Landing pages are a powerful tool to help your business achieve its goals online, but can quickly become overwhelming and a burden if not executed correctly.
To use landing pages to your advantage, it’s important to develop a succinct strategy that outlines how your landing pages will be used as a part of your greater marketing mix.
According to Marketing Sherpa, 48% of marketers build a new landing page for each marketing campaign.
This emphasizes how essential it is to continually improve upon this process for your marketing team to help ensure it becomes more systematic, while remaining agile to account for changes that will continue to drive results for your business.
Use this resource to help your organization better understand your marketing goals, how to best match your landing pages with each marketing channel, what it takes to build successful landing pages, how to optimize your landing pages for optimal results and what it takes to measure if your landing pages are effective.
Identify Your Goals
Like any marketing campaign, it’s important to establish your goals for using landing pages from the very beginning.
The overarching goal for any landing page is to focus an entire page of your website on driving a person to perform a specific action with limited distractions.
Choose two to three goals for your landing pages to start with to help better focus your strategy to best suit reaching those objectives.
These goals should tie back to the larger business objectives of your organization, impacting your continued success and growth.
Some typical goals your organization may be looking to achieve with its landing pages include:
- Increased subscribers, leads or customers
- Successful up-sells or cross-sells
- Engagement on social media
- Growth in revenue
- Videos views
- Inbound goals
- Generating downloads
Once you’ve identified which goals match the interests of your business, it’s time to analyze how your landing pages will help your organization achieve those goals as part of your larger marketing strategy.
This involves developing the tactics that’ll be used to help reach those goals and understanding how your landing pages will help complete the process for each objective.
Match Landing Pages to Each Marketing Channel
It’s time to reach your ideal customer on the channels where they are most active and match the landing pages you’re going to use to each channel appropriately.
Map out the handful of channels where you’re going to communicate with your audience on a regular basis and start planning the landing pages that would tie into those campaigns accordingly.
First map out the different paths a person would take across the conversion funnel to understand how and where a prospect will be interacting with your business. This will help your team better plan on where you’ll need to setup landing pages across a potential customer’s experience with your company.
These paths are not straightforward and take long-term analysis to identify, but by mapping them out from the beginning you’re giving your organization a strong framework to start for your marketing initiatives.
A path a prospect might take could first start with them finding your company on social media, next on an PPC ad, again on social media, through the search engine results and then finally bringing them to your landing page.
Another person might discover your business through the search results, visit your website, return later to read your blog post they found on Twitter and then end up on one of your landing pages from there.
There are many paths a person can take down the funnel to end up on your landing pages; it depends on their channel preferences, the channels your organization is active on and the messaging you’re sharing on each.
Although it’s a long-term analysis, focus on mapping out the most common paths that lead to conversions on your website is the most effective approach to synching your landing pages with these paths across your marketing channels.
Understanding the goals of your marketing, as well as the channels where you’ll be communicating with your audience will also greatly inform the amount of landing pages needed and the placement of these pages on your website.
Once you’ve mapped out the journey of a prospect across your various marketing channels, then it’s time to begin building landing pages that suit the needs of each type of prospects.
Build Your Landing Pages
Each landing page you’re building for your business has a unique goal and suit a particular user with specific interests, which is why each needs to be crafted properly.
To begin building a landing page, work with a marketing software vendor like Jump lead to help automate much of the process when it comes to their design, development and optimization.
There are many details that go into the creation of a successful landing page, which is why it’s so important to make use of an automated system to help scale your efforts and better synch them with a CRM and other tools.
Each landing page must meet the needs of your target audience and the goals you’re looking to achieve by focusing on the following criteria:
- Understand the goal of the particular landing page
- Create a consistent experience from channel a visitor came from
- Meet the expectations initially set from the referral source
- Compare competitors landing pages as a source of inspiration
- Who is the audience you’re trying to reach
- What marketing messages are you trying to convey
- Include quality content across the landing page
- Keep it simple and focused on one succinct goal
- Design the landing page to best represent your business
- Add an engaging headline to the landing page
- Include images that help convince a visitor to take action
- Use a strong call-to-action to drive visitors to convert
- Generate an effective form to gather leads
- Turn on conversion tracking to ensure activity on your landing page is monitored
- Add copy explaining your company’s offering that provides a reason to sign-up
- Include trust elements to help influence a conversion
- Incorporate an enticing offer that provides compelling value
- Ensure your landing pages are mobile friendly
Optimize Your Landing Pages
Optimizing your landing pages to ensure they are best equipped to drive results for your business is essential for their continued success.
The most effective method of optimizing your landing pages is to consistently experiment with A/B testing to see what works best with your particular audience.
A/B testing allows your organization to test what elements on your landing pages drive the most conversions. By showing your audience two versions of the same landing page with one element altered, you’ll be able to understand if there’s a statistically significant difference in the actions taken with that landing page.
These two versions should be tested simultaneously with a large enough audience to ensure you’re able to pull statistically significant insights, otherwise your test might prove to be too small to show any true preference over one version or another.
In some cases the altering of a specific element will have no effect, while others will increase or decrease the amount of conversions a certain landing page drives.
One of the main elements on your landing page that should always be tested for an opportunity to optimize is the call-to-action button in terms of its placement, color, size and copy.
Consider also testing the forms on your landing page, the headline, copy used, trust elements included, the visuals used, the placement of any part of the landing page, the amount of content on the page and more.
Your landing pages are never truly perfect and should be continuously tested to ensure they present the best opportunity possible to drive conversions for your business.
Metrics for Success
After launching your landing pages as a part of your larger marketing campaigns, it’s time to understand if you’re on the way to achieving your goals.
Again, the goals you’ve set aside in the very beginning help determine the metrics you’ll be monitoring to understand the performance of your landing pages overtime.
Key metrics to pay attention to for your landing pages are:
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Conversion Rate: The percentage of users that took the desired action on your landing page. This can be directly measured through the performance of your form
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Number of Page Views: The amount of traffic that was generated to your landing page, which is a good comparison point for how many conversions are driven from this amount of traffic. This is an indicator of the quality of the traffic being driven to your landing pages as well.
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Cost Per Sale: The average cost of generating a sale from your landing pages.
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Number of Leads from Form Submissions: The number of prospects brought into the conversion funnel as compared to the total number of users that submitted their information into the form on your landing page.
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Total Number of Customers Generated: The total number of paying customers driven to your business from your landing pages.
These are some of the most important metrics to monitor when it comes to your ongoing campaigns involving your landing pages. Take into consideration the nuances of your campaigns and adjust your landing pages according to their performance overtime.
Source: Jumplead
