How to Generate Traffic with Landing Pages
If you’re currently busy building your website and developing your online marketing presence, you’ve probably noticed the emphasis on conversion rates as a marker for success. Funneling user clicks into completed transactions depends on a variety of factors, but one critical component that is often overlooked is the landing page—an essential element for maximizing your digital marketing.
A common mistake made in website design is when advertisers direct traffic to their homepage. You’ve probably experienced this frustration yourself: you’re trying to check out a certain sale from an email marketing campaign only to be brought to a homepage where you have to search for the exact promotion you were looking for, or even worse—you have to login to the website before you can find the particular service you need.
Having to take extra steps to find the specific page that your audience needs decreases the chance of a completed sale. That’s why landing pages—which function as individual web pages used solely for marketing campaigns—are so important for maintaining the user’s focus on what you are offering them.
When streamlining your web design and the effectiveness of your marketing, practice makes perfect—and implementing multiple landing pages can increase online leads by up to 55%. By using landing pages as doorways to your business, you can boost conversion rates by connecting directly with your customers.
So with the importance of landing pages in mind, here are 5 tips for crafting a flawless marketing webpage!
Spend some time on design
The effectiveness of a webpage can be attributed in part to how it is designed; in any advertising context, your audience will judge a book by its cover. Planning, testing, and refining your landing page design is absolutely critical for increasing your conversion rates.
The best landing pages are clean and well-organized, utilizing colors and images to best direct the audience’s eyes towards a singular call to action. The placement and positioning of images, videos, headings, and text should be neat and non-intrusive in order to take full advantage of the landing page’s marketing potential. A good example of the importance of page design is the contrast between the call to action click and the rest of the page background—we want the color disparity here to be just right for emphasizing why the customer should continue pursuing the offer.
Text should be sparse and impactful—as this Unbounce study demonstrates, landing pages with less than 100 words are 50% more likely to get a conversion than a wordier page. To avoid overwhelming your audience, prioritize info that will facilitate their arrival at the next step, and ensure that the language is quick and easy to scan. Here’s an example landing page with the different elements broken down into what purpose they serve:
Focus on consistency
As with the design of a landing page, it’s important to remember that repetition is a powerful tool for your marketing campaign.
Keep in mind that when your targeted audience arrives at a landing page, they’re going to be coming in with an expectation already formed by the advertisement that led them there. If you click on “20% off your purchase today!” and find yourself on a homepage with a variety of dropdowns and distractions, you’re less likely to expend the effort of locating that discount.
The landing page should therefore match that advertisement in design and copy—tackling both visual and literary cues to compel the audience forward. This is where the landing page differs (in a good way!) from the homepage; landing pages are better at scoring conversions because the entire purpose of the page is to deliver what the ad has promised the customer. So regardless of what kind of landing page you’re using for your business—data collection forms or clickthrough pages that lead directly to the sale—having a consistent message from the moment the user clicks on your ad is imperative.
Make your formatting accessible
Another way to elevate your online marketing strategies above competitors is to invest some extra energy towards formatting.
Because landing pages are so crucial in getting conversions, making them mobile-friendly and viewable ensures that customers are able to intuitively and easily complete their purchases. An example of designing with mobile devices in mind is to keep the call to action button and associated form front and center, clearly contrasting with the background—so that the customer notices it right away, no matter what device they’re using.
This way, you can be confident that your page doesn’t exclude that critical “mobile-only” audience by catering to multiscreen users. Limiting the number of form fields can also help with this; prioritize only the data that customers will actually give you for a conversion, like a simple email address.
For accessible formatting (just like with design), simplicity is key—landing pages don’t have to be too showy, but they should load quickly and entice the user to click on.
Tailor the copy for your audience
As established in tip #2, the landing page should be an echo of the advertisement. So when refining your landing pages, you want to look at where the traffic is coming from and compose copy that reflects the audience's expectations.
Once you’ve outlined the various sources of traffic and which landing pages work best for funneling conversions, it’s critical that the copy used on the page demonstrates an awareness of the audience’s language. Avoid buzzwords and marketing jargon; if the users are coming from an email link, you want to customize their landing page a little differently than those coming from a social media source—they might need some more convincing of the offered benefits.
For example, look at the all-important call to action button. “Submit” is a little dry; does your audience want to “Get Started!” or “Start Saving Now”? The call to action should relate directly to what your audience wants, and what the advertisement has promised them.
Additionally, copy that includes audience-specific social proofs (like testimonials, case studies, or endorsements) is shown to boost conversion rates. Ultimately, your copy needs to be crafted from the perspective of the customer, and not the marketer.
Test the page thoroughly
This last tip seems obvious, but it is absolutely required for developing above-average landing pages. Testing out a landing page allows you to track conversions and see, in real time, what needs to be tweaked about design or formatting. That data is incredibly helpful for comparing user experiences and tracing the flow from advertisements to landing pages and (eventually) completed conversions. Consider your landing pages as dynamic and versatile pieces of the marketing funnel—you can never test them too much!
If you keep these simple tips in mind, you should be able to develop clean, effective landing pages that can boost your conversion rates and grow your online business. Get in touch with us if you’d like to get started with devising a marketing strategy unique to your business and audience!
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