Three different methods for building landing pages for B2B marketing teams

This guide will help you understand and choose the appropriate methods for building effective landing pages based on the goals and circumstances of your B2B marketing team and organization.

Additionally, this guide will help your marketing team improve operations once you select an appropriate method. 

We’ll cover three methods your marketing team can use to build landing pages. The method you choose will depend on your goals, circumstances, and available resources. 

For each method, we will explain the following:

• Under what circumstances the method works best
• Steps for successfully implementing the method
• Advantages of the method
• Roadblocks to watch out for when using the method

Let’s get into it. 

Method 1: B2B marketing teams use a landing page builder

This method involves a marketing team using a landing page builder that provides predefined templates to create landing pages. 

Landing page builders provide well-tested and optimized page templates for general marketing purposes.

Here are some examples of landing page builders that provide templates:

• Leadpages - https://www.leadpages.com/
• Unbounce - https://unbounce.com/
• Instapage - https://instapage.com/

Landing page builders enable marketing teams to build landing pages quickly and without significant assistance from creative resources such as designers and developers.

This method works best for marketing teams in the following scenarios:

• Marketing teams without access to creative resources 
• Marketing teams that need to be highly agile and create landing pages quickly under very tight deadlines
• Marketing teams testing messaging before committing significant resources to decide on a new campaign initiative.

Steps to a successful implementation

Step 1: Create a plan

Define your reasons for choosing a page builder and the limitations of this option. Make your team aware of your reasoning. 

Since this method typically produces a lower-quality experience for your target audience, you want to make sure you’re addressing your marketing team's concerns before choosing this method and spending the resources to get the landing page builder configured within your organization. 

For instance, if your goal is to test messaging, then you’ll want to make that clear early on. In that case, your metrics to measure success might include the following: 

• The amount of traffic driven to the landing page
• New customers that attribute their interest in your product or service to this landing page and its content  (at least in part) 
• Website visitors reacting positively to the messaging, which might include a high click-through rate, form fills, or a lower-than-average bounce rate.

If a team uses this method to test new messaging and determines the messaging to be successful, then it’s likely the marketing team will switch to Method 2 and Method 3, which we will explain later in this guide. 

Step 2: Establish an initial implementation

Here are some considerations when establishing your landing page builder implementation:

• Ensure the landing page builder is integrated with your marketing automation tool or CRM.
• Ensure that the landing page builder is integrated with your website analytics tool, such as Google Analytics. 
• Integrate your marketing automation tool or CRM so data is collected and channeled into the right tools. 
• Ensure the landing page follows your company’s branding as much as the template allows. Get the landing page template reviewed and approved by your internal creative team. 
  • Make sure your internal creative team clearly understands the advantages of this method and why you’re using it in the first place (which you do as part of step 1).

Step 3: Establish an operational process for creating landing pages using the landing page builder

Define the operational process and roles for building landing pages to ensure your team moves efficiently. As mentioned before, this process will involve fewer moving parts than methods 2 and 3. 

For example, decide who will create the images for the landing page and who will perform quality assurance on each landing page before publishing it in the live environment. 

Advantages of Method 1

Improved ability to produce work quickly and have ownership over deadlines

Allowing marketing teams to retain decision-making power will enable them to make decisions more rapidly and reach a consensus through less effort.

Think about the back-and-forth, asynchronous communication involved in passing work between teams so that different stakeholders can give their approval. In many cases, the individuals working on the project must put their work on hold until they receive outside approval, resulting in a drawn-out process. 

When a marketing team creates a landing page mainly on its own, it can move faster from not having to seek approval or feedback from other teams. 

Less Resource Intensive 

Because landing page builders provide pre-built templates and the ability for non-technical teams to build pages, this method typically requires less agency involvement and fewer resources. 

Creating landing pages with minimal agency support can be risky, especially when your team needs more technical experience and creative skill to make that landing page effective. 

So, ensuring that the marketing team has a certain amount of experience producing landing pages is vital. 

If your marketing team gets to the point where they need an outside team or agency to help build the landing page, this method ceases to be cost-effective. 

At this point, you’re better off choosing Method 2. 

Potential roadblocks for Method 1

Challenges with branding, quality, & consistency

By working without an agency, marketing teams limit their options for using more complex implementations within their landing pages.

When you use a landing page builder, you can customize the branding on the page—logo, colors, and fonts. You can even drag and drop sections to create a page using one of many page builders. 

That said, landing page builders can also limit a team’s ability to create a branded page or add more custom features. 

Landing page builders provide templates in more of a one-size-fits-all approach. So, landing pages created with prebuilt templates do not always have the same branding quality as other pages built by an agency using a more comprehensive approach.  

To help assess if a landing page builder meets branding standards, consider the following questions: 

• Does the top navigation match my company’s corporate site?
• Can I use the fonts within my company's brand guide?
• Can I configure the landing page builder to match colors, buttons, and headings?

Complications with debugging & troubleshooting

When marketing teams create a landing page without an agency, they can run into technical problems and errors that require additional expertise to troubleshoot or fix.

These problems and errors could involve: 

• Complications with using the content editor of the landing page builder
• Failing to integrate your landing page with your marketing automation tool 
• The integration fails with the landing page builder and your marketing automation tool or CRM 
• Using an image that doesn’t fit correctly into the template
• Creating a page that doesn’t display correctly or work on mobile devices

Complications with performance & landing page optimization

It’s also easy to make mistakes that aren’t apparent without the expertise of an agency, such as: 

• Images that are not correctly sized or optimized for the landing page template on all screen sizes, resulting in the subject matter of an image getting cut off when the image displays on mobile devices. 
• Search engine optimization (SEO) settings getting misconfigured or set up improperly. Misconfigured settings could result in, for example, a page going public that shouldn’t appear on search engines, a page’s title tag and meta description being incorrectly entered or optimized, or a landing page that starts cannibalizing traffic from another page on the corporate site.
• Responsive page issues where text appears in images
• Disregarding (and creating) a lousy mobile experience

Method 2: Having teams collaborate with an agency to build landing page templates

With this method, a landing page template is built by an agency and implemented into a marketing automation tool (like Pardot, Marketo, or Eloqua) or a website content management system (CMS) like WordPress, Drupal, or Hubspot.

With an agency creating the landing page template, marketing teams can focus on other areas. These areas include improving the landing page strategy, drawing up effective messaging, and maximizing the marketing campaign's reach. 

So, instead of building the landing page, the marketing team focuses primarily on the strategy behind the landing page. 

Since this method includes an initial step of designing and developing landing page templates, marketing teams and their agency have the opportunity to create a design that accomplishes the objectives of each landing page template.

Because this method requires the creation of landing page templates rather than individual landing pages, the designs created for each template need to be reusable and repeatable for future marketing campaigns. 

Furthermore, agencies can build customization into landing page templates for flexibility of layout and content options depending on the marketing automation tool or CMS a marketing team uses.

Tasking an agency with building a template could allow an internal marketing team to create multiple templates for various uses, including forms, e-books, guides, campaigns, and more. 

This method works best for marketing teams in the following scenarios:

• Marketing teams that run multiple, simultaneous marketing campaigns where there are efficiencies of scale to justify the investment of establishing customized landing page templates
• Marketing teams within companies that want to maintain high brand standards and consistent, user-friendly digital experiences
• Marketing teams that have relatively consistent needs when they create landing pages
• Marketing teams that want to retain a consistent experience on their landing pages and other digital properties

Steps for a successful implementation

Step 1: Decide which landing page templates to create

To get started, marketing teams should identify marketing campaigns that they routinely run so that they can build templates to support these campaigns. 

Here are some of the most common types of landing page templates that marketing teams may benefit from creating and having on hand at any given time:

• Gated asset landing page template: This template introduces a gated asset and includes a form visitors can fill out to download the asset. 
• Conference/event landing page template: This template outlines information for an upcoming conference or event and allows page visitors to book a meeting with a sales representative at the upcoming event.
• Webinar landing page template: This template outlines information for an upcoming webinar and collects registration information.
• Sales rep landing page template: This template introduces a sales rep and allows prospects to schedule a demo or ask questions.

Step 2: Put together a strategic brief to inform the design of the landing page template

Creative briefs provide unique insight into each target market. They can provide the design team with valuable information that helps them create landing page templates that meet the marketing team's goals. 

Beyond communicating the goals of the landing page, the creative brief explains where the intended audience(s) might be in their purchase journey. 

Ideally, the brief provides the design team with insights that help them create a landing page that connects the target audience with the value they’re looking for. 

If the creative brief gives this insight to the design team, they know to create a landing page that shares content instead of prompting someone to sign up for a demo. 

When you write the creative brief, make sure to explain the following three points: 

1. Define the target audience and provide relevant information on their interests, goals, challenges, pain points, and assumptions. 
2. Define the main value proposition (what you’re going to give site visitors for engaging with your page) and any secondary value propositions. 
3. Define what sections, features, and components the template will need for its initial use and what it might need for future landing pages that use this template. It is important to be thorough and map out the template because you don’t want to tweak it too much in the future. 

B2B website landing page creative brief template

View creative brief template

A creative brief keeps teams on track, reduces rework, and helps development teams create a product that advances business goals. In this way, the creative brief acts as a compass to keep teams moving in a strategic direction.

Therefore, the marketing team needs to provide a creative brief that gives the agency direction as they design each template. 

After the agency reviews the creative brief, the marketing team should meet with the agency and give them a chance to ask questions and clarify information.

Step 3: The agency will design & develop the landing page templates

At this point, your agency will design the landing page templates based on the insight and direction you provided in your creative brief. 

When the agency provides initial wireframes or designs, review them thoroughly and use the creative brief as your checklist. Ensure that the landing page template meets the strategic goals outlined initially in your creative brief. 

After the agency completes the landing page template designs and the marketing team approves of the initial direction, the agency will move into development. 

Since certain marketing automation tools have templating limitations, the development team must communicate any limitations so that the marketing team knows how to successfully implement the template.

Step 4: Establish an operational process for creating landing pages using the new landing page templates 

Now that the marketing team has their template integrated into a marketing automation tool or CMS, they need to ensure they’re taking the proper steps to create pages from this template. 

To ensure marketing teams stick to a consistent and thorough process, they need to be able to answer the questions outlined in the process document below: 

• How much time and resources should the teams put into each creating each new landing page using the template?
• Given their responsibilities, how much time should each team member put into the development process?
• Who will create the creative brief for each landing page?
• Who will provide image assets for each landing page? 
• Will the design team assist with this process?
• Who will create the landing pages? Will someone on the marketing team complete this task, or will it fall to another team?
• Who will provide the written content for each landing page? 
• Who will create the forms and corresponding marketing automation workflow for this landing page?
• Who will define the KPIs for the landing page? 
• Who will create a dashboard that automatically pulls in data for each landing page template?
• Who will perform quality assurance on each landing page?
• What are the quality assurance expectations for each landing page?

Step 5: Create a landing page from your landing page templates

Now that you’ve established an operational process using the answers to the questions listed earlier, you’re ready to create a landing page. As long as you’ve stuck to the process, you can now populate your landing page with content, test it, and implement your campaign. 

Advantages of Method 2

Marketing teams get to delegate the design of the templates & focus on what they do best

Marketing teams have the strategic skills to reach and educate prospects along their purchase journey. 

Having an agency build a template gives marketing teams more time to focus on devising strategy and creating content that will effectively move the target audience along the purchase journey.

Essentially, having a marketing team partner with an agency allows each team to do what they do best, which saves resources for both teams. 

Qualified web development teams establish an efficient system to build landing pages.

Once landing page templates are integrated into your marketing automation system or CMS, the marketing team can operate with minimal agency involvement once it comes time to use the template. 

But website projects are complex, and technical issues are likely to occur. So, as capable as a marketing team may be, they will benefit from having access to a specialized team of technical designers and developers. 

Landing page templates are designed specifically for your company

You can go to a big box department store and purchase a shirt, sweater, or pair of jeans off the rack. But if you go through the process of getting clothes tailored, you get a far superior result.

The same principle applies to custom-built landing pages. When you have a team of experts tailor a landing page to meet your unique needs, you—once again—get a more practical, memorable, and effective result.  

When you go through the four steps outlined earlier to successfully implement this method, you get a custom-built landing page that considers your company’s offerings, strategy, purchase journey, target audience, and so much more. 

Once they have the template, the marketing team can work with greater agility

Custom landing page templates require a detailed, strategic process to create for marketing teams and their agency of choice. 

And when a marketing team requests a custom template, it requires them to pause operations while they wait for the template to be built. 

But once a landing page template is finished, your team can use it to create future landing pages with greater speed and efficiency. 

Potential roadblocks for Method 2

Requires more time & money (but creates a better result) 

Simply put, this method typically uses more resources than leveraging a prebuilt template; however, a more custom and thorough approach to building a landing page template will likely lead to more effective results. 

Because this method involves collaborating with an agency, the marketing team uses more than just its own time. So, depending on the size of your team and the resources in your budget, it might not make sense to go with a custom-built landing page—even if it means missing out on more effective results. 

Higher friction in the communication channels 

Creating a custom-built template involves a lot of nuances, time, communication, and complexity. And an effective process requires a marketing team and agency to collaborate effectively and stick to a pre-defined process the entire way through. 

In this environment, it’s easy to miscommunicate, mistranslate information, misunderstand, and make mistakes. 

So, to keep friction low, your agency needs to exercise thoroughness and communication by outlining its current and short-term needs throughout the building of landing page templates.  

Beyond that, the agency must provide expectations for timing and process. Any miscommunication about timing and windows to provide feedback can contribute to delays and misaligned expectations.

Method 3: Marketing teams use an agency to build a custom landing page for a more engaging experience 

Sometimes a templated landing page limits a marketing team’s ability to create a user experience that conveys an engaging message or achieves a specific goal. 

That’s where a custom landing page has the advantage. 

A custom landing page makes the most sense when a marketing campaign, significant event, interactive tool, etc., needs to provide a highly engaging experience for the target audience. 

Examples of landing pages that benefit most from custom implementation:

• Calculator - A calculator landing page allows the marketing team to provide data to the target audience. This data helps the audience justify the ROI of the promoted product or service. 
• The promotion of a significant event - This landing page allows marketing teams to create a comprehensive landing page to promote an important trade show or conference.
• Product launch microsites -  A microsite introduces a company’s product, service, or story that has enough distinctions from a company’s main brand. This entity requires a separate web experience to tell its story effectively. 
• Target market segmentation - When you want to target a specific audience using messaging distinct from your main message, you likely want to deploy a landing page created from a custom template. For instance, an American company might want to create a custom landing page that speaks more directly to a Canadian audience's pain points and circumstances. Or, for a company that appeals to a wide variety of customers, the marketing team might want to create a separate landing page with messaging that connects to a more specific but highly valuable segment of customers within the larger target audience. 
• Questionnaire - This landing page allows marketing teams to create a questionnaire that provides prospects with information and insights based on data they provide themselves. Questionnaires allow marketing teams to collect valuable quantitative and qualitative insights. Still, marketing teams need to ensure that they provide equally valuable insights based on the information provided in the responses from the target audience.
• Report or guide promotion - This landing page allows the marketing team to preview information found in their high-value content, such as a report or guide. In many cases, report or guide landing pages include a gated form that prospects need to complete to download the report or guide. As an alternative to gating your high-value content, these landing pages can provide the high-value content directly within the landing page. 

This method works best for marketing teams in the following scenarios:

• When a marketing team needs to provide a highly engaging experience for the target audience. These initiatives often require the marketing team to communicate unique or in-depth messaging that relies heavily on visuals or branded elements.
• When an initiative requires custom development and the implementation of logic, such as a tool, calculator, questionnaire, or the incorporation of a data set. 

Steps for a successful implementation

While the steps for implementing this method resemble those taken in Method 2, Method 3 focuses on creating a landing page rather than a landing page template. 

Therefore, despite the similarities, the process of implementing this method differs in several ways.

Step 1: Create a strategic brief for your landing page

To keep the design team focused on creating a landing page template that meets your goals, marketing teams must provide a creative brief to their agency of choice. 

As mentioned before, the creative brief provides guidance to reduce wasted time and energy by answering key questions and providing direction upfront. 

The time a marketing team takes to put a creative brief together will pay off in saved meetings and rework that stems from miscommunication and misaligned goals throughout the process.

B2B website landing page creative brief template

View creative brief template

Based on the objectives and goals outlined in the creative brief, determine a budget for this project It important to confirm your budget with your agency to make sure they can accomplish your goals and meet the requirements that we're outlined in your creative brief. 

Keep the budget in mind for every decision you make. Marketing teams need to understand the budget implications of their requests, and they should focus on the areas that will impact the landing page the most.

Step 2: The design phase begins

At this point, your agency will design the landing page based on the insight and direction you provided in your creative brief. 

Since this method involves creating a fully operational landing page—not a landing page template—the design and marketing teams face fewer restrictions in ensuring their design is reusable. Because of this, the design team can exercise more creativity and make the landing page more engaging. 

Most of the time, the design team does not need to start from scratch. The design team can repurpose page layouts and patterns from previously built landing pages without compromising the page experience. 

Since this method requires more resources, repurposing existing assets can help the design team conserve resources and stay within budget. 

When the agency provides initial wireframes or designs, review them thoroughly and use the creative brief as your checklist. Ensure that the landing page meets the strategic goals outlined initially in your creative brief. 

Step 3: Finalize design & move into development

After the agency completes the landing page design and the marketing team approves of the initial direction, the agency will move into development.

When development teams implement a new landing page, they need to know if they should build editing capabilities for minor adjustments and tweaks or just leave the new landing page hard-coded.

A hard-coded landing page can continually be updated by a development team or by a marketing team member that feels comfortable editing code.

Step 4: Create documentation to assist future updates & maintenance 

When a custom landing page is created, the development team needs to provide information on how to maintain or update the landing page down the road. 

This especially applies to landing pages that include questionnaires or calculators. In these instances, a team needs to maintain all data included with the landing page. 

Also, details on website tracking and analytics should get documented so that the marketing team knows how to maintain or add goal tracking to the landing page in the future.

Advantages of Method 3

Allows content & strategy to inform the design to a greater degree

When marketing teams need to tell a specific story or communicate a particular message, it is more effective to have the page’s content and strategy influence and lead the development of the page’s visual elements. 

When a page’s content and strategy dictate the design and development of a landing page instead of having a template dictate the copy and design, marketing teams can take more liberties in making sure the page remains true to strategy. 

As helpful as a template can be, there are times when it restricts what a team can create, which can limit the team’s ability to execute the original strategy. 

However, when you build a landing page from scratch, you can think outside the limitations of a template. Since there’s no incentive to recycle a custom landing page (in this case), the design team can create a page free of the limitations of a template. 

Higher effectiveness when it comes to generating demand & educating prospects

Method 3 provides the ability to create a calculator, questionnaire, or insights database that allows marketing teams to showcase unique data and insights to their prospects. This allows the marketing team to provide the target audience with more immediate and valuable insights. 

For example, rather than simply telling your audience about one of your products and its benefits, a custom landing page could have your audience answer a set of questions that lead them to discover the benefits of your product or how it would save them time and money. This questionnaire could also help your audience discover which products would best meet their unique needs.  

Essentially, these highly customized landing pages go deeper into educating your customers by providing them with insights that are unique to their specific circumstances. Companies know a lot about the value they bring. And these interactive tools offer another way to showcase that value.

Plus, these interactive tools can collect insights provided by prospects that can give marketers a deeper understanding of their target audience and how to best address their needs.

Potential roadblocks for Method 3

Time-consuming to consider all factors for a custom landing page

On a per-page basis, there are a lot more resources involved in executing this method compared to methods 1 and 2. 

So again, you need to ensure upfront that producing a high-value tool like a highly custom landing page will pay off. In other words, if you choose this method, ensure it’s worth the time before producing anything. 

There are a lot of tasks to check off the list when building a landing page. This includes setting KPIs, tracking goals, strategizing SEO considerations, creating a social media plan, performing quality assurance, etc. 

Because this method involves many tasks, it can be highly resource-intensive to address all tasks.

Also, it can be hard to fit all tasks within a timeline, and mapping out all the tasks that need to be done can feel overwhelming. Yes, an agency can take care of most of the items on the task list, but the marketing team needs to invest time into ensuring the agency adheres to the strategy outlined in the creative/strategic brief. 

Also, decide up front how you will distribute your landing pages. Not promoting a landing page through the proper channels can keep it from having an impact that justifies the cost of creation. 

Requires a high degree of oversight from the marketing team

Because this approach involves a marketing team collaborating with an agency, there is a heightened need for communication, specifically when providing the creative brief to the agency.

Marketing teams need to set aside an appropriate amount of time to help support the design and development of the landing page. 

If the marketing team doesn’t have the time to communicate with the agency and project manage the landing page creation, this method will likely prove difficult to execute. In that case, the marketing team would need to communicate their limitations. Otherwise, this method could consume even more resources or prove a wasted effort.