e-dreaming

Even if you never create a strategy for developing landing pages, you still HAVE a landing page (assuming you have a website)—they just won't perform as well as they might.  In fact, they might perform so poorly that you begin to think you wasted money building the website in the first place. 

By default, your website's home page is your landing page. But because most website designers don't understand conversion optimization—by the way, unfortunately, that's the norm in the world of website development today—it is likely that your home page, even as a home page, isn't very effective.  And even if your home page is optimized for conversion, it is still likely to be a poor performing landing page, especially if you offer more than one product or service.

Effective landing pages focus on a single message, and do so to the exclusion of all the other messages.  Your home page cannot afford to exclude the other messages, e.g. if you sell lots of different kinds and brands of tires and other services, your home page cannot hype the sale on Firestone tires to the exclusion of the others brands (and you wouldn't make yourself very popular with your other suppliers).  Unlike home pages, your landing page can/should present the same pitch multiple times, with alternative wording or with additional information, further increasing the odds of conversion.  The "buy it now" button may well be on the page multiple times also, and may be represented in multiple ways—doing everything possible to get the visitor to convert.

Most website owners, and even most website developers, simply don't realize the effectiveness of this approach.  If you understand who your prospective customers are and what they want/need, by carefully crafting the content of a landing page to present a single complete and compelling message, the page is destined to convert much better than your home page ever could... and a change in your conversion rate is a change to the profitability of your website.

There are certainly lots of benefits to having a smart landing page strategy, and most of them have president's pictures on them.