A Digital Media Strategist Will Carefully Study Your Landing Pages

Photo Credit: Hamed Saber

This is the third article in an eight-part series which describes the role of a digital media strategist in improving the website operations of a company or organization.

A landing page is a specific page on your website designed to be the place where a website visitor “lands” after clicking on a link on an external website (a banner ad or pay-per-click advertisement, for example) or typing in a web page address they have learned of elsewhere. The goal of a landing page is to persuade a visitor to perform a certain action (make a purchase, fill out a form, request further information, etc.).

It is vitally important to develop landing pages which provide continuity between the messaging which leads the visitor to the website (the messaging contained in your promotional vehicle) and the call to action the visitor encounters when arriving at the website. For example, if one of your objectives is to sell romantic comedies from your online DVD store, you might send a promotional email blast to your mailing list which advertises a sale price on the newest date movie on DVD. But if clicking on the image of the romantic comedy DVD in the email blast brings people to the home page of your website (which features a variety of movie genres — comedies, dramas, documentaries, science fiction, etc. — and which doesn’t mention the sale), the person who clicked on the offer in your email blast will be confused. There won’t be continuity between the message contained in the promotional email blast and the message reflected on the landing page (in this case, the home page). Instead, the offer in the promotional email blast of a discounted price on the newest date movie on DVD should lead the person who clicks on the offer to a landing page which: 1) presents only the DVD which is on sale; and, 2) which has only one goal — to persuade the visitor to purchase the DVD.

In addition to evaluating the continuity between your promotional vehicle (email blast, pay-per-click advertisement, etc.) and its corresponding landing page, your internet strategist will evaluate three important aspects of your landing page:

1. its initial appearance;
2. its copy; and,
3. its usability.

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