Stop Wasting Money and Follow These 5 Tips for Building Landing Pages That Convert

One of the most common mistakes we see marketing teams make is treating landing pages – the standalone web pages built specifically for digital marketing campaigns, where visitors “land” after clicking on an advertisement – as afterthoughts or easy lifts instead of with the thought, care and attention they deserve. 

Landing pages aren’t lesser than your main website pages. In many cases, they’ll be more responsible for engagement and conversions, especially if you’re putting significant spend behind ad campaigns at high volumes. 

Whether your landing page is hosting a content download, a video, or a get in touch call-to-action (CTA), the copy, design and user experience should be intentionally executed to both reflect the corresponding ad campaign and make taking action extremely compelling for the reader. 

Otherwise, you’re quite literally throwing money away on ads that won’t convert. Even the most powerful, deeply personalized and outside-the-box advertisement won’t save a lackluster landing page. Think of your ads like the promise and your landing page like the payoff.

1. Create Multiple Variations

Just like your ad campaigns target different personas as well as different stages in the buyer’s journey, so should your landing pages. There’s no such thing as a catch-all landing page – or at least, there shouldn’t be. 

Anyone landing on your page should feel like it was built just for them, and the only way to do that is to create multiple landing pages, with messaging specific to:

• Persona: If you serve both accountants and wealth managers, for example, you know that their needs and goals are different and your landing pages should be tailored to these nuances.
• Stage of the buyer’s journey: Content that resonates with a prospect in the consideration stage will be markedly different from what a prospect in the awareness phase is ready to consume (see our breakdown here for content that aligns with each stage).
• Your ad campaigns: Especially if you’re bidding on keywords, make sure those search terms show up prominently above the fold on your landing page.

2. Prioritize a Mobile-First Design

Recent research indicates that over 70% of web traffic comes from mobile devices – and that 61% of users will never return to a website that isn’t mobile friendly. 

So while you can’t ignore the desktop experience, it’s important to focus on optimizing your landing page for mobile performance to capture the majority of potential visitors: 

• Aim for < 3 second load time
• Make sure your forms are short and easy to fill out 
• Include strategic design elements like videos and carousels, which enable you to include more valuable information without lengthening the page scroll
• Test the landing page yourself to ensure there are no confusing line breaks or warped formatting issues

3. Go Hard on Social Proof

Prospects want to know that people like them and businesses like theirs have been successful using your product or service. Reviews, testimonials, logos and star ratings lend credibility to your business while creating an aspirational element that enables your prospects to envision themselves as the heroes of their own stories.

It’s unlikely users are going to read every word on your page or scroll all the way to the bottom, so pull your social proof closer to the top of the page.

Another key here is to tailor the social proof you choose to the persona for whom the landing page is being built. Going back to our earlier example, accountants don’t care how well you serve wealth managers; they want to know that other accountants, who face the same challenges they do, love your solution.

4. Maximize the Impact of Copy and Design

Your landing page has to grab and keep a reader’s attention long enough to drive a conversion, or at least make enough of an impression that a prospect returns to your website at a later time. 

So make them want to stay on your page and learn more about you with:

• Beautiful, high-resolution product images
• Outside-the-box creative (avoid using the same stock photos you see on every advertisement and eBook cover)
• Messaging that makes it clear you understand their pain points, challenges and goals
• Benefits and features; your audience wants to know both what you can do for them, and how your solution works

5. Give Away Something Useful

Make your landing page as customer-centric as possible by thinking outside the ‘get a demo’ or ‘let’s talk’ box – offers that help you sell more than they help your prospects buy – and giving away a free resource that provides actual value, such as:

• An eBook tailored to their challenges based on what you’ve learned from client conversations
• A detailed checklist that helps them do their job more effectively
• A practical user guide with tips they can put into action right away
• A free consultation with one of your subject matter experts

Ready for more? Check out our free landing page template, which you can use as a guide for conceptualizing and building your next landing page.