"Who, me? More landing pages, you say? But I've already got some of those floating around my website." Sure ... BUT WHERE ALL THE LEADS AT?!
Several months back, I wrote an article about why landing pages are an indispensable part of marketing. And for all you marketers out there who have been going inbound for a while, you probably 'get' why they're important. But are you creating enough of them to really scale your lead generation efforts? For many of you, probably not. Let's find out why -- at least in the case of landing pages -- more is better.
Why You Need More Landing Pages
First, I'm going to throw some brand spankin' new data at you, straight from our Marketing Benchmarks From 7,000 Businesses report, which you can download in full here for free. Just have a look-see at the graph below:
While most companies don't see an increase in leads when increasing their total number of landing pages from 1-5 to 6-10, companies do see a 55% increase in leads when increasing their number of landing pages from 10 to 15. And look how that leads index number spikes even more when a company has 40 or more landing pages on their website. And here's how it breaks down for B2B and B2C businesses:
While both B2B and B2C companies seem to benefit from having more landing pages, it seems to be even more advantageous for B2Bs to hit that 40 landing page threshold.
As you can see, it's hard to deny there's a pretty strong correlation between the number of landing pages you have on your website and lead generation. But why is this so? Here are four good explanations why the more landing pages, the better your leads number.
1) More Landing Pages Means More Conversion Opportunities
Quite simply, the more landing pages you have on your website, the more opportunities you have to convert site visitors into leads. There's also a huge SEO benefit to having more landing pages, which can have an impact even before visitors land on your website. Think about it: The more landing pages you have, the more landing pages will be indexed in search. And if a searcher stumbles upon a search result that directs them straight to one of your landing pages, you'll have essentially cut out the extra step of a visitor perusing your site and needing to click on a call-to-action to get to that same landing page. In other words, the pathway from discovery to conversion has much less friction. And do you know what happens when there's less friction? You generate more leads.
2) More Landing Pages Means More Variety
You've all heard that saying, "variety is the spice of life," right? Yep -- it applies to marketing, too. Consider it from your visitors' perspective. Say you're visiting a business' website, and you surf on over to its "Resources" section (you know, where a business might organize all its offers and their respective landing pages). Now let's also say that "Resources" page only features 5 -- or even 10, according to the research cited above -- offers because, well, those are the only offers this particular business has available. And maybe none of those offers really appeal to you, because well ... there's just not enough variety. So you go on your web browsing way, abandoning the site without converting on anything. And hey, the same thing will happen if that business only has CTAs for a few offers placed throughout your website or promoted via their other marketing channels. If none of them tickle your fancy as a visitor, you're probably not going to convert.
In a nutshell, don't let this happen to you. Creating more landing pages means you'll have a wider variety of offers for your visitors to convert on and for you to promote, which leads us to reason number three ...
3) More Landing Pages Means More Marketing Collateral
The more landing pages you have, the more offers you'll have to fuel the rest of your inbound marketing efforts. Remember, content is the heart and soul of any successful inbound marketing strategy. Without it, you'd have nothing to email your contacts, nothing to share with your social media fans and followers, nothing to promote through your website calls-to-action, nothing by which to get found and rank for your keywords in search. The more offers -- and landing pages to house those offers -- you have, the more (and more effective) inbound marketing you can do. And because reason number two (variety) is also a big factor in this, the more landing pages you have, the more prospects you'll be able to capture as leads for your business.
4) More Landing Pages Means More Targeting Opportunities
Segmentation matters -- and not just when it comes to email marketing. But when you identify various different buyer personas and segments within your audience, you have the opportunity to better appeal to those different audiences' interests and needs with more targeted and relevant offers. And to leverage this savvy thinking, face it: You need more landing pages. So what naturally ends up happening for marketers who build up a big arsenal of 40+ landing pages, is they start to create more segment-specific content that, because it's highly relevant to different parts of their audience, is much better able to convert visitors into leads.
How to Increase the Number of Landing Pages on Your Site
"I get it, I get it: More landing pages is better. But how can I go about cranking out more of those bad boys?" So glad you asked!
1) Invest in a Landing Page Creation Tool (And Control Over Your Website)
Let's address one of marketers' biggest landing page creation roadblocks first. According to MarketingSherpa's Landing Page Handbook (2nd edition), the number one reason businesses don't use landing pages is because their marketing department doesn't know how to set them up, or they are too overloaded. If you're nodding your head in agreement, you absolutely positively need to invest in a tool that enables you to quickly and easily create optimized landing pages. This involves taking control of your website, so if it takes you weeks to get a landing page created (or even just edited) because you have to go through some third party resource like a webmaster to make changes for you, put an end to that as soon as possible. Inbound marketing requires agility, and you'll never become an agile marketer if you're dependent on someone else to get things done for you. Plus, I hear HubSpot has a pretty sweet and easy-to-use Landing Page tool (*wink wink*).
2) Create More Offers
I'm just gonna give it to you straight. You can't just go around slapping together a ton of new landing pages, no matter how motivated you are to reap those "more is better" results. You're going to need offers (and good ones, at that) to go along with them. Keep in mind that landing pages are simply the gateways for your marketing offers, so in order to increase your site's number of landing pages, you need to increase offer creation, too. And don't get me wrong, this is going to take you some time and effort, but it's also absolutely necessary if you want larger gains in lead generation.
Before you start creating new offers, take a look at the offers you already have, and identify where you might have some holes. Do you have offers to suit prospects at each different stage in your marketing and sales funnel? Do you have offers in a variety of different formats (e.g. webinars vs. ebooks vs. templates vs. videos, etc.)? Do they cover various different topics your target audience cares about? Once you've identified what your holes are, then you can start filling in the gaps. To learn more about offer creation, check out this blog post about how to create marketing offers that don't fall flat.
3) Tweak the Offers You Already Have to Cater to Individual Personas
Okay -- so you're going to have to create a bunch more offers to leverage the lead-gen power of an increase in landing pages. But here's a little saving grace: not all of these offers need to be created from scratch. In fact, if you already have a few general offers on your hands but also know that you have a few different buyer personas that you market to, one great way to increase your number of offers (and as a result, landing pages) is to tweak your existing offers to cater to each of your different personas. As you're doing this, reposition the content and create a landing page that caters to that persona's individual needs, problems, and interests; adjust the offer's formatting, depth, and length; modify language and tone; and incorporate industry/persona-specific examples -- all of which we elaborate on in this very post about how to tailor offer content to suit individual personas.
And once you have a variety of persona-specific marketing offers, then you can segment your prospects by persona and nurture them with the right offers through tools like email marketing, or dynamic CTAs on your various web pages.
4) Repurpose Content You Already Have
While we're on the topic of tweaking existing content, don't overlook the fact that there are a lot of different ways to create new offers using content you already have, saving you the time and effort of building a brand new offer from the ground up. Some great offer ideas pulled from our article, "The Time-Crunched Marketer's Guide to Creating Lead-Gen Offers" include creating a blog bundle by pulling together a compilation of your best blog posts around a given topic, making a data compilation of interesting industry research and data you've already collected, turning an educational PPT presentation you've given into a downloadable PDF or a live webinar, recording an interview, creating an FAQ-driven ebook, etc.
Do you have enough landing pages on your website? In what other ways can you increase landing page production?
Image Credit: grongar



Steven Longoria 3:51 PM on October 26, 2012
I like to split-test offers using opt-in skin plugin from wordpress. i'm always split-testing the offer at the bottom of my blog posts. it's easier than creating a whole landing page IMHO.
Greg Linnemanstons 5:09 PM on October 26, 2012
Thanks, Pamela! As always, hit us right between the eyes with the stuff that makes the most sense and will help us the most. This should have been a Monday morning post so we could spend the whole week acting on it!
Philipp 10:06 AM on October 27, 2012
Aaah, I lost my previous comment here.
To make it short: Can you give a specific example of this? Any company that sells physical products, not services?
Jen Birge 2:14 AM on October 28, 2012
Wow - 10-15 landing pages, I see the logic, I just never looked at it that way. Thankfully, I have access to new landing pages each month. Thanks!
manoraj 6:28 AM on October 28, 2012
great article...
but crating more landing pages wont spoil your quality of the site , having to much words repeated will make your site SEO very poor , and would make your site land in black list of google search ...
Giancarlo Newsome 2:50 PM on October 28, 2012
Awesome (as always) content.
Laura McDonald 3:53 PM on October 28, 2012
It's sometimes not always better to create loads of landing pages, optimising the ones you've got works too.
It's sometimes too easy to think this isn't working, let's create a new page. Take a step back and think about what the user wants to see on the page, rather than filling the page with offers.
As always though, a great post!
Bruno Babic 4:49 PM on October 28, 2012
Hello Pamela, I am really grateful to you for sharing with us such an insightful and invaluable piece of information that’s especially encouraging for myself as somebody who, believe or not, has painfully and embarrassingly struggled to start making money online since 2005.
Having gone through my 7 year long hurting drama of trying to figure out how to make money online, I must tell you that you now have made me feel much more confident and knowledgeable on how to go about improving my online presence by creating more landing pages.
Please, feel free and welcome to visit my first ever personal blog and leave your comments there.
In advance many thanks.
Bruno Babic
Casey Gollan 8:05 PM on October 28, 2012
It's certainly not surprising that more landing pages = more leads. More landing pages tends to mean that there is a 1:1 message match between the ad and the landing page which is key. Additionally, it tends to mean that landing page testing is occurring which, of course, is also key to increasing conversions.
Companies that have investing in a landing page testing tool for years now know this is no secret. What is surprising is how few companies have yet to adopt a landing page testing strategy.
For the past two years I've heard that conversion optimization is going to be the Next Big Thing in 2011 or Next Big Thing in 2012 and while many smart marketers are trying to get it adopted in their organizations, many small business owners without experienced marketers on their team, still know little about conversion optimization ... or care about it at all.
Nazmul Alam 6:34 AM on October 30, 2012
Landing page always play a vital role in lead generation. effective landing page delivers the best and online marketers should think about it.SEO, Inbound Marketing and other marketing tools used by the marketers but an effective landing page is essential.
Brandon Dudley 8:30 AM on November 01, 2012
If you are creating duplicate content or similar content on landing pages you likely are not going to help yourself in organic search much. However, they could be helpful with email marketing,PPC and even places for calls to action from social media.
Ben 11:51 AM on November 01, 2012
VEry good article. I'm still wondering where I should host my landing pages ? Is a subdomain like click.mydomaine.com a good way or should I use a specific place in my site ?
Thanks again