If you’re trying to achieve effective digital marketing, you know that landing pages are at the core of your efforts. Organisations that get them right turn their websites into assets that consistently bring in and nurture leads. However, they’re challenging to set up perfectly and can become an expensive liability that does more damage to your organisation than good.
We understand that you may feel worried or nervous about setting up a good landing page. Without the knowledge and experience, it can be pretty intimidating to tackle the process yourself. That’s why we’ll discuss how you can set up a great landing page in 5 easy steps.
Before adding anything to your landing page, you need to figure out how it fits in with the rest of your website and marketing strategy. To this end, ask yourself the following:
What is the purpose of this landing page? Is it to inform, convert or nurture visitors?
How will you drive traffic to the page? Is it connected to a campaign, and what should it reference in the copy?
What other pages will relate to this landing page? Be sure to link appropriately.
How will you capture visitor information? Will you put content behind a form, or ask visitors to sign up for a newsletter?
If you intend to capture information, what lead magnet will you use? Blog articles, research, whitepapers, free demos, or consultations can all be used.
After answering these questions, you’ll have a greater idea of the direction your copy, design, and CTAs will follow. You’ll also have a better idea of what data to track and what metrics to judge success by.
Now that you have an idea of what you want to achieve, you can begin to create your copy. When creating copy for a landing page, you want to keep focused on the actions you want your visitors to perform while providing the information they need to do those actions. For example, if you want visitors to convert, you need to convince them why it’s in their best interests while assuring them your solution is the best.
The key to your copy is to keep it brief and easily scannable. Bullet points, bold headings, and short, punchy, paragraphs all assist in achieving this effect.
Quick tips
With your copy in place, it’s time to put your call to action (CTAs). These are the pieces of copy or buttons that encourage your visitors to convert. Even though the purpose of your page is to educate your visitors, you always want to tell your visitors what to do next.
CTAs should be sprinkled throughout your copy. The most obvious CTAs should be listed at the top, near the middle, and at the end of your copy. No matter where your readers are on the page, you want them to have the opportunity to use the CTA.
The CTA itself should use action words that inspire urgency. Think of “Sign up today”, “Find out more,” and “Buy now”- each tells the reader to perform an action and to do it quickly.
In addition to your more obvious CTAs, include links to other pages where it makes sense. For example, if you touch on a subject that you cover in more detail elsewhere on your website, link to it for the readers that may have a better chance of converting on those pages.
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With your design and call to action-ready, you can start designing the page. Design should reinforce your main message, and help make the page look interesting without distracting.
For this, be sure to avoid too many images and stick to neutral colours in general. The only area you want to deviate from this (ever so slightly) is where you want to call attention, namely the call to action, the form, or the hard-hitting copy.
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Your landing page is live! But that doesn’t mean the job is done.
You need to monitor and optimise your landing page as you drive traffic to it for the best results. Thankfully, marketing platforms like HubSpot can help you identify what works on your page and what doesn’t. It achieves this through reporting, heat mapping, and showing you how visitors interact with your page.
However, it’s important to track the statistics that matter. If you try to record everything, you won’t be able to garner any real results and will just confuse your marketing team. Keep it simple with one objective in focus at a time, and you’ll enhance your landing pages.
Quick tips
Following the above steps can help you build your first landing page, but there’s a lot more to running a successful website. Understandably, you may not have the time, resources or knowledge to do it all yourself - which means you need to find a partner to guide you.
If you want to be an organisation whose website is a central asset, you need to start with an experienced web developer that understands the sales and marketing process. We understand that finding the right developer is a frustrating and time-consuming process, which is why we have spent the last 12 years designing, developing and maintaining high-performing websites for dozens of B2B clients worldwide.
We give you everything you need to build a high-performing website - developers included. Start with taking our free website audit and watch as your search rankings, traffic and online leads increase.