Create the Perfect Landing Page to Market Your MSP

The landing page is the apex of your marketing funnel. It’s where you want everyone to end up and (hopefully) convert. As you might imagine, this makes the quality of any given landing page a critical consideration and something that needs to be prioritized on your website. 

Let’s go over the process of building up your landing page so that it is as effective as possible in achieving your goal.

We’ll start from the very beginning: with an empty page that we can go through piece by piece to maximize its returns. Before you do anything else, you should take a few moments to get yourself in the right mindset.

Ask yourself, have you taken the time to think about how you would pitch the landing page’s offer in person? Your goal should be to emulate this approach as closely as possible on your landing page. You also need to make sure that everything on your page helps to support that particular page’s goal, and you need to establish the appropriate tone for that landing page to take. It is crucial that your landing page is designed and drafted to focus specifically on your visitors’ priorities.

Once you are in the right headspace and have established the right language for your page to use, it is time to get writing.

The Elements of an Effective Landing Page

Let’s go over the considerations you need to make concerning each component of your landing page.

The Headline

The headline is going to be the first thing that one of your website visitors will see when they click through to your landing page. Therefore, it is important that it makes the value of what you have to offer particularly clear. It isn’t the what, it’s the why.

For example, let’s say you wanted to create a landing page to collect signups for a business continuity webinar. While your headline could be “Business Continuity Webinar”, it definitely shouldn’t be. Something like “Find Out What to Do to Keep Your Business Going Through Disaster” is a far more impactful alternative that communicates the value that will be taken away from the landing page.

By making it clear what you have to offer in a way that elicits some emotion, you can start off your landing page strong.

When you build your landing page, your Headline needs to be in a Heading 1 format, and you can break up your content with Heading 2 subheadings as well.

The Content

Once you’ve primed your audience to your landing page’s intention, it’s time to state your case. You need to lay out your argument in support of your position. Therefore, you should cover a few steps:

• 1. Briefly Summarize the Pain Points Your Target Should Be Feeling. Your landing page needs to reinforce that you understand exactly what your target audience is experiencing, What are the challenges that they are seeking a solution to? What negative impacts are they likely to experience if something doesn’t change? Briefly touching on these details will help to confirm to your audience that they are in the right place.
• 2. Solve the Pain Points You’ve Introduced. Any visitor to your landing page isn’t going to be looking for an explanation of their problems alone, of course. Once you’ve established an understanding of the issues they face, you need to show that you have the means to resolve them. Provide them with a brief overview of the process you will put into place for them, specifying the impact each step will have to reduce their stress.
• 3. Make Sure Your Copy is Compelling. It is important to keep in mind that, at the end of the day, your landing page is effectively a glorified advertisement. This means that your copy needs to communicate your message effectively, whether it is perused in detail or simply skimmed. Being direct with your headlines and your body copy is crucial. Focus on being informative, and instead of pushing the sale, let your conversational knowledgeability show your visitor that you are their best option.
• 4. Write Your Copy to Match Your Target. The beauty of landing pages is how customizable they can be (a point we’ll return to later). This means that you can make them as specific to a certain audience as you want them to be. Let’s say you wanted to market how your MSP’s services can be useful to a variety of different industries. You can tailor your landing pages to each of the industries you want to target, touching on their individual needs and concerns more specifically. While many needs overlap, the priorities of different industries will not, which you can use to your advantage.

The Call-to-Action

Once you’ve convinced your target that you know what you are talking about and are capable of assisting them in minimizing their pain points, you need to give them some direction. Give them some options to reach out to you, along with an added incentive to do so.

Why give them options, rather than simply providing them with a form to fill out (as we’ll discuss next)? Simple: some people will want to talk to you immediately, rather than receive an email to set up a meeting. Giving them the option to talk to you right there and then will not only show them how responsive you’ll be to their needs, but it also gives them the rush of instant gratification that many of your prospects will crave… particularly if their issue is a pressing one.

For those who aren’t facing immediate pressure, it pays to sweeten the pot for them. Offering some kind of deliverable or other value-adds in return for form submission can be what tips the scale and gets you their contact information—and crucially, the permission you need to use it.

The Form

On the topic of the form, the key is to keep it simple and ask only for the most basic information you need. This makes it simpler for your prospect to fill out, which inherently makes them more apt to do so. After all, information now has value, so the less you ask for the less of an up-front investment your prospect will perceive themselves making. Stick to their name, email, and maybe the company they work for and their position within that company.

Furthermore, any fields that you may mark as “optional” should be removed. The more fields you have, the less likely it is that your prospect will fill out the form.

It’s really helpful when your form can automate some of your sales and marketing processes, which is where JoomConnect comes in.

With a JoomConnect Form, you can have all of the information that your form collects go into ConnectWise Manage or Autotask and kick off all sorts of automation. 

Here’s an example:
Let’s say your landing page is for a free 30 day trial of your phishing simulation service, and you also want to include a nice branded flier that the user can print out and hang around their office that talks about ways to prevent a phishing attack.

We actually include this phishing handout, as well as the landing page content and more as a part of our MSSP Cybersecurity Kit for your MSP Website).

With JoomConnect, your form can take their basic contact information and create a new company and contact record. It sets them up as a new lead, and you can have it automatically assign a sales activity to someone on your sales team to reach out, as well as generate a ticket to have the phishing simulation account set up. You can add them to your Prospect - Phishing Trial marketing group (for future communications) and if you utilized ConnectWise Manage you  you can have the form drop a track that will send them some information over the next 30 days and schedule a follow-up activity for sales to reach out to review the results of the 30-day trial. 

On top of that, you can have the form let them opt in to join your newsletter list, and that would drop them into your newsletter marketing group for you.

That’s a ton of time saved, and it ensures that nothing ever gets missed in the complicated sales process.

You can learn more about how JoomConnect forms work here.

The Thank You Page

Okay, so you’ve convinced your prospect to do what you wanted them to do. That’s fantastic, but you need to follow through a little more. Thank them for whatever it is you wanted them to do, whether it was joining a mailing list, signing up for some event, or simply requesting more information. This part is important because it reinforces that you care about their outcomes as well as gives you the opportunity to go a little further. Sure, you have their contact information now, but with another call-to-action on your thank you page you could start them down another related sales funnel or educate them on the benefits of your other services.

This is also a great place to initiate any downloads a prospect was promised in return for the form submission. 

General Landing Page Best Practices

While all of the above elements are crucial to designing a landing page that accomplishes its mission, there is even more you can do to really boost its efficacy. Consider the following tactics:

Match Your Landing Page to the Rest of Your Marketing Campaign

Chances are, your landing page isn’t the first place your target will be exposed to your brand. They may have stumbled upon your service page when searching on Google for an answer to their problem, or received a postcard in the mail that empathized with their needs. It may sound too simple to matter, but matching your landing page’s design and branding to the rest of your campaign can have an impact.

Let’s say they navigate to the link you included on a postcard. If the same image from the postcard is present on the landing page, they’ll have the reassurance that they are in the right place. This can help to establish trust—and even the smallest amount of trust can make a big difference.

Include Social Proof

Let’s face it… any shrewd business owner is going to take anything you say on your landing page or in your marketing materials with a grain of salt. After all, why would you say anything negative about yourself in your own marketing materials? Of course, you’d talk up your own capabilities, right?

However, by adding some testimonials from your existing customers and clients who have received the service, you bring in a third-party opinion. Sure, you may be picking and choosing the opinion to present, but that doesn’t matter nearly as much as the fact that an external business can confirm that your service helped them and that you are trustworthy. Your landing page needs to be as convincing as possible, so don’t leave out any advantage you have to make it so. Even adding stats can make a big difference in how effective your landing page is.

Remove Opportunities to Navigate Away

Okay, so you’ve created an entire campaign to drive your prospects to your landing page and invested the time, capital, and energy into enacting it…

Wouldn’t it really suck if your prospect made it all that way, only to go somewhere else on your website before they provided their contact information?

This is why it is important that you make it so that anyone who hits your landing page has two options: either navigate back to the page they were on, or fill out the form and progress to the thank you page, where they can continue browsing if they so wish. Therefore, your landing pages shouldn’t have the assorted menus and links activated on them, as you effectively want to capture your audience on that page.

Design It Strategically

We’ve already discussed how you may have those who will simply skim your landing pages along with those who will read every syllable and punctuation mark on them. You need to make sure that your landing page can communicate effectively with the entire spectrum of visitors between those two extremes. There are a variety of ways that this can be accomplished.

First off, all of your most important information should be communicated “above the fold.” This is an old newspaper term that means that the gripping information should all be displayed at the top of the page, where your audience can see it without flipping the newspaper over—or, in website terms, without scrolling down the page at all. Second, formatting your content as we’ve discussed by summarizing overarching ideas and benefits in your headings makes it easier for these points to be seen by all.

Finally, including other elements (images, videos, and the like) can help to keep your audience’s attention on your page while also reinforcing your message. One caveat to this, however, is that the additional elements need to contribute something. Don’t include them just for the sake of having them, because that would make them a distraction over anything else.

Test and Revise

Of course, you should always keep in mind that your landing pages could be made better, so it pays to have more than one version of each in circulation. Utilizing A/B testing can help you create the most effective version of each landing page possible, so don’t miss out on the opportunity to improve your website’s capacity to convert. This kind of evaluation should be repeated as time passes to ensure your landing pages continue to communicate with your target audience.

If You Need Help With Your Landing Pages (or Getting Your Prospects to Them), We’re Here to Help!

From campaign to conversion, we can assist you in developing a marketing strategy and creating the materials and content used in it, regardless of whether you’re trying to break into a new client base or retarget some of the clients you currently have for other services.

To learn more about the many opportunities you have when working with us, reach out to us today by calling 888-546-4384!