Definition of a Landing Page and Its Usefulness

A landing page can be classified as a page among your website pages that is designed specially to convert your traffic into leads.

It might be among your website pages but it is different from other pages on your website because it follows these criteria:

Let us just simply say that, a landing page is any page on your website that has a contact form and information about products or services you are trying to sell to your target audience.

KEY-NOTE:

If you want to take anything away from this article, you should remember that any page with no navigation on your website and any form that is used to convert web visitors into leads is a landing page, and it is a necessity for every business to have it.

How Does Landing Pages Work?

A landing page works in a simple way and it involves your web visitors taking the following actions

If you are making use of an email automation tool like Hubspot, it will be easier for you to see the offer that your lead converted on when they converted, and what other engagements they had done on your website.

The information you get will allow you to nurture your leads in a more targeted way by helping you to decide on the most proper next marketing actions to take.

A nurtured lead has a higher chance of converting to a paid customer and moving faster through the marketing sales funnel.

This will improve the return on investment (ROI) of your marketing efforts and also increases your revenue.

The goods and services we use on a daily basis are paid for, and the concept of monetary value will also be applied to the logistics behind a landing page.

The reason for this is because you are equally exchanging valuable information with your leads irrespective of the side of the information you are on.

Your website visitors will fill out the form on your landing page because they believe you will share a valuable resource with them in return for giving you their information and a marketer will gladly provide the leads with the valuable resource because the information acquired from your lead will be used for your marketing campaign in the future.

In this case, it is a win-win situation for both your business and your visitors.

Landing Page Conversion Process

Although your landing page is the main component of your website conversion process, meanwhile there are multiple key elements that are combined together to make the conversion of your marketing campaign a successful one.

i. Calls-to-Action Button (CTAs): 

Your call-to-action (CTAs) button is a line of text that your web visitors can use to complete the conversion process.

On landing pages, CTA is what tells the visitors where they are supposed to click to access your valuable resource.

CTAs are also available on some of your website pages where your content resonates with the valuable resource you share with your visitors, as well as on relevant blog posts that correlate with content within what you want to offer to your visitors.

The more your CTAs resonate with the resources you offer on your landing pages and other pages, the higher chance you have to convert your visitors.

ii. Lead Capture Form: 

Your website landing page itself is a home to the lead capture form that your leads fill out in order to access your valuable resource.

As mentioned previously, the only purpose of your landing page is to explain the benefits of your products or services offers and direct them on what actions to take so they can turn into leads.

Once they have submitted their form, they are most likely redirected to a “thank you” page or they should be redirected to a page where they will still have to download your offer.

iii. Thank You Page: 

An in-line thank you message is used most times, but is of great recommendation and benefit that your supply your new landing page lead with a specially dedicated thank you page.

Your thank you page can also include the “Download Now” option button that your new leads can click on to download the valuable resource that you offered them on your landing page.

Apart from the valuable resource you are offering to your web visitors, thank you pages are excellent ways for you to continue your marketing conversion process and direct your visitors down to your marketing funnel.

If you want to offer your website visitors secondary offers like case studies, white paper, webinars, and many more.

You should provide it to them using another form and a specific CTA that correlate with the offer you want to share with them E.g, “Get a Free Consultation,” “Secure your webinar Space,” and many more.

Information Required Before Creating a Landing Page

Before building your landing page, you must make sure you do all the needed background research about your target customers to put together the right information so that you make your marketing effort a successful one.

Before you can do the background research on your target customers, you must cover the below information before you start building your landing page

Buyer Persona

Buyer Personas also known as customer avatars are semi-fictional representations of who your target customers are.

Their data can be based on market research and current information on customers. 

If done properly, they will give you a clear insight into the behavior of your customers and their mode of thinking, which will give you an idea of how you can provide them with the most valuable content.

It is marketing best practice to create a landing page that will target just one among your buyer personas (If your personas are more than one). 

Don’t try to tailor the objective on your landing page to multiple personas, it will not correlates well with all of them, and this landing page's bad practices will decrease your chance of a higher conversion.

Targeting only one persona among many personas that you have will be more focused and will also increase your conversion rates.

It is great that your marketing effort is niche based and focused than attempting to market to the masses.

Offer

An offer is a valuable resource that you give to your website visitors which is different from the products and services that your organization sells.

The offer can come in form of an E-book, tip sheet, webinar, or anything else that is informative about your business industry and can be downloaded.

The offer must be a content around the pain point that your buyer personas are experiencing as well as the customer journey stages which is explained below.

Customer Journey

Customer Journey can be described as the process that a potential buyer goes through before making a purchase.

Customer Journey can be broken into three different stages: the awareness stage, the consideration stage, and the decision stage.

You should create different types of content for each stage of your customer journey to help your visitors move from the first stage to another stage.

Below are the details of what each stage is all about;

• Awareness Stage: 

At the first stage of your customer journey which is the awareness stage, your website visitors at this stage have expressed symptoms of a potential problem but don’t know what exactly their problem is.

Your target customers at this stage are probably doing lots of research to better understand their symptoms and the things that are causing them.

The valuable resources you can use to target people at this stage include online guides, e-books, and white papers.

• Consideration Stage: 

At the consideration stage, your target customers have clearly identified their problem, and now they are thinking of better ways they can solve the problem.

The types of content you can create for people at this stage of the customer journey include videos, white papers, and many more.

• Decision Stage 

At this stage of the buyer’s journey, your target customers already know how they can solve their problems.

This is the same stage that they are doing business comparisons to know the best business that will solve their problem.

At this stage, you can provide your target customers with valuable like case studies, product information, and demos.

Building a Great Landing Page

After you are done with your buyer persona background research, then you can set up your landing page.

Meanwhile, there are special landing page best practices that you need to follow to increase your chance of having a higher conversion rate on your landing page.

Landing Page Best Practices

1. Create a Compelling Headline: 

You need to come up with a compelling headline that will capture the attention of your target customers to click through your ad and want to learn more about the information.

Your Headline is the first thing your target customers will see when they land on your landing page, so you need to make it interesting enough to speak to their emotions.

2. Convey the Value of Your landing page Offer Efficiently: 

It is essential to convey the value of your landing page offer concisely and effectively, it is crucial to the success of your landing page.

You might not have heard anything like the blink test; the blink test in marketing states that you have to convey your content value and message to your target customers before they have time to blink their eyes.

This means that you have no more than 3 -5 seconds to sell your value to them, your failure to adopt this marketing tactic will lower your rate of Conversion.

3. Include Your Objectives in Bullet Points: 

People are fond of mixing things up, and we have a short span of attention for things like a landing page.

To engage your landing page readers, you will need to avoid writing long paragraphs. 

Instead, you should write brief content of your offer, and list out in bullet points what your website visitors will read when they download your valuable resource.

By presenting the list of your offers in bullet points, you will engage your readers while also showing them a preview of what next you are offering.

4. Build your Form Fields: 

You need to be mindful of the number of form fields you included when creating your landing page form.

The total number of form fields included in your landing page should resonate with the stage of your customer journey.

Meanwhile, at the awareness stage, your form should be brief and contain a basic form field of name and email address.

The further the customer journey, the more form fields that will be required, as your target customers are getting closer to making the buying decision.

Once your target customers are at the decision stage, you can get more information from them so that you will be able to close sales easily.

5. Remove or Limit your Site Navigation: 

You should remove or limit site navigation when building your landing page.

Adding too much site navigation will give your target customers the opportunity to leave your landing page and you don’t want your target customers to leave your landing page so that they can focus on your landing page content.

By removing or limiting your landing page navigation, your target customers will stay longer and focus on your offers, rather than getting distracted by navigation through various pages on your website.

6. Add Compelling Images: 

Images of what you are offering your target customers should be included on your landing page.

You must include a good image to engage your target customers. 

Images also capture people's attention which can also make them stay longer on your page.

7. Add Social Sharing Widgets or Icons: 

Although site navigation should be reduced or removed from your landing page, but it is important that you include your business social media sharing widget or icons so that it will be easier for your target customers to share your page with their loved ones.

Meanwhile, you need to make sure that another tab is opened when your target customers click on the social media icon to share your page.

You want to give them the option to share your page but you don’t want them to leave the page.

8. Provide Testimonials When Relevant: 

Adding reviews of your past customers is also necessary for a landing page because these days online users will look at past customer's reviews before making a purchase.