Does this sound familiar? You’ve decided to launch a new product or service in your business, and you want to create a landing page to promote it.
You start hunting for options to build a landing page yourself – and find something like ClickFunnels or Kajabi. While these tools are excellent to get you started, there are some definite drawbacks to using them.
Today’s blog is more of a PSA, but let me walk you through why you might want to build those pages on your actual website instead of an external, third party platform.
Building on Your Website Saves Money
First off, using your existing website to house landing pages saves you money. If you’re looking for potentially the lowest cost to get your service off the ground, signing up for a $100/month membership that you have to keep paying in order to have those pages live isn’t really all that cost effective.
Imagine you want to sell a new product or service, and you know that you’re going to run that campaign for 6 months. Even if you get the most basic version of ClickFunnels, you’ll end up paying $600 to have that campaign. That’s not huge, but even hiring a web designer to flesh out a page can end up being cheaper, depending on the size of the page.
But it’s not just about the cost either. It’s a lot about the user experience.
Keeping Landing Pages on Your Domain
Here’s the big kicker with any of these landing page projects – when you do a big push marketing wise and you’re sending all that traffic to yourbusiness.mykajabi.com, someone will have a hard time finding that page again and you’re not helping out your own SEO. After all, that landing page doesn’t live on your website; it lives on a third party platform.
That means that the benefits you might get from running paid ads to that landing page, making sales, and driving traffic for those targeted key phrases do nothing to help your organic SEO in the long-run.
It also means that when someone remembers they saw your landing page before, if they want to re-find it, they may have to hunt through their history with a bunch of other Kajabi and ClickFunnels pages for other businesses to find yours.
Instead, when your campaign runs to a page at yourdomain.com/landing-page/, you’re able to drive traffic to your actual website. When you run a successful campaign and get conversions, Google recognizes that and knows that you’re providing an answer to their customers’ questions. It’s also much easier for your customer to find again.
Don’t give a third party those sweet, sweet SEO boosts. Get those for yourself, girl!
(Heaven help me…hahaha)
Full Design Control
Another thing – when you use your own website for landing pages, you get far more consistency in your design than when you’re working within templates that a third party is going to give you. Especially if you already have a custom website built out, that landing page can be built to be seamless with your overall branding and current user experience.
Consistency in your brand not only helps improve your average user experience as someone goes through your website and other marketing materials, it also helps to build trust in your brand. Trust is harder and harder to gain in today’s world, so you want to be sure that you’re not causing any confusion about whether or not someone has found your business or someone who is similar to you.
How Do You Build Landing Pages in Your Website?
The answer to this question is going to vary depending on the type of website you have. But if you have a Wix, SquareSpace, or WordPress website, a landing page is really nothing different than a new page on your website. If you’ve already built other pages on your website, all you need to do is repeat that process.
Depending on your goals for the page, many experts would recommend removing at least the top navigation from a landing page, so that the browser has to stay within just that page. This can be trickier, but isn’t impossible. Depending on how your website is built, doing this could be a check of a box or talking to a developer to give you that option.
Personally, if a landing page is within your website, I’d always recommend keeping your footer navigation active regardless. After all, half of the point of bringing them to your website is to allow them to dig further into your website if they’re just not sold yet. You also tend to have contact information, legal notices, and copyrights in your footer. Using your same footer block will prevent you from having to redo some of that work.
What Do You Need in a Landing Page?
Now, you might be wondering how is a landing page all that different than a page on your website? First off, remember that a sales or landing page has a slightly different objective. Ideally, you’re wanting to give your target customer all the information they need to fill out a form, pick up the phone, or make a purchase – without having to leave that page at all.
That means the components you’ll need on that page are different, and it will need to be a lot longer than a typical page on your website.
On most sales/landing pages, I’d recommend you include:
- Benefits and outcomes of the new product/service
- All the details of what they’ll get
- Information about you or your brand to help them feel connected to you
- Social proof, i.e. testimonials, reviews, and/or ratings
- Contact form to get more information or get on your list
- And a way to buy or take that next step
With a landing page, you have to reinforce what you’re saying more because it’s possibly the first page of yours that person has seen. And you’re also hoping they’ll spend money quickly and make a decision faster than a colder lead coming to your homepage. So make sure you answer all the questions they might have to get them to hit Buy.
What Do I Need?
Obviously building landing pages into your website is easier if you have a flexible solution that you can DIY. While you can do this with many theme builders in WordPress, if you have a custom WordPress website, you may need some help to get started.
The cool thing though is WordPress allows you to build templates, so say a super awesome WordPress developer like myself could build you a customized landing page generator, just for you. Just sayin’. 😉
