The Complete Guide to a Landing Page
Your website could have hundreds of thousands of visitors a day, but if those visitors are simply dropping by your site only to bounce off and go elsewhere, you are missing out on valuable leads. This is where lead generation-focused landing pages come in.
Landing Page vs. Webpage
At first glance, a landing page and a webpage may seem like the same thing. However, they are, in fact, very different entities and serve two separate purposes. A traditional webpage contains the core content of your website. The goal of a webpage is to provide the page visitor with quality content, to establish your qualifications or another moderately abstract goal. The goal of a landing page is much different. When visitors come to a landing page, your goal for them is simple: to take an action.
Landing pages have a job to do. They work to get visitors to take a single action, turning these page visitors into new leads for you. The action you encourage landing page visitors to take can be anything that captures them as a lead: submit contact information, sign up to receive an email with more information, make a purchase, download a piece of valuable content (known as a lead magnet), or simply engage with your brand. As soon as they submit the information and hit the button to submit, it is called a conversion. Congratulations! You’ve just utilized a landing page to capture a shiny new lead.
The Key Elements of a Successful Landing Page
Get Your UVP and USP Front and Center
A landing page is meant to grab visitors and capture their attention for only a short period of time, eventually leading to the goal of adding those visitors to your marketing funnel as potential leads. That means you need to make sure your USP and UVP are immediately known to avoid visitors from bouncing off of your landing page.
• Unique Value Proposition (UVP) – This is your company’s identity. Your UVP tells landing page visitors who you are and what you are about. The UVP tells your story in concise way that should immediately build affinity with your brand.
• Unique Selling Proposition (USP) – This tells people why they should care about what you offer. A good USP causes people to desire your product or service. A great USP will make landing page visitors realize almost immediately that they would be foolish to not fill out your lead capture form to engage with your brand.
A UVP tells landing page visitors who you are and the USP follows up by showing visitors that they should care about what you are offering.
Fluid Design
A good landing page will perfectly walk the line between being visually appealing, yet cohesive enough to carry visitors smoothly through the page and completing your lead capture form.
A multi-media landing page – text, photos, video, infographics, pull quote reviews – will help your landing page appeal to a broader audience and increase the legitimacy of your landing page. A good landing page will provide a multimedia experience. A great landing page will do so without feeling cluttered, giving visitors a clear, enticing path to complete the page’s call to action.
Call to Action (CTA)
The most important element of a successful landing page is a clear, persuasive call to action (CTA). The purpose of a landing page is to capture information from visitors in order to convert them into leads and nurture those new leads through their customer journey. While landing pages can have multiple CTAs, one should be your central focus and should stand out against all others. Sure, it may be great for a landing page visitor to follow your brand on social media. This is a secondary CTA that can be added in a less prominent location. The goal of the landing page is to capture a visitor’s name and contact information. Therefore, the CTA should be front and center, preempted by strong reason(s) why it will be a great benefit for that visitor to provide their information.
Lead Capture Form and Button
Although it may seem relatively simple, the lead capture form can often present many challenges in actually converting landing page visitors into tangible leads. The main goal of a landing page it to get visitors to absorb the information, submit their information and hit the all-mighty final submission button.
When creating a fantastic lead capture form consider:
• Positioning. Position your lead capture form above the fold (no scrolling required).
• Length. Limit the number of required fields. Remember, you can always ask more questions to qualify the lead in a later stage of your marketing funnel.
• A Great Button. Consider a button that says something other than simply, ‘Submit.’
• Confirmation. Send an email confirmation with valuable content/information in addition to redirecting to a thank-you page.
The Marketing Funnel
Once your landing page visitor has filled out the lead capture form and submitted their contact information they become a part of your marketing funnel. This means that they are now a moderately warm lead. Your company’s Unique Value Proposition (UVP) has resonated with them. Furthermore, the landing page’s specific Unique Selling Proposition (USP) is something they have expressed interest in. While this is great news, this is where it is up to your marketing team to continue nurturing that lead through the marketing funnel, giving them multiple touchpoints, until they reach the point of sale or conversion.
Remember, a good landing page will only work if you work it right! Don’t forget to launch some A/B testing to determine how visitors are responding to variations in your landing page. Even the smallest variation may lead to drastically higher conversion rates. A/B testing combined with ongoing analysis and optimization of your landing page(s) will help you fill your marketing funnel with well-qualified leads.
