Why Landing Pages are Crucial
In a Website Redesign
If there’s one thing you should be doing to dramatically improve your online marketing ROI today, it would be to use landing pages on your website. If your website isn’t already focused on lead generation, then it’s likely that your site has no true landing pages. If it does, bonus points for you. Regardless, we’ll show you how to make them better.
What is a Landing Page?
A landing page is a website page that allows you to capture a visitor’s information through a lead capture form. A good landing page will be targeted to a particular source of traffic—say from an email campaign advertising a particular whitepaper. People who click through from the email are sent to this specific landing page, where they learn more about the whitepaper offer. Because the page is targeted and because it has an interesting offer behind a lead capture form, you are able to convert those people from website visitors into leads with whom you can then follow up.
Why are Landing Pages so Critical?
Too many companies send their advertising, email or social media traffic to their homepage. This is a missed opportunity. When you know a stream of targeted traffic will be coming to your website, you can essentially filter where they go based on their demographic. Landing pages present a different offer than simply showing them your website’s homepage.
What Makes a Landing Page Most Effective?
When you’re considering a website redesign or improvements to your current site, you must include both a strategy and design for effective landing pages.
5 Important Landing Page Elements:
- Limit Navigation.
Any navigation on the page that is not a part of the lead capture form is a potential distraction and may prevent visitors from completing the form. So, hide most of your Tier 1 and all of your Tier 2 and 3 navigation elements. Limit the number of exits from your landing page so that visitors stay focused.
- Deliver Value.
If you have a valuable offer, it’s reasonable to expect that your visitors will give up their contact information in exchange for it. Ask yourself if your offer is compelling enough for your audience. If not, improve the quality of the content. You should constantly ask yourself, “How can I make this even better?” Make sure your landing pages demonstrate that value.
- Enable Sharing.
Add share links to your landing page to encourage your website visitors to share your content with their audiences. People like original content and sharing increases your social reach.
- Keep it Short.
For the same reason that you limit navigation, keep your landing pages short and the form above the fold. Doing so will increase your conversion rate.
- Test, Test, Test.
Read all you want, but your landing page will never be perfect and will always benefit from testing and improvement. Use a landing page creation tool that allows you to create and edit landing page quickly, to see what works best for your business. Eventually, you’ll begin to understand exactly what your visitors are seeking out.
Landing pages are where the magic happens; they are where you convert targeted visitors into engaged and interested leads. Make sure your website redesign plan includes the creation of a landing page template and tool for easy creation and improvement. Make sure, too, that while you’re blogging you create original content to be used as a value-driven offer that will grab the attention of potential customers. At Hero, we’re all about landing pages and the value they can offer our customers. It’s important to remember that when creating these pages, you’re addressing your customer interests. Is your ROI not where you where you want it to be? Give us a call, maybe we can help.
