Marketing dollars spent on PPC ads, email marketing and social media to improve lead generation and conversions are never wasted, but what really matters is where those leads end up when they click on your ad or email link. If they find themselves on your site’s homepage, it may be time to consider that a greater part of your marketing budget should be devoted to landing pages. Landing pages focus on one thing: converting visitors into leads, which results in a higher ROI. To be sure, home pages serve an important function, but it isn’t serving as a portal to landing pages. With consumers’ demand for speed growing every day, that’s one click too many.
Your site has only a matter of seconds to make a great impression and convince prospects to stick around long enough to convert. Maximize the likelihood of that happening by developing a landing page content strategy that not only strikes a chord with your audience, but offers them a value-driven solution to the need that sent them searching in the first place.
Landing Page Design
There’s no magic formula or one-size-fits all template for the perfect landing page. The most effective landing pages are those that meet their objectives. Those objectives will differ from brand to brand, and consumer to consumer. Every landing page on your site should be treated as a unique silo, addressing a single question or need, and its content should speak directly to your users. Search engine ranking is a worthy objective, but your ultimate goal is conversion, not page views. With that in mind, your landing page content strategy begins to come into focus.
Landing Page Content Designed to Convert
If you’re looking to design a landing page that will offer your audience real value and increase conversions, there are some common rules of thumb you can follow. Remember, even after you complete your first “killer” landing page, you’ll need to continually test variations of it if you want to consistently improve your conversion metrics.
Headlines and Ads
1960’s advertising guru David Ogilvy said “On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.” It makes sense, then, that your primary and secondary headlines need to jump off the page and convince your leads to read on. Until they do, the time and money spent on the remaining content may all be for naught. Your headlines are the first impression you get to make, and we all know that first impressions can make or break a deal. Make them clear, concise and compelling.
Clean Copy
Strong, converting landing page content relies on careful word choice and readable sentence structure. Readers want copy that is visually palatable, and it’s your role to feed them what they’re hungry for. Once your awesome copy is written, edited and formatted for easy digestion, go back and carefully proofread what you’ve created. Your site’s landing pages are designed to convince readers to give you their personal information or make a purchase. They will be far less inclined to do so if your content is riddled with errors.
Buttons and Calls to Action
The most effective buttons and calls to action stand out by being big and bright, appear “above the fold,” and call attention to the keywords prospective leads are looking for, such as “free,” “buy,” “download,” etc. Don’t underestimate the power of your CTA button—it represents the tipping point between bounce and conversion. No matter what you ask someone to do on your landing page, they need to use the CTA buttons to do it. Make them shine!
Related: 7 Elements of an Awesomely Effective Landing Page
Wrap-Up
From simple tweaks to bold optimization changes, your brand’s landing page content strategy should never lose sight of the user’s experience. Search engine algorithms themselves are focused on a better user experience. Google's own mission statement sets this out: “Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
Learning to write persuasive landing page content is essential if you’re going to maximize conversion of leads through inbound marketing techniques like SEO, AdWords and social media. As always, there are exceptions to every rule, but these guidelines should get your landing page content strategy off to a good start on the road to higher ROI and more impressive conversion numbers.
