Why create a landing page?

Okay – so you’ve attracted enough attention to get visitors to your website.  Now what? Your next step is to turn your website into a lead generating machine.  This basically boils down to your website functioning as an avenue to convert your visitors into leads in order to further grow your business.

A key ingredient to this conversion is a landing page:  a website page that is structured to encourage visitors to share their details.  This is usually achieved via an ‘exchange,’ with the website giving a free offering such as a white paper and the visitor giving their contact details in exchange.

If you’re wondering where to start or just want more insight, here are our 5 tips on optimising your website for lead generation:

1 – Establish your end-goal

Decide what you define as a “lead”:  is it a visitor who completes a form or signs up for a newsletter or downloads free information?  Or is it someone who has requested a call back or set up an appointment?

Once you have established the goal, you can then construct the corresponding landing page, created specifically to motivate your visitor to interact with the page content and achieve your defined goal.

This will enable you to monitor your visitors’ actions and evaluate the success of their interactions with your site.

2 – Calls-to-action

Visitors to your site may be visiting for a specific reason – to buy your product or engage your services.  They may also require guidance as they move through the different steps of the sales funnel before the sale finally takes place.

By having calls-to-action (CTA), your visitor is guided to engage with your page according to the end goal that you want to achieve.   Common CTAs include “Subscribe”, “Download free white paper”, “Buy now” among others.

3 – Forms as strategy

Forms provide an effective way of getting your visitor to share details such as their name and contact details.   Filling out of the forms can be encouraged through visual cues such as arrows or highlighted key words to draw attention to the form.  Other ways may be words which create an urgency such as “Download now”, “Offer available for next 24 hours”.

Forms can also be strategically positioned on a page.  This maximises their impact and motivate your visitor to respond to the CTA and provide their details.  As the visitor moves down the web page or engages further with the website a CTA button is activated such as:  “Yes, I would love new information” or “No thanks, I don’t want to learn anything new. ”These forms are categorised according to the way in which they appear on the website as follows:

• Welcome mat: This type of form covers the entire page, forcing the visitor to interact with by signing up or declining in order to remove the form and proceed with the rest of the website.
• Overlay model: When your visitor accesses this landing page, the form appears in the middle of the page
• Top or bottom banner: The form is more subtle than the first two, appearing either at the top or bottom of the page
• Slide-in Box: This is a subtle, unobtrusive form, appearing in the bottom or top corner of the page

4 – Build relationships

Trust is a key factor of establishing a good relationship.  In order to facilitate this bond with your visitor, you need to provide insight into your testimonials.  This can be achieved either as a photograph and text or else a video of a customer describing a positive experience with your company.

Other ways of building a relationship is positioning yourself and your offering as a thought leader by providing free resource materials such as a white paper, webinar or infographic etc.

5 – Using design effectively

Each component of a website works together to guide the visitor into taking an action in line with an objective – be in signing up, going deeper into the website.

Design elements such as page layout and whitespace can be used as a means of facilitating the desired action on your website.

Elements include using whitespace as a means of highlighting a particular text or image.  Our eyes are naturally drawn to empty spaces and this can be use strategically to facilitate visual flow and visitor engagement or having your visitor take action in order to achieve your lead objectives.

Visual flow can also be assisted by design which imitates the natural reading or scanning of a visitor.  Such a scanning has shown a website reading taking place from the top left-hand corner of a website, moving across the page in a F-shaped pattern.  Placing key points on this pathway means that information is automatically read.

Once you have established your landing page, you can test its effectiveness in achieving your objectives.  This can be assessed by creating a variation of the page.  In this way you are able to test different tweaks and changes to find out which is the most effective in creating an optimised landing page which achieves your goals and grows your business.