out different influencers’ niches as certain influencers may resonate with your audience better than others. You can test the general aesthetic of the video, different video formats, the copy, and the call to action.

Landing pages are a key component of any paid media campaign. Having killer landing pages will lead to conversions if done correctly. Remember, not all landing pages will work with all audiences, testing is key to working out what works best for your desired audience.