There are so many reasons why someone may want or need to create a landing page without a website. Perhaps a business wants to cut digital costs or they are testing a new business idea.
If you’re testing a new business idea, you may not be ready to create a brand new website. A landing page may be all you need to conduct audience research, generate leads, and collect feedback for your digital marketing campaigns.
So how do you create a landing page without creating a new website? Let's first go over the benefits of a great landing page to help you determine if creating one without a website will be the right path for your own business.
Table of Contents
- Why Build a Good Landing Page?
- Pros and Cons of Creating a Landing Page Without a Website
- Creating Landing Pages Without a Website
- Landing Page Design
- Other Option: Create Landing Pages for Your Website
- What's Next in Building a Landing Page?
Why Build a Good Landing Page?
Landing pages can be used to present visitors with a specific product, gather leads, announce a particular promotion, or offer a discount. No matter the content, every landing page has a clear call to action, so your customers know just what to do.
We know that sounds a bit like a website homepage. So, what is the difference? Fundamentally, a landing page and the homepage of a website have different objectives. Your homepage may have many links, broad calls to action, or even target multiple audiences.
There are many paths a site visitor could take from your homepage. If they want to view your online shop, they will click on the products you list on your websites.
Landing pages, on the other hand, are highly specific. They target segmented audiences, or they promote only one product or offer. And, they have one specific call to action. Their capabilities to grow your business, with or without a website, are nearly endless. It all depends on your business. You do you!
Can you build a landing page without a website?
Landing pages are a powerful way to connect with your target audience. By setting up a well-designed landing page, you can start generating high-quality leads instantly.
However, if you are in the process of planning out your landing page strategy, you might be curious to know if you can build a landing page without a website. You can!
Ultimately, it is completely possible to build one and host it without having websites of any kind. In fact, this is a strategy that’s quite common among businesses.
However, the question is whether or not this approach is advisable. Really, whether you should build a landing page without a website or build a website first really comes down to your marketing needs.
What's the Purpose of a Landing Page?
A landing page is a standalone web page you can use to generate leads and potential customers through your online marketing strategy. Unlike a complex website, a dedicated landing page is a single page that will grab a visitor's attention, offers a focused user experience, and tells him what to do next.
You can use landing pages to promote a specific product, generate leads through a PPC campaign, or offer a promotion or discount coupon. Every landing page should also have a clear call-to-action (CTA) so visitors know what to do. This is vital for all marketing campaigns.
Landing Page vs Homepage
You might be thinking, doesn’t a landing page sound like a website homepage? The truth is landing pages and websites have different objectives.
A landing page is highly specific and focuses on a single goal, such as lead generation or promoting a single product or offer. They often also target a single type of audience.
However, a website homepage is designed to educate visitors and may have links to different pages, broader calls-to-action, and target multiple audiences. The example above shows a homepage for Rei Co-op, with a clear menu of pages to view from women's clothing to climbing gear.
Visitors can take many paths from your website homepage. For example, they could click your blog page, read your about page, etc. Yet, a landing page only offers users a single path to act, such as buying your product, signing up with their email address, or claiming an offer.
What Results Can You See?
After you've created your landing page, depending if you placed it on your website or not, you can expect your email list to grow. This means endless possibilities for you to market to this new audience.
You can also create a landing page that directs people to your website after they've filled out the sign up form or completed whatever they need to do. What's great about this is that you can do testing to see which landing page has succeeded in getting you more leads.
With the right landing page software or all-in-one marketing platform, this is a simple process since your website (or websites) can all integrate seamlessly with each other. This makes the data analysis tools easy to use and understand within the same apps.
If you are testing out a business idea and need different landing page copy, you can usually expect different bounce rates, sign ups, and sales. This is why you need to choose from some of the best landing page builders that can give you everything you need for free. What if you decide to keep only one landing page but have already paid for a plan to have multiple websites, landing pages, and more?
That's where TruVISIBILITY comes in with their free plan... for life. You can make nearly any type of landing page from their templates along with a website (that also has templates for every occasion and industry) and email builder.
To conclude, your results will vary. But having a landing page can more than double your conversion rate, collecting a great repository of leads for your business.
Pros and Cons of Creating a Landing Page Without a Website
Can you create a landing page without a website? As we said, of course! You CAN have a landing page without a website, the question is really if you SHOULD get a standalone landing page.
For example, a website shows that your brand is established. It will often include your phone number, contact details, and other important information that gives your business authority.
Without a website, you risk visitors thinking, “Why should I trust them? They don’t even have a website." Depending on your industry and audience, however, this may not be the case.
An established website is also an excellent way to generate organic traffic. Because websites include multiple pages, there are more chances to rank for relevant search terms, helping you reach your target audience through search engines.
Because of those benefits, you should have at least one website to use as your starting point. You can then build as many landing pages as you like, and as we’ll explain later, you can give each landing page a custom domain name, making it look like a standalone website.
Pro:
The most obvious benefit of building out JUST a landing page is that you wouldn’t need to go through the hassle of setting up a website. While setting up a website isn’t terribly difficult, the process can be burdensome for those who have never done it before. Additionally, getting a website up and running comes at a cost. Without the commitment of establishing a website for your company, you can easily whip up numerous landing pages.
Con:
However, there certainly is a downside to following this approach. Without connecting a professional custom website domain to your landing page builder, your landing page builder may generate a landing page URL for you. This URL can look unprofessional, to say the least.
For example, the URL could be something like emailsubscribepage.com/g4r3h7u9do39dki9. On the other hand, by connecting a professional website domain to your landing page builder, your landing page URL could look something like pages.ryansconsultingbusiness.com. Most would agree that this URL looks MUCH more professional.
Creating Landing Pages Without a Website
the process of building a landing page without connecting it to an existing website domain is relatively easy and straightforward. First things first, your landing page need to be hosted somewhere, and a landing page builder is a great approach. TruVISIBILITY's platform is a great place to start.
The first step of the process is to sign up for a landing page builder. More specifically, you need to get started with a landing page builder that doesn’t require you to connect with a professional website URL.
Step One:
Choose a landing page builder.
Some tools allow to build landing pages without needing to connect a professional website URL. Better yet, many of these tools allow you to do so completely for free. A few examples include:
- Mailchimp
- TruVISIBILITY
- Wix
- Unbounce
- Leadpages
- GetResponse
It's always smart to get a landing page software that offers an email app as well. This way, it is easier to connect and track data of how successful your landing page is at collecting email addresses. When you add an email account to your landing page, you can easily set up email automation for anyone who submits their email address on your landing page form.
Step Two:
Build your landing page.
Based on whichever software you choose, creating landing pages shouldn't take months and months to build if you know the landing page's purpose, message, and how you generally want it to appear. Within this step, there are a few things to do when thinking about your landing page design.
1) Define the Purpose and Goal of Your Landing Page
Decide what you want this landing page to accomplish. Consider the landing page’s target audience, as well as whether you have a certain conversion goal in mind.
2) Customize to Match Your Audience, Brand, and Offer
It’s important to define your target audience, but that’s not the only piece you can customize when it comes to building your landing page without a website.
Keep in mind not only who you want to reach with this page, but also how this page represents your brand and what components encourage visitors to follow through on your call to action.
These are the main three things to consider when working through the customization of your landing page with copy, images, and other design elements.
3) Optimize for Conversions
The most important part of your landing page is the clear and easy-to-follow call to action. It must be included, but it must also be easy to find. You don’t want someone visiting your page only to leave again because they’ve missed your call to action.
Make it easy to spot, but also give them a reason to take that next step.
This can take several forms, but usually, the best methods are providing value in return for filling out your form. This can look like a free product, a free ebook or other downloadable item, a consultation, a personalized offer, a contest entry, or anything that might be more fitting for your business. You can create one of these offers for people who fill out surveys as well.
The most logical sales tactic would be to set up a stall in the busiest part of the market and direct traffic towards it by telling potential clients about you, your brand, and what you offer.
This is the purpose of an SEO landing page in a nutshell. You want to rank highly on the first page of Google.
4) Thank Your Audience
Don’t overlook the importance of thanking the person who took the time to visit your landing page and follow through on your call to action.
In addition to showing your appreciation to your customers, follow-up pages like this are also a great opportunity to add even more value. You can attach an upsell offer, ask customers to fill out a survey, or promote upcoming events.
Step Three:
Publish and promote on social media.
Preview your landing page and review everything before you hit publish. While it’s easy to create a landing page without a website, it’s even more important that your landing pages are clear and speak for themselves.
If you’ve missed something that might confuse visitors or could impact performance, you don’t have the additional context a website can provide to help answer customers’ questions or give them more information.
Once your page is live, you can start measuring metrics from the analytics dashboard and begin optimizing to increase conversions.
Social media has become a staple in marketing strategies. A good landing page will also give visitors a chance to view the business channels on twitter, Facebook, or wherever else they have a page. This will put eyeballs and hopefully followers on the business's media pages, giving the business more opportunity to market to this audience.
Landing Page Design
Let's get to the nitty gritty of how to create a great landing page without a website, whether it's from your imagination or based off landing page templates.
It's important to remember that you can choose a plan that allows you to have unlimited landing pages in order to experiment with different designs, landing page copy, etc. This will give you a better idea of how many people sign up, are redirected to your webpage, or who lands on the page but doesn't submit their personal information.
From Scratch
Let's say you've read all the tips on building a landing page and you want to customize everything from the sign up form's text font to a specific background image. Then building a page from a blank slate may be the best solution for you!
People wanting free tools to build a landing page may find that not every tool is available to them, which is one reason many opt for choosing a template. However, TruVISIBILITY has all of their tools, widgets, and tips free and available to anyone using the platform no matter what pricing plan they belong to.
Landing Page Templates
Marketing landing pages that have a goal of getting people to sign up for a product or service will find landing page templates to be the most useful starting point.
They are already full of high-converting text that can be modified to fit your brand and message. Templates generally have all the widgets in place to be modified, moved, or deleted. Overall, a template is a great way to get ideas for lead generation. The most common templates for landing pages include:
- Event invitations
- Sales or discount coupon offers
- Video or webinar event
- Downloadable ebook or other content
Whichever way you choose to build and design your landing page, the best way to ensure your landing page generates leads is to connect your email for seamless email automation. Once someone submits their email address and other information, they should receive a welcome email in addition to the discount, webinar, or whatever the landing page advertised.
Other Option: Create Landing Pages for Your Website
If you find you need to connect a landing page to a website to better serve your business, then great! This is common in marketing, especially for ecommerce brands.
Most landing page software will give you the option connect your landing page to your domain, similarly to how you would connect your email software to your landing page. The process should be just as simple as well!
The benefits of creating a landing page for your website include:
- Brand message, images, colors are easier to design and match with your website
- You can directly take visitors and leads to your webpage after they complete the call to action
- Usually, there is an option within the same software to use their page builder for websites
What's Next in Building a Landing Page?
While there is much to consider before you create your landing pages, the most important thing to consider is arguably your landing page’s domain. While it may seem insignificant, your domain can have a massive effect on conversions.
Can't decide what type of landing page you can create? You don't need any coding knowledge or technical skills to build the best landing page for your business. With templates and predetermined landing page copy, you can get started checking out the functionality of TruVISIBILITY's platform today.
Interested in writing a blog for your business? TruVISIBILITY just introduced their Blogs app among their many products, which allow clients to make and add a blog to their existing site or simply to create a blog all by itself. It's an innovation among website builders and blog tools alike, so check it out today! (Yes, you CAN connect a simple landing page to your blog page as well!)
Want to receive more articles?
Sign-up for our weekly newsletter to receive info that will help your business grow