What if the key to growing your business was far simpler than you ever imagined?
No matter their size, every business owner is hoping to grow their company to its full potential. And to do so, businesses will invest a small fortune in hardware, software, and personnel recruitment in order to see their business grow.
While all of those factors can help your business expand, the real key is your website landing pages. By creating landing pages that do a top-notch job of converting customers, you can transform your business and take things to the next level.
Ready to evolve your own business? Keep reading to learn how to create landing pages that convert!
What Are Landing Pages?
Our guide is going to help you create landing pages that convert. Before we proceed, though, it’s important to answer a simple question: “what is a landing page?”
Landing pages are separate from the front page of your website. Instead, these are standalone pages that exist primarily to receive traffic, promote conversation with customers, and lead to conversions thanks to a clear CTA.
The best part is that landing pages themselves are very versatile. You can use it to offer special discount codes, get leads for your mailing list, or even make important announcements.
In this case, we want to focus on landing pages that convert. And our guide will help you craft such pages from the ground up.
Why Focus On Landing Pages?
Obviously, landing pages aren’t the only way to convert customers. Considering how important conversion is and how limited your time and other resources are, you might be asking yourself a major question: “why focus so much on landing pages?”
The answer is that landing pages are relentlessly focused on a single goal. While you may create killer content for the rest of your site in the hopes that it leads to conversions, this content is going to appeal to different people in different ways. And it made lead to unexpected outcomes other than conversion.
However, creating a good landing page is like working your way backward on a problem once you know the answer. In this case, the answer is to increase customer conversions. And you can either refine your existing landing pages or create new ones for the sole purpose of boosting the conversion rate.
And it doesn’t take that much time or that much money to rework a landing page. That means you can enjoy the benefits of this powerful conversion tool without detracting from your other marketing and sales efforts.
Now that you know more about what a landing page is and why it’s important to conversion, let’s review our top tips to create a high-converting page.
Do Your Marketing Homework
If we’re being honest, most landing page design is pretty disappointing. And that’s usually because the business did not do their marketing homework before creating the page.
At the bare minimum, this research involves using Google Trends to research keywords and how they have trended (or not) over the past year. The higher the demand for certain keywords, the more successful a landing page built around those words will be.
On top of basic keyword research, though, you also need to understand the sales funnel and where your demographic is on this funnel before they land on your page. For example, someone who is still researching different options and someone who is ready to pull the trigger on a purchase are likely to respond to very different CTAs.
In other words, there is no “one size fits all” approach to an effective landing page. Instead, the keywords, CTA, and everything in between need to be perfectly tailored to your specific demographic, which helps with conversion as well as your SEO design.
The Right Headline
One of the hallmarks of an effective landing page is a short bit of text near the top in a larger font. This serves as the “headline” of your landing page and is typically the first thing that a visitor will see.
But simply having a headline doesn’t make the landing page effective. As you might imagine, what is important is the exact headline that you use to engage with your audience.
In addition to being relatively short, the best headlines focus on benefits that you can offer to your audience. To add a sense of urgency, you can also add a timed element to the headline.
For example, a landing page with the headline “The Complete Guide to Opening Your Business” may evoke mild audience interest. But if you change that headline to “How To Open Your Business In Less Than a Week,” you are going to see a lot more interest from your chosen demographic.
A Dash of Personality
In a perfect world, your landing page is a reflection of your brand. And that means adding some of your unique personality to the page. But just remember: a little bit of personality goes a long way!
Perhaps the best example of this is the use of humor. Quippy jokes and funny punchlines are a really great way to connect with your audience and start building a real relationship. But the wrong kind of humor may be offensive and insulting to many of your prospective converts.
What does this mean for your actual landing page copy? We recommend restraint and adding small dashes of humor or other elements of your personality. If you want to take a small risk and add more personality later on, you can conduct A/B testing to see what your audience is positively and negatively responding to.
Understanding Keyword Intent
We have touched on the importance of both researching your keywords and understanding your audience. By combining these concepts, you can master one of the hardest parts of landing page design: keyword intent.
You can start by using free resources such as the Google Keyword Planner. You can use this to search for specific terms such as “save money quickly.” You can then look at some of the keyword ideas (particularly the long-tail keywords) related to this search as well as the number of monthly searches and what the keyword competition looks like.
Based on this info and your knowledge of your demographic, you can determine keyword intent. Some are pretty straightforward: those looking up “how to save money for a house” are interested in getting enough money for a downpayment.
Others require a bit of critical thinking. For example, “how much money should I have saved by 30” would be a popular search among young professionals looking to develop a reliable savings routine.
By understanding the intent of those conducting these searches, you can craft landing pages that speak to their needs and offer the exact solutions your audience has been looking for.
The Right Subheadline
As important as the headline is, it can’t work effectively on its own. That’s why you need to craft the perfect subheadline.
Subheadlines are smaller than the primary headline and typically appear close to (if not directly underneath) the first headline. And subheadlines can be up to two or three times the size of the original headline.
Though it can be longer than the original headline, your subheadline should still get to the point relatively quickly. And you may see very good results by including a short and direct CTA as part of your subheadline.
The subheadline is also the perfect place to include the unique selling point of your business. This works best when the primary function of the headline is getting the reader’s attention.
For example, let’s say that you have a short headline like “Need a Little Extra Cash?” Such a headline is a great way to get the reader’s attention, but it doesn’t really tell them what you can do for them.
But you can follow that headline with a subheadline such as “Contact our dedicated experts to start saving serious money by the end of the day.” This quickly explains your expertise and authority while letting the audience know, in very specific terms, what you can do for them.
Sales Copy: Don’t Reinvent the Wheel
While the landing page should be relatively light on text (more on this in a minute), it absolutely must include some sales copy. This copy is what convinces the visitor to heed your CTA and ultimately boosts your conversions.
Here some good news: when it comes to the landing page sales copy, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Instead, you can rely on traditional models such as AIDA in order to quickly transition all the way from capturing the reader’s attention to prompting them to take the desired action.
Other techniques may work well here, including Picture, Promise, Prove, Push and Problem, Agitate, Solve. As always, we recommend tailoring your exact sales technique to your unique demographic and their specific needs.
Light and Uncluttered Design
Remember when we said that landing pages are focused on a singular goal? Because of this, your landing page design should be light and uncluttered.
Too much text and/or too many images can actually be very distracting for your reader. Even worse, too much imagery can slow down how fast the page loads. And even the best-designed landing pages will be very ineffective if the page is slow to load.
After you manually trim down your text and your images, we recommend running your landing page through Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test Tool. This helps make sure your site looks good on mobile devices, which is important because that is how the majority of your visitors will be coming to the page.
Solid Visual Focus
So far, we have focused primarily on the text elements of your landing page. But for that page to do a solid job of converting customers, it needs to have a very strong visual focus.
In practical terms, this means the landing page needs a large image to attract the reader’s attention. The classic choice is to use a high-quality photo of a person to make a connection with the visitor. But you can use a different kind of image if it is more relevant to your products, brand, and/or demographic.
A Crystal Clear CTA
As we discussed before, the whole point of a landing page is to lead your customers to the CTA. However, for that CTA to be effective, it needs to be completely crystal clear to your visitors.
Generally speaking, a good CTA is direct, impossible to miss, and spells out exactly what you want the visitor to do. Think of it this way: a visitor should be able to spot and understand your CTA within just a few seconds of loading the page.
If that sounds like a short period of time, keep in mind that most of your audience is going to load the page and quickly skim it to see if they are interested. If they don’t even know what you want after a few seconds, they are going to click away and the conversion opportunity is lost.
Using Testimonials
The real “secret weapon” when it comes to conversion is social proof. Simply put, many modern consumers won’t simply take the word of a business about their customer service and products. But they place a great deal of trust in the thoughts and opinions of others, which is known as “social proof.”
You can use this to your advantage by incorporating things like customer testimonials into your landing pages. These testimonials establish trust quickly because landing page visitors naturally trust their fellow consumers.
And you can carefully curate the best user testimonials for your landing page. This helps promote the positive experience of dealing with your business and will ultimately take your conversions to the next level.
Your Next Move
Now you know how to make your landing pages convert like never before. But do you know who can help your business reach its full potential?
Here at DesignLoud, we specialize in web design, digital marketing, SEO, and more. To see how we can help with your landing pages, simply contact us today!
Share this:
