10 tips to build an effective landing page
A cornerstone of achieving web conversions is strategically placing landing pages as the first point of contact with your website. Landing pages are a bit different from your normal web page—having a smaller scope and narrowed down objective—although still an extension of your overall web presence.
Essentially, a landing page asks visitors for their contact information in exchange for some kind of content in return, ideally cultivating a sale or building a customer relationship. Your website should showcase your brand, company, or organization with a holistic view—what you have to offer, telling your story, testimonials, contact information, you name it—while a landing page is laser-focused with one key action or takeaway for your visitor. When done right, both you and your visitor gain something from this initial point of contact, and it can generate even more web engagement and repeat visitors in the future.
So, here are 10 tips to keep in mind when building your next landing page:
Identify your target audience and how to find them
Identifying who your target audience is should be the easier part. Finding them, however, may be a little trickier. This is where your searchability comes in. Optimize your SEO by using relevant, targeted language that you know your ideal customer is looking for. Actually, the more specific you can make a landing page, the more likely it is to stand out when prospective customers make those niche search engine inquiries. Think about it this way: optimizing your landing page for a search term like “flexible PSTN calling plan for small businesses” puts you in a much smaller candidate pool than trying to be the #1 hit in a broad search term like “phone provider”. The people who come across a more specific landing page are much more likely to be actively looking for what you have to offer, instead of happening to stumble upon your page after a general search, but it’s not really what they’re looking for.
Build the right type of page
Landing pages can help you with converting visitors from simple awareness of your brand/product/company to generating interest, making a decision, and ultimately following through with an action—all by interacting with your Call to Action (CTA)—but more on this later. The way to go about conversions and actions will depend on the type of interaction you ultimately hope to achieve out of the situation. Lead generation is much more common for landing page conversions than flat-out pushing sales (although ecommerce is different for obvious reasons).
Knowing the type of page you’d like to make affects the language, content, and CTA you use. A lead generation page will include a form to gather the information you’re looking for from your visitors—name, email, company, etc. Lead generation pages are most commonly used for B2B marketing, and should offer something like a whitepaper download, eBooks, registering for a webinar, or a free system demo in exchange for the desired contact information from visitors-turned-potential-leads.
Clickthrough landing pages are most used by ecommerce or SaaS and will typically use a clickable element to send visitors elsewhere—like an embedded link to a sale or subscription shopping cart, or perhaps a button to download the app in an app store.
Identify a clear Call to Action
Your Call to Action (CTA) is the action you’d like visitors to complete when interacting with a piece of digital content. CTAs include signing up for a newsletter, filling out a form, registering for an event, or even following your social media accounts. When creating a dedicated landing page, you should have a singular, specific goal in mind: intrigue the audience enough to follow through with your CTA, which should be the solution to the problem they are struggling with. To make your CTA as clear as possible, center your unique selling point– a.k.a. your solution to their problem–as the focal point within whatever clickable element you choose.
Don’t settle for boring content
The landing page should be exciting to look at. Visuals help maximize engagement, which will make visitors more receptive to what they see and what you have to offer. Bland content doesn’t intrigue visitors the same way that eye-catching graphics, balanced colors, thoughtful typefaces, and carefully placed clickables will.
Optimize your landing page to load quickly
Even though your page is visually enticing, it should still load quickly – the human attention span is quite short, and almost 50% of web users expect pages to load in 2 seconds or less. So, your job is to make a good first impression, and quick. Things like unoptimized images with hefty file sizes, excessive Flash content, and an abundance of popup ads weigh your page down and cause load times to lag.
Keep mobile users in mind too
Although it’s fair to assume that most B2B and work-related searches probably happen on a desktop or laptop, you should always keep mobile users in mind. Just like any part of your social strategy and web presence, landing pages should be responsive and compatible with mobile formatting, too. Double-check to ensure that graphics, buttons, and other clickables are correctly oriented and remain visually effective.
Focus on earning clicks
Create content that will help you win the click – keep the page straightforward and showcase why your solution is unique to your visitor’s needs and can solve their problem. That solution should be the focal point of the landing page, and any clickables should have that one target in mind. Then, build your content around enticing visitors to engage with your solution, and hopefully be interested enough to want more information.
Use active language
Incorporate clear headlines and active language for convincing and direct copy—think phrases like “download our FREE eBook!” or “ready to see the difference [our product] can make?” vs “submit form”. There’s a difference, right? If visitors aren’t interested, they’ll click out and away in a matter of seconds. Action-oriented language that focuses on the benefits of what you’re offering is a straightforward way to guide your audience to follow through with clicks and conversions.
Cut out distractions
If the whole point of creating a landing page is to encourage a specific action, don’t overcomplicate things. Ensure your CTA is the focal point of the page and minimize any element that could take attention away from that clickable. If you’re pushing an eBook or whitepaper, now is not the time to promote an unrelated webinar – save it for a different engagement campaign.
Plan to follow up
Once visitors convert, obviously they expect to receive the material they were looking for in the first place. You can configure an auto-send of whatever content you’ll be giving them, or you can take it one step further and send a personalized message to each visitor who follows through on your call to action. Either way, successful landing pages will be mutually beneficial for you and the visitor.
Using Dynamics 365 Marketing to build landing pages
Dynamics 365 Marketing has loads of built-in capabilities that can be helpful tools in your digital strategy arsenal. On top of managing social media, creating marketing emails, carrying out customer journeys, and managing subscription lists and segments, you can also create top-notch landing pages with ease. The best part is, Dynamics 365 Marketing’s user-friendly, drag-and-drop interface allows you to easily build digital marketing pages—plus, you can create forms and embed them in your landing page, create and use redirect URLs, track clicks and engagement, and so much more.
Get started
Using a CRM application with your digital strategy is game-changing and can take your marketing ROI to the next level. If you’re ready to see the difference that Dynamics 365 Marketing can make, get in touch with us. One of our expert Dynamics 365 consultants will be in touch to set up a free system demo.