Do Traditional Landing Pages Work for Saas Startups?
User expectations are high and attention spans are short, so it’s more important than ever to pay attention to the finer details of starting up a business.
A Unique Challenge
Startups that aim to sell software as a service (SaaS) have a unique challenge in today’s market. It’s crowded out there and people are increasingly short on patience when it comes to online interactions with brands. Time is precious. Simplicity is key.
This gives the designers behind these brands a crucial role to play in engaging with and converting visitors. How should they approach landing pages in such a frantic and demanding environment? Is it OK to lean on the traditional tactics of constructing a landing page or does the rulebook need rewriting?
What Is a Traditional Landing Page?
We are now officially in the mobile-first era — Google has been implementing mobile-first indexing throughout 2018, which means that landing pages have had to evolve to remain relevant in almost every industry. The ‘traditional’ desktop-first approach to landing pages, which relied on an abundance of content and calls-to-action with plenty going on below the fold (BTF), has arguably been phased slowly but surely out of the creative workflow.
Landing pages have had to evolve to remain relevant in almost every industry
Sure, we’ve still got the same objective of communicating a multitude of marketing messages at once, but we’ve moved on from the one-size-fits-all approach of using landing pages as dumping grounds.
What Is the Role of the Landing Page Today?
Modern user behaviours necessitate more strategic input than ever before — that’s not to say that traditional landing pages were never strategically planned, but it is to say that it’s a bigger challenge to engage a more empowered consumer in this interconnected day and age. The number of potential touchpoints with any given brand is much greater than it was even 10 years ago; smart TVs, smartphones and smart homes make for smarter consumers.
This presents an interesting challenge in the creation of landing pages that are specific and targeted when it comes to individual campaigns. Traditional design principles like having a short and simple form with few fields to capture data still apply, but it often means that multiple landing pages are required for the same product (no two consumers are the same, after all, right?).
Whichever route your consumers take to find your SaaS to purchase, the landing page must exist solely to communicate the basic need for the product in the first place.