How To Make Better Lead Generation Landing Pages

How To Make Better Lead Generation Landing Pages?

Lead generation landing pages generally serve one purpose only - to capture lead prospect data in exchange for some valuable resource or “hook”. That resource might be a whitepaper, an e-book, a free trial, a webinar, etc. The general idea is to convince the prospect to part with personal information (e.g. name, email address, phone number, company size, etc.) which can be used to nurture that individual further down your marketing funnel.

Landing Page: "Specific page(s) on a web site created for visitors referred from marketing campaigns which are designed to achieve a marketing outcome."

Lead generation landing pages’ importance is often underestimated by organisations when considering different aspects of a marketing campaign. A lot of effort generally goes into into choosing the right channels and platforms to advertise on and designing the perfect ad creative for your campaign. Time and effort is also spent identifying the right personas to target on your chosen channels. Of course, these are all key ingredients of a successful marketing campaign but at the end of the day, especially if you’re paying on a Cost-Per-Click basis, that may all ultimately be wasted spend unless your landing page is up to the task. That task, of course, is to convince a prospect who’s arrived on your website, via your lead generation campaign, to part with their details.

What makes an effective landing page?

To be effective, landing pages need to combine the following:

• Usability
• Accessibility
• Persuasion
• Develop trust in the brand

You need to allow users to:

• Easily assess and digest key information about your product / service / offer
• Input their name, e-mail address, other info in the most straightforward way possible
• Click your CTA to submit their details

What are the key features of an effective landing page?

Depending on your marketing campaign objectives, there will be some slight differences in the content and features of your landing page. However, when it comes to effective lead generation landing pages, there are a number of consistently important core features including:

1. A Customisable Image

This could be a full page background image, or a dedicated space in your template to showcase your product / service / offer. Generally it’s best to give prospects a sneak peak at what it is that they’ll be getting. Your image should also match the style of your ad creative to ensure a consistent user journey and brand consistency.

• Selling a product? Include an image of the product being used in real life rather than a generic stock image.
• Selling a service? Include an image that depicts the core benefits of your service. For services landing pages, often a video may be more appropriate than an image.
• Giving away a free resource? “Sneak-peeks” often work well here. Showing the report cover of a white-paper is fine, but including a preview of the first (or any) page is even better.

2. An Editable H1

This is an obvious one - important for both UX and SEO purposes. Your H1 should be clear and concise and should be consistent with the messages in your ad creative.

3. A Short, Editable Paragraph

Again it’s important that this is free of filler and explains your core benefit statement in a clear and concise manner.

4. A Clear, Concise Form With Minimal Fields

People are becoming more and more savvy when it comes to disclosing personal data online. Don’t ask for any more than you need! Essentially, this is a transaction. Instead of money, you’re asking for users’ data in exchange for your resource and they will have a limit in terms of what they are willing to “spend”.

5. A Clear, Distinctive Call-To-Action

You can't expect site visitors to infer what steps you'd like them to take. You need to show them. This is where great design can become an asset in helping create the visual queues that will show a visitor the exact next action preferred.

And some other landing page considerations...

Video:

Depending on the objective of your landing page and your resources, a video may be preferable to imagery or even complimentary. If you’re selling a product, bring it to life with a product demo video. If you’re selling a service demonstrate the value you can bring to a prospect with a client testimonial video or a walkthrough video describing the benefits.

Trust Marks:

Particularly if your brand isn’t a household name, building trust in your brand is hugely important in the process of convincing a prospect to offer up their data in exchange for whatever it is you’re offering. Consider incorporating customer and partner logos, accreditation marks, customer and partner testimonials.

Thank-You Page:

This will allow you to re-introduce the main site navigation and look and feel. It’s also handy for tracking purposes as it will save you the hassle of creating custom events to track conversions (just use views of the page as a conversion). Adding social sharing buttons here to let people share the page with their networks can give you instant access to new potential prospects.

Landing Page "Home":

Where should your landing page live within your website architecture? What happens if a user lands on your page from an advert and decides to browse your site before filling in the form? Can they easily find their way back to the landing page? If not, you’re losing out on valuable conversions and your campaign conversion rate is suffering. Think of ways to incorporate your landing pages neatly and logically into your site structure e.g. for an e-book/whitepaper, consider a “Resources” section for your site. It’s unlikely that it will be the only resource you ever offer, so why not have a section for all of these to live? This increase the shelf life of your resources and help with SEO. Finally, if you’re facing limitations to building a suitable landing page (e.g. lack of web development capabilities, lack of design capabilities, CMS limitations), the good news is that there are plenty of drag and drop tools out there that allow you to create landing pages and link them to your website with minimal fuss. They’re not free, but they are suitable for many organisations who aren’t quite ready to take the plunge and invest in website redevelopment. Some of the better options out there include InstaPage and Unbounce.

What conversion rate should you aim for?

Conversion rates will vary drastically depending on not only your landing page but also campaign type, channels, targeting, perceived value of your offer and a range of other factors. As a rough guide, the guys at Unbounce put together the chart below based on research in October 2017. It shows mean and best-in-class lead conversion rates by industry.

If you have any questions on lead generation landing pages, feel free contact us on 01-9052030 or Get In Touch.

Related Services:

Digital Marketing
UX Design