Creating the right landing page for your brand and campaign is one of the best ways to optimize your digital advertisements. A well-designed landing page can increase your return on investment and conversion rates tremendously. Every improvement you make to your pages, from the simplest of tweaks to the more advanced bold strategies, can have an immediate impact on your success. Remember that the whole point of creating landing pages is to direct your visitors to specific and relevant information quickly, instead of making them search for it throughout your whole website. This means that, while some may be helpful, the tips we have for creating the best website for your business will be different than the tips we have today for crafting the most effective landing page. Here are Bailey Creative’s top 10 tips for creating the right landing page for your business, campaign, and needs.
1) Set Goals
Like any good marketing strategy, a well-designed landing page will always begin by identifying your goals. Concrete, clear, and specific goals are crucial to creating an effective page and should happen before any sort of designing takes place. Decide what you want your landing page to accomplish and build from there. Some examples include increasing sales, conversions, website traffic, newsletter sign-ups, downloads, free-trials, brand awareness, local reach, and more. It’s always helpful to outline your expectations for your landing pages so that you have something to measure and gauge their success against later. Try to come up with a concrete number to compare your success to so that you are always actively working towards a goal.
2) Create a Clear Call to Action
Once you know your goals for your landing page, the next step is deciding what action you want your visitors to take. Your call to action should be directly tied to your goals and be supported by the rest of the content on your page. Strong call-to-action buttons can mean the difference between a bounce and a conversion, so they are more important than they may originally seem. Try to think past the simple and obvious “submit” or “learn more” buttons to really engage your visitors and make them want to click. We often recommend sticking to one or two call-to-action buttons at most so that you do not confuse or overwhelm your visitors with options.
3) Keep Messaging Consistent
You want to make sure your messaging is consistent not only throughout the whole page, but also between your ads and landing page. Although this sounds obvious, you would be surprised how often it is overlooked. Keeping your messaging consistent throughout your entire campaign will help prevent any sort of disconnect between what your ads are promising and what your landing page delivers. You want your landing page to provide a relevant and predictable experience for those who click your ads. Do not send your visitors to a generic landing page or your website’s home page or you risk a high bounce rate as people are left searching for the content provided in the ads.
4) Use Simple Forms
The simpler your landing page forms are, the easier it is for visitors to fill them out. This in turn makes people more likely to finish and actually submit their forms. We recommend asking for only the most necessary information and nothing more or you decrease the chances of people starting and finishing your form. Do you really need someone’s phone number and email address or does one suffice? Will a first name work or do you need a first and last name? When asking for billing info, take the vitals. Remember that once you have their contact info, you can always ask for additional information after the conversion.
5) Keep Your Consumer in Mind
When you are writing copy for your landing page, it is incredibly important that you use the voice of your consumer. Speaking in the language of your consumers, one they can easily understand without jargon, increases your chances of conversions. Leave out all the marketing buzzwords and terminology for your landing pages, and most other marketing material for that matter. Instead, try to appeal to the wants and needs of your potential consumers and emphasize the benefits you can provide them. Your consumers will probably care more about how your products and/or services can help them over the technical, industry-specific details.
6) Include Videos
Incorporating videos into your landing pages is a great way to reinforce your overall messaging and branding. This is especially true if you are trying to explain a complete or complex idea because it saves you from having to write walls of text that will only bog down your visitors. Videos are also a great way to humanize your brand and help make your landing page feel more personal. We recommend having an employee explain your service or customer demonstrate using your products in a video, instead of trying to convey the same information in text form. That being said, a landing page full of just videos will not be effective either – it is all about balance.
7) Pay Attention to Positioning
In the website design world, we talk a lot about something called “the fold”. Basically, you want all of your important items to appear “before the fold” or, in other words, visible to your visitors immediately without any scrolling. Put your forms and call-to-action button near the top of the landing page so they are easily accessible and visible right away. If your ads are successful, some of your visitors will be willing to convert as soon as your page loads so having this information pop up immediately will only help speed up your conversions. This doesn’t mean people will not scroll through your landing page, but you want the important information up top just in case.
8) Design for Mobile Users
Just like your website, optimizing your landing pages for mobile users is crucial to your success. Your page not only needs to look good on mobile, but it also needs to function and be tailored towards mobile users’ needs. Think about the last time you filled out a complete submission form on your phone, did you actually complete it, or did you get frustrated and give up? Keep your mobile forms very short and consider even just including a call-to-action button instead to make your consumer’s journey as easy as possible. Mobile ads are so effective because they appeal to consumers’ urgency and immediacy, so make sure your landing pages also tailor to this as well.
9) Choose your Funnel Method
You should make a decision between a long page format (a singular page) or series of mini pages (also known as mini-sites). Both have their advantages and disadvantages that should be applied to your business and target audience. Mini-sites cut down on scrolling and getting users used to clicking through pages on their way to a conversion, but they require a lot of content. On the flip side, long pages only have to load once and are arguably best suited for keeping landing pages short and engaging, but they can require a lot of scrolling. Again, you want to compare these options to your consumers and goals so that you funnel the most effectively.
10) Test Your Landing Page
Once you have your landing page launched, your work is not quite done yet. You want to test and track every aspect of your page to make sure it is as effective as possible. Just like how your website should never technically be complete, you should always be improving and optimizing your landing pages to better reach your goals. Remember that what works for one website or brand may not work for another. Run some A/B testing and play around with different headings, CTAs, buttons, images, colours, and formats to test what makes the most sense for your business and consumers.
We’re Here to Help!
We hope these tips help you get started brainstorming how to create or improve your company’s landing pages. Not sure how to take these tips and make them into actionable items? We’re here to help answer any of your questions and get you on the right path to better landing pages! Our website design and development services will help you create or update your website so that it separates you from your competitors and keeps your consumers’ attention. Fill out our contact form, give us a call at (519) 837-8333 or send us an email at info@baileycreative.ca to get started!
Want more digital marketing advice, tips & tricks, articles, and facts? Don’t forget to sign up for our monthly Digital Digest newsletter to stay up to date on our services and ideas! As a digital marketing agency, we’re here to answer any questions you may have and to help your business grow online to reach new consumers. Contact us if you’re ready to improve your online channels and build your brand’s digital marketing potential.
Create the Best Landing Page for Your Business
Creating the right landing page for your brand and campaign is one of the best ways to optimize your digital advertisements. A well-designed landing page can increase your return on investment and conversion rates tremendously. Every improvement you make to your pages, from the simplest of tweaks to the more advanced bold strategies, can have an immediate impact on your success. Remember that the whole point of creating landing pages is to direct your visitors to specific and relevant information quickly, instead of making them search for it throughout your whole website. This means that, while some may be helpful, the tips we have for creating the best website for your business will be different than the tips we have today for crafting the most effective landing page. Here are Bailey Creative’s top 10 tips for creating the right landing page for your business, campaign, and needs.
1) Set Goals
Like any good marketing strategy, a well-designed landing page will always begin by identifying your goals. Concrete, clear, and specific goals are crucial to creating an effective page and should happen before any sort of designing takes place. Decide what you want your landing page to accomplish and build from there. Some examples include increasing sales, conversions, website traffic, newsletter sign-ups, downloads, free-trials, brand awareness, local reach, and more. It’s always helpful to outline your expectations for your landing pages so that you have something to measure and gauge their success against later. Try to come up with a concrete number to compare your success to so that you are always actively working towards a goal.
2) Create a Clear Call to Action
Once you know your goals for your landing page, the next step is deciding what action you want your visitors to take. Your call to action should be directly tied to your goals and be supported by the rest of the content on your page. Strong call-to-action buttons can mean the difference between a bounce and a conversion, so they are more important than they may originally seem. Try to think past the simple and obvious “submit” or “learn more” buttons to really engage your visitors and make them want to click. We often recommend sticking to one or two call-to-action buttons at most so that you do not confuse or overwhelm your visitors with options.
3) Keep Messaging Consistent
You want to make sure your messaging is consistent not only throughout the whole page, but also between your ads and landing page. Although this sounds obvious, you would be surprised how often it is overlooked. Keeping your messaging consistent throughout your entire campaign will help prevent any sort of disconnect between what your ads are promising and what your landing page delivers. You want your landing page to provide a relevant and predictable experience for those who click your ads. Do not send your visitors to a generic landing page or your website’s home page or you risk a high bounce rate as people are left searching for the content provided in the ads.
4) Use Simple Forms
The simpler your landing page forms are, the easier it is for visitors to fill them out. This in turn makes people more likely to finish and actually submit their forms. We recommend asking for only the most necessary information and nothing more or you decrease the chances of people starting and finishing your form. Do you really need someone’s phone number and email address or does one suffice? Will a first name work or do you need a first and last name? When asking for billing info, take the vitals. Remember that once you have their contact info, you can always ask for additional information after the conversion.
5) Keep Your Consumer in Mind
When you are writing copy for your landing page, it is incredibly important that you use the voice of your consumer. Speaking in the language of your consumers, one they can easily understand without jargon, increases your chances of conversions. Leave out all the marketing buzzwords and terminology for your landing pages, and most other marketing material for that matter. Instead, try to appeal to the wants and needs of your potential consumers and emphasize the benefits you can provide them. Your consumers will probably care more about how your products and/or services can help them over the technical, industry-specific details.
6) Include Videos
Incorporating videos into your landing pages is a great way to reinforce your overall messaging and branding. This is especially true if you are trying to explain a complete or complex idea because it saves you from having to write walls of text that will only bog down your visitors. Videos are also a great way to humanize your brand and help make your landing page feel more personal. We recommend having an employee explain your service or customer demonstrate using your products in a video, instead of trying to convey the same information in text form. That being said, a landing page full of just videos will not be effective either – it is all about balance.
7) Pay Attention to Positioning
In the website design world, we talk a lot about something called “the fold”. Basically, you want all of your important items to appear “before the fold” or, in other words, visible to your visitors immediately without any scrolling. Put your forms and call-to-action button near the top of the landing page so they are easily accessible and visible right away. If your ads are successful, some of your visitors will be willing to convert as soon as your page loads so having this information pop up immediately will only help speed up your conversions. This doesn’t mean people will not scroll through your landing page, but you want the important information up top just in case.
8) Design for Mobile Users
Just like your website, optimizing your landing pages for mobile users is crucial to your success. Your page not only needs to look good on mobile, but it also needs to function and be tailored towards mobile users’ needs. Think about the last time you filled out a complete submission form on your phone, did you actually complete it, or did you get frustrated and give up? Keep your mobile forms very short and consider even just including a call-to-action button instead to make your consumer’s journey as easy as possible. Mobile ads are so effective because they appeal to consumers’ urgency and immediacy, so make sure your landing pages also tailor to this as well.
9) Choose your Funnel Method
You should make a decision between a long page format (a singular page) or series of mini pages (also known as mini-sites). Both have their advantages and disadvantages that should be applied to your business and target audience. Mini-sites cut down on scrolling and getting users used to clicking through pages on their way to a conversion, but they require a lot of content. On the flip side, long pages only have to load once and are arguably best suited for keeping landing pages short and engaging, but they can require a lot of scrolling. Again, you want to compare these options to your consumers and goals so that you funnel the most effectively.
10) Test Your Landing Page
Once you have your landing page launched, your work is not quite done yet. You want to test and track every aspect of your page to make sure it is as effective as possible. Just like how your website should never technically be complete, you should always be improving and optimizing your landing pages to better reach your goals. Remember that what works for one website or brand may not work for another. Run some A/B testing and play around with different headings, CTAs, buttons, images, colours, and formats to test what makes the most sense for your business and consumers.
We’re Here to Help!
We hope these tips help you get started brainstorming how to create or improve your company’s landing pages. Not sure how to take these tips and make them into actionable items? We’re here to help answer any of your questions and get you on the right path to better landing pages! Our website design and development services will help you create or update your website so that it separates you from your competitors and keeps your consumers’ attention. Fill out our contact form, give us a call at (519) 837-8333 or send us an email at info@baileycreative.ca to get started!
Want more digital marketing advice, tips & tricks, articles, and facts? Don’t forget to sign up for our monthly Digital Digest newsletter to stay up to date on our services and ideas! As a digital marketing agency, we’re here to answer any questions you may have and to help your business grow online to reach new consumers. Contact us if you’re ready to improve your online channels and build your brand’s digital marketing potential.
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