Improving the 4 Most Important Elements of Your Landing Pages

Hearing us praise landing pages is nothing new.  As a matter of fact, we talk about landing pages a lot in our free eBook “Key Components That Are Missing From Your Marketing Strategy” hoping that we get the message about the importance of landing pages out there.

MarketingSherpa’s “2012 Search marketing Benchmark Report – SEO Edition” has reaffirmed our belief that having well designed landing pages is, by and large, a critical aspect for significantly boosting your company’s bottom line.

As their study proved, only the most advanced marketers seem to be using SEO landing pages to strategically increase lead and customer conversions.  What does this mean for you?  That there’s a lot of room for you to make a big impact through landing pages.

Landing pages are a great way to get a ton of organic traffic coming your way, and the opportunity is yours for the taking.  But not just any landing page will do.  Let’s move out of the beginner landing page stage and dig into what you really need to have on your pages to make them a profitable and worthwhile investment.

The 4 Key Points Of Any Landing Page

Clarity

You have just a few very short seconds to try and impress your visitor, so you better have a clear landing page that’s direct in what it’s asking your visitor to do.  When you look at your page, you don’t want it to make your visitor guess or even think about what it’s about.

Your offer and the intended audience needs to be made clear right from the get to (you could suggest a problem and how your product can solve it, for example).

TIPS:

• Make sure that you have a very clear headline with a strong offer being presented
• If your offer is featuring an author (i.e. a research paper), then create a sub header that explains why the author is credible (i.e. professor at Harvard University, an industry leader, etc.)

Page Design

Page design ties in directly with clarity.  Given the short amount of time that you have to impress any visitor, you have to make sure that your page design both brings clarity and enhances your message.  For example, are there too many design elements on your page?  Or are there not enough?

Using bullet points is a good example of effective page design, but using 5 different fonts on your page is probably a pretty bad idea.  Keep in mind that a visitor’s eyes move from left to right, so whatever’s on the left hand side is what will be seen first.

TIPS:

• Remove any top navigation from your landing pages.  This will only distract your visitor and likely have them end up on your website.
• Remember, the goal of your landing page is to get them to fill out a lead-capture form so that you can nurture them further down the sales funnel later on.

Friction

Something that a lot of marketers don’t consider is the friction that their landing pages may be causing their visitors.  For example, some of the things that a landing page may request of a lead or a visitor can make them uncomfortable, and so they don’t end up filling out the lead capture form.

TIPS:

• On any form, ask for minimal information.  The more work that a visitor has to put in for something, the less likely he or she will do it.
• When at all possible, try to avoid asking for a phone number.
• Use tools like HubSpot’s “Smart Forms” to cut down on any repetitive form filling

Value Proposition

We talk a lot about value proposition in our eBook “The Immediate Solution For Lead Generation” and how you want the perceived value of your offer to be strong.  If it isn’t, then there’s a slim chance that you’ll have any visitors offering up their contact information to receive your offer.

Visitors will see your offer as not being worth the time, or not being worth the potential “spam” emails that we all worry about getting when we sign up for an offer.

TIPS:

• Create an actionable headline.  Just as we mentioned in our clarity segment, you want the landing page to be direct and clear
• Make sure that any CTA buttons stand out. Several studies, such as in Susan Weinschenk’s PhD piece “Neuro Web Design: What Makes Then Click? (Voices That Matter)” reveals that the size and color of your offer button will affect your conversion rates