4 Must Haves for Building Landing Pages that Convert – Think Mobile-First
While websites can produce lead generation opportunities, landing pages are designed to ONLY produce leads. In today’s episode we discuss the 4 must haves for building landing pages that convert. Tune in.
4 Must Haves for Building Landing Pages the Convert
Hello, good afternoon I’m Michael Winn Chief Digital Officer at Digital Opps a division of RB Oppenheim Associates. Welcome to the virtual lunch and learn where we talked about and discussed digital marketing strategies to build your business.
Today we are going to talk about four must haves for building landing pages that convert. Think mobile first, that’s really the key we have to understand and know that when we are placing a digital marketing campaign the biggest sort of influence or power that’s going to be behind that is going to be the social web whether it’s Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, or whatever the platform may be. The majority of your users that are consuming that content or that are being displayed your ads are more than likely going to be on their mobile device. So when they learn more, buy now or free sample and they click that button they need to land on a page that’s ready to go in their mobile device. So let’s talk about and get a good understanding that websites can generate leads, but landing pages are designed only to create lead opportunities for your business.
Number One: Provide Instant Value
So when you understand that it, I think there’s four things that we need to really think about. Number one you need to provide instant value. In today’s market we don’t have a lot of attention, we get distracted very easily and we’re always looking for great value. As you’re a business, when you’re thinking about that landing page in the content or the offer that you’re going to provide, keep that in mind to provide instant value. You want them to have the ability to enter their name, email address, maybe phone number it depends on what you’re looking for but for sure an email address. And then boom give them instant access, whether it’s an ebook whether it’s a white paper or if it’s some kind of custom chart related to your industry or service. Think about that kind of instant value and then another couple of other great free offers or instant value content pieces would be access to a free webinar, a free course that you might offer to provide them more education on how to get the most out of your product or service checklist, or a green tool to provide someone everyone wants to be prepared before they make a decision. Or everyone wants to be prepared to make sure they get the most value out of the thing that they purchased or that they’re looking to purchase and of course if you have a subscription model offer them a free trial or if you have a particular product you can offer them a free demo or free consultation. All of these things, you want to be able to provide instant value.
Number Two: Remove All Distractions
Number two, remove all the distractions. What I mean by that, we were recently working with a client in creating a landing page. We were working with their web team and they did a really great job in understanding what landing pages were. So removing all of the navigation items, the navigation buttons, again it seems counterintuitive but we’re trying to remove all of the distractions. You want the user, when they hit that landing page to know you want this one thing and you’re going to give them instant access to that valuable content that they were interested in. So again remove all the distractions; no navigation at the top, you don’t need a sidebar, you don’t want long paragraphs of text. You have to be concise, compelling, short, and to-the-point. Get your value, click here, make it easy.
Number Three: Understand the Digital Marketing Funnel
Number three is understand the funnel process. We talked about this in a previous episode for those of you who may be tuning in for the first time today, if you haven’t checked out our digital marketing funnel series I highly recommended it. It’s a 5 part series, you can go dig deep into the funnel process. But just make sure that you understand what that landing page is for. Is this for general awareness? Is it for the consideration stage? Is this for the conversion stage? Is it loyalty or is it advocacy or brand ambassadors? So understanding those five funnel processes and what content is on your landing page is critical.
Number Four: Have a Link Back to Your Home Page
Number four: at the very bottom you need to have, you must have in order to be compliant with many of the ad platform especially Adroll which is probably one of the best retargeting ads platforms, you must having link back to your home page and a link to your privacy page as well. And that can be done in a very small footer area with a button or just a hypertext link that takes that user there but again it’s all the way at the bottom.
So if we go back over these the four must haves: would be provided instant value, you want to you want to offer those ebooks, white papers, custom reports, webinars, free demos, free trials. Number two: remove all the distractions, no navigation, no sidebars, no long paragraphs. Number three: understand the funnel process and how it relates the content on your landing page. And number four: make sure you have the compliant issue pages that you need so that you’re complying with the guidelines of the ad platform.
So again when you’re building these landing pages and you want them to convert you have to think mobile first. If your website is not mobile optimized but you’re still running ads, understand that they are not going to convert at the rate they should. Even for some companies it would be better served to have a subdomain structure, like offers.mydomainname.com, and create it mobile-optimized. Don’t try to get your website redesigned so you can run ads, you can really put a stop in your process. You can easily create a single page landing page, mobile optimized, use WordPress it’s super simple. And then direct your ads to those mobile landing pages. Mobile first is huge. If you’re not sure how much of your traffic is a mobile-optimized, you can always check out your Google analytics reports in Google analytics. It can show you the network, the devices, the operating system, there is a lot of information. It can give you statistics and data, that will show the number one what kind of device, desktop or mobile viewing and then of course you can look at what are the refers in other words where are people coming from to get to the specific Pages ,whether it’s Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, email newsletter, whatever that sources, your digital ad campaign, or marketing tactics. So it’s important that you understand again these four must haves really can make or break your digital campaign. When in doubt make it mobile, keep it simple, and provide value. At the end of the day, making sure that your landing pages convert.
Guys, thank you so much for tuning in today and I’m Michael Winn, Chief Digital Officer of Digital Opps a division of RB Oppenheim Associates. We will catch you guys tomorrow, have a great day!