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To help your business grow and thrive, you must find leads and nurture them in all the right ways, inspiring them to become paying customers. If you want to do that effectively, you’ll need to use landing pages as bait while fishing for leads. You cannot just slap together a page willy-nilly and hope for great results, however. You must take the right approach if you want to capture leads for your marketing program.
Ready to get started? Here’s all you need to know about creating high-quality landing pages.
First Things First, What is a Landing Page?
Before you can create compelling landing pages, you need to know exactly what a landing page is anyway. A lead generation landing page is a standalone, purpose-built web page designed to serve as a gate to even more content.
When well-designed, the page inspires visitors to fill out the form and trade their contact info for a valuable piece of content, like:
- eBooks
- Newsletters
- Checklists
- Tutorials
- Product demos
- Online courses
- Webinars
The sky is the limit on what you put behind the gate, but the journey starts with a landing page that drives interest in the content behind the form.
10 Smart Landing Page Best Practices
Here are 10 excellent best practices to use in the creation of all the landing pages for your brand.
1. Use Headlines to Focus on the Benefits
The vast majority of web users like to scan their content instead of reading all the words on the page. So, be sure to give them the inside scoop by using your headlines to focus on the benefits. By providing the ‘why’ front and center, your landing page will inspire action and get you more leads from the start.
2. Choose a Picture That Illustrates the Offer
A picture speaks 1,000 words, so it’s wise to put imagery to work on your landing page. To do that effectively, select an image that clearly illustrates the offer at a glance. Better yet, find an image of someone benefiting from your offer to get your landing page visitors filling out your form fast.
3. Create Truly Compelling Copy
Landing pages are prime marketing real estate, which means you need to make every last word count. You don’t want to waste any space, or your visitors could get overwhelmed and click away. To avoid that, write clear, concise, and compelling copy that helps your visitors see the benefits of trading their info for the gated content.
4. Put the Lead Form Above the Fold
The form must stay above the fold, or it could get lost in the fray. What’s the fold anyway? Think of your landing page as the front page of a newspaper, which has a fold right in the center. The top section has the main headline of the day to inspire passersby to stop and buy a copy. On a landing page, the area above the fold is everything you can see before scrolling down at all.
5. Include a Clear, Standout Call-to-Action
If you want your landing page visitors to take action after reading your content, you need to tell them the next steps to take. Fortunately, you can easily do that by always including a clear, standout call-to-action (CTA). Although CTA styles vary, landing page versions should just instruct your readers to fill out the form to get the content as promised.
6. Offer a Relevant Incentive
The content offered through your landing page must align with your brand. Otherwise, your visitors might wonder, “What’s the point?” and you definitely don’t want that. So, think about what resources your customers might need from your brand and build them out as your next piece of gated content.
7. Don’t Ask for More Than You Need
No one likes long forms to fill out. For that reason, you should only ask for the information you need to take your marketing program to the next level. Ideally, you should just ask for their name, email, and other pertinent contact info. If you’d like to build out buyer personas later, you can always send over surveys by email to gather other data.
8. Remove All Navigation
Landing pages have one goal: to get visitors to fill out the form in exchange for the gated content. Any other navigation on the page will distract from that goal. Keep distractions to a minimum by removing all other navigation buttons, links, and the like, so your form can stand out and get the attention it deserves.
9. Ensure Your Page is Responsive
With so many people now using their mobile phones to browse the web, all your landing pages must be responsive to have the desired effect. A truly responsive web page consistently shows up on all devices, ensuring your form stays visible and easy to access always. Also, go beyond devices alone to check that the page appears as it should across all browsers before calling it good.
10. Make Your Website Search Engine Friendly
To best promote your landing page, you’ll need to make it search engine friendly. Start by choosing a target keyword for that specific page. Then, integrate it into at least one heading and once every 250 words throughout the rest of your content. After that, only use semantically related keywords for the rest of the page. By doing that, you’ll have your landing page content optimized for both organic search and paid ads.
The best landing page examples have all the above elements in place from the start. With that move, your landing pages can dramatically increase the effectiveness of your lead generation campaigns. Your efforts will help promote the success of your company by demonstrating the value of your brand to your customers.
