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Thinking business with Keith Costello, founder of The Loft

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You can drive large volumes of people to your site, but how do you then convert those readers into customers? The first thing you must do is build a great landing page. 

According to the firm SiriusDecisions, your customers will ‘discover’ 67% of all new products they buy online. This means your customers’ first port of call when searching for something is the web. They are not engaging with shops or salespeople until later on in the ‘customer journey’. 

We know that ‘giving away’ content, which takes time to produce, can result in interested customers in the long term, but many small business owners worry about what this outlay will mean for the business in the short term. 

This is where landing pages come in. A good landing page allows you to track and convert leads. 

From a marketing perspective, a landing page is something that is put together for a particular purpose or campaign. Visitors will not be able to navigate off the page to another page on your website as the two aren’t connected. The landing page drives them towards a particular conversion that you are seeking. 

The goal of a landing page is to convert

There are two types of landing pages. Click through landing pages and lead generation landing pages. 

Click through landing pages prompt the visitor to follow on to another page for more information, whereas lead generation landing pages are used to capture visitor information, usually through a form, in exchange for some kind of marketing collateral that the visitor wants. 

Changing your landing page is more flexible than a page on your website, and so it can be tailored to particular demographics or locations. The goal of landing pages is conversion, and you can use A/B testing to determine where you get the best response. 

Creating a campaign

In building a landing page campaign, you need to set clear goals about what you are trying to achieve and then understand what your call to action on your landing page will be. 

By analysing your most popular content, you will be able to understand better what information visitors to your site need the most. 

Information requests can lead to a value exchange. What information are your visitors most likely to fill out a form or click through to another page for?

Once you have done this, you need to promote your campaign. This can be done several ways. 

Attracting visitors to your page

Many brands use PPC campaigns on Google to promote their landing pages for conversions. This means that when someone browsing the web clicks on your Google Adwords ad, they are taken to your landing page and converted by getting them to fill out a form. It is important that the messaging in the ad and the landing page are consistent, so if you have an ad offering a free trial, they are taken to a landing page for a free trial. 

Keeping things fresh by building new landing pages and offering fresh content is important in boosting conversions. 

Landing the conversion

Some kinds of action that a landing page can call the user on to complete are:

•    Requesting a free trial 

•    Complete a purchase

•    Subscribe to download a promotional product (eBook, templates or reports)

•    Update or change email preferences

•    Gain extra information

•    Be enticed to join your email mailing list

Your landing page needs to answer four central questions within seconds of visitor landing on the page:

•    What have you offered?

•    What are the benefits from the offer?

•    Would the visitor need the offer now?

•    How does the visitor get the offer?

Some tools to create landing pages that work

Leadpages: This allows you to get up and running fast, providing professional looking templates for creating landing pages. The tool is designed to convert online traffic to subscribers and help you grow your email list. 

Unbounce: This tool offers a lot of functionality and might be a good solution for marketers who will need to build a lot of landing pages. There are a lot of templates to choose from and Unbounce also has its own WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor that allows you to build your designs. 

Instapage: Allows you to create landing pages very quickly. Once again there are lots of templates available. It lets you A/B test your landing pages and track your conversions. 

If you are trying to show a return on investment from creating marketing content or if you seek to increase the volume of warmer sales leads, creating professional looking landing pages is a must. 

Article by Sean O’Neill. 

READ MORE: A free content marketing guide for website owners.