For the majority of businesses today, cultivating qualified leads and generating conversions are the keys to success. While strategies like social media marketing, emails, or PPC (pay-per-click) ads are effective at spreading brand awareness, prospective customers are unlikely to convert unless they feel compelled to take action. This is where creating an engaging landing page for your products or services comes into play.
If you’re interested in cultivating more leads and possible conversions, it may be time to consider reevaluating the layout of your primary landing page and its contents. When done properly, a powerful landing page can drastically decrease visitor bounce rates to your website, ultimately improving your customer acquisition rate over the long term. Simply put, if your landing page isn’t built to impress, chances are you’re missing out on a lot of potential business.
Whether you’re seeking to revamp your existing landing page or craft an entirely new landing page from scratch, it’s critical to first understand the fundamentals of how it’s done. Read on to learn more about how landing pages work, what they should include, and common mistakes to avoid during the creation process.
What Is a Landing Page?
Companies and marketers talk about them all the time, but what is a landing page exactly? When people click on a banner ad or an email, they’ll arrive at your landing page to learn more about your products or services. From there, visitors are presented with information designed to encourage them to move forward with the next step in the buyer’s journey.
Essentially, there are two main types of landing pages:
- Click-through landing page: These landing pages encourage customers to commit to making a purchase directly. A click-through landing page focuses on pitching the primary value propositions of your brand, after which visitors can click on a single CTA (call-to-action) link that leads them to a checkout screen, app store, or particular product page.
- Lead generation landing page: In the case of a lead generation landing page, getting visitors to subscribe to an email list is usually the overarching goal. In exchange for this information, brands will typically offer some useful resources in exchange, like a free ebook, a discount on services, or some other incentive.
What Are the Key Components of a Landing Page?
No two landing pages are the same, and your industry or offering will influence how you approach creating yours. However, there are several key fundamentals that most landing pages share, and including these elements in your page will ensure that visitors feel enticed to take action. Here are the most vital landing page components that many of the best examples online today share.
A Strong Headline
The first thing a visitor sees when navigating to your landing page is the headline. This text should be concise, but it should also provide context into what you have to offer and why it’s unique. If needed, use the main headline to present a problem and include a subheader that offers a solution. This approach works well to illustrate a particular issue customers experience and exactly what your company can do to fix it.
Relevant Videos or Images
Landing pages should always get to the heart of the matter right away by delivering the information customers need to make an informed purchase. This means keeping text to a bare minimum and using photos or a video to illustrate your offering. Find a powerful hero image to work as the centerpiece of your landing page and consider adding a brief explainer video that discusses the key details about your brand, what it does, and how it does it.
Key Differentiators
Consider the key traits of your business that cause customers to choose you over the competition. It could be decades of industry experience or the proven ability to achieve better results than another business in your industry. Whatever it is that sets you apart, look for opportunities to showcase those differentiators on your landing page.
Social Proof
A good landing page should help to build trust between your brand and the visitor. To do this, think about adding social proof through testimonials or examples of product reviews from previous customers. You can also provide links to your social media accounts so prospects can get a sense of what other people are saying about your company.
Short and Concise CTA
The most impactful item on a landing page checklist is the call-to-action, or a brief one or two-sentence invitation for visitors to proceed with the next step. This CTA may lead prospective customers to fill out an email subscription form or it could include a clickable button to move straight to checkout. Either way, it’s important to create a CTA that inspires confidence, motivates, and ultimately convinces readers to move forward in the conversion funnel.
Things To Avoid When Creating a Landing Page
Crafting a landing page that gets results can take some trial and error. To expedite the process, it helps to have an idea of certain problems that can bog down the delivery of what you’re trying to convey. Take a few moments to review some of the most common reasons why landing pages fail to convert and how you can avoid these pitfalls.
Convoluting the Landing Page With Extra Stuff
Landing pages full of text, advertisements, and links to other pages can be overwhelming for many visitors, making them feel uncertain about what to do next. Try to make sure your landing page addresses one specific problem-and-solution scenario as quickly as possible. Instead of trying to cram everything into a single page, you can always build more landing pages to drive visitors to other services or products you offer.
Ignoring Design Problems
It’s critical to consider how your landing page could be improved to provide the best user experience. Look for landing page themes or color schemes that are consistent with your brand to give your content a professional look and feel. You’ll also want to ensure your landing page loads quickly to keep visitors interested, so it’s a good idea to ensure browser caching for your website is enabled. You can also speed up load times by removing unnecessary plugins that may cause your landing page to stall when loading.
Neglecting To Optimize for Mobile Devices
The best web pages have a responsive design, meaning they will adjust themselves to fit the screen of whatever device the visitor is using. Ideally, your landing page should look the same on a PC, mobile phone, or tablet. If visitors need to zoom in or scroll all over the page to get the information they need, they may simply lose interest or look for another solution. It’s also a good idea to include a mobile-friendly button on the landing page that allows visitors to easily contact your team for services over the phone or through an embedded chat feature.
Tips for Crafting a High-Impact Landing Page
In many cases, the quality of your landing page will shape the overall success of your digital marketing endeavors. If you’re not generating the leads or conversions you want to see, it may be best to consider altering aspects of your landing page to make it more engaging and easier for visitors to navigate. Here are a few best practices that will help you create a landing page that gets consistent results.
Stay on Target
One of the most vital landing page attributes is the ability to deliver valuable information on a single point of interest as quickly as possible. Avoid overwhelming customers with too much information that doesn’t directly relate to the topic at hand. The most effective landing page addresses one particular problem the visitor is facing and offers a single, simple solution to confronting that challenge.
Remove Conversion Barriers Wherever Possible
Identify any potential roadblocks that could make visitors to your landing page reluctant to move on to the next step. Some of these barriers may include poorly crafted copy, broken links, or slow landing page loading times. Another reason for low conversions could be a lack of trust in your brand, especially if you’re a newly established business. In this case, consider including information on your landing page that promotes your company’s reputation, such as any accolades awarded to your company or a few positive testimonials from actual customers.
Use Analytics To Gauge Landing Page Performance
Today’s analytics software can be an invaluable resource for tracking how customers find your landing page, how long they stay, and what percentage of them eventually convert. Another critical metric is your landing page’s bounce rate which indicates that visitors who arrive on their page are probably looking for something else. When your bounce rate starts to jump, it’s likely there’s some disconnect between the content of your ads and the actual products or services your landing page offers.
Need Help Designing the Perfect Landing Pages for Your Website?
At Cleverly, our strategists and designers will work with you to create a landing page to meet your unique needs. We create landing pages with design elements that pop, compelling copy for engagement, and CTAs that garner responses. To ensure your landing pages remain effective in the long term, we also conduct split tests of different variables to identify ways to optimize your conversion rates.
Contact Cleverly to schedule your free landing page consultation today.
