Guest author Anna Crowe is Content Strategy Lead at Leadfeeder.
Creating a landing page is easy. With multiple landing page creators on the market, you can publish one in minutes.
The hard part? Designing a landing page that converts inbound traffic into leads.
If your messaging, copy, or branding fails to capture interest, high traffic numbers become irrelevant because you’ll struggle to generate leads. It’s like having a basketball team that easily enters the opponent’s court but fails to land the ball in the basket—a lot of hard-earned momentum goes down the drain.
In this post, you’ll learn how to keep your landing page from “dropping the ball” during one of the most transformative, make-it-or-break-it points in the Buyer’s Journey.
Imagine being greeted by a salesman making an interesting offer. He begins his pitch, but there’s a problem … his voice is too quiet, he sounds like he’s talking through his nose, and he constantly beats around the bush with sales jargon like:
“We have over 10 years of experience.”
Or the innovative classic …
“Satisfaction is guaranteed.”
He’s mumbling, and you can’t understand him.
Would this salesman stand a chance at selling his product to you? No way.
Your landing page is like a virtual sales rep. Without a value proposition to explain why you’re uniquely suited to help your visitor, it “mumbles” and lacks clarity, causing your visitor to lose interest and leave.
According to research by MarketingExperiments, “The biggest hurdle companies have is creating an effective value proposition; the second is communicating it clearly.”
What makes for a compelling landing page value proposition? Two things:
Invision’s landing page headline describes the benefit of its product. Invision then reinforces its value proposition by explaining how those benefits come about with the following points:
Falcon instantly acknowledges its target audience and explains how its product can turn any social media marketer into a “content whisperer, content wizard, team whisperer, analytics geek, customer hero and strategy guru.”
Fine-tuning your value proposition can be tricky. To discover why customers choose you over the competition, pay attention to the language customers use on review sites, testimonials, and when you interact with them.
Getting potential leads to your page is great. Unfortunately, this doesn’t guarantee that they’ll enter your sales funnel or buy from you. Your landing page must still get your visitor to click, subscribe, or engage.
To ensure that your landing page actually entices your visitors to act, use benefit-driven points to explain exactly how the features of your product or service add value.
Apple’s iPod ad is a classic example:
The feature is “1GB of storage for MP3s”; the benefit is “1000 songs in your pocket.”
Here’s another great example from Drift:
The feature is an AI chatbot that engages customers while they’re browsing; the benefit is that you get to “skip the funnel.”
As a self-described marketer stuck in a salesperson’s body, I’ve learned a hack for writing benefit-driven emails, marketing copy, and product descriptions without painfully waiting for inspiration to strike. It’s called the “so what?” test.
Simply read through your features and landing page copy until you find parts where you talk about your product or service. Then ask yourself, “So what?”
For instance, if you’re selling an inbound lead generation tool, you can use this question to transform the following bland descriptions into beaming benefits:
After answering the “so what?” question for each point, create a vivid picture of how the reader stands to benefit:
Seventy-nine percent of smartphone owners use their devices to shop. But when forced to wait longer than three seconds for a page to load, more than 50 percent will exit a webpage.
Given that it takes mere seconds to gauge compatibility with mobile devices, there’s no excuse for not having a responsive landing page. The small tweaks needed to improve responsiveness, like decluttering design elements or resizing images, might take a few minutes and will ultimately reward your landing page with a better user experience and more traffic from Google.
Restaurants that have an eager line of customers queuing outside entice people who pass by. Similarly, luxury clothing stores that shut down for celebrities to shop in them often sell high-ticket items without worrying about price objections.
Social proof is a powerful persuasive tool.
According to research by Nielsen, 70 percent of people will trust a review from someone they’ve never even met. Social proof works because:
People might be skeptical about what you say about your product, but they’re likely to believe what someone else who’s used your product is saying.
That’s why testimonials, reviews, and certification badges are an excellent way to communicate trust and authority on your landing page.
(Source)
Loading speed might seem like a small detail, but it can have a meteoric impact on your conversion rate. Pages that load faster have better engagement, stronger conversions, a friendlier user experience, and better search engine rankings.
To improve your landing page loading speed:
If your landing page isn’t filling your funnel with leads, there are barriers to conversion that have to be addressed. And the only way to discover, diagnose, and fix these barriers is to track problems and test changes with user analytics data and behavioral tracking tools.
For instance, at Leadfeeder, our Google Analytics and heatmap data revealed that users were confused about our pricing.
(The pre-test pricing plan page)
Our pricing plan—which was not clickable at the time—was attracting a lot of clicks. This signaled that users intended to learn more about pricing, but were prevented from doing so because they couldn’t click to find out more.
In response, we tested a clickable plan (alongside other CTA changes), got a 33 percent conversion rate boost, and generated an extra $11,000 in MRR.
After creating your landing page, combine Google Analytics data with mouse click data, scroll maps, and heatmaps to discover barriers to conversion. Then, A/B test key changes to discover a winner that continually drives more leads and revenue.
Smart basketball players know: Every shot counts. That same message goes for marketers. Smart marketers know: Every visit counts. That’s why optimizing your landing page for each visit is vital for turning leads into customers.
If you understand why the ball isn’t making it to the net, you’ll create a better, more effective landing page for everyone.