One of the most important factors in a digital marketing campaign are landing pages. That’s because landing pages help convert! In this article, we’ll discuss building and designing landing pages. If you want to take it to the next level and get your viewers to perform actions, like filling a form or asking for a consultation, then let’s start building a landing page!
Table of Contents
What is a Landing Page?
A landing page is what helps traffic convert – meaning, it is content that takes your particular target audience and pushes them to perform an action (such as downloading your content offers, free trials, or coupons.) You might be thinking: Isn’t that what a homepage on my website is for? Not quite. Landing pages are more specific than a general homepage because they cater to a particular stream of traffic generated from a lead magnet or single offer. They have one objective: converting visitors into leads.
Building a Landing Page
There are a few factors one must consider when it comes to having a well-built landing page:
- Pinpoint your Customer Personas
It is essential to understand who your customers are – after all, they are the building blocks to establishing an effective marketing strategy. You can begin with basic information such as age and name. Then, move into more specific traits like race, income, lifestyle, location, hobbies, etc. From here, you can develop several customer personas and their respective consumption habits. Finally, you will be able to build a landing page that speaks directly to this target audience.
Customer personas are great information to use when trying to improve engagement. Let’s say you are gaining traffic to your landing page but your viewers are not following through with the call-to-action. You can re-evaluate and re-build your landing page message according to the persona.
- Creating a Goal
A goal is any action you want your potential customers to perform. If you have more than one desired goal for the same campaign – let’s say scheduling an appointment and filling out a survey – then the best course of action would be to build more than one landing page with each focused on one of these goals. Here we see again what makes a landing page different from a homepage – being specific. Instead of directing your viewers to a general homepage where they have no clear direction on what to do next due to the wide-variety of options, you direct them to a clear main message on what action they should carry out and why.
Sometimes you might only have one goal per campaign, other times you might have several. What matters is that each goal has its own landing page.
- Measure your Results
The question then becomes: how do I know my landing page is performing optimally?
One strategy to answer this is to create more than one landing page for the same goal. Why? Because then you weigh them against one other in order to determine which page resulted in the best outcomes. This will ensure that the highest performing landing page is used – allowing the most number of visitors to become customers. This means that when building a landing page, you need to measure its performance.
How? There are 5 different landing page metrics: the first and most significant is the conversion rate. To calculate: divide (the number of conversions completed actions) over (the total number of visitors) then multiply the outcome by 100 for a percentage. The remaining 4 metrics include bounce rate, page views, time spent on page, and users by source. Landing page metrics are essential, however, do not fully accept them because they can be impacted by a number of external factors and are not always what they seem. For instance, the bounce rate might confuse clicking on your product tab as a bounce rather than engagement.
In general, the best strategy would be to use the metrics continuously in order to get an overall idea of what’s working and what’s not. Also – make sure to visualize these numbers using graphs and charts.
Designing a Landing Page
Next, let’s discuss how to design a landing page. Always keep conversion in mind when designing a landing page – since that is the ultimate objective, after all. There can be many reasons as why viewers leave your landing page quickly without engaging:
- It doesn’t meet their expectations
- They don’t find it visually appealing
- They can’t navigate the call-to-action (too many distractions)
- The forms are intimidating
Here are a few components you should remember when designing:
Captivating Designs
A potential lead opens your landing page – you now have only a few seconds to leave a strong first impression. In fact, according to a recent study conducted by Microsoft, the average person has an 8 second attention span. Wow – talk about pressure. Don’t worry, the good news is that there are ways to work with this. First and foremost, make sure the design is unique and not generic. If the landing page looks like every other web page, you miss your chance at grabbing the viewers attention. So you want something easy to read, organized, and eye-catching. Basically: remove everything that might distract your viewer from the main message. Be obvious with your message by having your headline connect directly back to the ad or email campaign that sent viewers to the page.
Secondly, make sure to use images and videos. Images help highlight your offer or promise in a clear and powerful way. Videos take this a step further – particularly when you speak directly to the target audience. This means you should not make a cheesy infomercial – rather, take this as an opportunity to connect to your audience and inform them on what to expect. Thirdly, compelling content is crucial, so use the power of words to impact your viewers on a deeper level. One way to do this is by emotionally targeting the audience using words such as “feel”, “missing out”, “must have”. However, remember to keep content clutter-free by using bulleted lists and small paragraphs.
Mobile Friendly
Yes, investing in responsive landing page design that works across multiple devices is worth the time and effort. More people than ever are using their smartphones to find information – so, if you want to increase your chance of sign ups, invest in a responsive design.
Social Sharing Buttons
Make it easy for users to share the landing page with their online social network via LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. This will extend the reach of the landing page beyond your current followers and fans.
Lead Capture Form
Forms are what transform browsing viewers into active customers. There is a fine balance between asking for too much information and too little. Importantly, you want to keep your forms straight to the point and only ask for information that you truly need. Generally speaking, after 7 fields in a landing page form, conversion rates drop intensely. So, carefully study each box of requested information.
Sometimes a form may be subtly repetitive. For instance, say you’re asking for both what country and which state the customer lives in. Usually you would not need to know both pieces of information – unless time zone is a necessary factor for your offer or product demos. If that is the case, use drop down menus in order to speed the process up for the user. A basic form to start with on the initial landing page is simply asking for their name and email address. From here, you can establish a relationship with the customer with the newly obtained contact information.
When it comes to aesthetics don’t be afraid of using white space – meaning, don’t cram the boxes of requested info right next to each other but instead space them out to look less intimidating. Also, use directional visual clues when designing your landing page. Make it obvious with arrows or signals where and what you want the user to fill out.
Next, focus on your call-to-action. Reinforce to your viewers what benefits they will get on your offer, and make it loud and clear. For instance, instead of saying “Join BetOnline” you can say “Get FREE Betting Tips”. Another good way to start your CTA is the phrase “I want to …”. This provides clarity about the benefits – “I want to grow my traffic” or “I want to become a life coach” – pushing the user to click.
Keywords
Like most inbound marketing content, the use of keywords is essential when designing a landing page as it will optimize search engines and increase web traffic.
Thank You Page and Email Responders
After signing up, a customer should receive what is called a “thank-you page.” This should either confirm the receipt of the lead, provide them with the offer, or display details for further steps. For example, if the landing page promised a coupon to the user after providing their email, then the thank-you page would provide the coupon code or link. In addition to this, an automated email confirmation is useful. This email may include a reminder such as the date and time for a live webinar or an appreciation of their time. The point of these two components is to not leave the customer hanging after filling out the landing page, but instead reassure them.
With all these tips in mind, we hope you’ve realized why you need a landing page to help your traffic convert. Still lost? Don’t worry, SEO Design Chicago can help you create the perfect custom landing pages for your business.
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