Creating a Landing Page to Achieve Maximum Results

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1 Creating a Landing Page to Achieve Maximum Results

2 Landing Page? By now most of us will know what a landing page is and what it aims to achieve, but for those of you who do not, we can simply define it as; a web page, which is created to inform its audience on a focused subject matter, the primary goal of which is to invite users to complete a specific action and create a conversion, as well as monitor the effectiveness of online and offline marketing campaigns.

3 Now, what type of marketing campaigns can these be, and what kind of content do they generally contain? Well, a landing page can be set up to promote a single product or a product range of a company. It can be for a physical product such as a new line of sports gear or the latest model of a mobile phone, or a service such as a training course or a financial product. It may not even be as a promotional tool at all, but as a form of data capture that will allow the company to create regular interactions and touchpoints with its customers in the future, to help build and maintain relationships with them. This can be in the form of an information brochure download or a free trial or promotional offer.

4 The Core Elements of a Landing Page The CTA: CTA stands for Call-to-Action, which is a statement asking the visitor to perform a particular action such as contacting the company by telephone or , clicking through to another page, or filling in a form. It is recommended that you have at least three of these on any landing page. Even if they are all directed to the same destination. Click-throughs and forms are the most recommended actions, as they allow you to more easily monitor the success of the campaign. Furthermore, it is important that at least one CTA is place above-thescroll, which is the area of the page visible on screen without having to scroll down. It is important to remember that not all screen sizes are the same, so you need to take this into account when designing the layout of the landing page.

5 The presence of a contact form is by far the most recommended contact method, as it also captures the prospect s details for future communications, as previously stated. You can then place various other CTA s on the page informing the visitor to complete the form, preferably as large call-out captions or as buttons with anchor links back to the form.

6 The Conversion: When the prospect responds to the Call-to-Action and performs the desired action it is called a conversion. For example, for a landing page where the CTA is clicking through to an e-commerce page, the conversion occurs when the client purchases the product and is converted into a customer. A conversion can also happen upon the completion of a contact form as a method of lead generation. It is therefore imperative that the landing page has some kind of web tracking inserted, such as Google Analytics, and that the destination page, such as a thank you or success page, is set up with goal tracking, so that you can monitor the success of the campaign and how effective it has been as part of the overall sales/conversion funnel.

7 The Event: An event occurs when any action is carried out by the prospect. This can be from actually landing on the page in the first place, to watching a video, clicking on another link or downloading a PDF. An event is not always considered as a conversion, however, it is still important to track events, which requires some more complicated Javascript code to be inserted into the page, so you ll need to ask your web designer to implement it. You will then be able to see which elements of your landing page are most interesting to visitors, so you can use that knowledge to made the page more attractive. In their article, The Benefits of Using Video on Landing pages, Unbounce mention that using video on landing pages can increase conversions by 80%. However, putting too many events on a landing page can reduce the visitor s attention ratio and deter them from the primary aim of the landing page, which is completing the conversion!

8 The Incentive: Landing page conversion rates are much higher when they offer an incentive such as promotion or a free offer to motivate the user to complete the requested action. Examples are to download a free brochure, whitepaper or e-book; receive important product notifications or a newsletter; sign up to receive a free trial of a service, an online tool or a game; a promotional coupon or code to receive a discount when purchasing a product online for example; or to take part in a contest or prize draw.

9 The URL: The link URL of the page, or the web address, is what will be use within the marketing campaign. This can either be an offline advertisement in a magazine or a TV spot, which tells the reader or viewer to visit a URL to find out more information. Alternatively, a live link can be inserted into online media, such as HTML ers, advertising banners or Pay-Per- Click campaigns such as Google Adwords. Therefore, if your main goal for the landing page is to capture details of a prospect then you may want to host the page on a separate domain from your corporate website. Otherwise, the savvier web users will tend to remove the extension following the first trailing slash to access the home page of the website and search there for the information, rather than actually completing the form with their personal information. For example, if we had a campaign with the URL, it wouldn t take a rocket scientist to know how to access the rest of our website.

10 It is also important that the URL text is creative and gets stuck in people s minds, so that if it is given in a magazine then people can easily remember it further down the line. The downside of having a separate URL from your main company domain is that your core domain will not benefit from the positive SEO side-effects of having a lot of extra traffic that is being driven from your campaign, directing to your primary domain. The best way to overcome this is by directing the form to a thank you page that is hosted on your corporate domain, so at least your main site can pick up some of the traffic upon completion of the form, or even enhance crossselling.

11 The Design and Content: The design must be clean and modern, without too much cluttered information that could distract prospects from completing the actions or events for which the page was created. It should also be very visual and appealing, with lots of imagery and large captions, as well as creative copy to draw the visitor in. Most importantly, the headline must stand out and motivate readers to take action. Regarding the overall look and feel of your landing page, you will want to consider whether you will style it with your corporate brand or you may decide to break away from your usual company design and vote for a much more creative and modern visual concept. Design

12 Besides large imagery, caption bubbles and bullets, another way of grabbing and holding people s attention is by adding interactive elements such as a video feed to the page. This not only captures interest, but also allows you to provide the visitor with much more information on your offer without cluttering up your minimally designed page. Finally, do not forget the most important factor of all. Make sure the page is responsive. Not adapting the page format to mobile phones and tablets will lead to landing page suicide! Now we have looked at all the basic elements a landing page needs to be a success and drive up lead conversions, let s look at some final considerations and questions surrounding landing pages.

13 Should I Optimize my Landing Page for a specific Keyword? There is no reason why you can t optimise your landing page for the keyword that best describes your product or offering, however creating one for the sole purposed of optimising another website, or piggybacking off the landing page to obtain more traffic to your main corporate website, should never be the main objective for creating a landing page. That black-hat technique was extensively abused in the 90 s, which back then were referred to more as doorway pages. Google eventually discovered this as the all-seeing eye usually does and now does not take much notice of brand new web page URLs with minimal content for that reason, and seeing as landing pages are often temporary for a specific targeted campaign, promotion or new product, it is really not worth spending too much time optimising it for SEO purposes. However, if you are creating the page for a PPC campaign, such as Google Adwords, it will need optimising to ensure it receives a good quality score, which helps the campaign run more efficiently. Also, if you are creating a landing page to capture leads for your sales force, for a core product or service that is likely to be on offer for a while, then yes, it is advisable to carry out at least some on-site optimisation, as eventually it is likely to be ranked by Google and a well designed and implemented landing page could provide a continual source of lead generation.

14 How much should I Invest in a Landing Page? This completely depends on the ROI you have projected to receive from the campaign and its primary goal. You will most certainly want to invest more in a landing page that directs people to purchase products or lead generation for your sales force, than a page that has been set up to capture data for a newsletter send for example (although this is still important). The idea is to ensure you have a measurable outcome to your campaign, so a value can be attributed to each goal conversion and the campaign ROI can be calculated. Either way, as we have already covered, landing pages are more often used temporary and tactical marketing campaigns, so they generally have a short lifespan. It is therefore not advisable to spend thousands on hiring a full creative team unless you are sure that it will generate enough revenue to cover the expense. As previously mentioned, make sure that you set up web tracking on your page and it is set up as a goal, preferably within a full sales funnel to be able to best measure its overall effectiveness.

15 Web Design and Online Marketing Agency arayoweb.com