by Michele Leon

Are you a business struggling to receive organic traffic for lead conversion? If yes, this article will give you valuable insight into landing pages. So, what are landing pages used for? Let us find out.

What are Landing Pages?

A landing page, also known as a squeeze page, a capture page, a splash page, a lead magnet page, or an opt-in page, is a stand-alone webpage with the core purpose of advertising and promoting a specific product. That product may be a service, event, or something tangible. These types of pages work to capture leads and convert them into customers. A landing page may have several options to serve various purposes.

For instance, your page may incorporate a form to capture the visitors’ information in exchange for an offer. No matter what options you have, the core purpose of a landing page is lead conversion.

How Does a Squeeze Page Work?

A visitor sees a call-to-action (CTA) on your squeeze page, which leads them to a form. The visitor then fills out the form to provide contact information. Later the information is used to convert each visitor into a potential lead for sales conversion.

The data received through the form is automatically input into a leads database in your CRM. Your sales and marketing team then uses this data to target potential clients and pursue them into buying from you.

You can use a marketing automation tool to see what promotion offers on your splash page leads to conversion more and use it to its maximum effect. This strategy will allow you to identify the offers that appeal more to your visitors and lead to sales conversion.

What is a nurtured lead?

A nurtured lead refers to a person that has the potential to convert into a marketing-qualified lead (MQL). This lead moves through your marketing funnel to the sales funnel faster and enables a quicker return on investment (ROI) for your digital marketing efforts.

Things to Consider When Creating a Landing Page

Before building a landing page, you must thoroughly research various aspects of your brand and the potential customers you wish to target. So let us explore different elements you must work on before designing your landing page.

1. Building a Buyer’s Persona

Before you build a splash page, you must establish who your target audience is and what are their needs, wants, and pain points. This information will allow you to incorporate content that appeals to your potential customers by answering concerns and questions or resolving their problems.

If you are a startup, you can do market research to explore the characteristics of your ideal consumers. You can also look at consumer personas your direct competitors are using and tweak those personas as per your business needs.

On the other hand, if you are an established brand, you can use your legacy customer data and identify your ideal customer. You can add characteristics based on demographics, such as your ideal customer’s age, gender, profession, interest, needs, wants, location, etc.

You can have one or multiple buyers’ personas for each product or service offered. Once you have a consumer persona, you must incorporate content and offers into your landing page that will attract your ideal customers. In turn, you’ll attract better organic traffic to your website and generate a higher number of potent leads.

2. Creating An Offer

To entice a visitor into entering information into a form on your opt-in page, you need to create an offer that provides value. The offer can be a free downloadable tutorial or e-book, discount, tips sheet, comparison guide, webinar, and such.

The offer should address a pain point that your ideal consumer persona experiences.

3. Planning Your Customer Journey

A buyer’s journey is the experience your customer feels when going from each phase of the buying process. You can further break it down into several stages that are as follows.

Awareness and Consideration

In this phase, your potential customer will express what they want from your business. You must understand the wants and needs of your customer and create content for your landing page with information about how you can fulfill your customer’s demands and requirements.

Decision

At this phase, your customer will know what your business has to offer and will begin comparing your product or service with other available options in the market. You can help your consumer choose you as a desired vendor at this stage by offering them free value via demos, case studies, reviews, and product information.

You can always seek professional assistance from companies such as Marketing Links to turn visitors into potential customers.

What are Landing Pages Used for?

You can use a landing page for various purposes. These include the following.

Establishing the First Impression

A landing page can be an introduction to your brand to potential customers. You can create a long-lasting first impression to attract new customers and retarget existing customers.

Lead generation

You can use a landing page to grab customers’ information and generate potent leads. If a visitor willingly submits their contact information, this is a positive sign that they are interested in knowing more about what you offer. Knowing this increases your chances of converting curious visitors into potential customers and buying from you.  Using email marketing to connect with your contacts regularly is the best way to build relationships and increase sales.

Promotional Offers

Similarly, you can use a landing page to target new customers and retarget your existing consumer base. You can create landing pages to promote offers on your products and services. For instance, you can create landing pages for promoting upcoming sales.

A landing page can also help promote a new product you are about to introduce. Similarly, you can create landing pages for promotional offers during holiday seasons.

Building Credibility

Offering something free of cost via a landing page can help your business build a credible brand identity in the market. You can even integrate your customers’ reviews to create a positive brand image in the minds of your visitors.

Testing and Tweaking Your Digital Marketing Strategy

You can build landing pages to test the effectiveness of your digital marketing strategy and the content you use to target prospective customers. Testing your landing page can allow you to rectify weaknesses and incorporate impactful content to attract visitors.

One of the best ways to create impactful landing pages is to collaborate with a professional digital marketing agency such as Constant Contact to boost your customer engagement and ROI.

How do you Build an Effective Landing Page?

Now that you have researched all aspects of creating a landing page, it is time to start building your landing page. Here are nine elements you must incorporate to make an effective landing page.

1. A Compelling Headline

It would be best if you first came up with a compelling headline that can instantly capture the attention of your visitors. Your headline must be appealing enough for the potential visitor wanting to learn more and continue to read your entire landing page.

Think of your headline as the first impression, and you want to make it an impactful one.

2. Convey What You Have to Offer

The next step is to convince your customer that your product or service can offer what your customers want. You should immediately convey this message to your visitors without giving them time to blink. It would be best to make your offer clear within 3 to 5 seconds, or you will risk losing the chance to convert visitors into customers.

3. Including Bullet Point

Modern-day consumers have a shorter attention span. Therefore, ensure to make your landing page dynamic by mixing things up. Instead of writing long textual paragraphs, you can use a summary of what your products and services have to offer.

The best way to do this is by using bullet points. Bullet points will help keep your reader engaged and give a preview of what your customer can expect.

4. Building the Form

You can create a form on your landing page by integrating different form fields or provide a link to an existing one you have aligned with your ESP (email service provider). However, you must keep your opt-in forms basic and brief with to-the-point information. An opt-in form should contain minimal information. Some may only include a place for the email address. I recommend you also get a first name to personalize your communications. More information tends to turn people off from completing the form. Remember, you can always gather more information further down your sales funnel.

5. Avoid Site Navigation

When building a landing page, you must remove any options for site navigation. Always aim to keep your customer on the landing page and solely focus on your content. Any opportunity to navigate to a different page on your website will distract your customers’ attention and result in losing the lead.

6. Use Visuals

Adding visuals to your landing page adds an appeal to your landing page. Therefore, including engaging and relevant images and graphics on your landing page is a good idea. Pictures will help draw customers to your page and keep their attention to staying on it. The more time a visitor spends on your landing page, the higher the chances of lead generation and conversion.

7. Integrate Social Media Page Icons

While you should eliminate the navigation option, you may consider adding social media icons to your landing page directing visitors to share your page with their connections. Rarely would I recommend this, but it is an option. If you opt to do this, make sure that clicking on the social media icon opens a new tab instead using the same tab. Using the same tab will distract your visitor, likely losing you a potential lead.

8. Mentioning Testimonials

According to statistics, 90% of customers make purchasing decisions after reading positive reviews and testimonials. Therefore, you must add positive testimonials from your satisfied customers. You can use text or video to display testimonials on your landing page.

These will further aid your landing page in convincing your visitors to complete your desired call-to-action and enter your sales funnel.

9. Stating Clear Call-to-Action

Once you have managed to grab your visitor’s attention, it is time to give clear instructions about the next step. ThisThis next step is where you state a clear call to action. Including your CTA at the middle and end of your landing page content is best. The number of times you incorporate your CTA into your landing page depends on the amount of written copy contained on the page. For example, a landing page that consists of just a couple of paragraphs of content should include the CTA just once at the end.

A CTA can be as simple as “get a quote,” “download an e-book,” “sign me up,” for example. However, keep your call-to-action simple and let the customers know what to expect next.

The following images are two examples of landing pages made with Leadpages. I think it’s my favorite landing page platform! Take advantage of their FREE Trial and see what you think.

Tips to Improve Landing Pages

The landing page is just the beginning phase of your digital marketing strategy. However, it would help if you promoted your landing pages to attract organic traffic to your website. Here are some tips to improve the effectiveness of your landing page.

Call-to-Actions

Your call-to-actions are a great way to capture customers’ information or attract them into your sales funnel. Therefore, spend some time developing a CTA that resonates with your potential customers’ needs. Treat your CTAs as assets and use them strategically throughout your landing page.

Email Marketing

You can promote your landing pages through email marketing. For example, you can send out a promo email to your existing customers in a personalized message. You will increase your chances of existing consumers buying from the ongoing promotional offer.

Asking for Referrals

You can ask your existing satisfied customers to share your landing page within their network. Social sharing is another excellent way to increase the effectiveness of your landing pages. As happy customers share your landing page with their family and friends, these referrals are more likely to complete the desired CTA on your landing page and convert into a potent lead for revenue generation.

Leveraging Social Media

Social media is one of the most efficient and cost-effective platforms to promote your landing pages. You can share a link to your landing page on your social media business page. However, you must be smart about it and only promote your landing page where you will most likely find your ideal customers.

Doing that will help avoid time wasters and only get visitors looking for your business’s products and services.

Conclusion

Landing pages are equally effective for all, regardless of your business’s products and services. However, it is best to seek assistance from a professional content marketing company like Marketing Links to create visually pleasing and engaging landing pages. Suppose you want to create landing pages without the aid of a professional; I recommend Constant Contact or LeadPages. Neither requires you to be a web developer. Constant Contact and LeadPages offer templates enabling you to easily create a landing page and make it live in minutes.

You now know what landing pages are used for, and that’s to target one specific product, obtain information of those attracted to that product to add them to your sales funnel and increase revenue.