We’ve all made this mistake, right?
We send all traffic from social media or paid ads to our home page.
Home pages are usually not great at getting visitors to complete a certain action quickly.
Sure your home page might sum up what you’re all about but it’s often the most generic page of your entire site.
They’re built with multiple offers and features to provide a generic starting point for new users.
If you’re going to engage the right targeted customer with highly relevant content, then then you need to write and build effective landing pages.
Not only will you optimise conversions but you’ll also substantially reduce lead generation costs.
In this article we’re going to:
- Explain the essential components of a high-converting landing page
- Introduce the Problem/Solution/Benefit Formula
- List the Five Proven Conversion Boosting Headline Formulas
- Provide copy direction for an effective landing page
- And provide our infographic for the Anatomy of a High Converting Landing Page
What is a Landing Page?
A landing page is a page on your website designed to convert visitors into leads. It will focus on encouraging a certain targeted audience to complete a desired action. The page will usually have a short form that allows you to capture a prospects information in exchange for an offer of value.
Components of an Effective Landing Page
1. Compelling Headline
Perhaps the most important element on the page, the headline has to command the visitor’s attention. It immediately tells the visitor they are at the right place AND what’s in it for them.
It will most likely resonate the Value Proposition for your brand or for this particular aspect of your business. It has to be benefit driven and compelling!
Is this a landing page from a Google Ads campaign? Consider a headline that closely matches your advert proposition. It makes the page more relevant for the visitor and increases your Quality Score with Google.
2. Problem-solving Support Copy
You’ve captured your prospect’s attention with the headline, now confirm that your offer matches the visitor’s needs in a sentence or two. What is your promise to prospects?
3. Strong Call-to-Action
It’s crucial that we clarify what we want a prospect to do next by stating a clear Call-to-Action (CTA). This is often achieved by applying button copy that completes the sentence, “I want to __________”.
Use strong contrasts in colour to make your CTA buttons or links stand out. Red or orange buttons are often used to catch the visitors’ eye.
4. Reinforcement Statements
We use Reinforcement Statements to reinforce a proposition or highlight an offer. They are usually a short sentence displayed at a large point size. And often followed by a CTA or a Solution Grid.
5. Concise Solution Grids
Our Solution Grid is a design layout defining the key features or benefits in a concise manner. That is, what are our solutions to the prospects’ main problems?
Use images or icons to convey the topic, short sub-headlines to punch the benefit and concise body copy to explain further.
A Solution Grid might come as a short row of 3 items or a longer grid of 6, 8 or more points. We might also use a Solution Grid to outline Next-Steps or How-to lists.
6. Detailed Support Information
When we want to explain sub-topics in a little more detail, we’ll often use yin-yang sections – so called as we’ll often alternate content from left of page to right of page for a friendly design flow. Each section will include a combination of a sub-heading, support body copy, relevant image/icon and an optional CTA.
7. Succinct Bullet Points
Bullet points make it easy for a prospect to grasp the essence of your offer by keeping things short. Speak to their prospect’s pain points and how your offer solves them.
8. Striking Hero Images
Great images are as important as compelling headlines. Be sure to include relevant and engaging images to draw the prospect further in. Video is a particularly strong and engaging method to tell your story.
9. Lead Capturing Opt-in Form
Given the purpose of a landing page is to capture leads then the opt-in form is crucial. It needs to encapsulate the information we want from a prospect to complete a goal (download an eBook, sign-up to a newsletter, complete an application, or add to shopping cart).
Offering a lead magnet (e.g. eBook) at this sales stage might help us start a conversation and enable us to nurture that prospect further with personalised email.
An opt-in form may be repeated 2 or more times throughout a long landing page. Only collect the information you really need.
10. Social Proof
Prospects may not take your word for it, but they will listen to other customers. Include relevant testimonials, reviews and/or case study excerpts on the landing page. These could link to more detailed reviews but be mindful of whether tempting the visitor to another page is a good idea for this specific landing page.
11. Mobile Friendly
It almost goes without saying but your landing page has to incorporate responsive design – it has to be easy to interrupt and use on all devices.
Other Page Design Options
Remove Navigation
If you’ve led a prospect to this page from online promotion and with a direct call to action in mind, then remove distractions and any chance of them wandering elsewhere by removing website navigation.
Social Sharing Icons
Include social sharing icons so prospects can share the landing page with others across their social platforms or bookmark it for themselves to reference later.
Testing & Optimising
Use A/B Tests to optimise a landing page for conversion over time. Test substantial design alternatives and/or subtle changes in headlines, copy, images and CTAs to see what resonates most with prospects.
Page URL
It’s not only useful for the visitor but also good for google rankings, that your page url is descriptive and contains your focus keywords. http://acme.com/great-landing-page
SEO Meta Tags
Always include a short Page Title in your meta tags for the landing page. The Page Title should include your focus keywords and again concisely explain what the page is about or what’s in it for the prospect. This is what they will see as the heading in a google organic search result, so make sure it’s also compelling not just a list of disjointed words.
Links to Other Pages
Lots of links on a home page make sense to encourage a prospect to navigate to the most relevant pages for them. On a specific landing page though, keep links just to relevant support pages so as not to distract the prospect from your intended CTA.
Live Chat Support
One of the strongest conversion tools that you can get for your online shop is Live Chat software that allows you to chat with your online visitors. Even if you make your landing page close to perfect, there will always be visitors with unanswered questions. Of course, you cannot answer all potential questions on your page, that would destroy its clearness. That’s where live chat comes in.
Formatting
For clarity and an easy user experience your page structure needs to follow the styling that has been have established for the website.
Heading styles, body copy, emphasis copy, call out grids with icons, quotes and CTA buttons should all follow a pattern that the visitor becomes familiar with so that all your content is structured and easily skim-read or followed word for word.
While some detail can be left to the design team, within your content brief identify all key styles:
- H1 (only one per page), H2, H3 .. H6
- Body Copy, Bullet Points, Numbered Lists, Emphasis copy etc
- Hyperlinked copy, Buttons
Choosing Hero Images
Great landing pages have great images. It’s that simple. As mentioned above, the image you choose should help boost the overall message of your campaign. It should help to illustrate exactly what it is you’re offering and shouldn’t be too abstract or arbitrary (no matter how good they look).
Here’s a 7-step framework for judging hero images, and it goes like this:
- Keyword Relevance (does the image complement the targeted keywords?)
- Purpose Clarity (does the image help clarify the message of the site?)
- Design Support (does the image support and enhance seamless flow of page design leading to the CTA?)
- Authenticity (does the image represent your brand in a credible way?)
- Added Value (does the image add value? Improve relevance? Demonstrate benefits?)
- Desired Emotion (does the image portray desired emotions that trigger action?)
- Customer “Hero” (does the featured image depict the customer as the “hero” once equipped with this solution
Follow the Problem/Solution/Benefit Formula
- Establish a problem. What’s a common issue your audience has? Identify it and agitate it!
- Present a solution. Next, state why your product or service as the best solution to their problem. Ensure that your solution covers every detail of their problem.
- Show a benefit. Now, you can show your prospect how much better life can be when their problem is solved.
Copy Direction for an Effective Landing Page
Step 1: Identify the Audience
The first step to creating landing page copy is to identify who you are targeting.
Step 2: Choose the Desired Action
Now that we know our intended audience, it’s important to identify the exact action we want them to take.
Your landing page should NOT be a brochure. It should NOT be informational.
The entire point of a landing page is to generate action.
Step 3: Identify the Core Problem
Once you’ve determined your targeted audience segment and desired action, your next step is to identify the key problems facing this segment that might be solved by your product/service.
Copy should use this central theme in the Value Proposition and as a filter for the rest of our copy.
Step 4: Write the Value Proposition
Now that we’ve identified the core problem for our target audience, it’s time to write our Value Proposition.
This is your business’ chance to demonstrate the value you bring to the table, IN THE CONTEXT of your audience’s needs.
Don’t talk about you.
Talk about the customer.
Step 5. Provide the Support to your Solution
After the heading and cover section, I recommend creating a “Solution Support” section.
This could involve a “Solution Grid” of 3, 4, 6 or more support summaries or you can follow up with an in-depth paragraph that explains exactly who you are, what you’re offering, and why visitors simply HAVE to get it.
Step 6: Write the How
Moving forward along our landing page, it’s time to talk a bit about HOW we can fulfil our promises to our customers.
Never lead with the “how”.
People don’t care about how until they resonate with you on “why”.
But once we’ve resonated with them at a core level and promised a central benefit that solves their problems, it’s important to touch on how we plan to deliver.
The “how” section of your landing page is all about finishing out the narrative that you are the answer to their problem.
You have the most freedom to get a bit off-track in this area but try to bring everything back to that central problem in a way that drives visitors toward the targeted action.
Step 7: Include the Social Proof
Your landing page is a narrative.
It presents a story that says YOU are the answer to your audience’s most pressing problems.
One of the easiest ways to evidence this story is social proof.
Anyone can make claims, but if you can show people that you’ve already solved these problems for others, they are far more likely to buy into the narrative.
Step 8: Write the Final CTA
By now, you’ve written the copy for your entire landing page.
It’s time to tell them to take that desired action.
They are interested.
They read your entire pitch.
Tell visitors precisely what you want them to do.
Takeaways
There you have it, numerous low-effort/ high-impact components to a landing page that could have lasting dividends to your business.
It’s time to explore how you can start using these essential lessons to build your effective landing pages.
Start by implementing each of these components, and you’ll be well on your way to engaging your visitors and converting them into customers.
Remember, consumer psychology can sometimes be surprising, the only way we can be confident that we’ve achieved our best page is by continuing to test. It’s always better to experiment with different versions of your pages to see which works best for your market — optimisation should become a routine at your company.
