You have a perfect plan for a business website and are ready to implement it. You hire the best developer around and soon enough, your website is live. A few months down the road, you start getting hits on your site. Exciting! The numbers start growing because you have invested a lot of time and money in SEO and other marketing options, but soon you realize there is something that’s just not right – conversions are horrid! You did everything the so-called gurus recommended, so what could be so wrong? You forgot to give your landing pages the ‘magic’ they need.
Here’s what you REALLY need to know about crafting killer landing pages:
Landing Page or Home Page?
Make no mistake about it, a landing page is NOT the home page of your business. While your home page tells someone something about your business, landing pages should be very specific. Look at them as ‘pages on a mission’ – a mission to convert page visitors into customers. Each landing page should be specially designed and optimized to persuade site visitors to act in some way, which could be to purchase a product you are selling, sign up for your newsletters or something else that will be of benefit to your business.
So there you have it, the first principle for designing landing pages: make the home page for information about your businesses and spare landing pages for convincing them to do something. But how do you optimize landing pages to be of high impact?
Enhance User Experience
Before you sit down to write a landing page, ask yourself two questions:
- What do I want my visitors to do?
- How do I want them to remember my website?
It is all about carefully carving your goals into landing pages; and by ‘carefully’ we mean both architecturally structuring the landing page and presenting information or content in a way that will increase the chances of converting your visitors. We’ll cover more on content below, but right now, let’s focus more on the structure of the landing pages.
Think of organization and segmentation as a way to attract more conversions. You want to help your visitors ‘place themselves in buckets’ you’ve set up for them, so organize the content in a way that will make it easy to find what is relevant to them. It goes without saying, your site should be clean – but that alone doesn’t cut it. Work on the navigation so that everything a visitor wants is either right in front of them or just one click away. Don’t forget to have the call-to-action button right there too!
What to Write
Nothing will make much sense without content that is carefully thought out. Therefore, you need to write a high-impact pitch on your landing pages. It starts with a clear but spellbinding heading, followed by a sales pitch that will make the visitor do one or more of the following:
- Purchase
- Give permission for you to make a follow up
- Give you feedback
- Click or visit a page you intend them to
- Share with a friend or someone else.
Once you achieve that, you’ll have it right – an effective landing page for your business. You might want to do some testing on your landing pages though until you get something that works perfect for you. This may include changing template styles and layouts, buttons, messaging… The bottom line is: landing pages should NEVER go wrong.
