What Do All Effective Landing Pages Have in Common?

Since the average small business is now spending $75,000 a year on digital marketing, you need to make sure your efforts are giving you a strong ROI.

Landing pages are a great way to drive traffic to your URL while sending your visitors a focused message about your products. Creating effective landing pages will help you to close your leads quickly.

A landing page is a way to create something interesting that breaks with the design of your site. A focused landing page gives you the opportunity to take over the screen for the sake of one product. Instead of adhering to the balance expected for a site, landing pages give you the opportunity to experiment with display space and calls to action.

Creating an effective landing page takes some finesse. Follow these 7 tips to make sure yours connects with your audience.

1. Be Purposeful

Your landing page needs to be laser-focused on one goal. As much as you’d like to sell all of your services to anyone you get in touch with, a strong landing page needs to be limited.

An effective landing page should alert users of a new product, a single promotion, an e-book, or an email newsletter. You should have one goal and have, metaphorically and literally, one big red button for users to push.

Your goal should be to collect visitor information so that you can generate some leads and reach out to customers later.

Don’t confuse the message. If your goal is “download our e-book” perhaps you need to write “download our e-book” at the top of your page with a few lines for customer information. Something as simple as that could do more customer outreach than a month of cold-calling.

2. Think Like a Customer

Get to know what products and services your customers like the most from you. This should be the direction that your most effective landing pages will be pointed towards.

Have a target audience. Be as specific as possible. Get an understanding of what goals your audience members have, what they might want from a product and what incentives they look for.

Cater your message to be as direct as possible.

Send out an online survey to your most trusted customers in advance of designing landing pages. This will give you a hint as to what your customers respond to.

3. Use Simple Language

A page that makes multiple offers could seem unfocused to customers. It could be visually or textually confusing and distract from your message.

You don’t want to overwhelm your viewers once you have their attention. Use simple language and a simple design. You don’t have to show off your design chops when all that you’re trying to get is a list of email addresses.

Make sure the process is streamlined, language is distilled down to a minimum, and visual distraction is eliminated. You need your goal to connect with your readers and to inspire them to action. A shadow of a question in their mind could turn them away from you.

4. Give Good Content

While you want to keep it simple, you should be able to answer any of your visitors’ lingering questions.

Your product or service should solve a common problem so make sure it’s clear how it does that. Your product or service will also have a certain value or a price, so be clear about that.

Once your customers start using your product, they should be able to see measurable changes in their life. Describe in a clear and concise manner how this service or this product brings tangible added value to them.

5. Lock The Gate

If you want users to stay on your landing page until they’ve completed their task of filling in a form and hitting a button, don’t add extra links. While you can add one or two to your main page or to related services, extra links will be distracting.

You want to convert your visitors to leads before they click away. Gathering traffic is good, but not before you’ve gotten the information you need.

Everything your users need should be located on the landing page. If they need something else or to click something other than “submit”, start again. Your landing page shouldn’t give visitors any reason to click anywhere else.

6. Make a Clear Call To Action

Your “big red button” can be just that. Make sure it’s short and uses active words or action verbs. The point of your call to action is to tell viewers what they need to do next to participate.

“Download Your Free E-Book” is just as good of a call to action as “Buy Now”. You’ve given your visitors a clear direction and told them exactly what they’ll get when they click.

Make sure that you’ve got an extra hook to make visitors feel like they’ll miss out if they don’t click your call to action. Tell them “only a limited number available” or “special promotion” and they’ll be more motivated to click your button.

7. Add A Great Headline

Headlines tell your visitors what you’ve got for them and why. They can also ask a common question for which the answer is your products.

Don’t stay focused on features. Connecting with customers on an emotional level is valuable. Talk about benefits and the way that your product or service will improve the lives of your visitors.

A great headline will cause your visitors’ ears to perk up when they see it. Inspire action with just a few words.

Effective Landing Pages Should Be Sincere

If you’re trying to design effective landing pages, you need to be honest with your audience. You believe in your products, so tell your customers why. Keep the benefits of your products in your mind, not just the features.