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If you’re looking to gather leads for your business, you need to have a landing pages strategy. Just like every other marketing tactic, this can be done well or it can be done poorly. In order to see the greatest return on investment, businesses need to understand how to set strategic goals for their landing pages and how to design them to be effective.
What are landing pages and why are they important?
Let’s start the guide by being absolutely clear: your homepage is not a landing page. For that matter, neither is your product page, your pricing page, your contact page, nor even your about page.When we talk about landing pages from a marketing perspective, we are referring only to specific pages that have been expressly designed to achieve a particular goal.Typically, the goal will be to obtain the user’s email address and other personal information. But it could also be to download a PDF, register for a webinar or make a purchase.Whatever the goal is, the landing page should be solely focused on that goal. As Tim Ash, CEO of Site Tuner and author of Landing Page Optimization, says: “You have to have a singular focus and discipline and be very clear about what the desired conversion action is on your landing page.
“Landing pages with multiple offers get 266% fewer leads than single offer pages.” - Wishpond
They can be extremely simple or incredibly complex depending on the website and the data available. That being said, all landing pages, regardless of who they are aimed at or what their goal is, will have the following elements:
A headline
This is the first thing people see and will usually outline exactly what you are offering.
An offer
You must give users a reason to take action. This is achieved by highlighting what you are offering and how they will benefit from it.
A call-to-action
This is the element that users click to take action.Typically it will be a button, but it could also be a link or a form. And that’s it.
Most landing pages will have a few more elements, such as images and trust indicators, but a landing page can be successful using only the three elements above. In fact, keeping the landing page as simple as possible with a single offer leads to better results.
“The average attention span is 8.25 seconds.”— Statistic Brain
Why are landing pages so important?
Trying to get a user to take a single, particular action on a standard web page is very difficult. Our attention spans are so small now (they were measured at an average of 8.25 seconds in 2015 and only decreasing as time moves on) that a standard web page simply has too many distractions. Even if a user comes to a webpage with a goal in mind, they may get distracted by something in the navigation bar, a link to another part of the website or an advertisement on the page.
The beauty of landing pages is that they limit a visitor’s options to a single choice: whether to opt-in, or not to opt-in. By removing the navigation bar, the sidebar, the footer, and by focusing the design and copy on achieving one single outcome, users are guided towards that outcome. As a result, the decision becomes binary.They either complete the intended action or they exit the page. There is no alternative. When the user completes the action, you get your lead.
Key takeaways:
- A landing page is a distinctive page designed to achieve a specific goal.
- Your homepage is not a landing page.
- All landing pages have a headline, an offer, and a call-to-action.
- Short attention spans mean users are easily distracted.
- Landing pages only give users one option and are therefore more effective at achieving a particular goal.
Join us in part two where we dive deeper into creating high converting landing pages for business, with effective planning and creation of the perfect landing page.
