The Anatomy of a Landing Page

Landing pages are an essential piece of any online marketing strategy, but only if they’re put together properly. In today’s blog, we’ll discuss the ins and outs of creating landing pages that encourage conversions.

What is a Landing Page, Anyway?

A landing page is a specialized web page to which you can direct visitors to accomplish a specific goal. This goal is often along the lines of collecting contact information or pushing a visitor further down the marketing funnel, and towards a purchase. The more landing pages you have, the more opportunities to grab and nurture leads you have.

However, making a landing page is more than just throwing a bit of copy and some form fields on a page and calling it a day. It is a process that will require considerably more forethought and planning to have any hope of achieving your marketing goals.

What does an Effective Landing Page Have?

For a landing page to be optimally effective, it needs to incorporate a few key components.

A Target!

Your landing page should be directed to a particular segment of your audience that has a specific need. This need should be addressed and a resolution presented on your landing page in a way that is most likely to be effective with your selected audience.

Ready… Aim...
To identify your target, it helps to identify both the traffic type, and the user type. Your traffic type will tell you which of your marketing channels--pay-per-click, email, social media, and any others--performed the best. This can be measured by creating a duplicate landing page for each traffic type and comparing the total traffic to each.

User types are pretty much exactly what they sound like: they’re the kind of users you are attracting and marketing to, from CEOs, CFOs, and other business members. Where user types are concerned, it is important to identify which contacts from your list are most likely to want to take action, and have the power in their organization to do so. Directing these users to your landing page will make it more likely to be successful.

An Offer!

How likely is it that you would hand over your contact information without getting anything in return? Your prospects are the same way: there needs to be a bit of give if you’re going to take their information. Therefore, you need to offer them something, and you need to make that offer as crystal-clear as possible.

A common tactic to be found on a landing page is to offer a trade: their contact information in exchange for a FREE ebook (notice how FREE is emphasized) or a percentage-based discount for the deliverable, product, or service that the landing page references.

A Few Words of Advice Pertaining to Your Offer:
First, don’t make people search for it, and second, make sure your offer has some worthwhile value. These both have everything to do with maintaining your contact’s interest. If they have to search for what they’ll get in return for their information, they aren’t likely to provide that information. The same is true regarding the inherent value of your offer--if it doesn’t pertain to the people who reach your landing page, they aren’t going to give you their information before hitting the red ‘X’ in the corner.

Interesting and Compelling Content!

While the visitor who has made it to your landing page will likely know what to expect, you still need to walk them through the process to ensure that you don’t lose their interest at the last moment. Briefly touching on a few points to explain your offer, followed by why your visitor should take advantage of the offer, with the inherent value and benefits of the offer will make it harder for your visitor to turn down this offer.

Good Formatting!

Your landing page should, or rather, needs to be formatted in such a way that will convey the most important information to your visitor immediately. This means that your most critical information should be displayed above the fold--your offer, and the form to take advantage of that offer. A good rule of thumb to follow is if your visitor has to scroll down to see the important stuff, they aren’t going to scroll down. In other words, if they have to scroll, you’ve lost them.

You also want to keep your landing page content as easily-digestible as possible. Using bullets and boldface are a great way to accentuate your most critical points, as they not only keep the information you’re sharing nice and organized, they also add weight to your content and make it appear more authoritative.

Will They Stay Or Will They Stay?
A key consideration to constructing a landing page is to ensure that your target essentially has two options to navigate away from your landing page--not counting the ‘back’ button. They should only be able to complete the form to move ahead and return to the rest of your website (preferably to some other impactful content), or close out of their browser. You don’t want any of the usual navigation links to be present on your landing pages.

However, once your target has moved on to the success page, you should allow them to share the offer out on their social media. This provides a free bit of social proof to add to your benefits.

Attention-Grabbing Elements!

Speaking candidly, regardless of how enthusiastic they are about what they are about to learn or receive, your prospect/contact will probably become considerably less enthusiastic when they encounter just a wall of text and a form.

A good way to keep your visitor’s attention is to incorporate an image. An image, mind you. You don’t want to go overboard on images, either. After all, your visitor is going to expect information from your landing page, not pictures. However, a single image can help engage your web visitor and help to give them some context. You should then use that image in any marketing efforts that lead to that landing page, like email and social media initiatives, to tie them together thematically.

And… Action!
You should also consider using video content to help generate more impressions and inspire more actions from your landing page. Video content can provide a significant boost to conversion rates--about 80%. That’s almost double the conversions!

Don’t underestimate the power of a risk-free experience, either. Offering a free trial can help convince a prospect to try out a service, only to find themselves depending on that service by the time the trial ends. It also doesn’t hurt to predominantly direct your message to a particular channel if that channel has historically performed well. You can test this by creating multiple landing pages and assigning them to different channels: pay-per-click, email, social media, and others to measure how effective each channel was at directing your audience to the landing page.

Thank You/Success Page and Email Responder!

Once you’ve used your landing page to collect your visitor’s information, the worst thing you can do is leave them high and dry. Fortunately, there are plenty of methods to keep your new lead engaged and involved on your website. First, you need to once again enable the navigation links in your header, footer, and possibly sidebar to allow your visitor to explore your website. Not only that, you should use your success page to thank them for their information and suggest their next steps as they explore the rest of your website. You could even link to blogs that they may be interested in.

This is also a good place to push for a social media following through a call to like your page, or follow one of your accounts. This may not be your primary call-to-action, either, but it is useful to have regardless.

So, as you create your landing pages, the crucial pieces to remember are:

• Make sure what you are offering is clearly described.
• Use content that is clear and compelling.
• Keep navigation links off the landing page, and include the option to share to social media on the success page.
• Test everything to ensure everything works so you don’t turn off potential clients.

Need more assistance? Give JoomConnect a call at 888-546-4384 or contact us to see what our marketing services can do for you!