How to Make Awesome Landing Pages
By
June Spring
Companies spend a great deal of money on marketing their websites, constantly looking for ways to bring in new traffic. But what happens once the traffic comes in? How many visitors arrive at the home page and get lost, without any chance of converting into subscribers or customers?
Step One: Vision
The first step in creating a good landing page has less to do with actual website design and more to do with the overall vision. Before you can determine layout, logo design, colors, content, and so on, you need to have a solid understanding of goals, target audience, and benefits. Here are a few steps to help you nail down an overall strategy for your landing page:
- Identify Your Purpose: Why are you designing a landing page? What do you want it to do? When visitors come and interact with the site, what action do you want them to take?
- Think Like the Visitor: Part of thinking like a visitor is knowing about your visitors. Who is your target audience? What are their interests or hobbies? What are their personalities online? Conduct market research, either on your own or with the help of a marketing company, to determine exactly who it is that you’re trying to reach.
- Define Benefits: Think about the goal of your landing page (Sell a product? Enlist signups for an event? Recruit new subscribers?), and then think about what benefits it offers visitors. Why should they do what you’re asking them to do? What will they gain? These benefits need to be a key component of your landing page.
Step Two: Organization + Design
Armed with a solid purpose, a defined target audience, and a clear understanding of benefits, you’re ready to design your landing page. While the specifics of your page depend on the specifics of your goals, some general principles usually apply. Here are some important tips for landing page design!
- Write a Clear Value Proposition: The headline of your page is your first chance to catch a visitor’s attention. It should match the messaging of the advertising or other content pointing to the landing page.
- Minimize Distractions: There’s nothing worse than a landing page that distracts visitors from the goal to which you’re trying to move them. Eliminate pop-ups, automatic music, broken links, and other distractors that steal the visitor’s attention and muddy your message. Keep your page free of clutter.
- Use Images: Use images to showcase the thing you’re trying to sell or promote. Let visitors see what it looks like or how it’s being used. If it’s not a physical object, create an attractive banner, logo or text image to add interest to the page.
- Include Testimonials. Do you have feedback from satisfied clients to add to the landing page? These testimonials create trust and boost the power of your message. Other ideas include logos of endorsers or current clients, video spokesmodel, etc.
- Be Scannable: Make it easy for visitors to come to your landing page and quickly ascertain what you’re trying to say. Use bullet points and short paragraphs, and focus on benefits.
- Call to Action: No landing page is complete without a solid call to action. Do you want your visitors to sign up for your newsletter? Add a prominent “sign up here!†button, and make the sign-up simple. Do you want people to buy your book? Provide a “buy it now!†button as well as a request to buy at the bottom of your content. Do whatever you can to simplify the process for your visitors.
