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Hopefully these pages that people "land" on when they reach your website are optimized to generate and nurture leads, deliver conversions, and move visitors down the marketing funnel to help them convert to leads. If not, you've got a lot of wasted opportunity happening on your website.
How do you optimize your site's landing pages? While there are several tips and tricks to get the most value out of your landing pages, the primary pointer is rather simple: Stay focused. Very focused.
Landing pages are exceptional visit characterisation tools. But to be most effective, they should focus on one specific topic. For example, if your goal is to get visitors to convert to leads by filling out a form to download an eBook, stay focused on the eBook. Tell your visitors what they will learn from the eBook and why they should download it. Do NOT also try to pitch other content, sell other services or provide visitors with other opportunities to navigate away from the page (Valk, 2014).
An example of a landing page that does this really well is HubSpot's own landing page promoting its on-page SEO template:
The page clearly explains what a user will learn from the content and the company gets bonus points for using smart content. What does that mean? Do you see how there is "Hi, HubSpot Customer" where a form would typically be? HubSpot knows me and it knows that I'm a customer, so it doesn't burden me by making me fill out a form to provide information they already have. Instead, they have decided that they don't need any more information from me right now and they're going to let me just pass on through to the gated content and download the template. Now that's great user experience. It's also a topic for another post.
Still not convinced that landing pages are worth the time and effort? Think again. Take it from the creators of inbound marketing, HubSpot. Here are a few reasons they give that every business needs landing pages:
- Easily generate leads. Landing pages allow you to convert your site visitors into leads with forms to collect contact information.
- Give your offers a place to live. What good is great content if you don't have a place to present it to your audience? Landing pages provide a home base where you can send prospects through social media and email promotion.
- Collect demographic information about your prospects. With the forms used on landing pages, you can collect more than just the typical name and email address. As long as you keep your forms short - five fields or less - you can collect all kinds of information that could help you in your marketing efforts. Think city, state, postal code, age range, income level, company size, etc.
- Understand which prospects are more engaged. By analyzing the information provided through the form submissions, you can begin to see patterns emerge in regards to who is most interested in your content.
- Provide fuel for other marketing channels. Building off of the last point, by understanding who is interested in your content, you can create more content to continue to appeal to your biggest fans - and nurture them until they convert to customers.
- Offer insights into the effectiveness of your marketing offers. Because landing pages have clear conversion opportunities, it's easy to measure their effectiveness. You can track the number of page visitors, the number of form submissions (conversions), and then hopefully which of those conversions become customers.
So if you haven’t started using landing pages, perhaps today is the day to take your first step. I think you’ll be quite pleased with your results.
Resources
Valk, T. (October 2, 2014). "Landing Pages and Why They Matter". Yoast Academy. Retrieved from https://yoast.com/landing-pages-matter/
Vaughan, P. (April 27, 2012). "Why Landing Pages Are an Indispensable Part of Marketing". HubSpot Blog. Retrieved from http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/32566/Why-Landing-Pages-Are-an-Indispensable-Part-of-Marketing.aspx
