Inbound Marketing Lead Generation Part 3 (of 5): How to Make Landing Pages Sizzle

Welcome back to our five-part Lead Generation series. We hope you’ve been learning some stuff along the way and paying attention, because now it’s time to really get into the nitty gritty. This third installment focuses on How to Make Landing Pages Count. Utilizing landing pages can make or break a good lead, and there are specific techniques that will help you improve their effectiveness.

Part Three: How to Make Landing Pages Count

When someone is sent to your website, you might think that the best strategy is to send them directly to your home page. After all, this will give them a good overview of your business and its website. The problem is that a home page is often too general. Instead, what you want to do is have visitors arrive on landing pages that compliment the link they clicked and what they’re most likely interested in. When utilized properly, the rate of conversion from lead to customer can be substantial, and here are seven techniques to increase the chances of that happening:

Learn What Makes Up an Effective Landing Page

The first step to creating an effective landing page is to learn what it needs to include. There are four necessary elements — headline (and possibly a sub-headline), brief description of the offer, at least one supporting image, and a form to capture visitor information. The form is the most important part. And if you’d like, you can also add supporting items like testimonials.

Remove the Navigation

Each landing page is intended to keep the visitor in place to increase the chances of conversion. By removing the primary page navigation, you’ll avoid distracting them with other areas of your website. This is an easy fix, so there’s no excuse for not following.

Match Headline with Call-to-Action

People don’t like the ol’ Bait ‘n Switch, so make sure you’re not guilty of doing this to your potential leads. When a person clicks on a link that brings them to your landing page, he or she will expect the offer to be the same. Any deviation could spell trouble or, worse, a lost lead.

Keep It Simple

No one likes clutter in their home, and the same is true with the websites they visit. If your website is too “busy,” it becomes distracting. Your offer should be clear, concise, and immediately noticeable. If it’s more like playing a game of “Where’s Waldo?”, then you aren’t doing it right.

Emphasize Benefits

Now that you’ve caught your visitor’s attention, it’s time to remind them why they linked to your landing page in the first place. List the benefits of your offer in either a short paragraph or bullet points, or possibly even both. But also be sure to put a cool spin on it, using verbiage that conveys the true value of your offer.

Encourage Social Sharing

Even though Social Media websites have proven to be quite effective in the marketing world these days, many companies still don’t take advantage of them. Each of your landing pages should include buttons that will give your visitors quick access to e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, and other ways to share your offer.

Increase Number of Landing Pages

The more landing pages you have, the more leads you’ll obtain. Increase your number of landing pages from 10 to 15, for example, and you’ll see quite a boost to the number of leads that visit your website.

We realize that’s a lot of information to take in, so while you’re soaking it in, stay tuned for part four of our Lead Generation series, Creating Highly Effective Forms. If you thought learning how to make landing pages count was exciting, you ain’t seen nothing yet!