How to Create Effective Landing Pages
What are Landing Pages
A Landing Page is any web page that a visitor arrives at or lands on after clicking an ad, for example, a Google ad. What most marketers do is drive all the traffic from ads to their home page. Instead, creating specific landing pages for the different offers you are providing, is a better option for giving the visitors a great user experience and for bringing conversions. People just have seconds to decide whether they are interested in your offer after arriving at your landing page. So designing your landing pages keeping in mind the visitors will give effective results.
Why should you use a Landing Page
Landing pages should be simple and clear if you want your visitors to take the necessary action you want them to take. This is a much easier way to guide your visitors to help them find what they are looking for and meet the conversion goals.
Most people don’t want to spend a long time on the landing pages. Long forms with detailed descriptions can repel them. Making shorter landing pages with important information can lead to more conversions. It also depends on the price of your product. Higher priced products may require more information to be given describing the product features, hence a detailed landing page can be chosen.
Types of Landing Pages
Select what type of landing page you want to create based on your requirements.
Click-through Landing Page
The sale of products doesn’t happen on the landing page itself. The visitor is guided to the product page from here where the actual transaction takes place. You might have many products and creating a landing page for each product can be a waste of time and money.
Click-through landing pages are the best option if you want to announce events, season offers, special occasions, etc. These pages can also be used for your email campaigns. Drive your email subscribers to your landing page by sending them emails offering deals and offers. You can’t send an email for each and every item. Instead, use the landing page in your email guiding your readers to click-through to get to your items page so that they can make purchases.
Lead Gen Landing Page
Build your email list for your email marketing campaign by using lead gen landing pages. Using a lead gen page you can gather information about your visitors like their name and email id so that you can contact them later.
Getting people to give their details to you can be a hard task as most people won’t divulge their details unless they get something in return. You can offer them a free ebook, a newsletter subscription or a free trial of your products for giving their information on your landing page.
Create a Perfect Landing Page
Now you know what kind of landing page you want to create. You have made a research on your goals and whom you are targeting. The next thing to do is to design a perfect landing page. Consider the following factors when creating a landing page.
Customize your Landing Page
Direct your visitors to landing pages made specially for them. Create your landing pages considering where your traffic is coming from. If your traffic is coming from a Facebook ad you would want to include a message saying welcome to the Facebook users. If your visitor has come through a PPC ad include the keyword they have searched for on your landing page.
Make it Simple
Make your landing pages crisp and clear. As your visitors spend very less time on landing pages, it is beneficial to keep your landing pages easy to understand. Your landing page should give them information about what they are looking for and what you want them to do. Use clear headings and give your information in points so that they can understand it easily and quickly.
Fast loading
Visitors usually don’t like to wait for pages to load. Make sure your landing page loads fast and gives visitors ample time to think about your offer.
Build Trust
Even if your landing page is interesting and loads quickly, visitors may not convert as they don’t trust your site. Creating a professional page with testimonials can help build trust. Increasing your brand awareness will make you a trusted brand which is essential for more visitors trusting you.
How to drive traffic to your Landing Page
PPC and Paid Ads
Optimizing your landing page for PPC involves creating pages with a good design for your PPC visitors. Optimizing the particular elements of your page will increase the number of visitors who will convert.
The advantages of optimizing your landing pages are more PPC leads and better quality scores.
Here are a some factors you need to consider for more leads.
Write a headline that is related to your PPC keyword and ad text to increase the engagement of the visitor. A professional design that is based on your brand to give a good impression to the visitor. Write matter that gives specific information about your offer. Use a form that is easy to understand and doesn’t take much time for the visitors to fill. And finally a call to action button that is prominent and doesn’t miss the visitor’s attention.
Solo and Native Ads
Opt for solo ads, your ad will be the only one displayed in the newsletter, therefore the name solo. If you want to highlight your business it is better to go for solo ads. Sites like e-magazines and newsletters post solo ads. Solo ads are more costly than native ads as they are placed as the only single ad in the newsletter. They are both free and paid ads and selecting a small or a medium ad will not cost you much.
Native ads are placed as a part of other published content. For example Newsfeeds contain native ads which are usually a part of the feeds. The advantage of native ads is that they won’t go unnoticed like other ads. They are less expensive and ensure conversions.
Solo ads and native ads are effective ways to bring targeted traffic to your landing page.
Facebook Ads
Facebook Ads are useful in bringing targeted visitors to your landing page. Creating an ad on Facebook is quite easy and you can select the action of your ad for example a page like, an app install, etc. Create a Facebook page where you can offer coupons to the visitors who can use them on your landing page.
Guest Blogging
Include your ads in the guest blogs that you post on other blogs. Guest blogging is the current trend and using it to advertise your offer is an excellent method to bring in new leads to your landing page.
Email Marketing
You can include your ad in the emails that you send to your email list. These ads will direct them to your targeted landing page and this will give you more conversions. Make sure that you direct them to your landing page and not your home page.
Sharing on Social Media
Send your ad link to your groups in social networking sites. You can create an interesting offer which will encourage sharing among your community. This is a great way to send target audience to your landing page.
Tracking the Results
Landing pages are beneficial in gathering information about the visitors. By including a form that asks for personal information, you will be able to know where your visitors are coming from and a few details about them. Keep track of which ads are performing well and which ads are leading to more conversions so that you can make improvements to the ads that you will be using later. There are a few effective tools that will help you make great landing pages like HubSpot and Unbounce. These sites also give you additional tools to bring in targeted visitors to your landing page and also help you evaluate your ROI.