If you’ve worked hard with PPC or social media campaigning only to have website visitors leave within a few seconds of landing on your website, it can be a monumental waste of ad spend.
And as an online shopper, there’s nothing worse than landing on a page and being disappointed with what you see.
Whether it’s the design, the usability, or the lack of relevance to what you were originally searching for, you’ll click away fast and be unlikely to return in the future.
Conversion optimization starts with creating a set of killer landing pages. Pages that grab the attention of the reader and compel them to take action.
Here are some important lessons for creating landing pages that don’t hold back.
Lesson One: Get Deep With Your Customer Research
You’ll need a clear idea of your ideal customer before you start crafting your landing page and for this, you’ll need to conduct extensive customer research in the following areas:
- Big data analytics (Google Analytics)
- Social media analysis (like Buzzsumo)
- Wider industry trends (try Google Trends, Hashtagify, industry reports, and publications)
- Competitor research (through services like Mention)
- Customer feedback, surveys, and focus groups
This exercise should provide a glut of audience data from which you can start to build a list of ideal customer profiles, also known as personas.
Your personas should be created with a genuine customer in mind. In fact, give them a name and write a fact file for all of them, including:
- Their average income and spending habits
- The publications they read (industry and non-industry related)
- The products they would buy from you or your competitors
- The devices they use
- The times of day they tend to browse online
- The social media sites they use and the types of content they share most frequently
The list of demographic characteristics is endless, and the more details you collect, the better.
Lesson Two: Take Your Landing Page Goals To The Next Level
Suppose you’re setting up a landing page to capture leads for an advice service. Your goal on the face of things might be to get the reader to fill out your information form.
This is a clear goal, but you can expand on that.
Your audience has arrived on your site to find out more about the services you offer, but they’re not necessarily ready to hand over their contact details yet.
You first need to make them feel comfortable with where they’ve landed and assure them that your site can solve their problems.
Going back to your customer research, you’ll need to pick out all of the common worries and hesitations your customers share.
Think about what really keeps your customers awake at night. When you take into account the emotional needs your products can support, you can start to make your landing page goals more urgent and compelling.
Lesson Three: Do More With Less
The focus of your landing page offer should be presented in a clear and concise manner. Keep the language simple, direct, and make sure not to add any unnecessary verbiage that distracts from your goal.
Your Headline – The headline needs to be clear, appear above the fold and contains the most important benefit for your customers.
Your Subheading – This should back up your initial headline statement and provide a key phrase and further benefits.
Body Text – Without being too wordy, sum up the other key benefits and features, reiterating how you solve your customers’ pain points with your products or services.
Call to Action – If this is a form, keep it as brief as possible.
Images and videos – Short autoplay videos can replace the main cover image, depending on the products you offer and the amount of money you have available to invest in professional stock imagery. Make your imagery as emotionally affecting as possible.
Eliminate distractions from your landing page design, including blogs, FAQs, social media links, contact page, etc. Your design needs to be clean and clutter-free in order to generate the best results.
Lesson Four: Don’t Give Up
Don’t be hesitant to create and A/B test multiple versions of your landing page design to see which patterns and formulas bring in the best results.
You can download a split testing plugin like Optimizely (compatible with most sites, including WordPress) to make this task easier. For example, you can duplicate your live page, set up goals and test parameters, preview the test and run it through your site.
In all stages of website creation, make sure to regularly duplicate, alter and test content based on your results. Automating this process as much as you can ensures that you work from actionable data in the most efficient way. Use an easy to edit online store environment like Shopify, or the landing page creator Instapage, if you haven’t got access to quality web designers.
Once you have gone live with your new landing page design, you will need to keep a close eye on Google Analytics reports monitoring its success. From these results, you can then look at some of your other underperforming pages and make some of the above changes and SEO tweaks to make them more effective for your customers and search engines.
Landing pages need to create an impact within seconds. In order to do this, successful brands must do their best to zero in on their customer’s core problems. Gear all landing page content towards getting the right reaction and you’ll surely see results.
Need to create a landing page but don’t know where to start? We can help!
