Imagine a father is at the ballpark with his son. Two vendors hear the kid whining about being hungry. One vendor yells “hotdogs!” The other tells the father that he can shut the kid up for $5. He gets the sale. Why? Because he uses targeted landing pages. A bit more advanced strategy for your landing page optimization process.

A targeted landing page speaks directly to the needs of a specific type of customer. It connects on a deeper level because it’s not just yelling “hotdogs.” It’s selling a solution to a specific need – and that increases conversion rates.

When done well, a targeted landing page will always have a higher conversion rate than a generic landing page. There are too many types of customers for a single, generic page to satisfy. The page will yell “hotdogs!” and everyone will wonder “why should I care?”

Target one customer at a time

Let’s say you’re a flood insurance company and you want people to fill out a form to request a quote. You could use a single landing page that emphasizes “coverage you can count on.” OR you could use a different page for each type of visitor.

Here are three examples:

• Business owners – the page can emphasize the comfort of knowing that they will get back on their feet and back to work if a flood strikes. You can even offer them a row boat for the commute.

• Homeowners with families – you can emphasize how devastating it can be to lose a home, and that your company will help get the family back on solid ground.

• Retired homeowners – people who have health problems or who are on fixed incomes have entirely different concerns. Whether they need money fast or help processing a claim, the page should address those needs.

One landing page cannot speak directly to these groups – but three targeted pages can. You should know – really know – the concerns and interests of your audience. Then, position the call-to-action as the best way to meet those needs.

Target the level of interest

You can even take landing pages a step further and target different points of your conversion funnel. Instead of having one page for each product, you have several that are targeted to different levels of interest and engagement.

Here’s a simple example using the AIDA marketing formula:

A – Attention – a landing page can focus on encouraging the visitor to begin initial engagement. For example, you can focus on growing:

• Email subscribers
• Webinar attendees
• Content readership (by offering a whitepaper, etc.)

I – Interest – a page can focus on getting a visitor interested in your product or service. You can do this by having them watch a video, read a third-party review, or attend a product-related webinar about your company.

D – Desire – here you need to convince people that your product will solve their problems. You can do this by offering content (video, whitepapers, etc.) that speaks to the prospect’s specific needs.

A – Action – this is the page where you want visitors to take the final step. This might be:

• Adding a product to a shopping cart
• Requesting to be contacted by a sales person
• Buying a ticket to an event

Again, these are just examples and ideas. The point is that you should understand the basic steps in your audience’s path to conversion. Then you can target each step with different marketing campaigns and landing pages.

You can even target landing pages to each step in the conversion funnel for each type of customer. This would require some work (three profiles and four steps would yield 12 pages). But it’s totally worth it.

Ask yourself: what is more likely to sell a hotdog? Some guy yelling “hotdogs!” in your face, or some guy telling you he has your favorite mustard and a great price?