Almost three years ago, the Amber Creative team wrote about landing pages and its direct effect on increasing a company’s sales. The truth in it remains to this day. As a refresher, a landing page is a single webpage that is created for a specific purpose and is usually intended to capture leads. It’s different from standard webpages within a website in that a landing page is more direct and is geared towards achieving a single goal.
Web Ascender puts the main difference between a landing page and a website like this:
…your website is your entire online first impression, while your landing page is only one part of that impression; your handshake, greeting, or smile.
Kelly Main of Fit Small Business added that for 2019, brands looking to utilise landing pages are determined to “increase their conversion rate and the overall return on ad spend”. In short, a landing page aims to (and does) convert your visitors into leads and eventually, sources of revenue.
Like creating your website and individual web pages, a lot of thought should go into planning your landing page. Albeit made up of a single webpage, a landing page is crucial to capturing people’s interests with a few hook words or images.
Before launch, however, you need to ponder over some questions that help launch an impactful landing page. In this list, we give you six questions you need to answer to create a high-converting landing page in 2019:
- What purpose will my landing page serve me?
- Who are my prospects?
- Does my offer clearly define how it benefits my target audience?
- Am I using relevant keywords to communicate my offer?
- Does my landing page look trustworthy?
- Am I bloating my landing page with unnecessary copy?
Questions you must answer before creating a landing page
Whether you’re a newbie looking to include a landing page to your digital strategy or an industry expert re-evaluating an existing one, these questions will help you assess the essentials and ax the fluff that doesn’t help you achieve your end goal.
Question 1: What purpose will my landing page serve me?
Other ways of putting this question: Why am I creating this landing page in the first place? Before you inspire visitors to make certain actions, you need to first define precisely how you want the page to benefit your brand. Your goals could be to: increase sales, generate leads from traffic, or add contacts for your community marketing efforts.
It’s important that you answer this first because all succeeding aspects of your page are determined by what goal you decide to focus on. A single, clearly defined goal affects the overall design, the information you wish to collect, the tone and language with which you’ll be communicating your offer, and the overall copy. In the end, everything must come together to achieve the goal you’ve determined.
Question 2: Who are my prospects?
Identifying your audience and building a persona helps you define other parts of your landing page. The page should target a specific cohort, so after finalising your goal, determine who your prospective audience is. As much as you want to be inclusive, trying to serve everybody’s needs with a single landing page may do your brand more harm than good. With your prospects’ exact preferences in mind, you’ll know exactly the elements that will appeal to them the most and what they expect to be served with. Additionally, their distinctive qualities will allow you to tailor everything based on their needs.
Now you may already have an inkling about the behaviour of your audience, but as with other initiatives, it’s best to be driven by data. You can try analysing data lifted from Google Analytics or observe the information gathered through social media listening.
For instance, you’re offering a “guide to landing page techniques” in return for a visitor’s email address. So, whatever else you put within the page must sell the relevance of that guide to a distinct group—digital marketers who need it.
Question 3: Does my offer clearly define how it benefits my target audience?
Here’s a tip: when trying to figure out how best to write and display your offer, try imagining that your visitors are busy. That they wouldn’t spend their precious time sifting through the clutter just to figure out your offer’s value and relevance. Or that they would, but not until they get hooked by your concise and irresistible caption. Thinking about it this way forces you to cut through the chase and write your offer in a manner that tells your prospects—right off the bat—what’s in it for them.
You can lay it all out in hierarchical levels. Companies usually start with a “no-strings-attached” offer or promise of freebies, followed by a comprehensive list of what visitors will get once they sign-up.
Online writing portfolio platform clippings.me compels prospects to stay and read more by stating what the platform is and its value to members. Farther down the page, they point out some of their platform’s benefits. Notice how they also peppered the landing page with sign-up buttons, making sure their visitors are guided and can easily navigate it once they’ve finalised their decision to buy-in.
Call it a case of handholding, but it’s essential to make sure that your visitors are guided. Keep in mind that they’re more likely to check your competitors if they’re confused.
Question 4: Am I using relevant keywords to effectively communicate my offer?
We’ll assume that you want your landing page to be optimised for SERPs. If so, then you need to align your keywords to your landing page’s overall content. Keywords are an important aspect of SEO. Optimising your landing page also means following the rules and avoiding SEO mistakes that hurt your landing page’s chances of ranking well.
Start by brainstorming keywords related to your industry and then observing how these keywords or phrases rank using keyword tools such as Google’s Keyword Planner. Keeping the list of relevant keywords in mind also helps narrow your focus, leaving you only with the essentials. Finally, the keywords simplify your acquisition and customer engagement process. It ensures the delivery of your page to those who will indeed find it valuable.
Question 5: Does my landing page look trustworthy?
One of the reasons why prospects visit a website is to judge the brand’s ability to follow through. A landing page that’s incoherent has spammy-sounding copy, doesn’t load immediately, or has unrealistic propositions, doesn’t look trustworthy. These are all conversion killers that you wouldn’t want within your landing page.
Believe it or not, your visitors are discerning; they’d know exactly whether you’re up to snuff. So, you need to earn their trust before you expect them to convert. Get them to trust you by including aspects of social proof. Social proof is the “psychological phenomenon where people assume the actions of others”. Including social proof on your landing page raises its level of trustworthiness.
Some types of social proof you can use are the following:
- Testimonials
- Reviews
- Client list
- Awards
- Certifications
- Partnerships
All of these (and more) contribute to your brand’s credibility and helps visitors finalise their decision to engage.
Question 6: Am I bloating my landing page with unnecessary copy?
When writing in school, our main concern is to hit a word or page count. So, we pound our essays with fluff. However, copywriting for the web is different. You need to convince your readers to buy-into your proposition without drowning them with unnecessary words that don’t emphasise your value.
Copywriters are concerned with writing copy that compels readers to take necessary actions. For landing pages, mainly it’s conversion. By “compelling” we also mean “valuable” or “user-oriented”; not just a litany of how great and awesome you are. Treat the landing page as another venue to illustrating how your products or services can change their lives for the better.
Creator and filmmaker Matt D’Avella bags what it means to have an effective landing page. True to his minimalistic nature, he concisely states what members get once they subscribe to his email list. He then leads their attention to forms that lead prospects to sign-up.
His landing page did exactly what it was made to do—get visitors to his door. This is a great sample of how to maximise a landing page without bloating it with unnecessary copy. You don’t have to inflate your landing page, because once visitors sign up, it then becomes easier to introduce them to other content and offers.
A landing page is an effective platform for converting visitors into leads.
Before getting right into the development phase, however, it’s important to ask questions. Know exactly how the page will serve you, who your prospects and the benefits are, whether you’re using relevant keywords, the page’s trustworthiness, and whether you’re inflating it with useless copy.
Planning doesn’t have to be a burden. Check with our in-house experts and get in touch with our web development team today!
