The use of landing pages for marketing campaigns can be a very helpful tactic when focusing your audiences on your key actions. Driving them to a home page or product detail page on a website can be distracting, as there are many other elements including site navigation, logins and related content. A landing page however has a single purpose: conversion. Let’s explore how to best use landing pages to support your integrated marketing campaigns.
Types of Landing Pages
Landing pages generally fall into two categories: lead generation and click through landing pages.
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A lead generation landing page could be used to capture visitor information via a form in exchange for something like a white paper, case study or to sign up for a webinar. For these types of landing pages, the benefits of the offer are the most important thing for visitors to initially see.
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A click through landing page is useful when a business or organization wants a visitor to take a specific action on another page such as submitting an application or signing up for something.
Components of a Great Landing Page
A landing page uses a separately designed template, so that there is more of an emphasis on completing an action from the page. While the design of your landing pages should of course have a visual consistency with your brand and the other campaign elements, all landing pages should have several core elements:
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Masthead image: This should be prominent so that the user immediately understands that they are in the right place without reading anything. If your campaign has multiple components (e.g., display ads, social media, email) then this visual should be consistent with them.
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Headline: This should be short and compelling so that the visitor immediately knows what the offer is. There may also be a need for a short subheading depending on the nature of the offer. Wording should be action-focused and should speak directly to a user’s need or painpoint.
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One clear call to action: Typically this would be presented as an obvious button (e.g., Apply Now, Contact Us) because it’s the reason you are driving the person to this page.
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Benefits of the offer: If you need additional content, keep it short and sweet using bullets or other visual strategies to not overwhelm users.
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Embedded form: Depending on the type of offer or next step, your landing page should have an embedded form. Form fields should be limited to only what you need so you don’t lose a visitor’s attention.
In addition, there may be a need for some additional supportive information, such as a testimonial quote or review – focused on helping the visitor trust your brand and take the next step. Always be sure that your site navigation and links to other site pages are not part of this page since they will distract from the reason the person came to the page.
What Marketing Tactics Should Drive Visitors to a Landing Page?
Unless you are doing general brand awareness marketing, you should think about using a landing page for your campaign. Promoting a specific product on social media? Drive them to a landing page. Using email to contact your existing or prospective customers about an offer? Drive them to a landing page. Investing in paid search to drive targeted visitors? You guessed it – drive them to a landing page.
Also, make sure that each individual promotion uses its own landing page versus being tempted to have more than one promotion on the landing page. Distracting users from the reason they came to the page will negatively impact conversions.
Optimizing Landing Pages for Search
Some offers may be exclusive for select audiences, so optimizing them for search wouldn’t apply. But if you’re looking for your landing page to rank in organic search, follow these landing page SEO best practices:
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Research and incorporate long tail keywords into your page: Since landing pages are aimed at converting, you want to focus on “bottom of funnel” (aka transactional) keywords which are known as long-tail keywords. Use your favorite keyword research tool (e.g., Google Keyword Planner) to search for phrases that are relevant to the topic. Then weave these naturally into your copy.
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Optimize meta tags: Writing a meta title focused on a key phrase and supporting it with a well written meta description can help attract organic traffic to your page as well.
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Follow standard technical SEO best practices: Like all site pages, your landing page should have a fast load time, should have optimized headings and structure and the page URL should also be topically relevant. Additionally, be sure to test both desktop and mobile versions.
Do Landing Pages Actually Work? Yes!
Like all digital assets you will want to track every possible component of your landing page so that you understand how it performs. Track every button and link and if your conversion takes place on another domain, implement cross-domain tracking so you have full conversion data. There are many factors that can influence how well a landing page will work for your campaign, but consider these statistics:
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A good conversion rate is between 2% and 5%, but this will vary by industry and offer. The financial services industry for example has a 6% average conversion rate (source: Unbounce).
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A/B testing can help identify issues and help you better optimize your page.
Let the integrated team of experts at ZAG Interactive strategize, design and develop a landing page for your business to help support your business goals. Contact us to learn more about our services.