How to Build Landing Pages That Are Worth the Click
Driving traffic to your website might be your initial growth focus online, but once you've managed to earn that click, getting that traffic to stay on the site is paramount to your success. A click can be a hard thing to earn. This post is all about making those clicks worthwhile.
First things first, we want to create qualified clicks! A qualified click is a click on a link or ad that indicates genuine interest in the advertised product, service, or information. This means a qualified visitor (the person who makes the qualified click) is more likely to convert into a lead or customer compared to someone who clicks out of curiosity or by accident.
You can’t waste time or budget on the paid and organic on growing qualified clicks only to send them to a generic landing page! That means your homepage probably shouldn’t be the primary landing page for most of your marketing campaigns. You’ve got to build great landing pages. When you get good at it, these landing pages will power the growth of your business. And, they're the fun kind of pages to build!
Most clicks to a website hit the homepage. Your homepage is there to serve as the introduction to your brand for the average website visitor. It’s likely to be a page with a relatively high bounce rate because, like Bob Marley says, you can't please all the people all the time. What we mean is, while some visitors might fit your ideal customer profile, many users coming in through sources like Google (and even a lot of your direct traffic) might be members of an audience that's adjacent to yours, but fundamentally less likely to convert. These are called “unqualified clicks,” because the user is less likely to convert into a lead or a customer.
One way of organizing the steps to drive and convert qualified clicks to your site are:
Identify the right audience, and
Target them with content that will interest them, in order to
Drive them to a landing page with related content, so you can
Engage them with interesting, creative presentations of the features, attributes, and benefits of your product, and
Convert them into customers who are likely to make repeat purchases and refer others to your business
Performance focused landing pages are there to convert members of your audience based on what you know about them, like their needs, their desires, and their interests. Targeted advertising enables you to serve your message up to people who are known to be part of your audience. You can be confident that they're known to be part of your audience because the advertising platforms you'll use will enable intent-driven targeting and demographic driven targeting that will allow you to hone in on the users who are most likely to be receptive to your message.
The most important thing to remember is the content of your landing page needs to relate and even refer directly to the creative that you've shown your visitors in your ads and organic content. Why bother spending time and money to make those qualified clicks if your landing page content isn't going to deliver on the promise of your creative. If the content that they find after they click on your link doesn't relate to what drove them to make the click in the first place, they will abandon your website right away.
Landing pages need to be built to convert, so build landing pages that affirm the user’s click. Drive your site visitors to landing pages that are built to support the creative content you’re using in ads and organic channels. Use landing pages to amplify the presentation of compelling arguments, entertaining explainers, and elements of style to deliver on the promise of the content that drove the click. The ad and the landing page must appear to be part of the same campaign visually and verbally.
Creating a high-performing landing page requires some thinking about a bunch of key elements that work together to capture attention, engage visitors, and ultimately drive conversions.
Here are the essentials to keep in mind:
Hook & Clarity:
Attention-grabbing headline: Use clear, concise language that communicates the value proposition and sparks interest. This is a good place to test creativity against clarity to see which performs best for your audience.
Strong Unique Selling Proposition (USP): Be declarative about what sets your product or service apart. Clearly explain why someone should choose you over the competition. Distance not to be a creative place. State features attributes and benefits and do it concisely.
Device-driven design: Over half of web traffic comes from mobile devices, so ensure your page is optimized for all screen sizes. It's entirely possible that the majority of your traffic comes in through desktop or tablet sources. review your device metrics in whatever measurements and analytics tool you have to make certain your building a website for the audience you want, and the audience you have.
Campaign Alignment:
Mirror the message and tone: Use campaign-aligned messages, themes, and styles between your ad/organic content and landing pages. Maintain the same level of formality, humor, or excitement to avoid confusing users.
Maintain visual consistency: Use similar colors, fonts, and imagery across your ad/organic content and landing page. This creates a sense of familiarity and builds trust with visitors.
Match the value proposition: Highlight the same features, attributes, benefits and solutions in both your ad/organic content and landing page. Your landing page must deliver and elaborate on the promise of your ad/organic content.
Continue the user journey: Seamlessly transition users from the ad/organic content to the landing page. Use consistent action verbs like "Learn more" or "Download now" to maintain user flow and motivation. Build an expectation in the ad, and deliver on it with the landing page.
Engagement & Persuasion:
Engaging visuals: Always use high-quality images, videos, or graphics that are relevant to your offer and visually appealing. Great content demands quality production, and you can deliver a lot with the phone that’s in your pocket.
Benefit-oriented content: Don't just list features, focus on how your offering can meet their needs or fulfill their desires. Desire drives growth.
Social proof: Use testimonials, logos of trusted brands, and well-considered case studies to build trust and credibility by demonstrating the real-world application of what you sell.
Scarcity or urgency: Limited-time offers or low-stock alerts can encourage immediate action. Be careful to align your promotions with your brand’s voice and values. You can easily diminish a brand by offering too much.
Action & Conversion:
Strong, specific call to action (CTA): Tell visitors what you want them to do next, and offer limited navigational clicks (links away from the landing page) whenever you can. Use clear, action-oriented verbs and contrasting button colors to drive the visitor’s eye to compelling content elements and conversion events.
Form with minimal fields: Don't ask for more information than necessary. Make the conversion process as fast as possible. Prepopulate forms with as much data as possible.
A/B testing: Experiment with different layouts, headlines, and CTAs to see what resonates best with your audience. Ditto promotions, creative elements, features, and functionalities.
Bonus Tips:
Clear navigation: Keep users focused on the conversion goal by removing unnecessary navigation links. Some folks even recommend against using the logo image in your header navigation to link to your homepage. We tend to recommend using links that are proven to increase the likelihood of conversion, or for testing purposes.
Fast loading speed: Nobody likes waiting, so optimize your page for quick loading times. Hit Google’s Core Web Vitals for a smart start in that regard.
SEO best practices: If your landing page is relevant only to a given campaign, offers unique and dedicate promotional offers, or features information that you only plan to share with a specific audience, you may want to hide it from search engines. Otherwise, typical SEO best practices apply.
Remember, the best landing pages are subject to ongoing optimization. Track your results and make adjustments based on data and user feedback.
Now go get growing, and build those landing pages nice and sticky!
If you want to talk about, we’re here to help you get growing.
