How to drive traffic to a landing page
You’ve created your perfect landing page. Now what? A landing page is pretty useless unless it’s getting seen, so the next step is to think about how you’re going to get your landing page in front of the right people. Let’s take a look at your options…
The options for driving traffic to a landing page
You’ve got your landing page written, built and ready to go. Now you need to fill your marketing funnel with leads by getting some serious eyeballs on your offer. Luckily, there are loads of different options for driving traffic to your landing page, including:
- Paid search
- Paid social
- Organic search
- Unpaid social
- Email marketing
- Public relations campaigns
- Influencers
- Podcast and/or YouTube advertising
- Branded contests
- Online forums and niche groups
The method you choose for promoting your landing page will depend on lots of different factors – budget, resources, skills – but each of them has its benefits.
We’re going to focus on just four of the most widely used (and most effective) strategies for driving landing page traffic – two of which are paid, and two you can implement without paying a penny.
Paid search is a fantastic way of making sure your landing page is seen not just by more people, but by the right people; those who will be interested enough to click.
Paid ways of driving traffic to a landing page
Paid search
Most of the big search engines offer paid advertising options for small businesses. Paid search is a fantastic way of making sure your landing page is seen not just by more people, but by the right people; those who will be interested enough to click.
How do we know they will be interested enough to click on your ad? Because they have already carried out a web search for whatever it is you’re selling – that’s why they’re seeing your ad in the first place.
Let’s say you’re a brand-new microbrewery business operating a small, on-site bar. To drive sales, you’ve decided to start a beer subscription service, whereby customers sign up for a year and you deliver one of your beers to them each month. To market this new service, you’ve built a landing page that offers a 10% discount on the cost of subscription, and you’re advertising with a pay-per-click (PPC) ad on Google. For as long as your ad is live, whenever someone searches for “beer subscription offers,” they will see your landing page near the top of the search results.
Unlike the other returns on the search engine results page, your entry will be marked as an advert, and you’ll get a prime spot at the top of the page.
You can’t legislate for how many other businesses will be advertising the same product or service though, so you’ll need to spend a good bit of time creating a kickass advert to ensure you stand out from the crowd.
How easy is it to do?
Running a successful paid search advert isn’t easy – it requires some serious thought, market research and competitor analysis. To ensure your advert is seen by the right people (ie. the ones who might be tempted to click), you need to drill down as much as you can into your target audience. Ask yourself: Who are they? What do they do? What do they value? What do they hate? How much money do they have to spare? What will they be searching for that you can help them with?
… if you can nail down your audience, and then create the sort of copy and content that will compel them to click on your ad, you could be filling your sales funnel for just a few pennies per click
There’s a lot to think about, and a lot of variables that can make or break your efforts. But if you can nail down your audience, and then create the sort of copy and content that will compel them to click on your ad, you could be filling your sales funnel for just a few pennies per click.
It’s worth noting that paid search advertising is a skill, and there are loads of agencies out there now who make a full-time job of creating PPC ads. If you’re not sure where to even start, it might be worth your while to draft in a professional to give you and your ad the best possible chance of success.
Paid social
1.73 billion daily active users on Facebook. 500 million daily active users on Instagram. 187 million monetizable daily active users on Twitter. And 459 million monthly active users on Pinterest. Even with the new kids on the social block – ‘sup TikTok and Fortnite – the ‘original’ platforms are still commanding massive numbers of users, and pushing your landing page through a sponsored ad is well worth your while.
Just think about your own Facebook or Instagram feed for a minute. All those on-point ads that pop up on a daily basis. Seemingly, whatever you’ve performed a web search for in the past week is being thrust into your feed with alarming insight and terrifying prescience.
This is what you’re aiming to do with your advert, and again you’ll need to drill down the demographics and interests of your target customer to create an effective ad for social media.
Because, unless you know who it is you want to tempt in with your ad, you’re unlikely to get the results you want.
… you’ll need to drill down the demographics and interests of your target customer to create an effective ad for social media
Pick your platform
Different people will be on different platforms, and looking for very different things while they’re there. For example, Instagram is a great place to advertise if you’re a company that sells lifestyle products with a strong visual style. If, on the other hand, you’re delivering a B2B service for a very specific industry, advertising on LinkedIn is likely to serve you better.
Nail your buyer persona, find out where they hang out and what they are there for, then build the content of your ad around them.
Or, as with paid search ads, you can pay for a professional to do the hard work for you.
Driving traffic to a landing page for free
Organic search
The dream for any small business owner is to be found online. Anyone who’s been running their own business – and doing their own marketing – for even a short time will have been forced to grapple with SEO. And even if you’ve not yet manged to master the finer points of algorithms or building backlinks, you’ll know the importance of optimising your content to increase visibility.
By creating compelling, legitimately useful content for your landing pages and using the right keywords, your business stands a good chance of appearing more frequently in the SERPs without you having to take out an ad.
Rank, and file it
Obviously, the higher up the SERPs your landing page appears, the better. And that’s where organic search comes a little unstuck – because ranking #1 on Google ain’t easy. And while there’s no upfront price tag, it is rarely achieved without cost.
There’s an entire field of professionals dedicated to helping businesses rank higher on Google or Bing, because effective search engine optimisation requires skill, patience, technical know-how, and some serious strategy work. And that’s not to mention a commitment to regularly writing, publishing and pushing out brilliant, valuable content.
Organic search isn’t a quick win for driving traffic to a landing page, but landing pages can definitely be useful as part of a longer-term commitment to winning eyeballs organically with SEO.
… effective search engine optimisation requires skill, patience, technical know-how, and some serious strategy work
Organic social
Social media is a fantastic tool for helping small businesses to foster engagement with their customers for free. And it’s a great place to push out your landing pages when you’ve got a special offer to promote or a new product to flog, because:
- Social media is everywhere
- A shitload of people are on multiple platforms
- It’s free to use
- It’s easy to use
- It’s fun to use
Building up a committed tribe of followers isn’t necessarily the easiest thing to achieve in the first place, but once you’ve got a captive audience it couldn’t be easier to get your landing page link in front of the right people.
Get creative
One of the major plus points of social media is that it’s not a one-trick pony. As well as giving you a platform for publishing the link to your landing page, it gives you almost endless scope for promoting it. You can:
- host a Twitter chat;
- stream a Facebook Live with some Q+As;
- post an Instagram Reel that showcases the product; or
- post a Story that highlights the lighter side of buying from you.
Anything that’s going to capture people’s attention and get them thinking and/or talking about your offer is great.
As long as you’re building those connections, getting yourself front-of-mind and pointing people in the right direction, you’ve got a whole lot of opportunity for filling the top of your marketing funnel for zero cost.
It’s no good throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks. Every traffic source you explore should be well thought out, and you should have a specific reason for choosing the channel(s) you do
For every channel, a reason
And there you have it: how to drive traffic to your landing page. As a small business, the option you choose will depend on all sorts of variables, but you’ll always want to ask yourself two questions:
- What can I afford?
- What is feasible?
By all means try more than one channel for driving traffic to your landing page, but don’t take on more than you can handle in terms of either time, effort or money. It’s no good throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks. Every traffic source you explore should be well thought out, and you should have a specific reason for choosing the channel(s) you do. Be strategic. Be targeted. And watch those conversions come rolling in.
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