How to Make Better Landing Pages
If you are unfamiliar with landing pages, they are the website pages through which site visitors jump onto your website. These pages are meant to get people initially interested in your business so that they browse through your site a little more and, ultimately, convert. Conversions may look different for each company, but just think “lead generation.” Your goal is to get your site visitors to take one small step after another until they decide to purchase from you or become your client. That’s what we call inbound marketing.
More: Lead Generation 101
How to Make Better Landing Pages
Declutter Your Web Pages
We want you to take a good, long look at your website right now. How cluttered are your website pages? Seriously, look at them. Is it easy to find the information that you are looking for? Are the pages skimmable? Cluttered pages and high bounce rates have a strong correlation. And let’s be real, if you are trying to get people to move through your pages, you don’t want them bouncing off. That may seem pretty obvious, but when it comes to actually decluttering pages — well, that’s the harder part.
Create Call To Actions
When it comes to inbound marketing, we talk about CTA’s quite a bit. And, well, that’s because they really are that important. If you want to draw your leads into your business, you need to make it explicitly clear what you want them to do. “Click here for our newsletter.” “For more information, contact us here.” Be sure that you are sharing the benefits of performing the action with them so that they know what they are gaining. These are CTA’s that can help your site visitors become clients/customers.
Lead Visitors Through Your Site
The purpose of a landing page is to have a place where site visitors can enter your site. Think of a landing page as the landing pad of an airport. It is a setting for easy access to the airport, but you don’t want your visitors to stay there. You want to lead them to where they need to go. So, you create signs. “The a left down the hallway for a flight to Denver.” The same thing is true with your website.
You want to lead your site visitors to the place you want them to go. To do this, you can create buttons. Navigation buttons are, of course, key, but you may want to use other kinds of buttons as well. “Download free editorial calendar template.” “Subscribe to our newsletter.” Use those airport signs to cue in your visitors.
Create Simple Forms
As one of the steps in your lead generation process, it may be a good idea for you to use forms to collect information. Then, you can take that information and grow your email list and show them more about your company until you can get them to convert. If you are designing a form for your website, here are a few things you should know.
- Keep the form short. In general, people don’t like spending time filling out forms. Especially right now. I mean, it’s tax season for goodness sake!
- Be clear what you are asking for. “First name.” “Last name.” “Email address.” Be obvious what you want.
- Use a large font. Make sure your form is easy to read. It should be skimmable right off the bat.
- Create white space. Spacing is going to make your form look smaller and more manageable. Don’t be afraid to have lots of white space.
Show Visitors Your Site can be Trusted
First of all, make sure that any ads for your site that lead to a specific page match exactly to the page that they lead to. If the headings or images are different this is going to look suspicious.
The other thing you can do to showcase your trustworthy-ness is to showcase any certificates, endorsements or ratings you have. These can serve as that extra boost of confidence a site visitor may need to explore your site further.