Whether you are trying to nudge leads down the sales funnel with your landing pages or creating pages designed to capture new leads, nailing down your landing page design usually comes from split testing a few different arrangements. No matter which design you choose, all successful content marketing landing pages have a few elements in common.
Do Your Content Marketing Landing Pages Have These Elements? Here are four things your landing pages must have.
1. An Obvious Unique Selling Point
If you have not heard of the "blink test" before, it refers to the short handful of seconds you have to capture a visitor's attention when they land on your pages. It takes most people less than five seconds to decide if they are in the right place or if they should click the back button and look elsewhere for what they want.
Whether you are selling something or trying to capture leads, your landing pages must immediately let the visitor know why your offer is the best offer. Make sure that information is very easy to see, and that it does not require too much reading. Consider that the average adult reads 300 words per minute. If your visitor spends all five of her seconds reading, that is only 25 words.
2. An Irresistible Button
A great call to action button grabs the visitor's attention and tells them what to do next. It is reassuring and comfortable, and that is what people want when they are choosing whether to proceed with an offer. Content marketing landing pages are not good places to showcase your creativity and your willingness to go against the grain.
No links, no clickable images, no phone numbers. A nice, familiar, preferably rectangle-shaped button with a few words on it that sound like something good to do. Try me now. Let's get started. Get it here. Try it free. Start free trial. Keep it simple and obvious and people will not be able to resist pushing it.
3. No Navigation
Now that you have an irresistible button make sure you remove all the competition. Clear and simple navigation links are essential to every single page of your website, except the landing page. All your effort should be going into pushing the conversion, not providing options. That little button should be the visitor's only course of action.
If a visitor needs an escape, they can always click the back button. Of course, you are trying to minimize the number of clicks back, but it should be the only other course of action besides your beautiful button. Get rid of everything else.
4. A Visual Aid
Let's circle back to those critical five seconds you have to reassure visitors that they are in the right place. A visual aid can substantially cut down on the number of seconds a person needs to judge your page. In fact, researchers at MIT found that people can process images in only 13 milliseconds. There are 1,000 milliseconds in a second; that is a barely perceptible amount of time for most people.
This does not mean that you have enough time for 384 images, but it does mean that one image with about 20 words of text can give a visitor everything they need to know to stick around. Choosing the right image is important. Do not toss any old photo on your landing page just to have one there.
- Use People. People like to see other people; it's that simple. However, be sure to use real people and resist the urge to take the easy way out and use a stock photo. Eye tracking studies have found that people ignore images that are decorative or stock photos of unrealistic people.
- Or a Product. If it makes more sense to show a photo of your merchandise, then choose that. If you are pushing a particular product, a photo of that product will be more reassuring than a picture of you smiling. If you do go with a product picture, make sure it is high-quality and detailed.
Is it Worth the Effort?
As you can see, hundreds of words can be spent telling you the best way to arrange a few sparse bullet points, a photo, and a button. If you consider the importance of your landing pages, however, it becomes clear why so much time should be spent honing them down to perfection. To get the best conversion optimization results with content marketing landing pages, keep it simple, make sure it is interesting, and make sure that every single thing on that page is useful.
To learn more about the importance of content marketing as it relates to your landing pages, check out our white paper, "What is Content Marketing? And Why It's So Important!"
