A landing page is a specifically designed destination site for visitors to arrive at when they click on an ad, or a link in a marketing email (don’t confuse a landing page with your homepage). Unlike your homepage, the focus of a landing page is conversion, and therefore a positive return on investment. Keeping this in mind, the following tips will help you design a landing page that generates the leads you need to help your business succeed and grow.
Define Your Objectives
Again, landing pages typically have one, all important purpose: conversion. Your landing page should be designed to achieve a particular outcome (whether it be sales or data capture), and this should be at the forefront of your mind when it comes to the design process.
Planning is everything. For your landing page to be effective, it needs to meet the goals you set out to achieve, so be sure to define these before you begin.
Know Your Customers
The tone of your landing page should be defined by the visitors you expect to attract. If you’re selling cupcakes, the tone and design of your landing page is going to be extremely different from one selling life insurance. Absolutely everything on this page should be appropriate to your business and especially your customers.
Capture the Attention of Your Customers
Once your customers reach your page, you need to capture their attention quickly. To do this, incorporate a clear brand identifier (your logo for example), a bold heading, and an image that is relevant to your business.
Your customers are going to be initially drawn into your site based on its visual appeal, and using graphics to support your content can add value to your landing page. Stock photos are one viable option for images on your landing page, as they are professional and affordable.
Using the right stock image will help you communicate your purpose to your customers in a clear, professional manner.
Have a Prominent Purpose
Since you should have already defined your objectives and your purpose, it should be very clear to your customers what courses of action are available to them. Incorporate large, clear calls to action that make it easy for your customers to do what you want them to.
Remember, every extra click that it takes for your customer to act will reduce the response you receive by around ten percent. Putting a clear link in the instantly viewable part of your page will improve your response rate exponentially. Using imperative language (download now, click to buy) will also give them a little extra push in the right direction.
Keep It Simple
Extraneous information is the kiss of death to conversions. You do not want your visitor to become bogged down in reading content that isn’t relevant to the campaign at hand (remember those all important objectives).
Video footage can be a great way to convey a message to your customers and doesn’t require too much effort on their part. If you can’t afford to film custom footage, stock video can replace boring content and help improve focus by keeping your page length to a minimum.
Keep it Error Free
It is absolutely vital to proofread your landing page. Poor spelling, grammar, and broken links tell your customers that you don’t care, and will drive them away in droves. An error free landing page communicates effort, care, and professionalism.
About Rob
Rob Toledo loves all things design and marketing. He is working alongside Shutterstock Stock Photography creating guides for small businesses around designing better websites. He can be reached on Twitter @stentontoledo
If so, please join over 10,000 people who receive exclusive weekly online business and blogging tips, and get a FREE COPY of my eBook, 10 Steps to Free Website Traffic! Just enter your name and email below:
If you're building a business website these days, you're in luck.
WordPress has revolutionized the ease and power of what a website can do and be. Now you can quickly create a website that is optimized for top search results, and update it yourself whenever you want.
As you'll see in a moment, the SmallBiz Theme is much more than a mere WordPress theme. It's a complete solution for your business web presence including a Website, Blog, Facebook Page and Mobile Website.
Let's take a look at each of these, and how they help you generate new business from the web…
Click to continue...See my disclosure about advertising and affiliate links
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Thank you Rob for this thoughtful article. I think that sometimes we (me) get so excited about the graphics and color scheme that I can get sidetracked. Back in the day, as a media planner, I would spent a great deal of time understanding the consumer. This is an awesome question to ask clients or yourself when starting a new website.
Excellent article and advice. Sometimes you get so involved in getting all your content on the page , we forget to use the white space effectively to draw in your audience.
Hey Sam -
Thanks for your comment — I definitely understand the desire to incorporate tons of cool stuff all in one place — but sometimes overdoing it can really complicate the site’s experience