9 Tips for Creating a Truly Converting Landing Page
The goal of any landing page is to get the visitor to take a specific action -or to commit to a conversion event. Whether you’re asking for email info or selling a product, your landing page introduces a visitor to an offer.
You must write a copy that is compelling enough to show:
- what you are offering on that landing page
- what action the visitor is to take.
You need to create a new landing page for
- each new campaign
- each new offer
- each new promotion
The message on your landing page should be consistent:
- with the ad or social post, the visitor saw before arriving on the landing page
- with what your visitor will download from the landing page.
If you’re a small business owner and don’t have a small marketing team, you may not have the time or the resources to create landing pages for each campaign or spend time split testing and optimizing each landing page. If that’s the case, you need to hire an agency to do it for you.
There are elements that you want to continually test to see if they can optimize the conversion of the landing page.
Those 9 tips below will teach you a few strategies to consider each time you build a landing page for your business.
1. Specific page for Specific reason
You don’t need to see all results of all of the many marketing tests that have been run to realize that the more specific your landing page is to the offer you are providing, the more the page will convert. Ensure your landing page provides real value to the visitor.
Explain, in plain English, what your offer is and why it is of value to your visitor. If your ad campaign targeted a specific industry, don’t send that traffic to a generic landing page. Customize the content of your landing page to the specific language that industry uses.
2. Short-Form or Long-Form Landing Page
As a rule of thumb, less is more. People are busy.
Your visitors have many distractions in front of them. Don’t throw in complex design or copy that is competing for your visitor’s attention.
- start by defining the goal of your landing page
- figure out how much copy is necessary to get your point across
- describe the value of your offer.
Just because you’re giving away a free ebook, don’t think that it’s going to be easy. You still need to sell the idea of “free.” Whether you’re introducing a free offer or paid product, get to the point as fast as you can in your copy.
As a general rule, longer-form landing pages out-perform short pages. Now, that’s especially the case for products that are more complicated in nature or higher priced. Therefore more content is needed to build rapport with the visitor.
Shorter-form landing pages work for products that are very easy to understand or have a low price point. If you decide that your page justifies a longer copy, you want to keep it only long enough to tell your story and present your value.
3. Continuity from ad to landing page
Trust is key to every relationship.
Anytime visitors click your ad; you are entering a relationship with them. Inconsistent messaging is a sure way to destroy trust. The design or copy in your ad or social post should appear in alignment with the message on your landing page. If you are not sure how to build that continuity, get an agency do it for you.
Take a look below at a live feed ad from Facebook. The ad is selling a car diffusers at an 80% discount.
Now, take a look at the landing page, you’ll see that the image and copy are quite similar between the ad and the landing page…
If someone clicks on your ad for a free ebook and your landing page is offering a book that costs $10, then there is inconsistency in your messaging. The visitor clicking on your ad expecting a free ebook. However, when they read through your landing page, they are now told that in order to get your ebook the need to pay for it.
Not only will you lose a conversion at this point, the next time this person sees an ad from your company, but they will also wonder what the “catch” is. If they happened to see your offer as a social post, you might start to lose credibility in the eyes of your followers.
4. Personalize your copy
When creating the copy for your landing page, you should be writing with a specific person in mind. This person is called the avatar or the persona. Typically before you even start to write any copy, you need to describe in detail your avatar’s characteristics.
An avatar is a fictional, generalized representation of your ideal customer. Avatars help everyone in your business, your teams in marketing, sales, product, and services, internalize who the ideal customer you’re trying to attract, and relate to your ideal customers as real human beings.
Keeping your customer avatars in mind when you write your landing page copy, you’ll be able to write benefit-driven copy that is straightforward. You’ll now have your ideal customer’s pain points on top of mind as you write and be able to address those pains.
Personalizing a landing page by adding a returning visitor’s name to the page is very common.
There are ways to personalize your landing page using information that you might already know about your visitor. There a quite a few tools that allow you to add dynamic text to landing pages and have that dynamic text change depending who is visiting your page.
5. Keep their eyes on your offer
The goal of your landing page is to get a conversion. Having even a single link might distract from conversion. Your landing page should have your opt-in form and your copy- that’s it! No menus. No links to your services. No links to other landing pages.
The MyAdGency example is a landing page with their logo.
A few caveats here. If you’re running ads, you might have to have links to your terms of service, privacy policy or the link. Some ad platforms require your landing page link to these types of pages.
My personal preference is to include a link to your company’s home page. I typically like to do this by having my company’s logo on the page and having the log linked to my home page. I encourage this practice for this reason, even with the most compelling offer, if a visitor has never heard of your company, they might be hesitant to give you their email or take the next step.
If you give them a link to your home page, they will have the opportunity to learn more about who you are, then a few clicks on the back button and they’re back at your landing page, ready to take that next step.
6. Use more video
87% of online marketers use videos in one way or another to promote their business. Why? They’re effective.
According to Social Media Today, videos have 135% greater organic reach than photo posts on Facebook. So instead of only telling your visitors about the value of your offer, use video to show them the value they’ll receive once they have your offer in their hands.
Listed below are the top 10 benefits of embedding videos into your landing pages.
- Conversions! Remember that I said in the introduction that your ultimate goal in creating a landing page is to get your visitor to click on that CTA. Videos help with higher CTA conversion rates because they are engaging.
- A video Increases trust factors. A video increases trust because it gives a human face or voice to our otherwise human-less page.
- Videos helo your prospects stay longer on your page. The longer someone stays on your site, the more they become familiar with your brand.
- Videos show -not just talk about- your stuff A video shows how your products work. You communicate better by giving visuals, not just describing it with copy (remember that an image is a 1,000 words).
- People love videos. People watch & learn from videos. For the copywriter that I am, this is a bit disappointing. Personally, I prefer writing good copy that being in front of a camera. However, according to Crazy Egg, only 28% of the words on an average page of a website are actually read by real humans.
- Videos deepen consumer connection. When customers relate more personally to your video, it increases their connection to your product or service.
- Videos make your page more memorable than text. A remarkable video on your landing page will create a memorable experience. Videos can stimulate multiple sensory triggers – through both visual and auditory cues.
- Images get shared, and videos go viral. In our social world, images are by far the most shared content. Videos are hands down the most viral content online. Videos are viewed and shared millions of times every day.
- Easy-to-share relatable customer testimonials. People trust people. A potential customer will trust the opinion of a current customer more than they trust you. Think about it, if you’re shopping for, say, a new tablet, you’re probably going to ask your friends for their opinions, then you’ll go online and do research for where to buy it. If you land on a product landing page with a real, honest customer review about an online store selling your chosen tablet – you’re likely more inclined to buy from them, right?
6. Use social proof
A great way to increase conversions of your landing pages is to reduce the risk to your visitor.
Add proof elements to your landing page such as
- partner logos
- customer testimonials
- certifications
- chamber of commerce logos
- case studies
All those are great ways to build trust in the eyes of your visitors.
Here are a few examples of what social proof on a landing page looks like from GetResponse:
7. Your headline is the first and the most important line
The headline and sub-head are the most read part of any landing page. The headline is what grabs your visitor’s attention. The subhead is the bridge from the headline to body copy is might to keep the reader reading. Every visitor to your landing page, at a minimum, will read your headline.
“Every visitor to your landing page, at a minimum, will read your headline.” ~ Michael Alos, truDemand.com
Writing headlines is a craft but here are 4 basic tips for writing headlines that attract attention:
- Your headline needs to be a continuation of the ad or social post that initially attracted your visitor
- The headline should make the reader want to find out more and get them to read on to the subhead
- A headline needs to stand out and grab the reader’s attention.
- The subheaders should reinforce, support or add more value to the headline and get the visitor to read on
If you are unsure how to write a headline, check this training or contact us at MyAdgency.Com, we certainly can help you, not only with the headline but with the whole copy of your landing page.
However, the 4 tips above are definitively something to get you started.
8. Landing page is separate from your website
A landing page is a totally separate page than your website’s home page. Sure, you can send traffic to your home page or any other page of your website. However, a landing page is a specific page created for your offer and the ad campaign your running.
Remember we talked about
- consistency
- personalization
- being specific
None of that can be accomplished if you are sending traffic to your home page.
There’s nothing preventing you from driving traffic to your home page but you’ll be sacrificing conversions and not achieving maximum return on your ad campaign dollars.
If you look at the example above, you can see that the landing page on the right was developed with the specific intent of the goal of conversion. It has a headline, form, and copy. Looking at the home page on the left, there is no clear headline, no form and no call to action.
9. Perform basic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) of your landing page
By following the strategies outlined above, you’ll eventually discover that your website has more landing pages than you think.
While your landing page might never rank on the first page of Google for a keyword, performing basic SEO on your landing pages is worth the few minutes it will take.
Even if you are driving page traffic to your landing pages, it’s still a good practice to keep Google happy and to do the following:
- Make sure your landing page is mobile-friendly and responsive
- Add meta descriptions and title tags
- Create a text headline using an H1 tag
- Avoid popups, overlays and the like that take up the entire page or device screen
In closing
Creating great landing pages that convert is an art. It requires constant testing, tweaking, and ongoing optimization.
At MyAdgency.Com, we have an entire framework that we walk our clients through in order to optimize the conversion rate of our clients landing pages and maximize the investment into lead generation programs.
The strategies I outlined in above will give you a good foundation to apply to any of your current landing pages or landing pages you’ll create in the future.
If you need more information about how MyAdgency.Com can help you, just send us an email at xavier@myadgency.com or fill-out the form below.
