If you think about it, Ink Cartridges are the worst example of something you can “re-use”.

If you’ve ever had a printer, you probably know what I’m talking about.

Ink Cartridges are very… quirky, and by design.

There are thousands of reasons why your printer might not print a document. And they all (usually) have to do with the ink. (If it’s not the ink, it’s usually the drivers).

That’s why the #1 most common recommendation to fix printer problems will have to do with buying a new ink cartridge.

And this is again, by design, because it always feels like your printer is pushing you to buy a new cartridge.

For example, the fact that if any of the colors (let’s go with cyan) ends up empty in your color cartridge, the printer will just stop working until you buy a new one.

Or (and this is a really sneaky one), whenever you print in black, a bit of your colored ink is used to “create a richer shade of black” (Which is just a ludicrous excuse given by these companies).

And then I also have to mention the smart chips hidden in these cartridges that detect if they’ve been re-filled or not. Because if they were…

You bet that it might detect it and stop your printer from, once again, printing what you need it to do.

But thankfully, landing pages are not ink cartridges. We can recycle certain elements of our pages between projects and campaigns. In fact, knowing what and when to recycle can save you a ton of time in the long run.

But what elements and when is an article for another time. What we want to answer today is…

Can full landing pages be re-used for different campaigns?

Or are we forever destined to “mix and match” and make alterations between similar campaigns?

Let’s explore this topic by reminding ourselves some of the main landing pages concepts. And to do that, we first need to ask…

What’s the goal of a landing page?

That’s an easy one, it’s to get conversions, right?

Not exactly…

We need to remember that landing pages (at least the most successful ones) tend to represent what is only one step in a process for our leads. To get them from one buyer state to the next.

And while high conversions might mean we’re doing just that…

It could also mean we’re attracting a lot of people who, while interested in our initial offer, might not end up buying later on.

The real goal of a landing page is to act as a sort of filter to get the right people into our process. Be it an email list, a free event or a free trial of our software.

And a good way to test that is to control how many buy vs. how many sign up.

Conversions are too simple of a KPI. You need to keep track of parameters on a campaign level as well.

We need to control how our campaign is nurturing leads and how it’s providing useful solutions for those leads.

Which is why, to answer our main question, we need to look outside the scope of landing pages and onto the campaign level.

But wait…

What makes each campaign unique in the first place?

While the answer to this question might be different for every marketer, a good way to break it down is to think of campaigns as a process that targets 3 specific elements to get the sale.

Those elements are:

What problem it’s solving for the client
What solution it’s offering and…
Who we’re targeting

You can think of these as the 3 “main levers” that define the nature of every campaign.

The levers that, depending on which one you alter, can create dramatically different results.

Every campaign is created from a mix and match of these elements.

So if we want to explore the idea of reusing landing pages between campaigns, we need to play around with these levers a bit to see where and when it makes sense to.

So let’s play around, shall we?

Let’s say we clone a campaign so that it has the same focused problem to solve, the same solution and same target audience.

And let’s say that in each one we alter only one of these levers.

The results would look something like this:

A campaign that sells the same solution to different types of people with a similar problem.
A campaign that sells the same solution to the same types of people, but gives more focus on the different problems it fixes or…
A campaign that sells to the same types of people, who have similar problems, but offer them an alternative solution. (These make great down-sells BTW)

Okay interesting, so which one do you think it makes sense to re-use landing pages with in both of these campaigns?

In the second example, only the focus of the problem solved change. This would be if we had 2 landing pages of the newest Iphone, but one of them focuses on how easy it can fit in your pocket and the other one focused on the quality of its camera.

Problematic to reuse a landing page with, huh? You’d probably have to do some pretty hefty changes to both the copy and the images to reflect the different problems the solution focued on.

Not a good candidate.

And in the third one, well, it would be like trying to create a landing page for people who want to learn a programming language, but one offered a course and another one offered a book. Different solutions, but there’s no way we can re-use the same landing page here.

So I guess we stick to the first one. Same problems and solutions, just different people.

A quick example that just came to mind might be an ergonomic desk setup.

People who need ergonomic desks are worried about their posture and the comfort of sitting for long periods of time.

So anybody who sits for long periods could be in our demographic.

Secretaries, streamers, government desk workers, programmers, managers, competitive gamers…

All have the same problems. All need the same solution. Yet they’re all different kinds of people.

So could we in theory use the same landing page to sell a desk like that?

Hell yeah we could.

Now… should we?

Probably not.

At least, we shouldn’t use the exact same page, but maybe one that’s pretty similar and more targeted towards that person’s job.

Cause here’s the thing, if you’re a secretary who has the luck of choosing their own desk…

And you see two options online:

Which one do you think is going to work better if they saw it in an ad?

Ergonomic desk for sale
Ergonomic desk made for secretaries for sale

If you chose the second one then ding ding ding, you got it right!

There’s a general rule of thumb for marketers that says:

The more specific you are towards your target audience, the more sales you’re going to attract.

Especially if you’re trying to target people in ads.

Because naming the profession of the person buying will almost always attract more attention than if you didn’t!

Same goes when you do it throughout the landing page.

If you can make them say:

“this feels like this was made for me”

You win.

So while in theory, you could reuse landing pages for certain campaigns…

The best practice is to at least make similar ones that target each type of person directly.

Because a secretary isn’t going to use the same language that a programmer might use.

And we need to keep that in mind when we’re creating these pages.

Although, now that I think about it, ink cartridges might not be so different from landing pages after all…