That’s an easy question.
The answer is ‘Everybody’.
OK, so maybe we need to explain the answer a little bit.
Landing pages are vital to your business. It doesn’t matter if you are a startup looking to get those first five thousand users, or a car dealership who wants visitors to ask for quotes. Without landing pages, people who come to your website will not convert into users or leads. It’s as simple as that.
What exactly ARE landing pages?
According to Wikipedia, a landing page is a “single web page that appears in response to clicking on a search engine optimized search result or an online advertisement. The landing page will usually display directed sales copy that is a logical extension of the advertisement, search result or link.”
In other words, a landing page shows a specific message, to specific people, at a specific time.
But why do I NEED a landing page? Surely my marketing message is right there on the home page, for everyone to see? All I need to is drive traffic to my website, and BAM, people will start signing up (or buying, or asking for quotes, or whatever you want them to do).
But they don’t. And the reason for that is that…
Website visitors aren’t ready to buy
96% of your website first time visitors aren’t actually ready to make a purchase just yet. People browse websites like they window shop. They have five (or fifteen) tabs open in their browser. They are comparing prices while looking at cute cat videos on YouTube, or reading their friends’ posts on Facebook. So your marketing messages on your homepage have to compete with quite a few attention grabbers.
Landing pages are, in effect, a single marketing message. They give your visitors exactly what they are looking for, and give them a compelling reason to stop their window shopping, and sign up right now. Landing pages tell the people who see them that they have found EXACTLY what they were looking for.
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Keep in mind that people arrive in your website – or landing page – from a number of sources. They might have found you on Google, clicked a Facebook post, come from a YouTube ad, and the list goes on. This leads to another problem, namely that…
Websites don’t have enough landing pages
As we just noted, people can come to your website from a number of different sources. Those sources, or rather the messages in those sources is different. The expectations people have from the link they’ve just clicked are different. The REASON they’ve just clicked the link is different.
Taking a message that’s tailored for someone who clicked an ad in Google and using it for someone who clicked a link in a friend’s post in Facebook, because he shared your image of a humorous vegetable, just won’t work.
The more landing pages you have, the better. In fact, businesses with over 40 landing pages generated 12 times as many leads as those websites with only five. Why? Because the message that the landing page used was tailored to the specific link that people clicked, and to the specific device that people used to click ON (yes, there’s a difference between mobile and desktop landing pages).
Of course, to change this situation, budgets need to shift. Why? Because today…
Money is spent on getting traffic, not conversions
Companies spend $92 to bring traffic to their website. They will then spend $1 (that’s a single dollar) to convert them.
Yes, you need to drive traffic to your website. And yes, you’ll need to spend advertising dollars to make sure that you get a significant amount, as you are competing with lots of other websites out there. That is a given, and should be part of your marketing strategy from the get go. But traffic without conversion – conversion of any sort – is wasted (by the way, if you aren’t using retargeting methods with Google and Facebook, then you should be).
But you also have to spend some of those dollars to convert that traffic. The conversion might be software sign ups, or it might be loan applications, but if you don’t have the right landing pages with the right messages in play, that get to the right people, you’ll find that you’ve spent a great deal of money on traffic – and have nothing to show for it.

Avi Kaye is a social media marketing consultant for software startups. In addition to PageWiz, he also writes for himself on his own blog, in between numerous cups of coffee.