As a business, you’re never going to be able to just sit back and watch your leads pouring in. That's because while you're busy enjoying profits, there's someone out there who's trying to figure out new ways to attract your customers and clients and steal them to grow their business. If you want to attract new customers, while ensuring your existing clients remain loyal to your brand, you’ll need to step up your game and at least match (if not outdo) your competitor’s lead generation strategies. One way to do this is to create more compelling adverts. More specifically -  you need to create the ultimate landing page for your business.

What Is A Landing Page?

A Landing page is a standalone page on your website that is designed especially for advert or marketing reasons. When users click a search engine Ad or links on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram or even emails, they get redirected to a specially designed landing page, created to get visitors to click on the CTA and generate potential leads for the business. They do this by speaking directly to the visitors and offer them something they’re looking for in exchange for their contact details. Landing pages are particularly great at increasing the conversion rate of campaigns while having a low cost for acquiring a lead or sales.

Slack has a beautiful landing page that really catches the customer's eye.

Now, at this point, people usually have a common question - Are landing pages the same as homepages?

Definitely not. Landing pages and homepages are created with completely different objectives in mind.

What Is A Homepage?

Home page is the main page or in other words the central hub of your website. The link to your home page occupies the root domain of your website. This page usually aims to give a comprehensive overview of what your company does along with inducing the viewers with an urge to venture within the site to dig deeper for more information about the same.

The VideoForm HomePage

The people who land up on the homepage of a website should be able to access all the permanent web pages, service pages, blogs etc.  Also, make sure that the contact details of your company are properly displayed and people can actually find you on the social media as the engagement of your audience with your brand is not the only thing that you as a business are looking for but actually some action from their end.

Landing Page Versus Home Page

Landing pages are a must have for a number of reasons. But for the sake of simplicity, let's just focus on two vital factors that make them an important addition to your existing website:

1) Landing Pages Are Designed To Convert More Visitors

Landing pages are created with just one single objective which is to convert your website visitor into a customer. When the visitor clicks on the link to your landing page, it's a good indicator that they are considering purchasing what you have to offer. Your homepage cannot help the visitors to predict the goal. Every single visitor who lands upon your website is there with a different mindset and so the homepage should include all the navigation bars and links that could help the visitors access to the contents that they are looking for easily.

2) Landing Pages Are Focused On Persuasion

Whenever you visit a high end fashion store, it takes much longer for you to decide on which garment you would buy. This usually happens due to the sheer number of choices that are available. That's where the paradox of choice kicks in. The homepage is focused more on informing and empowering the visitors about all the choices that your business offers while a landing page focuses on persuading the visitors to click that shiny CTA button.

Why Building An Effective Landing Page Is Important

Landing pages are central to any brand’s strategy of attracting new leads to your brand or product. But you can’t expect results from any dull old page. To have the best results, you need to have a landing page that wows the visitors. Here’s just a couple of reasons why you need to make sure your landing pages are as optimized as they can be.

1) Landing Pages Are A Great First Impression

When your audience visits your website, they tend to stay there for a really short time before leaving. This is called a bounce rate. A huge bounce rate implies that your landing page isn’t captivating enough to hold your audience on the page, meaning it most definitely isn’t converting any leads. Having a great landing page doesn’t just decrease the bounce rate, it also acts as the viewer’s introduction to your brand. And that first impression goes a long way in getting the viewer to check out the rest of your webpages and go through your content - Meaning, you’ll be generating better quality leads with ease!

2) You Get High Visibility In Search Results

Landing pages are created to target a specific set of  keywords which can be promoted by using Google AdWords or some other paid boosting methods. Both of these promotion tools tend to move the landing page higher on the search ranking and actually shows the products and services in front of the people who are looking for things using similar keywords. Landing pages turn up the opportunities to track the success of a particular product or an objective through a fine set of keywords.

3) Efficient buying and subscribing

A good landing page acts like a catalyst to move the audience or all the prospects down the sales funnel more efficiently rather than having the audience waiting on the call to action. Landing pages make the CTAs more efficient and make people subscribe and sign up to join your client list easily.

It should be kept in mind that the landing page design that works for one company won’t necessarily work for another. Every target audience is immensely different and will react to different kinds of intent, product lines, costs, value propositions etc.

Well, now that you know the basics, it’s time to show you how to create effective landing pages yourself.

How To Create A Landing Page That Boosts Conversion Rates

Your landing page needs to generate leads like real crazy, so here are a few things that need to be kept in the mind before or while creating a landing page which converts really well.

1) What is the purpose?

Before starting to create a landing page, you need to be very clear with an answer to why you want to create it in the first place. This would help you land up on a singular goal which would help you minimize the choices that you would offer your visitors so that it becomes easy for them to take the call to action, making it an effective landing page.

2) Understand the user persona

User persona is basically your ideal target audience. Before actually designing a landing page you need to understand your target audience properly. From understanding the personality, age, habits, etc. you can easily make out the products and services that could sell off right after bringing them onto the table. This step would require doing some customer service along with online research to actually conclude the type of audience you’re targeting.

For instance, you are trying to sell an email marketing software to a blogger who has never really used one before, then in that case your landing page needs to emphasize on educating them the value of email marketing in order to actually target the right set of audience.

3) Choose the right keywords

Choosing the right keywords is very important for the search engine to rank your page better. You can start off by making a list of terminologies that are relevant to your page and business. Choosing the right keywords is actually a time-consuming or at times a tedious task but knowing the right ones is very important for your landing page to be efficient enough to convert.

4) Write a catchy headline

Since the headline is the first and the foremost element of a landing page, it needs to be supportive of the objective and be benefit driven. For a high converting landing page, the headline used should be creative, simple, to the point and with the feel of creating the urgency to solve a particular problem.

5) Create a winning call to action

Call to action is the little icon, button or a link on your landing page that basically invites the visitors to take the action. Usually a simple one works the best as it doesn't make the audience waver over hitting that button.  The goal is to create a call to action that tempts the visitor by alluring the audience for something that is of relevance or value to them . For instance, Free trials, demos, coupons, etc.
(P.S: Using a vibrant bold colour that stands out is usually preferable for a call to action.)

6) Make your offering very clear

While planning  an optimising strategy for your landing page the customer or consumer experience should be kept in the mind.  When a visitor comes across the landing page, they should have a positive feeling about it along with the sense of feeling smart, appreciated and also excited about what they are going to come across next. While strategizing your offer, just make sure that it doesn’t deem like you are trying to oversell them and also, offer them something that you would genuinely be able to provide them.

7) Use Captivating visual content

Visual content like images, videos, bold and poppy fonts work the best when it comes to drawing human attention which is because visuals are faster and easier to comprehend, they strengthen the message that you wish to convey and influence your visitors in a way you want them to act which turns to get you improved conversions or your page.

A well optimized advertisement campaign is of no use if it is not linked to a powerful landing page. So while creating a landing page just ensure that your advertisements are directing your visitors to the right place rather than confusing them and making them leave the page.

9) Give them social proof

This might not apply to you if you’ve just started your business. However, if your brand has been around for a while now, adding social proof like Testimonials, customer ratings and reviews, certifications, social connects, etc is great for building a sense of trust in the audience. This is mainly cause you're showing them the real results your products gave real people.

10) Use the scarcity technique

While going through different landing pages you must have come across the terms like ,”limited time offer ”, “limited quantity left ”, “grab it before it ends ”, “ offer just till the stocks end ”, etc. These are some of the most common marketing phrases that actually have the capability to compel your landing page visitor to act right away or else they fear that they would miss out on it. Some brands also specify the number of pieces that are left in stock which also works pretty well. Other elements like a countdown timer for the offer end is also a relevant one under the umbrella.

11) Use exit intent pop-ups

If a visitor is about to leave your landing page and an exit pop up shows up on the screen, it's almost like another opportunity to create a conversion. These turn out to be less intrusive unlike the other pop ups that appear as soon as a visitor shows up on the site. These exit pop up can be created for individual pages so that the context of the visit of your audience remains intact. These pop ups can also be accompanied by special discounts or some other offers which could work like a push to the visitors to actually buy the product.

12) Learn from your analytics

Now you have already created a landing page but how do you know that it's working well?

For this purpose, adding analytics tracking becomes important. it provides you with a lot of precious information on how the visitors landed on your website who they exactly are and how they behave while being there.  These analytics help you in developing an absolute advertising plan which paces up the growth of your business and its effectiveness.

Well, that's the end of our list.

Now, that you've got a pretty good sense of how a landing page works, how it can be boosted in terms of conversions and also the possible reasons why it might not be working that well for you,  it's time that you analyse your landing page and create the one that works the best for your business and help you grow.