For your business to be successful, people need to buy into your brand story. And for that to happen, you must pull every trick in the hat to first get people to visit your site. Marketers can use targeted landing pages to funnel traffic to a specific destination in order to generate new and qualified sales leads for future customer conversions. A landing page is a web page that presents a unique opportunity or specific offer to convert visitors, either by completing a transaction or by collecting contact information through the lead generation form. HubSpot discovered that businesses with more landing pages generate more leads. Businesses with 30 to 40 landing pages generate seven times more leads and those with more than 40 landing pages get twelve times more leads than those with 1 to 5 pages.
WOW! The best part is that a well-crafted landing page doesn’t take long to create and promote. Landing pages generally do not have any distracting external or internal links, except for the CTA, and typically uses both images and text to push the reader toward the desired outcome.
Want Big Results? Start By Defining The Right Conversion Goals For Your Business
The first step is to identify your business’ goals so that you can clearly outline your conversion process. For example, the conversion goal for a revenue oriented eCommerce site would be an online purchase, while for service companies the conversion goal could be anything from building customer list to generating leads. So, landing pages can be wildly different depending on the purpose, target audience, the intent, product or services, focus, industry, perception, cost, messaging and value proposition. And while there is no one standard manual for the creation of a perfect landing page, there are key elements in the layout and design, content, and form that characterize highly successful landing pages and are engaging for the greatest number of users.
Intuitive Layout and Design
MarketingSherpa notes that page layout has the single largest impact when measuring the performance of your landing page, so it is important to figure out how to make it easy to navigate and exactly where to place your sign-up form. Keep the page simple and to the point. Landing pages most definitely should have a headline and maybe a discretionary sub-headline, a brief description of the offer & its value to the user, and lastly, a lead generation form to gather information.
Offer– The offer should give more information about what it is all about, with a few brief points about the benefits of the offer.
Lead Generation Form– The form should also be easy to fill in but make sure it is interactive, intelligent, and intuitive. Alternatively you can use Leadformly to create well-designed capture forms to embed in your site. With responsive web design, you no longer have to place your content above the fold, but you do have to ensure that your form is relatively high up on your page so that it is easily noticed, and visitors do not need to keep scrolling for it.
CTA– There needs to be a strong calls-to-action, which best explains to visitors the value of taking such action. Let them know is in it for them. It is essential to have the right call-to-action button that clearly describes the action the lead needs to take, such as ‘register’ for a podcast, or ‘sign up’ for a newsletter, etc. You can even use a graphic to effectively espouse the cause of the CTA. Make the conversion action short and possible to complete in fewer steps.
It is necessary to make the design of the landing page appealing, using contrasting colors within your company’s brand color scheme and avoiding visual clutter with too many images. Less is more, when it comes to design elements of your landing page because including too much on a page can distract the visitor. Studies have revealed that users can easily get annoyed if it takes a page longer to load—leading to fewer page views, a decrease in customer satisfaction and in turn lower conversion rates.
All About The Content
Once you have decided on the layout and design, you will want to ensure that your content is action-oriented and compelling enough for the audience to want to click on the CTA button. The simplest way of generating more leads is by attracting users with a case study, whitepaper, tutorials or eBook, which requires filling out a form to be able to download the content. This information gathered gives you an opportunity to add them to your CRM for future contact. Using artificial intelligence built into your content you may be able to gather an impression of how your most valuable content is performing. We will be talking more about AI in marketing in our August 7th podcast episode so be sure to tune in. Our final tip about content is to try explaining the offer using bullet points or concisely in a paragraph, with a little marketing spin on it to get across the value of the offer successfully. All the various elements on the page have to be clearly connected to increase your conversions.
Gain Audience Trust With Credibility Indicators
People trust word-of-mouth marketing more today than ever before, so your business can only gain from good online chatter. Studies have shown that social proof increases trust and gives a huge boost to conversions. People find current user reviews more credible than traditional “marketing copy.” So, use customer testimonials, feedback and quotes to your advantage. Moreover, Google algorithms give preference to a highly shared page. So ensure that you put your social share buttons on the top of your page and also include them on your landing page.
Finally as with any online marketing campaign, A/B test your landing pages and tweak and optimize them in order to keep up with changing audience needs. A quality, well-optimized landing page will get you more leads and sales.