Why have a Landing Page?
Landing pages are a key part of any web-based customer acquisition strategy and every business needs a plan and a method to acquire new customers. This article will help you understand what a landing page is and how you can build a powerful landing page strategy for your business.
Landing pages are also known as sales funnels, marketing funnels or even funnel pages.
What should a landing page do?
An effective landing page will focus on a specific offer and must communicate the following three things to a prospective customer:
- Who the offer is for.
- What the offer is.
- Some method to get the offering. (The opt-in)
The game is to get the customer to opt-in
Landing pages are important because they are where prospects “land” when they click on an web advertisement or a social media post. The fact that a prospect is coming to a landing page means that you’ve at least got their attention (for the moment).
A landing page offers the customer something of value in exchange for their email address. http://bit.ly/2gUfmJ0
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Creating the offer
Before you can learn how to create an effective landing page, you must start with something of value to offer your prospective customer. Without a valid offer, there’s no reason to have a landing page.
Your desired outcome from a prospect visiting your landing page is that they “opt-in” for your offer. Your offer can be anything from a simple how-to guide, a whitepaper or an ebook, all the way up to buying your product or signing up for your service.
Here’s some ideas for landing pages offers:
- A detailed “How-to” guide
- A money-saving tip
- A whitepaper which describes a problem and a solution (specifically your solution)
- An ebook or physical book
- A free consulting session
- A product demo
- A free product sample
- A free trial period of your product or service
- A product or service discount coupon
- Signup for an upcoming webinar or training class
- Signup for an upcoming conference or meeting
- Purchase of your product or service
As you can see, your offering can be anything of value to your prospective customer. The offering can be a physical product or service. The offering can also be a digital product or service. It all depends on the nature of your business. In this article, we’ll keep the offering generic. In future articles, we’ll provide specific examples of landing pages for each of the above types of offerings.
Minimize the distractions
A landing page is not the same thing as the main page on your website. As you outline your website design, your business may or may not require a complex website design. Some types of businesses can operate perfectly well, simply with a series of different landing pages for their various offerings. If you have an extensive set of product offerings, however, you may well need to have a main website page where customers can find and purchase all of your products or services. This is especially true if you expect repeat customers to return to your website over time to buy from you. In this case you might use landing pages for specific product marketing campaigns.
Landing page design is simple:
There should only be two actions for a visitor on a landing page:
- Opt-in (i.e. interact with you)
- Leave
That’s right! An effective landing page is not designed to be a “hallway” with many doors to open or options to choose from. There shouldn’t be any other links to other pages on your website. AN EFFECTIVE LANDING PAGE MINIMIZES THE DISTRACTIONS!
The goal of a landing page is have your prospective customer self identify that they meet the criteria for the offer and that they have the problem which the offering fulfills.
IF the individual visiting the landing page doesn’t meet the criteria for the offering, you don’t want waste your time or the prospects time with any type relationship.
IF, however, the individual visiting the landing page is your ideal customer for the offering, then the goal is to convince them that you have a great offer for them.
The call to action
The call to action (CTA) is a marketing term which means that you want to move the prospect to do something.
That something could be the purchase of your product or service, but often it’s simply providing their email or contact information so that you can start the process of “nurturing” them to become a customer.
The simplest CTA is a button which leads to a form to capture their email.
In building a landing page, you will often include multiple CTA’s on your landing page as you attempt to convince the prospect that the offer is valid for them. The next section will cover how to work multiple CTA’s into your landing page structure
Landing page structure
Here’s a basic landing page structure:
- Define who the offer is for (allow a prospect to self identify with the offer OR leave immediately if it’s not for them)
- First CTA –> Present the first offer (“Sign up for our newsletter”)
- Define the problem that your offering solves. Define the solution.
- Introduce the offer
- Second CTA –> Give the prospect a second chance to sign up
- Build trust by presenting a testimonial or a customer story. Help the prospect understand that you have an offering or solution that has helped other customers like them.
- Reiterate the offer and its value in the customer testimonial.
- Third CTA –> Give the prospect a third chance to sign up
- Create a sense of urgency, as the prospects attention is beginning to wane if they’ve made it this far on the landing page. Include a time-bound limit to the offering. Communicate to the prospect that this offering ends on some date, and that they have to act now or lose out the opportunity forever.
- Alternatively: enhance the offering with a one-time special upgrade or enhancement which adds additional value if the prospect signs up now.
- Final CTA –> Give the prospect one last chance to sign up
Why this landing page structure works
Landing pages, if done properly, should create a sense of urgency in the prospect. The job of a landing page is to first offer something of value and then help the prospect understand that the offering is valuable to them. This is Sales 101. Any prospect who visits the landing page should and will leave the page if they feel that the offering has no value for them. As a small business, you don’t have time to waste on prospects who aren’t a good fit for your solution. Therefore, an optimal landing page design can be a workhorse for your business to help filter and find prospects who are ideally suited for your offering.
Get help on the copywriting
Every landing page has a simple structure. However, writing the copy for your landing page will take time. If you’re uncomfortable with this writing task, you might want to hire a professional copywriter to help with the content. This will be money well spent. The content on your landing page is critical to get right, because you only get once chance to convince a customer that you have something of value for them.
FIRE Business Platform can help
FIRE Business Platform is designed for small business. When you choose FIRE Business Platform for your website, you’ll have access to an entire library of proven landing page templates with state-of-the-art designs. You’ll still need to write some of the copy for your specific offering, but you’ll have a variety of funnel page templates to choose from.