In marketing, driving traffic is the easy part. The challenge is always what happens once that traffic hits your website. It’s important that your site quickly communicates what service or product you’re selling and how the visitor can’t possibly live without it. This can be even more challenging when your main website takes a broader approach to engage multiple audiences.

Enter, the dedicated landing page. In its simplest definition, a landing page is the first page a visitor sees when they reach your website. A landing page isn’t necessarily your homepage – it can be any page across the site. Knowing this, why leave that to chance? By creating a custom marketing landing page you can control exactly what a visitor sees and significantly improve your chances of conversion. It doesn’t matter if you’re using paid search marketing, social media or banner ads, you want to customize landing pages for each marketing effort and target audience.

Here’s an example of a page we created for one of our clients – They sell and install solar energy systems:

Let’s skip ahead and assume you already know about the power of custom landing pages. Let’s look at five ways you can make sure your landing page is effective in its goal – driving conversions.

  1. Develop a focused strategy. The typical homepage doesn’t highlight one audience or one aspect of your company’s offering. Often, they are created to be general. Using custom landing pages allows you to craft your messaging and your strategy according to who you’re targeting. If you’re a B2B company targeting real estate, then you need to tailor the page with real estate copy and imagery. If you’re targeting the Hispanic market which a specific ad campaign and you’re not translating the landing page, you’re missing out. Create a strategy that’s aligned with your target audience.
  2. Less is more. Don’t think that you need to include every feature, benefit and technical specification that describes why you offer the very best product or service in your industry. Keep in mind the cardinal rule of online marketing: you have a very short timeframe to capture attention. You have maybe three or four seconds to connect with your visitor. Keep the text to a minimum. Use a headline, short sub heading and bullets to communicate what you do and what’s in it for your customers. Don’t clutter the page with intricate background designs just because they match your brand. Keep the page “visually light” and you allow visitors to focus on the offer.
  3. Have a single call-to-action (CTA). Essentially, you want to explicitly tell visitors what it is you want them to do. If you’re selling a tangible product, you want to make it easy for them to order and tell them to “order now.” If you’re generating leads, you want to include a form to collect the necessary information. Avoid using more than one action for visitors to take. That leads to confusion and potentially, abandonment.
  4. Use relevant imagery. Often overlooked, the concept of imagery in landing pages can dramatically improve conversion rates. Humans respond to other humans so the inclusion of actual people has a positive psychological effect. You want to tailor images to the target audience. For example, if targeting real estate, then you should have images of buildings in the background where it makes sense. Humans are visual beings and we must play that up when considering that we have seconds to capture their attention.
  5. Test, rinse, repeat. We are huge proponents of testing and web analytics. You have a number of elements to test with landing pages. Headlines, sub headlines, bullets, images, button colors, layout, etc are all elements that you should test in different configurations. Once you find a setup that works, test it against an alternative setup. If you want to get fancy, you can do a multivariate test to run several elements against one another.

Hopefully you found this useful. These are just some of the basic landing page optimization issues that should be addressed and can significantly help with conversion. The main point is that by thinking about how you use landing pages in your marketing plan is the first step to increasing ROI. This is a big part of the value we provide our clients at Mixed Digital and a tactic that is essential for success.