Is Your Business Ready for Landing?

Are you ready to land more business?

Driving more business from your existing clients and generating new business from prospects is broadly what we all want to do. But where do you send your prospects when you build a new email or PPC campaign? Is it to your homepage – or somewhere else altogether? Often companies blindly link this activity through to their homepage expecting the recipient to then go and find out the information that they were intrigued by. Consequently, such an approach leads the resulting conversion rate to be, as expected, quite poor. The best practice is to build a custom “Landing page”. This is a page created specifically for the campaign or promotion where a visitor lands after clicking on your Google AdWords advert or something similar. So, what are the key ingredients that make up an effective landing page?

1. Clear and Impactful Design

The success of your landing page and its ability to deliver a conversion is fundamentally affected by the look, feel and the structure of the page. You need to have laser focus on that one conversion or objective – and ensure that all elements of the page help towards driving to that. That objective could be to complete a form, to watch a video, make a purchase or read a newsletter.  You need to consider the colours, design and images. It helps to ensure that the buttons you use are in strong contrast to the background. There are many different elements of a button to be considered: from the colour, its placement and its size. You need to test the different attributes in order to produce the best page layout. A recent example of this can be seen with a local firm of solicitors – in which we designed a page with clear navigation (colour coded) for web visitors to choose between either personal law or corporate law.

2. Less is More

You need to produce a clean page with clear and obvious navigation and no distractions. You need to encourage your recipient to read what they need and move down the proverbial sales funnel to complete the action, but no more. The skill comes in understanding what that level of detail needs to be – and what it is not. Too much and you can distract and overwhelm them. The copy should be easily “scannable” and the use of bullet points is key. You must consider the copy that is read at eye level (above the fold) – and the secondary information that you still want to share – but that can be kept below the fold for the recipient to scroll down to read.

3. A Well-considered Headline

A good landing page should have a headline and sub headlines that encapsulate your offer and communicate the key benefits that the recipient should value. Most effective landing pages use the headline to confirm the offer and the subheading for further explanations of the offer. Don’t forget you have around 8 seconds to convince the recipient of your offer so it’s crucial that the headline and sub headlines are clear and convincing. (The 8 seconds could be a myth. However there is no dispute that our brains take only a matter of seconds to assess whether you have found the information that you are looking for.)

4. Responsive and Mobile-friendly

Just over 52% of web activity comes from mobile so it is essential that your landing page can be navigated easily whatever the media. The page should load quickly and look and feel great on mobile. Consider your own website and visit the different pages on mobile (vs desktop) – how does it compare?

5. Keep Forms Short

All of us would like to garner as much information as possible from our web visitors, but in reality – the more information you request on your landing page the less the chance that you will get the form completed.  A more pragmatic approach is needed. Instead best practice is that if a form is necessary, only ask the visitor to complete the most crucial fields. Remember that you can use the thank you page to always ask for more.   We have taken this approach with our own web form: what do you think?

6. Consistency of Language

Remember that the customer experience must be consistent across all the touch-points, so if you use specific language or key phrases on your PPC adverts it makes sense to replicate this on the landing page. Repeating these words ensures visitors are on the same path and reassures them.

7. Signs of Trust

Good landing pages make thorough use of validation from third parties to communicate to the audience that your offer and your brand is trust worthy. Such signs of trust include accreditation from industry bodies as well of course as client testimonials.  Check out your own site and consider how you can weave such authority through it.

8. Test, test, test

It sounds obvious but only by testing and tracking results can you learn what is and is not working.  A great way of achieving this is through testing the work first on others within your own company, then when the work is ready to continue testing. If you decide to do any AB testing you need to ensure the differences are few, otherwise identifying what is and is not working is impossible. Remember your Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) too.
Logo of Clever Marketing - Landing page design with Clever Marketing - Hampshire Digital Agency - SEO. PPC, CRO Writing, designing and building landing pages is quite a complex and time-consuming task. But the results of strong landing page design can deliver you better campaign results and, crucially, a greater Return On Investment (ROI). If you would like a helping hand to ensure that your digital marketing campaigns get the best reception, give Clever Marketing a call on 01276 402 381 or complete our easy contact form.

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