More and more people are looking to start the life of self-employment or switching careers in their 30s that will take their work to the next level. Whichever the case is, it’s always a struggle, and maintaining multiple public profiles, websites, or social media presences can be too overwhelming for a start-up as well as expensive. Everyone is looking for ways to turn profitable in no time, meaning they grab any opportunity for cutting back on expenses. And because public presence has grown a lot in the past years, being active on all platforms consumes a lot of time and money.
A company usually starts with one or two people, a tight budget, and the desire for success. Don’t make the mistake of investing where you don’t necessarily need to. People love to hire designers and developers to make the perfect website everyone falls in love with, but if no one visits, why have a mouth-watering masterpiece for a bunch of money and monthly fees?
Instead, what start-up companies – in fact, even mature companies – are doing actively, is maintaining a landing page, and one or more active email-based campaigns. The reason for this is that it proves to be more effective for a relatively unknown company, than a fully designed website.
So what does this mean and why does it work better than a flashy website with 20 different pages and 500 links to different references? That’s exactly the problem. When talking about a start-up, you need to erase every and any notion you might have of what a website looks like. Because when they visit you, it’s not like visiting Google, Apple, Samsung, or Nike. They don’t know who you are, what you offer, why they should pick you. That’s why offering a dozen links and 25 pages at once with pictures and huge paragraphs everywhere can scare away potential buyers.
What Is A Landing Page?
What a landing page does is give viewers a single page, no links, no huge paragraphs, just a nicely designed page, with one single task they have to do: give you their email address. It’s easy, it’s fast, and above all, it’s effective. It has one goal, and that’s very clear to anyone who visits the site. For new customers it’s very important to seem transparent, so they know exactly what they’re getting into.
It takes no time to design, and it’s much cheaper than a full website. Maintaining is almost non-existent, and people can find a lot of information about the company very quickly.
Why Email?
Some people might think that email is dead, no one uses it anymore, but it’s quite the opposite. Email is reserved for important or official information. That’s what you became by giving you their address.
So how do you get them to give you their email? It’s very simple. The landing page is a beautiful piece of advertisement, with the button to give the address smack-dab in the middle. Around it should be all sorts of information: a photo of the CEO, or a short introduction, maybe 3-5 references or FAQs. They found you somewhere, liked you, and now are there to find out more. They see the introduction, they see the call to action, and above all, you need to make a promise: once they give you an email address, you’re going to promise them something in return. This can be a small gift, a video introduction sent to them via email, anything you like.
Seeing the information on the landing page and the promise of a mystery gift after giving you their address, they will not hesitate to do so. And after that, it’s just a matter of clear and constant communication.
More and more people have landing pages instead of huge websites, and if you think about it, I’m sure you see at least 5 landing pages a day. It doesn’t take a lot of time to make or maintain, and you won’t need to worry about the costs of the website in the first phase of the business. The only thing you need to worry about is customer satisfaction that will come to light after the emails roll in and the communication phase starts.
