How to design a campaign landing page

A campaign landing page is read by one kind of person. Somebody who just saw one particular advertisement, is mildly interested, is on a phone, and is one tap from going back to what they were doing. Everything on the page is judged by whether it holds that person. And the page has a second job that a normal website page never has. Its address is the only tracking a hoarding, a radio spot or a newspaper ad will ever give you.

The first line repeats the advertisement

Whatever the ad promised, say it again in the first line, in the same words. If the hoarding said implants in Rajajinagar, the page says implants in Rajajinagar. If the radio spot said no cost EMI till the thirtieth, the page says it before anything else.

This sounds obvious and it is the most common failure we see. The ad makes a specific promise. The page opens with a welcome message and a photograph of the building, and the visitor spends four seconds deciding they are in the wrong place. They do not scroll to find out.

The same applies to the language. A Kannada radio spot that sends a listener to an English page has handed them a second test to pass. If the ad ran in Kannada, the page runs in Kannada.

The address is the measurement

Digital media carries its own tracking. Offline media carries none, which is why the page address matters more here than the design does.

Give every medium its own page: one for the hoarding, one for the radio flight, one for the newspaper insertion. Identical content, three addresses. Now the analytics report is a list of media by name. You can see the radio page filling up at nine in the morning while the hoarding page does nothing for two weeks.

Then make the address usable in that medium. A listener must hear it once, in traffic, and type it later. A driver has three seconds. So one short word after the slash, lowercase, no hyphens, no dates. Read it aloud in Kannada and in English before you register it, because a word that is easy to say is not always easy to spell after hearing it.

Build it for a phone on mobile data

Most of this traffic arrives on a mid-range Android phone on a patchy connection, sometimes in a lift or a basement. A hero video and three web fonts turn a ten-second decision into a blank screen.

Keep the first screen light. One image, compressed properly. No autoplay video. Test it on a real phone with the connection throttled rather than on the office broadband.

On that first screen, before any scrolling: the promise in the ad's words, one piece of proof, and one action. Below it, the four or five things a buyer needs before enquiring. The detail of what goes in that section is in what a service landing page should include.

Make the action the one Indians actually take

Forms get the attention and the phone gets the enquiry. Build for both, in this order.

A tappable phone number, large, visible without scrolling, and answered by a person during the hours the campaign runs. If the radio spot plays at seven in the morning, somebody answers at seven.

A WhatsApp button that opens the chat with the message already written. Set that pre-filled text to name the campaign: "I saw your hoarding on Dr Rajkumar Road". Now every WhatsApp enquiry arrives already labelled with its source, and nobody in your office has to ask.

A short form for the people who will not call, asking four things and no more. Name, number, the one question you need to route them, and that is it. Every extra field is a reason to close the tab.

The page has an end date

A campaign page is temporary, which makes it the most neglected page on any website. Write down, before it goes live, what happens to it when the flight ends.

Take the deadline off. Take the offer off, or redirect the address to the service page. Keep the address itself alive for at least a year, because people write hoarding addresses in notebooks and call in March about a Deepavali panel.

One practical thing: put the campaign name and the end date in a comment at the top of the page file. The person who has to clean it up in six months will not be the person who built it.

The ninety seconds after the tap

The page ends at the button and the campaign does not. Decide three things while you are still building it.

Where the enquiry lands. An email inbox that four people can see is not a destination, and by Monday nobody knows which of the weekend enquiries were called. Send it to the CRM, or at minimum to one named person with a number on it.

What the visitor sees next. A thank-you page that says when somebody will call, and from which number, stops half the missed calls that follow, because the buyer now recognises the caller.

What is sent immediately. One WhatsApp message with the name of the person who will call and the showroom's hours. It costs nothing and it holds the enquiry through the gap.

Say plainly on the form what you will do with the number, and then do only that. A buyer who gets three unrelated promotional messages in the following week remembers the page, not the offer.

A worked example

A modular kitchen showroom on Kanakapura Road runs a Deepavali campaign: two hoardings, a Kannada radio burst, and a newspaper insertion in the local edition.

It builds one page and publishes it at three addresses. The hoarding panels carry a QR code and the short address. The radio spot says the address twice, slowly. The newspaper ad prints it in the coupon.

Three weeks later the report is not a guess. The radio address produced most of the WhatsApp messages and the newspaper address produced calls from an older buyer. One of the two hoardings produced almost nothing, and that was the panel behind a new flyover pier.

What to do next

Open your last campaign page on your own phone, on mobile data. Time the load. Then count how many taps it takes to reach a human being. Then check whether its first line says what the advertisement said. If the answer to either is bad, fix those two before touching the design. To have the media plan, the page and the follow-up looked at as one thing, tell us what you need.