Complete Landing Page Guide For Businesses

Introduction

Landing pages form the cornerstone of every online business that wants to improve sales and increase revenue. According to Taboola, 48 per cent of marketers build a new landing page for each new campaign.

The goal of every marketing campaign is to make sure your customers carry out a particular action. Knowing the action is one thing, making the customers carry out same action on a regular website can be a herculean task.

In this article, you will learn the most useful and profitable ways to design landing pages for your personal creative, coaching or business brand.

Let’s go.

What is a landing page?

Unlike all your other general marketing campaign targeted at a general service or product, a landing page is a standalone web page created specifically to marketing or advertising campaign.

A well designed landing page does greatly increase conversion of you traffic from your paid advertisement, organic email marketing campaigns, social media campaign and more.

Instead of directing your visitors to a general website that gives details of all your service, where it will be hard to find what they are looking for, you direct them to a specific page that drives them to take a use service or buy a product.

Setting Goals for your landing page

Just like every other sales or marketing target, your landing page needs to have a goal. A single focused Call to Action you want visitors to your website to take.

Without concrete goals, you will not be able to create an effective page. Write your goal first before you set out to design your landing page.

For example, you might want your user to:

• Purchase a product
• Join an email list
• Download a research or white paper
• Sign-up for a webinar
• Book a sales call
• Attend an event

The hallmark of any landing page is priority/focus. It need to focus on just a single action so you can record your success as well as your losses. You don’t want to settle for any wishful experience.

Difference between landing page and home page

The job of a homepage is to show off your brand, offer additional information about your services & core company values and also allow people explore your services/products.

A website homepage has a whole lot of distractions, tons of links asking users to perform different actions.

Meanwhile, a landing page is super focused. Has one or very few links that take visitors away from the dedicated call to action.

The goal isn’t to make a landing page look as amazing as a homepage, the goal is to make sure your users are able to measure a particular action taken by the user.

You get better results when you pair paid advertisement plus a landing page instead of some general company homepage.

Types of landing page

Lead Generation landing pages

These types of landing pages are always asking users for data. Mostly names and phone numbers. It’s used mostly by B2B SaaS companies selling high ticket product.

These types of companies has a longer sales cycle, hence tend to nature potential buyer (leads) for a longer time. Companies who run these types of campaign usually offer something free in exchange for site visitors details. For example, a free ebook, guide, checklist, special discount/coupon code, or webinar.

Click through landing page

These type of landing pages are sales focused. Businesses and creative entrepreneurs use it to sell or collect subscription on the go.

Each button on these pages has a sales intent. Also the copy is geared towards making the site visitor buy a product or subscribe to a plan.

Anatomy of a good landing page

Every service/product landing page has a list of core features. You must have seen these building blocks in most of the pages you visit. Although it’s good to move away from the norm and do what suits you, it’s way better to arm yourself with the knowledge of these pre-existing landing page format.

Knowing the rules well means you can break them effectively.

All landing pages that convert well follow a fundamental principle irrespective of the type of market they serve, their conversion goal, type of audience or price point. It’s so because every landing page is trying to persuade a user to take a particular action by proving they have the best solution to the user’s pain point.

Some B2B funders decide to go their own route when starting out with building landing pages. On the contrary, it’s better to understand what a landing page that converts looks like in other to avoid low conversion rate. You apply the rule, then find smart ways to optimize and increase conversions.

Components of a landing page

Depending on your target audience and niche, your landing page will look different from that of other companies. That said, there are six core essentials that make up a very high converting landing page.

• A unique sales offering
• A hero image, video or animation
• The benefits of your offering
• Some form of social proof
• A single conversion goal (CTA)
• FAQ

1. Your Unique sales offering

People are super reluctant to trust brands that’s not specific in their offering. You should know by now that the average human attention span is shorter than that of a gold fish, hence you have to state what you USERS will get when they patronize you and state it SUPER CLEAR.

Think of your unique sales offering as how you position your brand offering better than your competitors in the market place. It has to be succinct and appeal to your Ideal customer profile or brand persona.

The elements below will help you make your offer unique.

• The headline

Your headline isn’t a place to compose rhythms and rhymes. Clarity is the key here. It should clearly state what your customers will benefit from your unique sales offering.

Whenever I am writing my headline, I use the acronym WIIFM (WHAT IS IN FOR ME) to craft a very good headline. Customers are all about the benefits.

It’s only when they notice the benefits, they will move to other part of your landing page copy.

• A Detailed Subheadline

Your subheadline is designed to add more benefits to your headline and reemphasize your current offer to the user.

I know you have said something on your headline, but a few extra sentence of benefits will make it a whole lot clearer.

• A closing statement (optional)

Though optional, a closing statement will provide urgency, a swift reminder or anything else that will empathize with your users so they click your CALL TO ACTION

Think of it as the closing of your story, if you visitors skipped your heading & subheading, a closing statement might just be all they need to be convinced about your offering.

2. A hero image, video or animation

Most products aren’t so easy to picture in mind hence the reason why your site visitors need to have a feel of what they stand to get when they finally buy your product or what they will lose if they don’t buy.

A hero image, video or animation make your offer more tangible. A good rule of thumb is avoiding unrelated stock image.

30 per cent of top landing pages use video content.

As a product/service company, a 30sec video recording showing how your product benefits will have a greater impact on your products conversion rate than some stock photo on the internet.

3. The benefits of your offering

Users don’t buy features, they buy benefits. It’s all about what your product can do for them and nothing else.

Furthermore, making sure your benefits are clear and addresses each of your potential user’s pain points is the key to winning their trust and getting them to buy from you.

Always place benefits over features.

While a feature is a specific quality of your product or service, a benefits describes a positive impact that the feature has.

For example: provide 5G network to your users is a feature, making their online communication seamless is the benefit.

As you go about writing all the features, you don’t want to leave your site visitors confused. If you are looking to drive more conversions, the smart way is to combine features and benefits together, but lead with the benefits whenever you can.

4. Social proof

People buy from people they know, like and trust. Every human being is influenced by another human. Social proof is the influence that people around us have on the decisions we make.

It’s the reason why you suddenly decided to start using your current email service provider, it’s the reason why you decided to pay more attention to your landing page because other people said it’s improving their conversion rate.

• Social proof on your landing page can take many forms:
• Video interviews / testimonials
• Logos of partners or customer companies
• Case studies and report
• Review from popular sites like amazon, clutch, yelp and the likes.
• Direct quote from customers.

You cannot and should not fake your social proof. If people smell a rat, your business will be in very big trouble. Don’t go using “John doe” as your favorite customer name.

Be sure to make your testimonials a whole lot more convincing by including the who, what, when, why and how of your customer’s experience.

Using a real person as a testifier is the most effective way to communicate a customer’s experience.

5. A conversion Goal (your CTA)

I do recommend strongly you put your first CTA above the fold. If the headline and subheading are strong, in-fact majority of your conversion will come from this button depending on the action you want the user to perform.

Remember, a landing page should be focused on a single call to action and not confused your users with too many options. When you do that, your landing page becomes a general page.

Some options to consider before creating your CTA:

• If you are running a lead gen campaign, make your forms as short as possible. Only ask for relevant information. According to omnisend , the highest-converting number of fields for forms is 3.
• Avoid buttons text like “ CLICK HERE” GET IT” or “submit”. Instead use, words that tells your customer what they will be getting. ( “GET 10% DISCOUTN”, “BOOK A CALL” JOIN PAID NEWSLETTER”

It’s a good principle to keeps trying different options to see what works for you. Small difference can make a big impact on your conversion rate.

6. FAQ

According to hubspot, addressing buyer fears on landing pages can increase conversion rate by up to 80%.

Its good practice to answer every question you think your site visitors might have concerning your product. Especially questions relating to pricing, shipping, return policy, how to use the product, and more.

If you found out your landing page isn’t doing well, consider answering upfront any consumer objections you have discovered.

Driving traffic to landing pages

Designing a landing page is good but without traffic its nothing. You will have to bring your target audience to your landing page before they see your offering.

Here’s a few ways to drive traffic to your landing page:

Social media ads.

I have used these types of ads to bring thousands of visitors to my landing pages. Social media platform like facebook has billions of users, this means your ideal customer profile (ICP) will surely be on it.

Social media ads are some of the best ways to target people based on demographics, interest, status, educational background and more. For B2B lead generation, LinkedIn has more opportunity to reach professionals working in a particular industry.

Email campaigns

According to obello, 92% of online adults use email, with 61% using it on a daily basis.

Email works very well if you have built some sort of pre-existing relationship with people in your email list. You can use it to nurture existing leads or drive previous customers to a new product.

A well-crafted email plus a good landing page, does works wonders.

Paid search ads

Search engine like google are the best places for b2b companies to advertise their service/product. Users are targeted here based on search intent/query unlike social media where you push ads to them hoping users see these ads and click to learn more about your service.

Clicks from search ads has better quality score then clicks from social media ads. A good rule of thumb is to make sure your search ads copy match the copy on your landing page or wherever you sending your visitors to.

Organic seo traffic

Traffic from this source do not come so easily. Its worked for. It takes months and sometimes years of unrelenting dedication to start seeing result.

Organic traffic refers to visitors who visits your website from unpaid source like bottom half google or bing search results.

Though, normally called the cheapest form of traffic generation by marketers, driving traffic to your landing page through search engine optimization takes a careful balance of strategy, technical know-ho and brilliant content creation.

Landing page best practices

Landing page design tool like elementor page builder provides you the chance to be very innovative in your landing page design.

Irrespective of how expressive you want to be in building your landing page, you don’t want to begin without a plan in hand.

Here’s are some very proven best practices that’s sure to improve your conversion rate and reduce the amount of money you spend acquiring a customer.

1. Use clear, compelling copy with benefits
2. Keep you design very responsive
3. Keep your target audience at the center of your design
4. Remove navigation and distractions
5. Include social proof and testimonies
6. Show your product in action or the positive benefits of your service
7. Keep the best Call to action above the fold
8. Ensure your landing page message matches your ads
9. Use image that portrays your product or service offerings.
10. Keep testing and updating your landing page.

Top 5 landing page builder

• Elementor page builder
• Ubounce
• Leadpages
• Clickfunnels
• Instapage

Conclusion

Landing pages are very valuable piece of marketing strategy. Marketers and businesses who create landing pages tend to see more conversion and have low cost of customer acquisition.

Whether you are testing them out or already obtaining results, using them will greatly help you drive in new customer and increase revenue.