Noodle-glitch solver? Doodah for a thingummy? A tiny empire from a niche of the like-minded? Whatever you’re launching or marketing, are you going to unleash an excitingly informative web page, or capitalise on conversions with a laser-focused landing page?

What is more important?

• Building brand awareness or generating leads?
• Providing detailed information or promoting one specific offering?
• Improving your SEO or measuring your ROI?

Your answers determine whether you need a web page or a landing page for your next marketing campaign…

A traditional website, with all its pages, allows you to present a wealth of information, authority and value. A landing page, with its singular focus, is more intent on converting interested visitors into leads or customers. Both have their merits depending on your marketing objectives, target audience, and the outcomes you’re looking for.

The purpose of web pages

A website is a valuable way to maintain your online presence. You can send people who you meet here, so they can check you out. It’s where you can establish an online existence that is not at the whim of the social media platforms. Here, you can exhibit your virtual (or actual) wares, display your authority and reaffirm your credibility. Web pages are especially good for:

1. Brand awareness

You can use your website’s web pages to showcase your personality, values and unique selling proposition. Here, you get to establish credibility and trust beyond the fleeting glimpses that scrollers see of you on social media.

2. Providing detailed information

When your target audience is ready to buy, you want to make sure they have all the information they need. On your web pages, you can lay out the details of your offerings, processes, benefits, and pricing so potential customers can make informed decisions.

3. Improving SEO

With well-optimised web pages on your website, you can improve your search engine rankings. It’s great practice to ensure each webpage has the right keywords, meta description, SEO title and tags. Setting these up well increases your visibility to the very people who are searching for answers to the problems you solve.

The purpose of landing pages

Ever come to a landing page and realised you couldn’t click away—and not just because of the great copy! What? No distracting links? Your eye is drawn down the page as the information unfolds before you. Everything you need to know is right here because landing pages are standalone. Their sole purpose is to convert visitors into leads or customers with their single call to action. Landing pages are great for:

1. Lead generation

Landing pages are all about sharing valuable content, incentives, or offerings in exchange for contact information, or, let’s face it, moolah…

2. Promoting a specific offering

This is not the place to showcase everything you do (hint: use your website for that). Here, you are focused on using all the key elements of an offer to help a visitor decide to move forward with you—or not! Your sole focus here is to let them know about your offering, its value and benefits, any deadlines coming up, any bonus sweeteners, your guarantee, the pricing, and even some information about you if it helps move them forward to a yes—or a no…

3. Measuring return on investment

We can pretty much measure anything online these days thanks to services like Google Analytics, but a standalone page can give you quite a precise measure of marketing campaign success. Analysis of your landing page performance helps you optimise the page further for maximum conversion rates and sales. You can even test landing page performance using A and B versions to see what converts best.

The key differences between web pages and landing pages

By now, you’re realising that web pages and landing pages offer different types of value to your marketing. So, what are the defining differences between them?

1. Design

Web pages, as part of a website, are likely to be more comprehensive. You’re encouraged to meander around a site by navigating through the menu options and embedded links. A landing page has none of that. It’s simply one page, with minimal distractions and one very clear call to action.

2. Content

Web pages cover a multitude of information, from useful resources to product information, customer testimonials, and business background (aka, some goss about the founders). Landing pages are laser-focused on one offering only (no goss here, unless it helps people make a decision!).

3. Objectives

Landing pages are solely focused on converting visitors to leads or customers. Web pages are more focused on nurturing those leads and customers and supporting them going forward. Web pages help educate, establish trust, and engage visitors.

When to use a web page or landing page in your marketing campaign

Effective web pages for marketing campaigns include:

1. Well-designed Product pages
2. An interesting About page that features the brand’s story, team and values
3. Blog or Article pages that discuss target audience challenges, offer value and insights, establish expertise, and drive traffic to other parts of the website

Effective landing pages for marketing campaigns include:

1. Lead generations pages, especially if they have a valuable lead magnet to offer in exchange for email addresses
2. Event registration pages
3. Sales pages

Factor to consider

So, which is better? A web page or a landing page. Of course, it depends on whether your marketing goals require a comprehensive suite of web pages or a focused landing page.

A friend and client of mine recently launched his business website. He already has a magnificent following of many thousands on social media and he is now driving traffic to his website by posting regular blog articles. It’s already led to several big pieces of work because his credentials, authority and expertise are all captured in one place.

When I launched Sparticles in 2022, I just wanted to focus on building awareness of this offering in the early days. So, I created a landing page on the URL: www.sparticles.com.au and drove traffic here until I signed up my first few Sparticle clients. (After a few months, once the landing page fulfilled my booking needs, I created a Sparticles web page which I added to my Services and diverted visitors from the landing page back to my website.)

Making the right choice

The choice between a web page and a landing page depends on your marketing objectives, the specific campaign you may be running, and your target audience.

Regardless of whether you’re creating a web page or several, or one landing page, I encourage you to test and experiment with what works—and what doesn’t. Tweak and remeasure your results, though don’t amend too much at once otherwise you won’t know what’s driving the change!

Web pages and landing pages both have best-practice design, content and outcome methodologies. The Ink Rat offers SEO audits to identify where your pages can be enhanced, and landing page reviews to ensure they’re as effective as possible.

So, whether you’re curious or confounded by your web page or landing page results, get in touch and let’s chat for 30 minutes about how I can support you to be even better than you already are!