Landing page best-practices

Why are landing pages important for lead generation?

Most business people view no more than one web page after clicking an advertisement online. Usually, if a prospect doesn't like what they immediately see, they click away. For this reason, B2B marketing teams need to be familiar with landing page best-practices.

Landing pages play a critical role in online marketing, especially for B2B marketing and lead generation marketing.  The more effective your landing page, the more prospects will convert to become contacts. Because landing pages typically directly relate to the message and offer of an ad, conversion rates of landing pages can be much higher than the conversion rates of the rest of your website.

Landing page best-practices

• Content of landing page should specifically relate the offer and message of your online ad
• Keep the message and offer very clear and specific. Landing pages should not be "all things to all people." Landing pages need to be specific offers and messages to a target group of potential customers.
• Landing pages must include a call-to-action. Most effective calls-to-action for landing pages are either web forms or phone numbers
• Don't include website navigation in your landing page to keep a visitor focused on the primary message and to determine the effectiveness of the landing page.
• Judge the effectiveness of a landing page based on the conversion rate of that page alone. How many people visited the page vs how many people filled out the web form and contacted your organization?
• Reduce the links away from your landing page, and consider placing links below the fold.
• Make your landing page mobile responsive, because mobile and tablet clicks are gaining fast. Smartphones and tablets comprised 32% of Google’s organic search traffic during the Q4 of 2013. Also, During the 2013 holiday season, mobile had a 51% of email open share rate. Mobile dominates email open rates. Mobile responsive web design practices should be observed both on a brand website, as well as any campaign landing pages.
• Include enough relevant, supporting data, facts and media to inspire a prospect to convert. Don't make your landing pages too sparse. Add images, videos or feature comparisons to help inspire prospects to become leads. Images and video help attract and keep prospects from bouncing away.
• Provide a clear outline of the value proposition of your offer.
• Give something away in exchange for filling out a web form: Prospects are leery of giving away their information for no good reason. Give them a reason. One idea is to give away a factsheet, whitepaper or product overview document that can be downloaded immediately after filling out a form.
• Ensure that they receive the content immediately. It can be very irritating to a prospect if they don't receive the content immediately. Some organizations create a delay by having a sales rep email manually email to requested content.
• Include any trust elements: badges, testimonials, security certificates, case study data points or concise metrics to make a prospect feel comfortable with your brand. Just as your organization should optimize your website for trust, you should ensure your landing pages are optimized for trust.
• Consider adding social media sharing and email-to-a-friend components to gain an improved network effect from your advertising campaigns.
• Use marketing automation to understand the entire lifecycle that a lead goes through. Marketing automation can improve ROI and give you more visibility into each stage of the prospect's conversion pathway.
• Ensure that the page title of your landing page relates closely to any PPC ad copy. Ensure that the same, significant keywords exist in both your landing page title and the PPC ad--especially the PPC headline.

These landing page best practices will help to improve conversion rates associated with your online advertising.  Organizations should continuously experiment and iterate their landing pages, offers and associated ads to drive great results. These landing page best practices are merely general guidelines to help improve the outcome of campaigns. The design and iteration of landing pages is both an art and science.