Why You Need a Landing Page?
Landing pages have one chief purpose: to generate leads for your business.
You can define those leads in a number of ways and offer more than one type of content or experience through your landing page.
For example, many companies direct all their marketing efforts right to their home page. All that hard-earned traffic from advertising, email, or social media traffic is told to visit the homepage. Where they will be greeted by a lot of stuff, but NOT just an easy way to get the goody your promised them.
Turning away from a busy home page is easy. And done a lot. This is a huge missed opportunity.
How about instead of a cornucopia of services you offer, just give them the meat.
When you know a stream of targeted traffic will be coming to your website, you can increase the likelihood of converting that traffic into leads by using a targeted landing page.
Say for example, imagine you have a Google AdWords PPC ad running for one of your best keywords. Even if you advertise how great your company is and someone clicks through on that ad, do you want to send them to your homepage? When they land on your homepage, what are they supposed to do?
What do YOU want them to do? How about:
- Make an appointment with you
- Buy a product on sale
- Sign up for something special
- Obtain a coupon
- Download an e-book
- and on and on...
Once you figure out what action you want a visitor to take, make it easier for them to do just that. Link them to your landing page that lets them to complete that action. You'll see the effectiveness of your online marketing improve dramatically.
What Can I Give Away?
Figure out something of interest to your customers that demonstrates your future value to them. Such as:
- Ebooks and Whitepapers
- If you wrote a blog post that introduces a topic relevant to your audience, you can satisfy deeper interests in that topic by elaborating on the subject in an ebook or whitepaper. Using a landing page, you can "gate" this resource behind a lead-capture form for people to download.
- Email Newsletter Subscription
- Let's say you write a lot of blog content on a similar topic. Sure, you can develop an ebook or whitepaper that elaborates on specific details, but you can also offer your readers an email newsletter they can subscribe to for the latest content around your industry. On various blog posts, use a call-to-action (CTA) to invite readers to subscribe to your blog. This CTA can link to a separate landing page where they enter their contact information for addition to your email list.
- Event Registration
- Similar to online courses, industry events require you to collect information on your audience so they can receive updates prior to the event. An event, as well as its various sessions and keynotes, can have their own individual landing pages to turn event goers into event attendees and business leads.
- Free Trial of a Product
- Offering people a free demo of your product! Your demo offering could use its own landing page. Bring users to a page where they can sign up for a free trial of your software using their name, email address, job title, and any other information you deem necessary to give them the best customer experience.
- Community Membership
- If your business thrives on conversation among your audience -- perhaps you have a website dedicated to dialogue between users -- there's no harm in making it invitation-only. In fact, it's a great way to generate leads through the people who want to become members of your community. Create a landing page that lets website visitors sign up to become a bigger part of your business.
- App Download
- Developing a mobile app for your product doesn't just improve your customer experience -- it also gives you another avenue to capture leads from your audience. A lead-optimized landing page that invites users to download an app is quite common in the app-maker community.
What makes a landing page most effective?
Ready to create your first landing page? Here are some of the most important elements to make sure your landing page is working hard for you:
- Limit Navigation
- You've brought your targeted traffic to a page where they can take your desired action. Don't distract them! Limit the number of exits from your landing page so that your visitors are focused on filling out your form. A key part of this is to remove the website navigation elements on landing pages. This helps put the focus back on the content you're offering.
See how the landing page below does this -- aside from the logo, there are no navigation buttons to confuse or distract visitors:
- Enable Sharing
- Tap into a huge community of your best (and free) marketers: your audience. Add share links to your landing page to encourage your website visitors to share your content with their audiences.
- Deliver Value
- First and foremost, if you have a valuable offer, your visitors will give up their contact information in exchange for your offer. Ask yourself if your offer is compelling to your audience and make sure your landing page demonstrates that value.
- One way to ensure your landing page adds value is to show your audience the content they're going to receive -- directly on the page.
- See how this can look in the example landing page below:
- Keep it Short
- The longer your landing page and form, the chance you will lose their interest. Keeping your lead form short and straightforward will increase your conversion rate.
- Check It Out
- As many best practices as you may read about online, your landing page can always use more testing and improvement. Make sure it works flawlessly and represents you well.
- As many best practices as you may read about online, your landing page can always use more testing and improvement. Make sure it works flawlessly and represents you well.
Maybe all this seems a bit much. Maybe you have enough on your plate? Call Charleston WebBuilder. We will build you a landing page for your website, your marketing campaign, what ever you need one for - for only $100.
We can do that for you! You're working hard to drive traffic to your website, don't make the mistake of not capturing that traffic as leads.
Special thanks to Ellie Mirman and the geniuses at Hubspot for keeping us all informed on what is hot and what is hotter! Click here for a beautiful video they produced - a great watch:
