I have a plea: Please, online marketers, no more landing pages.
As a concept "landing pages" must be one of the most talked about online marketing ideas ever, and one of the most frequently used techniques for catching clicks on conversion-focused campaigns.
But landing pages are a bad idea, gone wrong.
Step back and think about the concept of a landing page objectively. A single page with an offer and a form. Who would this appeal to exactly? Simple, yes. Effective, no.
I can see how landing pages might have first taken off, way back at the dawn of the internet. A well-intentioned marketer probably spent an enourmous amount of time & energy & money planning and executing an online marketing campaign. And at the 11th hour, just before the ads were to run, he realized he hadn't given thought to where he was sending the clicks. A great ad campaign, with nowhere to go. What to do? Let's throw up a page with an offer and a form....that will hold us over.
Here we are, years later, and everyone's still using landing pages. As a crutch. Because that's what other marketers do. As an industry, we spend millions of dollars on landing pages every year (maybe billions?). We optimize them, test them, change them, put them up, pull them down, analyze them, hire people to help us with them.
It's time to reevaluate. Step back and take a fresh look. Landing pages are not good enough. Not for our users. Not for our brands. Not for our KPIs.
Anna Talerico
P.S. Podcast on this subject forthcoming soon....
