When thinking about landing pages, it’s important to consider the buyer’s journey. The buyer’s journey is the key to building trust with prospective clients and can help develop a long-lasting relationship. But how can you move a buyer along this journey?
Start by presenting highly targeted and relevant content, in the right place, at the right time. In order for a buyer’s journey to be successful, you need to empathize with your audience and understand their core problem.
Landing pages exist to help buyer progress through the different stages of this journey, making landing pages imperative to a business’ success. But with so many different ideas about what works and what doesn’t, our digital marketing team at Trailblaze Marketing has found these 4 common elements among high converting landing pages:
1. Clear Display
The average visitor only spends around 15 seconds on your landing page. All your action items, offer, form, and body copy should be unambiguous, and easy to digest. When a landing page loads, the prospect should immediately know the point of the landing page, or offer, and how they can get it.
Whitespace is crucial as poor readability will deter prospects from progressing further down your funnel. However, too many bullets can be problematic as well. You want to summarize your offer in a concise and enticing way, to hook potential clients.
For example, if you’re offering a downloadable eBook, you don’t need to state each section of the eBook; rather, share key points that will make your prospect hungry for more. Ask yourself: what is your offer’s value proposition?
Also, be sure to leave out site navigation and links to other pages. When a prospect is on a landing page, we want to make sure their focus is only on the offer. Below is an example of a simple landing page, that follows the best practices we’ve outlined:
2. Visually Engaging
On a marketer’s list of priorities, engagement is consistently in the top 3. So your prospective clients need to be able to interact with the landing page. You’re going to create it, but it needs to be able to sell itself with the site visitors.
Here is where you need to step backward and map your priorities. The list of landing page priorities should look similar to this:
1. Offer: use a high-quality image that immediately attracts focus.
2. Action: tell the person what steps need to be taken for them to get the offer.
3. Form: keep this visible, above the page fold! Keeping a buyer from having to scroll greatly increases conversion rates.
4. Copy: should include concise information about the offer, written in a way that a buyer knows what they are getting and doesn’t need to read multiple paragraphs to understand. Bullet points are great here.
3. Action Oriented
Every page should have a call to action, but especially landing pages. Make it known how the buyer will get the chosen offer. Is it a downloadable eBook? Do you want them to subscribe to a newsletter?
Whatever the offer, the buyer needs to know immediately what steps they have to take to receive it. Language is extremely important here. Use wording that makes them feel like they are getting something for themselves – rather than you promoting something.
For example, “Get my eBook now” is a better wording for a form-submit button than “Get your eBook now.” Be sure not to ask too much of buyers early on in the journey, or they may be discouraged from continuing on.
4. SEO Effectiveness
While keyword importance has been downplayed in recent years, SEO is still a very important element in landing page success. Begin by performing keyword research relevant to what you feel your buyers would be searching for in each given stage of the buyer’s journey. Then using your selected wording, lace your keyword throughout your landing page, in the headers, text, meta-description, and page URL.
It is also good practice to utilize these in the body of the landing page, as long as your page still flows smoothly. You don’t need to force your keyword into the body of the landing page. Keyword stuffing makes for choppy reading; remember, landing pages are for consumers – not search engines.
User experience is key here, as Google pays close attention to on-page signals like dwell time and bounce rate.
This example from edupath works well for 3 reasons:
1. They use a targeted message.
2. The form is the focus of attention.
3. The background images used increases the engagement of this page.
For their Digital Menu Board, this example is from one of our clients, INNOVEX.
Key points here:
- The message is delivered plain and simple, communicating the pain point of increasing profits for restaurant owners.
- It features a very simple description of what to expect in the eBook.
- No scrolling is required, and the form is very basic and easy to submit.
Another example from Lyft shows how simple is sometimes better.
- The message is as straightforward as possible.
- The form stands out more than any other element.
- The form-submit button attracts attention and makes buyers more likely to submit.
Now you know the ins and outs of an effective landing page! As an inbound marketing agency, we live and breathe HubSpot.
They recently shared a blog post about great landing pages, with examples and it’s another opportunity for us to see what others do well (and not so well) so we can apply it to our own work.
