Everyone keeps repeating how building landing pages is so fast and so easy, but when it comes to actually building one, lots of marketers are left alone.
Let’s read through the most important elements that make landing pages approachable and effective, and learn how to make them work for you and your marketing campaigns.
Focus on crucial elements and deliver a high-converting, visually appealing landing page.
You really shouldn’t build your landing page without a precise goal to begin with. Say you’re organizing a conference – what is the goal of your campaign in that case? Should it be selling your company’s products during the campaign? Maybe, but if nobody comes, you’d have no one to sell to.
So, would it be better to focus the campaign on inviting people to attend the conference in the first place? Most likely. As soon as you set up the goal, plan your campaign and design your landing page to fulfill it.
The next step of the landing page building process is planning a copy. Keep your goal in mind and think about what the visitors need to know and what would convince them to get to the end of your landing page and perform a desired action. There are a few crucial elements you shouldn’t overlook.
Start with the headline – it should be relevant to the goal, which seems obvious, but the Internet is filled with bad examples of headlines. The headline needs to be short enough to allow reading it in a blink of an eye: “Get a Free Design Trends E-book” would do it, but “Get the Inspiration From a Free, 120-page E-book About Popular Design Trends in 2021” would be a little too much.
Include benefits – whatever you sell, give away, or merely inform about, you need to show visitors how it will change their lives (for the good, of course). Features are good, but benefits are ten times better.
Cut, cut, cut – some marketers tend to write lengthy copy for landing pages, while the users definitely do NOT want to read walls of text. Write down the most important elements of copy for your landing page, and then try to narrow down the list to end up with up to three pieces of information you want to share with visitors. Don’t forget about the objective of your landing page!
It is really hard to point out the most important element of a landing page, but if there was such a contest running, I’m sure that Call to Action would make it to the top 3.
A CTA (usually in the form of a button) is the last thing users see before deciding to convert (perform the desired action) or letting it go. Use it wisely to convince visitors.
A Call to Action should say what’s going to happen after clicking the corresponding button. If it says “Get the discount!”, clicking should take the user directly to a discount code or the product page with a lower price. Be true to your words so you won’t disappoint your potential customers!
Some say that the design of landing pages is as important as the copy, but I beg to differ. It certainly has its role, but the research I’ve made not very long ago confirmed my suspicions – I’ve asked marketers, marketing agency owners and online education experts, and they all shared one thought: it’s great when the design is consistent and clean, but in the end, it doesn’t matter much. There are, however, a few things you should take care of, which are really important.
All these elements will be thoroughly described in the coming lessons.
Creating a form in a landing page builder is easy in theory, but to make it a high-converting one is much harder. Marketers tend to write long, multi-field forms whereas users tend to avoid the situations where they have to give away a lot of their personal (and even not-so-personal) data – they find it too time-consuming and suspicious.
The last element that bears significance in a landing page, is the form. Most landing page goals are somehow connected to lead generation, so you’ll probably need a decent form for yours.
Studies show that the optimal number of fields in a landing page form is three. What may be surprising is that the best-converting set of information is… name + phone number. Apart from that, remember the golden rule: prepare the list early on, and ask only for the necessary information – focus on maximizing the conversion not in numbers, but in quality.
Let us know what you think about Landing Page Academy, and we’ll send you a handy Landing Page Checklist in return. The checklist will help you make sure your landing page is ready to rock!
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Focusing on those 5 elements is actually the key to building an effective landing page. As for the takeaways, keep those short rules in mind at all times:
1. Choose a single goal and do all it takes to fulfill it.
2. Write short copy, focus on benefits.
3. Make the CTA convincing and stick to one CTA across the whole landing page.
4. Include original visuals and don't forget to optimize them before publishing.
5. Create short, easy-to-fill forms.
You've come to an end of the first Chapter of Landing Page Academy. Now it's time to actually build a landing page, so hit the button below and go to Chapter 2, where you'll learn how to find and choose landing page templates, how to write copy and design all the elements of a landing page. Check it out!
