Landing pages offer a time-tested way to funnel your prospects toward a sale.
They’re tightly focused, which eliminates distraction, and they help you track your progress over time.
If you start to see reduced engagement with your landing pages, it might be time to give them a face lift.
As part of a comprehensive inbound marketing plan, landing pages can showcase the value of your brand and products, and open up the door for you to build relationships with potential customers.
Without further ado, here are four ways that you can transform your landing pages for greater impact:
1. Add a larger-than-life image
In 2015, HubSpot shared a roundup up of 11 successful landing pages, about half of which feature huge images that dominate all or most of the screen “above the fold.” Most are lifestyle-type images that convey tranquility, excitement, or luxury.
Images can have a tremendous impact on your landing pages because they inspire emotion. It’s difficult to look at a photograph without attaching a particular feeling to it.. If you’re not fond of generic images, consider using a professional photograph of your product.
2. Start with video
Writing for Kissmetrics, Explainify CEO Eric Hinson centers his landing page advice around video. It adds another layer of interaction to the page and allows the user to interact with the site. Whether you use video to provide a more detailed product description or to highlight the Top 10 benefits of using your service, you might see a dramatic increase in engagement.
According to Hinson, the best videos for landing pages are short and personalized. In other words, you don’t want to take up much of your prospects’ time, and you want to serve up a video that will appeal to the potential customer who clicks on your link. For instance, one landing page and its associated video might be targeted to empty-nesters, while another might be designed for young professionals at the bottom of the corporate ladder.
3. Pare down and simplify
It’s tempting to cram as much information into your landing page as possible. You assume that more data and images will lead to more interested customers, but the opposite is often true. Web design in general has begun to skew toward the minimalist aesthetic over the last year or so, and you can borrow from minimalist sensibilities to make your landing pages simpler and easier to take in.
A single, powerful message can often yield better results than a big block of text. Similarly, if your prospects don’t have to scroll through pages and pages of copy to get to your CTA, they’ll be more likely to click on your link just to check it out. After all, you didn’t waste any of their precious time.
4. Provide more information
If simple and minimalist doesn’t sound like it fits with your audience, take the opposite approach. When you’re speaking to high-level executives about a B2B service, for instance, your audience probably has questions. Use your landing page to deliver vast amounts of information, but make the information easy to digest.
You might use big subheadings and smaller body text to help users find the information they need quickly. They’ll scan the headlines and read the copy only when they need the information contained in it.
Landing pages look simple, but they’re not easy to nail. While the above tips can help you narrow down possible barriers to engagement, you might need a professional partner to help you strike just the right note.
Download this Growth-Driven Design Playbook to see how to combine marketing and web design strategies to improve your landing pages and website as a whole.
This article originally appeared on the Inbound 281 blog and is republished with permission.