Recently, we have been posting a lot about social media, PPC, and SEO, because they are three of the key rapidly changing and evolving areas of Internet marketing. However, all three of these areas of marketing are used to drive traffic to your site, which is only half of the equation. The other half of the equation and key driver of results is conversion. As an Internet marketing firm, we can’t emphasize enough the importance of focusing on both areas to get the most out of your Internet marketing investment. In this post, we’re going to discuss the basics of landing pages and how you can maximize conversion.
Selecting Your Customer
Before you can start building a landing page, you have to gain an understanding of what you want to communicate. To know what you want to communicate, it’s best to gain a clear understanding of your customer’s needs. The best way to achieve this is by developing a profile or profiles of your top converting customers. Then, it’s a matter of selecting the customer profile and segment that you want to go after, and developing a landing page designed specifically for that customer.
Defining Your Goals
One of the most important things to do, if you have not already done so, is to determine the goal of your campaign and landing page. Your primary options are:
1. Lead generation – where a prospect completes a registration form in return for something free such as an eBook.
2. Ecommerce – whereby a customer adds items to a shopping cart and completes a check-out process.
3. Information based – where the primary goal is to provide educational information and build a relationship, etc.
Developing Your Content
Once you have a clear understanding of your goals and your customer profile that you would like to target, it’s a matter of developing the content for your landing page. And this is all about developing a compelling sales letter, if it’s a lead generation or ecommerce site. Our eBook, the 3-Zones of Internet Marketing, gets into more detail about sales letter development. We’d recommend downloading it for more information.
The key is that you want to view the content on your landing page as three distinct areas. The first, and most important, is your headline because it is the key element that pulls the prospect into your landing page to convert. Small changes to your heading can have a significant impact on your landing page conversion. Your heading should either refer to the place the visitor came from and/or the ad copy that encouraged the click. The second area that you want to look at is your submit button content. Ideally, you want this to match your heading. They should work as a unit. The third area you want to work on is your body copy, including your subheadings, bullet points, social proof, etc.
Designing Your Landing Page
Once you have a strong understanding of what you want to communicate, it’s a matter of developing the design of your landing page. Start off with a simple wireframe so that your content and layout drives the design, not the other way around. With your landing page, everything impacts conversion from the layout to the colour and your Web form. An important thing to keep in mind when developing your Web form is that the more fields that you have on your form, the more anxiety you create. Try not to ask for the phone number as it severely impacts conversion. Ideally, you simply want to ask for a name and email address to maximize the number of leads generated. Then, worry about qualifying and scoring your leads later in your marketing campaign. An easy way to do this is by adding qualifying questions at a more mature step in the sales process such as a webinar registration page.
Selecting Your URL
Then it’s a matter of selecting the right URL. You want to select a URL that is relevant and easy to remember. For example, if we are running a social media campaign, we may want to use a URL such as www.wolf21.com/socialmediabuzz. The reason for selecting a URL that is easy to remember is to make it easy for prospects to share the URL and maximize usage.
Once your landing page is set up, it’s all about testing. If you have any questions regarding landing page layouts and best practices, feel free to comment. We’d be happy to help.