How to Build Powerful and Profitable Landing Pages

There are number of data-backed reasons why digital marketers are needs to create more landing pages. From increasing conversion rates to deep-rooted SEO. But designing the often talked about more than 20 landing pages can be a pain. In this article we discuss the data and what defines a powerful and profitable landing page for your target audience writes, Aegea Barclay, Sales Development Executive, DevHub

THE MODERN CONTENT MARKETER’S BUYER GUIDE

Welcome to the 2019 edition of The Modern Content Marketer’s Buyer Guide. About 10 years ago, marketers realized that content is a critical piece of their pie, and have since been working overtime to generate content to help win the prospect’s attention.

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Targeted landing pages provide an excellent way for your sales and marketing teams to generate leads and create user personas. A well-designed landing page can lead to a huge increase in conversions for your business but building one can be an overwhelming task at best.

There are so many design options available that many business owners struggle to find the “perfect fit” and paralysis by analysis becomes a very real thing. With the 100s of possible ways to build a landing page, how do you combat this indecision and create a landing page that actually converts users?

First, let’s examine the key elements of any successful landing page.

Identify and Address the Need of The Visitor

Research by Statistic Brain has shown that a user will generally spend around 8 seconds on a landing page before deciding whether to hang around. Every landing page should have one clear purpose, and this is where your UVP (unique value proposition) comes into play. Your UVP is the first thing visitors will see when they click on your landing page and this is something you really need to spend time on, i.e. test, test, and test again until you find the UVP that provides optimal conversions .

If you’re not sure what your UVP actually is, here are a few ideas to take into consideration:

• Customer needs: what need or want does your product meet or fulfill?
• Your niche: what do you offer that your competition doesn’t?
• Target audience: who are you targeting with your USP and have you identified their personas?
• Clarity: is your USP clear, concise, and direct?

Following that, here are a few common landing page usages that your UVP might be based on:

• Promote an event
• Gain subscribers
• Drive newsletter signups
• Offer a free trial
• Host a competition
• How-to guides
• Price discounts

Remember, your ad is what gets your user to your site but your UVP is what hooks them once they’re there. If what you’re offering isn’t good enough, or clear enough, your users will click out of your site as quickly as they clicked on to it.

Provide A Solution To What They Need

The focus of your landing page should always be on the potential customer. Your key aim to is to tell your visitors what you do/offer, why they will benefit from what you do/offer, and how your product or service can ensure they receive those benefits. 

If someone has clicked on an ad to reach your website, then it means that your ad sparked their interest. Why? Because you’re promoting a solution to a key concern, want, or need that they have. It’s imperative to ensure that your landing page provides a solution to this need or you risk alienating your visitors.

Synchronizing your marketing content and landing page/s is extremely important. For example, if Joe sees an advert promoting a cure for hair loss and ends up on a landing page for synthetic wigs, he isn’t going to be very impressed. The design of your page must also match the email/ad campaign that’s linked to it.

Here are a few things to watch out for this regard.

• Always try to use the same fonts, colors, and images where possible for familiarity.
• Use the same keywords and phrases in your landing page and marketing copy.
• Make sure your offer/product is immediately visible on your landing page (i.e. your UVP).
• Ensure your content provides the solution your visitor has been promised by the ad they clicked on.

Turning clickers into conversions

Once you’ve hooked your visitors, it’s time to convert them into customers. A clear and concise call-to-action (CTA) will get you over this hurdle. A badly written CTA will get you nowhere , fast. Yet research from Small Biz Trends has revealed that almost 70% of SMBs don’t have a CTA at all!

Upon reviewing 1000s of CTAs over the years, we’ve gathered a few thumb rules for getting users to pay attention and convert:

5 essentials to optimize landing page conversions

1. Make your CTA stand out: place it above the fold and also in various places around your landing page if possible. Users shouldn’t have to keep scrolling to find out where to convert.

2. Design: your CTA should jump out of the screen with big fonts and colors that help to contrast it from the rest of the page. The rest of your page should be simple. The “cleaner” your design is, the less distractions the user has and the more likely they are to focus on your CTA. Ideally, your CTA should be the only clickable link on this page.

3. Make it an extension of your USP: your CTA should be a natural extension of your USP. Your USP sells your offer and your CTA provides a way to act on that offer.

4. Use buttons where possible: buttons are easy to use and it’s pretty obvious what they mean. It’s a literal call to action.

5. Use clear and concise copy: only ask for the bare minimum of information required if you’re trying to get visitors to sign up for an ebook or newsletter, or anything really. Asking for too much information decreases the likelihood that they’ll complete and submit the form.

“My favorite technique was just asking for a username rather than a full account sign up at first. It's the foot in the door principal — ask people for something small (a username) before showing them fields for more personal things like email and password. Once they fill in their username, they feel like they've already invested some time in creating the account and might as well finish." - Alexi Schiff, cofounder of Fetch Notes 

Is the complexity of building multiple landing pages dragging you down? Enter the automatic landing page builder.

If you only have 1 or 2 landing pages, then a regular landing page builder might work for you, for now. But if you’re dealing with 10, 100, or 1000s of pages, you need something much more advanced - and that’s where automatic landing page builders come in. Regular landing page builders are fine if you’re only dealing with a few pages, but can you imagine trying to create over 100 pages with it? And what if you need to make a minor change to all of those 100 pages? I feel stressed just thinking about it.

Automatic landing page builders allow you to create and manage 1000s of optimized landing pages at once by using tags. This means a lot less work for you as a business owner because you no longer need to create landing pages for every possible thing that visitors could be searching for on your website. 

And Finally, You Can Never Have Enough Landing Pages!

More landing pages = more conversion opportunities for your business . The main reason that most companies only have 1 or 2 landing pages is simply that they aren’t comfortable with creating them or confident enough in the results that can be achieved. But in our omnichannel, hyper-personalized world, brands need to ensure they give prospects the chance to connect via multiple touchpoints, each with customized messages that lead to customized landing pages instead of generic ones. After all, customized messaging will certainly drive a better click rate, but you don’t want all those clickers to land upon the same generic landing pages that negate all the work of the hyper-targeted messaging!

If you have been playing with the idea of hyper-segmenting and targeting your advertising campaigns but have stopped short because of the work involved with building hundreds of customized landing pages for each hyper-targeted campaign, then automatic landing page builders can come to your rescue. These tools let you customize hundreds of landing pages for each of your various campaigns and touchpoints, and offer a high level of flexibility to change and adapt the content without getting too technical.