How to create effective campaign landing pages

Landing pages are standalone web pages, created specifically for a marketing or advertising campaign.

It’s where a visitor lands after they click a link in an email, an ad on Google or social media, or a link in a piece of organic content.

Each landing page has one clear objective: to create conversions. This can be in the form of a lead, or a purchase.

Because they eliminate distraction in the form of navigation, competing links, and alternate options, the campaign you are pushing gets your user’s undivided attention.

In this article, we give you our top tips for creating landing pages with high conversion rates.

If you’re not sure what you want from your landing pages, how on earth is your customer meant to know? So before you start anything, make sure you are crystal clear on your objective. What do you want the user to do?

There are two main different objectives for landing pages:

• Click-through: focused on the objective of convincing visitors to click through another page where the actual conversion will take place.
• Lead generation: focused on capturing your visitors’ contact information

Depending on your core objective, you will have a different call to action. Here are some examples:

• Subscribe to a mailing list
• Create an account
• Purchase a product or service
• Redeem an offer
• Submit an enquiry

Make your call to action known with clear and concise copy and standout design (more on those later).

INCLUDE THE CALL TO ACTION ABOVE THE FOLD

If the marketing that leads users to your landing page is solid, visitors will know what they are landing here for. So let them dive straight into a conversion by placing your call to action right at the top of the page. You can include more information underneath for those who need a little bit more persuading before converting. For these people, make sure to sprinkle further call to action buttons throughout the page.

KEEP CLICKS TO A MINIMUM

The sole objective here is to get conversions. And by this point, your user should be fully primed for this action. So make it quick and straight forward for your user to convert.

REMOVE COMPETING LINKS

Users these days have an attention span of a goldfish (we cover this in more detail in our article on video content). So don’t distract them with other sparkly things – even internal links to other pages on your own website.

We can’t stress it enough – landing pages are there for one thing: to convert. So make this your user’s only option.

Remove internal links to other pages on your site (including navigation!), and external links, too.

STRIP BACK YOUR LEAD FORM

Consider what information you really need from your user and keep it to a minimum. This is about making it as quick and easy for your user to convert.

1. HEADLINE

As mentioned above, your user will have landed on your page via a piece of marketing which hopefully will have begun to explain the offer to them.

A good landing page headline will:

• Grab the user’s attention
• Let the user know they are in the right place
• Focus on the benefit to the user
• Let the user know what they are getting

2. SUBHEADING

Your subheading should describe the key talking points and guide the user to the action you want them to complete.

3. CALL TO ACTION

Be clear about what you want your user to do by using an action verb (e.g. “download”). Make it short, action-oriented, and compelling.

4. BODY COPY

For those who require a little more persuading before converting, write compelling body copy that describes your offering and how it solves their pain points. Use lists and bullet points to make this information easier to skim-read. Here’s where you can also include proof points to increase trust and authenticity.

Good design doesn’t have to be fancy or require tons of animation (in fact, less is more!). But make sure your landing pages are eye-catching, on brand and that the call to action is the focal point by using contrasting colours and plenty of negative space to guide the eye (read our web design best practices here).

Before pumping paid activity into driving traffic, it’s important to get the organic content to a good place for it to perform well on Search.Get clued up on what your users are looking for in line with your offering.

INCLUDE KEYWORDS STRATEGICALLY ON YOUR LANDING PAGE:

• URL: Write a clean and relevant URL and even better: include your keywords.
• Title tag: The big blue link that represents a page in Search Results. It’s also displayed at the top of your page in your browser’s tabs.
• Header tags: Putting keywords into an H1 says to Google that these are the most important words on your page.
• Image file names: Google can’t see your images, so it has to go off a written description of your images. Placing your keywords here will help improve ranking.
• Copy: Pepper your keywords throughout the copy, but sparingly. Google will penalise you for keyword stuffing otherwise.

Some scary figures on speed:

• 47% of people expect a site to load in less than 2 seconds
• 40% of people will abandon a website entirely if it takes more than 3 seconds

Source:  https://neilpatel.com/

So your site speed could be the difference between users converting and leaving.

Read our top tips for improving site speed here.

A/B testing allows you to test any element of your landing page: your headline copy, imagery, CTA colour, lead form, even the actual offer.

Create two versions of your page and split your traffic between them to see which generates more conversions.

Don’t forget to make note of what works to help you formulate a plan for your next campaign.

SITE-WIDE LINKS

Add your landing pages to your internal link strategy to drive equity to them.. Incorporate links across your site – these can be discrete anchor text links from the home page or location page, for example.

EXTERNAL TRAFFIC

Drive traffic to your landing pages in all of your marketing channels: social media, emails, blog articles, paid search ads, display ads, etc.

Landing pages are a great tool to convert users. A good landing page will have a single clear objective, and be simple, free from distractions, and easy to navigate.

Done well, they can help you hit your marketing target on multiple campaigns.

Propeller is a digital marketing agency specialising in UX design and web design and development.. If you’d like to discuss your upcoming marketing campaigns and landing pages with us, get in touch.