Landing pages are critical in digital marketing because they can make or break your lead generation process. Therefore, even small improvements in the landing page conversion rate can result in a significant increase in leads and sales.
All Businesses Needs To Use Landing Pages
All successful marketing campaigns are laser-focused. Therefore, each campaign should have a unique goal, message, and call-to-action. This is especially important in pay-per-click advertising (e.g. Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads, LinkedIn Ads, etc) because you are paying for clicks and not conversions.
In other words, the success of your advertising campaign is largely due to your conversion rate (how many clicks you turn into conversions – signups, purchases, etc).
This is why pointing an Ad (and customers) to generic pages like “home”, or “services”, will result in poor conversion rate, and subsequently, kill the campaign.
At a minimum, every advertising campaign should have a unique landing page associated with it.
Landing Page Must DOs
For a campaign to be effective, your landing page has to:
- Be a logical extension of your Ad (cannot be generic or misleading)
- Have simple copy and design (busy landing pages often perform poorly, because visitors are overwhelmed)
- Contain clear Call-to-Actions (e.g. send visitors to a shopping cart)
- Include concise headlines
- Include aesthetically pleasing Images & Icons (has to direct attention to the landing page Call-to-Action)
A few good examples:
Optimize, Optimize, Optimize
There is no such thing as the final version of a landing page because you should always be optimizing them.
If you are not sure how to start optimizing your landing pages, start by asking yourself these questions:
- Does your landing page pass the 5-second test? For example, does it tell the visitors “Who you are”, “What is the product or service you provide”, and “Why they should stay”?
- Do you need to simplify your landing page? Does it have enough white space?
- Is your page architecture working? Should some of the information be pushed above the fold? Are you asking for too much information?
- Do you need navigation? Can you justify the real-estate that it’s taking up?
- Are your Headings clear and appropriately sized? Do they capture attention?
- Do you need a landing page for each segment? Or can one landing page cover all segments you are trying to target?
- Are you providing a consistent experience across different devices?
- Is your message consistent from the start (Ad) to end (Call-to-Action)?
- Are you using pop-ups? Most pop-ups are irritating, why is your popup different?
- Are your landing pages misleading in any way? Misleading landing pages may give you a short-term boost but will hurt your reputation and brand over time.
It’s difficult to think of everything up front, hence why creating a landing page is only the starting point. Collect data, learning from it, and optimize.
Also, experiment with different versions (e.g. using A/B testing). With A/B Testing you are using real data and not intuition to optimize the conversion rate. Furthermore, by continuously experimenting and optimizing you are not only improving your conversion rate but your user experience as well.
Related: Improve conversion by continuously experimenting with A/B Testing
Summary
As we mentioned early, landing pages can make or break your lead generation process, so they are an essential asset that you need to review and improve continuously.
How frequently? It will depend on your business and desired conversion rate. However, in most cases poorly performing landing pages should be reviewed and optimized regularly (e.g. weekly or monthly).
Finally, in most cases, a complete overhaul is not necessary. Instead, focus on smaller incremental improvements, and over time your landing pages will have a significant impact on your business.
