What Are (Optimised) Landing Pages?
Like many computer terms, there are plenty of definitions running around for this one. Technically, any web page can be called a landing page as it can be used to direct users to (land on) your website. You could use your blog, paid adverts or even search engines to funnel traffic to one or more pages on your website. These could be your product page or even a search page. However, this is rather misleading as for a landing page to be truly effective it must also be optimised for a specific job and cannot be like any other page on your site. We therefore refer to Optimised Landing Pages as special web pages built with one purpose in mind, such as receive traffic for a promoted product or from specific search terms. It must also contain a call to action (CTA) such as an enquiry form or a buy button.
Since optimised landing pages should be built with a specific purpose in mind, it is hard to provide hard rules to follow since these depend on what you want to achieve. However here are some basic ground rules to follow that will help you get it right:
Design
The design and general layout of a landing page should not follow that of your main website. This is because the purpose of the landing page is to get the attention of the visitor on one target message. The role of menus and other navigation functions on your website will only serve as a distraction and reduce the effectiveness of your page. On the other hand, the landing page should portray a clear message, such as product and its benefits and visitors lead to a powerful call to action such as a buy now button.
Relevant
A landing page should be carefully targetted to a specific audience and not be generic. For example, if the page is to be used to direct traffic from a paid advert for a product, then the landing page should only focus on this same product. Landing customers on a generic page will confuse your visitors with irrelevant content or appearing out of context.
Mobile Responsive
Visitors will come to your page using a variety of devices. Increasingly people will use their mobile phones and other types of mobile devices. You must also consider other forms of marketing campaigns you are running that link visitors to your landing pages, such as email newsletters and offers. These will be read on mobile devices too and will funnel readers to your optimised page at the time they are read. A mobile responsive landing page will be able to adapt to the device used to deliver your message... and convert.
Analytics
No matter how optimised your landing pages are, you must use analytics tools such as Google Analytics to review and constantly adjust your pages. Firstly, you will monitor traffic giving you a good idea of the volume of visitors landing on the page. Delving into the stats, you should keep track of your effective traffic sources such as search engines, social media or paid ads that are working to generate your traffic. Furthermore, a landing page can track conversions helping you visualise the effectiveness of your landing page strategy as you continue tuning the parameters.
Quality Content & Copy
Amazingly, you may not be a good judge of what your landing page should say and do. This is because you already know your product or service inside and out, whilst your landing page should target visitors who are likely still unaware of what you offer. This is why professionally produced content (which includes headlines, copy, graphics, media, meta tags and call to actions) will make a huge difference to how your page communicates the benefits and relevance to our future customers.
The production of rich media such as videos plays a very important role in landing pages too. It is well known that pictures and photos are vastly more effective at communicating with customers than text. A well produced video can make a compelling case to visitors who are more likely to take the time to watch it. Infographics are another powerful media type that can help you map out ideas, benefits and other key messages in a simple (fun?) way.
The Importance Of Being Social
While you are creating content for your landing pages, you should already be thinking of shareable chunks of information to use on social media platforms. Think of visitors who will help you gain more visibility by simply sharing your interesting content with their friends using Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn or other popular hangouts. Don't forget to add social interaction buttons on your content. Your landing page should also make use of social sharing protocols and meta tags (such as OpenGraph) to give you more control over how your content will show up on social media.
Be Ruthless
Landing pages are meant to be disposable. This means that while monitoring your performance, you should also periodically decide which pages will stay and which pages should go. Keep landing pages fresh and relevant and kill off pages that are pushing last year's offers. You should also be constantly thinking of creating new landing pages to match your new products and market trends. You may also use landing pages to push seasonal offers and other ways in which you promote your products.
In conclusion, optimised landing pages can help your sales team generate new sales leads and meet monthly targets. The above points only cover some of the basic concepts and best practices to get this right. You should however also consider internal processes and sales conversion abilities within this context since sales leads will still need work in order to convert!
Webcraft - Inbound Marketing Solutions
At Webcraft we help organisations build up and implement a comprehensive digital strategy for their business. We also provide the tools you may need to execute your plan in order to be both efficient and effective on the net. Powered by our WorkSpace Cloud platform, our Inbound Marketing solutions includes websites, blogs, landing pages, ecommerce and much more.
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