The goal of a landing page is to nurture customers who aren’t yet ready to buy, and to demonstrate how your company provides specific value in that area.
Such a page is important when trying to drive sales of your product or service, boost customer experience and help you gain customers quickly with enticing offers.
In this blog, you’ll learn about the key components of a great B2C and B2B landing page and how you can integrate them into your content to increase conversions.
Landing Pages
A landing page is a web page created for a particular purpose and is a standalone page you can set tracking parameters on and track user behavior. Landing pages typically have one of five purposes:
- Encourage a visitor to click (to go to another page, on your site or someone else’s).
- Get a visitor to make a purchase.
- Encourage a visitor to give his/her permission for you to follow up (by email, phone, etc.).
- Get a visitor to tell a friend about your products/services.
- Get a visitor to learn something, or leave feedback. This might include posting a comment or rating your products or services.
When a potential customer visits your landing page via organic search, PPC ads, social ads or promotional emails, they’re showing interest in the specific value proposition or product on which they’re clicking. However, a landing page isn’t enough to drive a purchase by itself.
There are specific ways you can organize the content to drive conversions, and eventually sales. Here are the best practices to achieve landing pages that attract more customers and amplify their signals of interest.
1. Craft the perfect headline
A headline is the first thing a user sees on your landing page, and the majority of visitors will read your headline but only skim through the copy. So it’s important to write headlines that sell.
To do that, avoid headlines that are ambiguous or don’t sum up your content correctly. Firstly, it’s important to make sure you cover your content in an engaging, concise and eye-catching way.
Secondly, make sure the headline conveys the benefits of your offer. This will make users more likely to stay on the page and act on the call to action.
Thirdly, keep in mind that an optimized page title (including a keyword you are targeting) can also help you rank better in the search engines. Having an indexed landing page on your site that is keyword optimized raises its visibility for that particular query.
Finally, always ensure that the headline of your landing page matches the headline of your email, ad, SEO copy, etc. for a seamless user experience.
For example, if your ad is for “boutique stores San Francisco” then the headline of your landing page should have the words “boutique stores San Francisco” in the headline and be accompanied by relevant content.
2. Build a separate landing page for each active promotion
It’s crucial that the content a user clicks on closely matches the headline and body content of your landing page. This is called ‘message match’, and it’s defined as “[…] matching the heading of your landing page with the headline of the ad or piece of marketing your visitor clicked.”
Message match is an important part of a great user experience.
And because most B2C companies create and distribute a large amount of content across many different categories and product types, simply sending users to your homepage or a different product page from your promotional pages won’t allow that message to match up properly.
For example, if you send an email that advertises local concerts in your area, including one they might be especially interested in, he/she will click on your CTA button to buy tickets for that concert.
If instead of a ticket page for that artist, you send the user to your site’s homepage where the promotional content is for baseball tickets, he/she will probably be pretty annoyed.
Even if the concert tickets are still available, the user may become frustrated or confused and give up on buying them altogether.
To combat such an issue, any promotion you run should direct customers to a dedicated landing page where the headline and content match your ad or email promotional copy.
The user should immediately see contextual clues that relate to a click or search. You don’t want to make users take additional steps to find the correct content.
3. Use images carefully
65% of people retain information paired with relevant images — compared with just 10% of people who only hear the same information.
Because of this, it’s best to provide an image that highlights someone using your product or service, or illustrates what the visitor will receive if they convert on your landing page.
But be careful. Your images should always help you earn conversions, not distract your visitors. Not only should your images be inspiring, original and eye-catching, but they should be carefully positioned to inspire the reader to action.
A concise, educational video can also help boost conversion rates if you’d prefer to go that route. Plus, with all the tools and software available now it’s easy to make great videos without hiring a professional.
Keep in mind that using images of people can be especially tricky. These types of images should have the person/people facing toward the call to action button.
4. Craft engaging CTAs
Your call-to-action (CTA) button is the most important part of your landing page because it’s the way that new leads are created in your system.
Without this button, you don’t get potential new customers, and the rest of the copy and images on your page lose their importance. Great CTAs (that involve 3 key elements) can increase your conversion rate by tens or even hundreds of percentage points.
Visitors need to feel compelled to click on the CTA button, so you must convince them to do so.
Avoid boring or unclear copy like “submit” or “get started” and focus on engaging, personalized copy such as “Send me the eBook” or “Get my free trial.” Make it crystal clear what the user will receive by clicking on the button.
In terms of CTA color, your button should contrast with its surrounding elements to draw the maximum amount of attention. Use A/B testing to see which colors work best for your business.
Preferences can often vary by industry and persona, so it’s important not to make assumptions based on “best practices” that may not be applicable for you.
That being said, it’s typically best to keep your page color and the objects on it to the left hand side of the color wheel shown below (green, blue, purple) and use contrasting colors for your CTA button(s).
5. Test your copy and CTA
Speaking of keeping it simple, let’s talk landing page copy. Anytime you’re writing copy for a designed page, keep the layout in mind.
You don’t want your audience to be staring down a wall of text that they need to comb through to get to the point. When you can, use bullet points, headers, and subheads to drive your point home concisely.
But as always, test your copy. And test your CTA. And then test some more copy. And then test CTAs again. You’re never going to know what resonates with your audience until the numbers tell you the truth.
You’re going to have to trust me that this landing page has been tested against other copy and different forms and different CTAs. Turns out, competing in AdWords (without just raising bids) is pretty compelling.
6. Keep the design straightforward and easy to navigate
Have you ever landed on a page and just … gotten lost?
Don’t lose conversions because of this. Your landing page design should reflect your brand colors and look like something you’d want to include on your website. Along with keeping your forms simple, you want to make the whole page navigable.
7. Leverage case studies and social proof
This tip is easy. Any time you can leverage the nice things your customers have said about you, do it. If you don’t have a large cache of compliments, you can lean on logos instead. Just make sure you have permission!
There are a few different platforms that will integrate with your landing pages to keep reviews fresh, like Yelp, Google My Business, and Trustpilot.
You can even use simple embed codes. Keep these reviews at the bottom of the page so you don’t distract from the action you want your audience to take. These should be also related to the headline describing the action, or else your audience will get pretty confused.
8. Keep your landing page mobile-friendly
As is important for any marketing, you want to make sure your landing pages are compatible with any device or viewable on any screen size. A lot of plug-and-play landing page solutions have this feature built in, allowing you to see common sizes before launching your shiny new page.
Just a tip: Play it safe by keeping your buttons and/or forms toward the center of a full-size page with a single-color background. That way, shrinking and stretching on whatever strange screens your page may encounter is less likely to break something important.
9. Make sure it loads quickly
If you’re a marketer, you probably already have landing pages whirring away as well as your website. If you’re seeing a high bounce rate on a particular page, load time could be the culprit.
It can be easy to cut corners with one-off landing pages, but make sure nothing on the page is too heavy or big. Resizing takes up a lot of time. And when your landing page doesn’t load fast enough, it can damage any SEO you’ve done for the page.
10. Put the important information above the fold
Just like an email, you want to make sure when someone is clicking through, the important stuff is visible first. This is particularly important for highly actionable pages, like buying tickets or entering a contest.
Things you can put below the fold: any testimonials, case studies, or client logos. Your own terms and conditions. Suggested content (e.g., if you liked this, you’ll also love our guide on our to make your lead forms pop!).
11. Update your landing pages regularly
User experience and landing page trends change. So like any blog post or site page, the content on your landing pages should stay up to date. If your previously best-performing ad begins to fall off, outdated landing pages could be the culprit.
Even just a refresh of the background colors, a new CTA, or some fresh copy will prevent fatigue and signal to Google and any ad platform that the content is fresh.
12. Add a thank you page
Okay, it may seem like all these tips are pointing you away from confusing your audience … and maybe you’re right. Thank you pages are just another step in this process.
Once someone lands on your page and completes an action, give them a visual confirmation that you have their information, the wheels are churning, they have reserved a spot.
This can come in the form of a thank you script: “Thank you. Your information has been submitted.” Or you can redirect to a full thank you page that features some of those special extras you may have buried below the fold on the previous page.
13. Build your landing page for SEO
This is an important one. If you need your landing page to have staying power, try to flex some of your SEO muscles. If you run a blog (or your own website), you probably already know these basics. Here’s a review:
- Unique URL: Giving your landing page a unique URL isn’t just so people land in the right place, it can also optimize for whichever keywords you want to rank for.
- Title tag: This is separate from your header tag, it’s the title of the page. Again, plug-and-play landing page solutions should have an option to alter this (i.e., make it different from your header tag), just remember to fill that field out.
- Header tag: This tag is the title of your page (ironically). Whatever your landing page headline is, shrink it down for your header tag.
- Meta description: Most people forget to fill this field out, which could be fine, but for landing pages, you want to. The meta is what google populates under your search result, and landing pages often have some … dispersed copy. So you want to tell google exactly what to grab and put out there on the SERP.
- Image file names: Self-explanatory, obvious, necessary. Name your images! Give them names that reflect the purpose of the page. If you can get your target keywords in there, even better.
- Backlinking: This is the final step, after publishing your page. Not only should you link to your landing page from ad campaigns, you can try to embed the link within blog posts, your website pages, hand it out to affiliate partners, etc. The more spots your link appears, the more google is going to recognize its relevance and authority.
