The key to any successful digital ad campaign is a thoughtful, tailored landing page. Without it, all the energy and ad dollars spent on attracting customers to your ad and enticing them to click is wasted. It’s like setting out mousetraps without any cheese: how can you expect to capture that mouse without a delicious offer? (Ed: For the record, we don’t think of our clients like mice in a trap). Unless you’re going for simple brand awareness, you need to have a way to convert those ad impressions and clicks into leads. A great landing page is the crucial home stretch of that process, so let’s dig into 5 best practices that will keep your landing pages humming.
1. Use a Clear, Concise, Action-Oriented Headline
Like a great subject line, your landing page’s headline gives a visitor a quick, compelling overview of the subject matter at hand. In just a few words, your headline should set up expectations with clear, concise, action-oriented language. This is not the time for coy, clever wording. You need to spell out why your visitor can benefit from the offer on your landing page in no uncertain terms.
Headlines like “Crush Your Competition with Our Social Conquesting Guide” make it clear how someone could benefit from filling out your form. Taking a less direct tact with something like “Would you like to be more competitive in your industry?” might work on an initial ad, but it’s too vague and open-ended for a landing page.
2. Use Numbers, Bullets and Bold Text to Emphasize Key Points
The window a marketer has to close the deal from ad impression to new lead is very short. The last thing you want to do is slow down a visitor’s comprehension of your services with lengthy paragraphs and dense text.
Using numbered lists, bullet points and bold text allows you to highlight the meat of your offer without it getting bogged down in details. Not only do they allow for quick understanding, but they also visually help break up your page and train a visitor’s eye to the most important info.
3. Remove Your Website’s Standard Site Navigation
The key here is focus! You don’t want someone becoming distracted by your blog or product pages: you need them to stay on the landing page and fill out that form. So, it’s common for the best landing pages to remove all trace of the larger site navigation entirely, making it so that there’s no way to navigate away from the form to other parts of your site. It also keeps those potential leads focused on what they came to your landing page for in the first place!
Again, your goal here is to convey value propositions quickly and effectively in a way that gets your visitor to take the action you desire—not spend time browsing your website. By taking away the ability to navigate to other areas of your website, you keep the focus where it needs to be.
4. Your Form Length Should Mirror Your Offer
When it comes to the length of your contact form, you need to consider what you’re giving away in exchange for that information.
If you’re giving away a 20+ page eBook that provides invaluable information in a visually engaging layout for a potential customer, it makes sense that you’d ask for additional information like Industry, Company Size, Role/Position, Buying Behavior, etc. But if you’re simply looking to add more email addresses to your contact list, it’s best to keep things nice and simple.
Ideally, your team would create landing pages for every stage of the marketing funnel. You don’t want brand-new prospects to reach the same landing pages that a hot lead would see: both are in different stages of the buyer’s journey and therefore would likely have different levels of information they’re willing to give you.
Also consider how many chances you have to lose someone once they reach your landing page. You don’t want to miss out on a great lead because your form took 5 minutes to fill out!
5. Get Visual with Illustrative Images & Video
Remember point number 2? People’s attention spans these days are lightning-short. An eye-catching visual or engaging video can keep people trained on your offer, whereas a straight-text page will likely end up feeling like a chore to read.
Whether you’re pulling design from the eBook you’re offering or adding context to your offer with an illustrative image, breaking up your landing page with visual elements can help create a more immersive, engaging experience.
Curious to learn more? Dive into the world of Pay-Per-Click campaigns—where landing pages play an integral role—with our Quick Look series!
