Homepages vs Landing Pages—Maximizing the Attention Span of Your Audience

So you’ve got an announcement to make and unfortunately the PA system in your elementary school is no longer cutting it. You’ve already learned by now that releases with multimedia content create 10x higher click-through rates and 5x more social sharing than a standard press release. Your multimedia assets are gathered and you are ready for them to get some views. You could always post it on your homepage but…how will you attract new views?

Think of landing pages as previews or extensions of homepages. You are not creating another homepage—you have already paid your web design staff or agency to do a fine job with that! With landing pages, you are grabbing the reader’s already short attention span (you’ve got 8 seconds, make the most of them!) and guiding them through this content journey. The purpose is to be focused, purposeful and call your audience to a particular action.

Homepage vs Landing Page

Let’s explore taking it online to maximize views and readers’ attention on your content:

Fight for attention, not space.

Don’t make your viewers hunt for what they need. Break up your content with bullet points, subject headers or numbered lists. Chopping it up this way makes it more digestible and easier on the reader. According to Unbounce.com: “With 50 links on your homepage, your attention ratio is 2%--compared to 100% with a single CTA.” Does the reader have to sift through a lot of text and links to find what it is you’re asking them to find?

Maximize SEO opportunities.

Use keywords in Call-to-Action Buttons, captions & headlines to reach what users are searching. What more can they learn about your company or services through this announcement? When you type words into a search engine you’re likely not putting full sentences. Test keywords from your release and see what results come up—the objective is to get your content placed higher here!

Remove the excess, keep the relevant.

Your message should be cohesive with your branding but if there is a lot of overlap, consider removing some distracting information and links from the landing page. Since landing pages are distinct from homepages, this allows you to focus more specifically and deliberately to achieve your marketing goal.

Don’t get cut off.

Long videos, headlines, captions, link titles are all trading in the minivans and sizing down for convertibles. Avoid having headlines and material get cut off by limiting it to 100 characters (with spaces) while keeping the most important keywords in the first 65. This allows it to show up in search engine results and email subject lines more clearly, as well as being easily shared on social media.

When deciding to distribute a landing page, make the most of the time you have with your audience. Value it and put yourself in their eyes on the screen. Are you giving up all the goods up front, or are you carefully leading viewers through a single marketing or sales objective? Most importantly ask yourself, how long would you spend here before pressing the X?

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ABOUT THE EXPERT: Megan Petrello

Megan is a Senior Project Manager for the Online Services team at MultiVu, a Cision company. She started her career as a Customer Content Specialist at PR Newswire before transitioning to her role as Project Manager at MultiVu. Megan has a Bachelor’s Degree from Ohio University, specializing in Communications & Management. Her experience has helped to create successful landing page campaigns to meet clients’ digital marketing needs.