Every business owner or marketer wants to maximize conversions. There are hundreds of strategies that are aimed to increase conversion rates, and all of them are more or less effective. Some tactics may work perfectly for certain companies while being absolutely ineffective for others. One of the best approaches that work well regardless of your industry is landing page optimization. Many companies, however, forget about optimization when planning their marketing strategy, which is a big mistake.
If you have a well-written and compelling landing page, prepare for the fact that it may not work well with some types of audience. People are different, and you should understand your audience perfectly to come up with a landing page that will fulfill its purpose. Landing page optimization can make your marketing efforts more effective. You can improve your landing page conversion rates if you study your audience, incorporate SEO, and use different types of content. But first, let’s figure out what landing page optimization is, and why you need it.
What a Landing Page Is
The key pages of your website are accessible through the navigation bar or in your blog. Landing pages are different from other parts of your site. The main difference is that landing pages have a specific purpose and they are not a part of the general framework of the website. People may visit your landing pages from:
- Paid ads;
- Guest blog posts;
- Posts in social media;
- Webinar links;
- Internal blog posts.
The term “landing page” doesn’t refer to a particular type of page. It’s all about the purpose of this page. For example, your homepage can be a landing page. Pages that focus on the benefits of your company or features of your products can also act as a landing page. A lending page may be filled with content or have just a few lines of text. The main element of a landing page is a call to action. This is the main thing you want your visitors to see, and a landing page should help your visitors focus on the CTA.
You may also include an additional CTA. For example, the first CTA might encourage your visitors to purchase a product, while the secondary CTA might offer them to learn more. Using two CTAs is a good practice because visitors who don’t convert immediately can get more information about your products or services and consider making a purchase in the future. However, the main goal for every marketer is to convert visitors as quickly as possible. A landing page only exists to present a specific offer and to generate conversions.
There is also a specific type of landing page called a lead capture page. Just as other landing pages, lead capture pages are aimed to convert prospects into leads. The difference is that lead capture pages do it by asking the audience to provide their contact information. Most often, such pages require visitors to provide their name and email. However, in some cases, you may not even need their name. You can use a lead capture page to build your email list. It’s just another method of getting new email contacts, and you can also combine it with other approaches, such as social media marketing.
Landing Page Optimization
Landing page optimization is a process aimed to help you increase conversions. You should adjust your landing page, analyze its performance, and continue this process until you achieve the desired outcome. There are many methods of landing page optimization and many beginners expect that they can simply implement one practice after another, watching the sales grow. Unfortunately, the reality is a little more complicated.
There is no method that would work perfectly immediately. After you try a certain approach, you need to run tests, analyze your performance data, and the reaction of your audience. After this, you should optimize your page again and again. This is a continuous process. Such a complex approach to optimization might seem overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to be. The main thing is to plan everything in advance. Besides, you can use various automation tools, increasing the efficiency of this process significantly.
The Importance of Landing Page Optimization
Simply put, optimizing your landing pages will make you a better marketer. If you learn different methods of optimization, you’ll be able to adjust your marketing strategies to the needs of different companies, no matter what their industry is and what type of audience they have. Instead of blindly following some advice from other marketing experts, you can develop your own practices, test the performance of your website, and improve your techniques accordingly.
Of course, such a proactive approach might turn out to be more time-consuming. However, it allows you to create a much more effective website that will actually fulfill its purpose, converting a greater percentage of visitors. Obviously, the effectiveness of your efforts also depends on the quality of your product. However, once you’ve got a nice product that actually provides value, you should focus on generating traffic and monitoring this traffic in order to optimize your landing pages.
The importance of landing page optimization is easy to explain if you think about the purposes of these pages. They pursue a number of different goals, each one of which is important for your company. You can combine landing page optimization with everything from PPC advertising to social media. Most often, businesses use their landing pages to:
- Promote a sale or upcoming product;
- Monitor and analyze the efficiency of certain groups or keywords in PPC ads;
- Segment offers depending on the types of audiences and their preferences;
- Take visitors to the next step in your sales funnel.
When designing a landing page, you should have a very specific goal in mind. You should also be ready to get rid of everything that doesn’t contribute to achieving that goal. The goal determines the type of landing page that is appropriate in your particular situation. For example, you might create a click-through landing page that simply leads visitors deeper into your website. Quite often, such landing pages ask visitors a simple question to determine the problem they would like to solve. After this first step, you can learn more about their needs and preferences to offer a customized solution. For instance, you can achieve it by including multiple calls to action.
Another type of landing page is aimed to generate leads. In this case, your visitors simply need to provide their email and name to continue the process. These are pages where visitors might choose to purchase your product, opt for a trial version, or learn more to make their decision later. Such landing pages are usually very simple so that nothing will distract visitors from the CTA.
How to Optimize Your Landing Page
1. Determine your goals
The first thing you should do is to determine the goals of your campaign. Many landing pages are ineffective because companies fail to focus on a clear goal and therefore are unable to come up with the right CTA that will drive conversions. As we’ve already mentioned above, you can have more than one CTA on your landing page. However, there should be one main CTA and additional CTAs that simply help your visitors learn more. Thus, you should make sure that your visitors will focus on the main CTA. If they see too many offers, they will lose focus, and the conversion aspect of your landing page will suffer.
You might choose to create a minimalistic landing page that has just a few lines of text, or you can design it as a simple guide that explains the importance of your product and helps visitors understand how they can use it to solve their problem.
2. Write straightforward headlines
You don’t have much time to grab your audience’s attention. We recommend that you make a straightforward headline your visitors can focus on. A good headline will enable you to create a clean page with no unnecessary text, making your visitors want to click your CTA button to learn more.
3. Write compelling copy
Sometimes, the best approach is to provide your visitors with the necessary information about your offer from the very beginning. It can be a great solution if you have a new product or if your product is completely different from other existing solutions. Your visitors might need an explanation, and you should provide it. However, your copy should be not only informative but also compelling.
This is the main challenge for many businesses because they realize that they need to find a good writer who will understand the specifics of their business and the needs of their audience. Your writer should also be able to choose the right writing style, making sure that your copy will be effective for a particular type of audience. To find the right writer for your landing page, you can check out a review website like Online Writers Rating. This way, you’ll be able to hire the most experienced writer who knows what an effective landing page looks like.
4. Choose the right images
The textual content is extremely important but you shouldn’t forget that you can also use visual content. It quickly grabs attention and it can help you work with your audience’s emotions, which is a very effective approach. Make sure that your images reflect your core message, as well as important details from the text so that your visitors can understand what your landing page is about by simply looking at it. Some companies even include galleries of images so that people who visit their landing page can quickly evaluate the range of products, understanding whether or not they’ll be able to find something for themselves.
5. Use strong CTAs
A CTA is the most important part of your landing page. All the text and images have the same purpose: they should make your visitors click a CTA button or link. Therefore, you should pay particular attention to your CTA, making sure that every detail works well and helps you convert prospects. Most often, companies use CTA buttons because they give you more opportunities to create nice design solutions than links. There are three key aspects you should keep in mind when designing your CTA buttons:
- Size. The CTA button shouldn’t be too small because it must grab attention. However, if your button is too big, it will likely repel your visitors. Make sure to sync the size of the CTA button with the layout.
- Color. The color of your button is extremely important because each color invokes a certain emotion. Therefore, you should make sure that the color of your CTA corresponds to your message. We also recommend that you choose a color that contrasts with the background. Most often, businesses use blue, green, and orange CTA buttons.
- Message. The text of your CTA button must be short yet compelling, emphasizing the importance of your CTA.
6. Optimize form fields
Given that one of the main purposes of the landing page is to obtain your visitors’ contact details, you should make sure that your forms are simple. Your visitors should understand exactly what information you need from them and why you need it.
The main question is, do you need to ask your visitors for their name or should you stick with an email address only? We suggest that you follow a general rule of thumb. If you’re working with enterprise clients, you can ask them for the name. Otherwise, an email address is enough. You can also simplify the transition from a user to a lead by providing multi-page forms. In this case, it will be easier for your visitors to provide more information.
7. Test your landing pages
A/B testing is a necessity if you want to improve your conversion rates. Play with different layouts and different types of content to determine which approach demonstrates the best results. Fortunately, there are many tools that allow you to optimize the A/B testing process, saving a lot of time.
Final Thoughts
Landing page optimization allows you to consistently improve your landing page, making sure that it not only performs its function but also becomes more and more effective. Although the optimization process might seem to be a difficult and time-consuming process, the truth is that you only need to adopt the right strategy and make the necessary adjustments based on the preferences of your audience. We hope that our tips will help you create an effective landing page that will boost conversions, increasing your profits in no time.
Author bio:
Frank Hamilton has been working as an editor at review service Best Writers Online. He is a professional writing expert in such topics as blogging, digital marketing and self-education. He also loves traveling and speaks Spanish, French, German and English.
0 Comments