Building a successful landing page is an essential step in the process of building a successful digital marketing campaign.
The fundamental role a landing page plays in your marketing campaign ecosystem is to clearly define the value you have to offer potential customers and generate conversion opportunities.
Equally, missing this step in the campaign, or paying too little attention to the importance of the landing page in the marketing process, inevitably leads to failure, translated into an inability to convince your potential customers to buy.
Exactly like this:
So whatever marketing goals you’re aiming for, you need not just a landing page, but a landing page built on a rigorous, clearly staged process with implications that start from creative premises and reach far into the realms of data analytics and behavioral science.
In this article, we set out to discuss absolutely every step you need to take to build a professional landing page.
We will also clearly explain the logic behind each step, so that you can fully understand the importance of a landing page and the potential for success it offers.
Right then, in the following we will talk about:
- What is a landing page;
- What types of landing pages exist;
- Why a quality landing page is vital in the digital marketing plan ecosystem;
We’ll also discuss the steps you need to take to build a landing page that delivers real conversions to your marketing campaign and not just vanity metrics.
More specifically, we’ll discuss:
- What and why wireframing is important in creating a landing page
- User Experience (UX) and User Interface (UI)
- The best copywriting formulas you can adopt to get the ideal conversion rate
- How to effectively approach the Web Design component and how to choose the right design elements in your landing page so that you deliver the visual and navigational experience you want.
- What are the most effective landing page optimization strategies
- The tool we used to create a landing page that generated a conversion rate of 31.2% in a B2B campaign, run during the period of the state of emergency to fight the Coronavirus epidemic:
Before we go any further, I want you to know that all the information you will learn below is the result of over 4 years of landing page design work.
Also, the steps of building a landing page, which we will discuss later in the article, are steps that we follow rigorously, because they have proven their effectiveness over time.
Of course, the landing page mentioned above is the end result of these steps.
Therefore, after you have gone through this article, I guarantee that you will be 100% ready to build the exceptional landing page you want and, more than that, we are confident that, from today, you will be able to make landing pages more and more performing.
Here we go! 🙂
First of all, it’s important to clarify:
What is a landing page?
In the digital marketing sphere, a landing page, also known as a “landing page,” is a web page that is displayed in response to a user’s action (also known as a microconversion) to access:
- an advertisement run in social media
- a hyperlink
- a newsletter
- a result displayed in a search engine
- etc.
Ideally, this landing page is a logical informational extension of the advertisement, the link clicked, the newsletter, the Google result and so on.
A landing page has the fundamental role of strategically guiding user actions to drive conversions, whether it:
- selling a product or service
- subscription
- subscribe to an event
- download a document
- etc., depending on the marketing objective imposed in the marketing strategy initially set.
Landing page types
From “about us”, to “coming soon…”, to “long form sale landing page” and even “404 Page”, there are many types of landing page, each defining a specific action it is intended to achieve.
However, all of these landing pages fall under the umbrella of two fundamental types:
- Reference landing page
A landing page reference is a web page that presents relevant information to the user. This page may contain images, videos, various dynamic combinations of links and other elements.
- Transactional landing page
A transactional landing page, on the other hand, is meant to influence a visitor’s actions towards making a specific decision convenient to the marketer, mainly a transaction.
Generally, to carry out the transaction, this type of landing page has a form to fill in.
In a transactional landing page, the goal is to gather as much information about the visitor as possible and, ultimately, to convert them into a customer.
By this point you’ve probably pretty much figured out what the landing page is all about.
It is not enough, however, to build a landing page, it is extremely important that this page is of quality.
Why is a quality landing page vital in a digital marketing campaign?
Let’s start at the beginning. ?
Basically, the plan of a promotional campaign is structured in 3 stages:
- The stage of attracting potential customers, which mainly revolves around ads (creative + strategic placement)
- Conversion stage, which involves the existence of a landing page and where its quality is crucial
- The measurement and optimization stage, where we discuss tools for measuring results and retargeting and remarketing tools.
Of course, each of the 3 stages is made up of a specific set of tactics.
In essence, the quality of these tactics determines the success achieved in each of the 3 stages.
In turn, the success achieved through the effective implementation of the 3 stages determines the success of the campaign as a whole, measured against the fundamental objectives set out in the promotion strategy.
It sounds complicated, doesn’t it?
Basically, it goes something like this:
Surely all 3 steps are important.
- reclamations are important;
- the channels you run, too;
- buyer persona profile and target audience location process are, again, important.
More importantly, how you choose the right measurement and retargeting tools and how you set them up plays a critical role in the success of your marketing campaign.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
But if the ads are the ones that draw potential customers’ attention to your product or service – assuming you’ve targeted the right audience, in the right channels, at the right time and place, with the right message – and the tools give you the insights you need to correctly measure and optimise your promotion campaigns and retarget the leads you get, well, landing page remains the centre of your promotion campaign universe.
Why?
Let me give you an example closer to home:
I’m sure you’ve been to a food market before.
In this place, we both know that the predominant strategy by which stall sellers try to attract customers is to make their voices heard. Literally.
“Yes, crave strawberries, yes, please, crave, crave!”
I think I can guess what the above exclamation sounded like in your mind. 😀
Although rudimentary in our perception, this technique is a marketing one and is often quite effective in attracting customers.
However, even if a customer gives in to the salesperson’s insistence and approaches the stall, the work of persuasion is far from over and the “conversion” is far from being achieved.
Once persuaded to approach the stall, the customer wants to know the arguments why those products are best suited for them.
In fact, it is in this step that a good salesperson is differentiated from a poor one.
One of the most important marketing lessons you can learn in marketing is that many know how to attract attention, but few know how to sell.
And this is representative of absolutely every other business, whether you’re selling strawberries in the marketplace or a marketing automation tool based on artificial intelligence algorithms.
With-this-claim-you’re-doing: attract attention.
In fact, come to think of it, even in digital marketing – though we perceive it as a more process-refined promotional process – people still shout at the top of their lungs to get attention whenever the opportunity and platform allows it.
And where you can’t use your voice to shout, you “shout” in writing and pictures…
Is it enough just to attract attention to close a sale?
Let’s take a look at the average Conversion Rate on some of the most popular digital platforms*:
- Facebook Ads: ~9.2%
- Instagram Ads: ~3%
- LinkedIn Ads: ~6.1%
- Google Search Ads: ~4.40%
- Google Display Ads: ~0.57%
*source: this information is freely available on the internet.
Let’s say that the weighting between “infimum”, “satisfactory” and “successful” in the case of an online marketing campaign is related to different factors such as:
- Product/service quality
- Nice
- Potential audience
- budget
- etc.
One thing is certain:
At these low conversion rates, you can’t afford to lose too many potential customers down the road.Agree?
So, where do you think all these potential customers “landed” who followed up on the advertisement you placed on one of the above platforms?
You guessed it: on the landing page.
And if your landing page isn’t built properly, if it has gaps on the UX (User Experience), UI (User Interface) or copywriting side, if it isn’t properly optimized for all devices, you have a problem.
You can brag that you beat the official stats and got an above-average conversion rate for the platform you ran your ads on, but if potential customers don’t take the step to the final conversion to purchase, or whatever goal you set for yourself, because your landing page has poor quality, all your numbers are nothing more than Vanity Metrics.
So you need a quality landing page that delivers the numbers you need to meet your marketing goal.
Well, let’s see then:
Steps to follow in building a landing page that delivers real conversions to your marketing campaign and not just vanity metrics
To build a proper landing page you need to go through a few steps, and you also need:
- A professional tool, specialized in creating landing pages – it is preferable to have an integrated visual composer builder, so that it can be easily handled.
We at re7consulting agency use one of the most powerful tools of its kind on the market, which we will talk about, however, a little later. Until then, you still need:
- A wireframing tool – which we’ll also discuss in a moment.
- A web design savvy person who understands the importance of UX (User Experience) and UI (User Interface) processes.
- A copywriter who knows how to juggle sales copy and specific copywriting formulas
In another vein, the “few steps” we mentioned earlier are actually 7 – which we consider necessary and have followed in building hundreds of landing pages so far – namely:
- Objective definition
- Target Audience Definition
- Wireframing
- UX (User Experience) Design
- Copywriting – defining tone-of-voice and choosing copy formulas
- Measurement
- Optimization
Here are the 7 steps we follow when we build a landing page (that’s 3 times a week, on average 🙂 ).
Let’s go into a little more detail about each step. It is generally not a good idea to start a project without setting very clear goals that you want to achieve in the end, and the process of building a landing page does not disregard this rule. The first step appeals to your strategic thinking and ensures that the next steps sync up to guide your campaign in the right direction. We, in the agency, set our goals using the SMART method, which is, at this time, the most efficient method of setting where we want to go. Here is a detailed article about what SMART is and how to use it to set your marketing goals correctly. You’ll also find in this article a free template you can use to make the process easier. We are basically talking about creating a Buyer Persona profile, which is the proper name given to a fictional representation of the ideal customer; if you are an entrepreneur, you can refer to this Buyer Persona as the avatar of your business’s ideal customer. Why is it important to know who we are talking to? A Buyer Persona gives you all the insights you need to better understand your potential customers. That way, you’ll know how to address them, what design elements to use, what benefits of the product or service to bring forward, etc. How to create a Buyer Persona profile I talked about in another article published on the re7consulting blog: Locating the target audience in 4 steps, which I invite you to read to deepen the topic. Tot in this article you will also find a buyer persona profiling framework, which you can download for free. Wireframing defines a minimalist landing page design process at a structural level. A wireframe mockup looks something like this: From a practical perspective, wireframe layouts give us the assurance that content elements, graphics and navigation elements are placed in the correct positions. Also, as a collective effort in creating a landing page, wireframing helps us keep a unified vision of the project. Such a wireframe diagram can even be created on a sheet of paper with a pencil. Today, however, there are plenty of specialized tools that can help you in this process. Moqups is one such tool (the print screen above is taken from a wireframe made in Moqups). We use it regularly because it offers us an extremely intuitive interface and a visual composer builder that allows us to quickly make wireframe layouts. We will discuss the wireframing process in more detail in a dedicated article, scheduled for next week. Another aspect worth noting here is that the wireframing process is essential in the UI (User Interface) Design stage, due to its fundamental purpose of providing an idea of how future visitors will interact with the landing page. And while we’re on the subject of UI Design, know that this process is just one step in what is called UX (User Experience) Design, which we’ll talk about next. UX Design defines an entire ecosystem of creative and functional processes that revolve around the goal of providing a special and relevant browsing experience for users. This process involves processes such as custom design of the purchase process, how to integrate the product into the landing page, strategic insertion of brand elements, graphic design, navigation experience, loading speed, functionality, etc. We will discuss this topic, however, separately, in an article dedicated entirely to how to treat the User Experience component when working on a landing page. The next step is copywriting. This process usually begins with a strategic planning session in which the following are established: Have you heard of AIDA? Well, AIDA is one of the most popular copywriting formulas. AIDA is basically an acronym that outlines the steps a potential customer has to go through on their way to conversion when they reach the landing page. In the case of the AIDA formula, the steps are: Each of these stages is important because they incorporate specific copywriting structures built to amplify the potential customer’s interest and drive their purchase decision. In addition to AIDA there are many other copywriting formulas (ACCA, AAPPA, PAPA, PAS, etc.), which we will also discuss in a future article. In this step, you have a number of measurement tools at your disposal, depending on how you choose to build your landing page. For example, you can build a dedicated landing page integrated as a new page in your website. In this case, Google Analytics or Google Search Console can give you all the information you need to get an idea of how your landing page is performing and provide you with the insights you need in the next step, optimization – which we will discuss in the next step. On the other hand, if you use a dedicated builder, specialized in creating landing pages, chances are high that it will also have a section for analyzing the data entered on the landing page. We, for example, as I told you earlier in the article, use one of the best performing specialized builders in the world. This is the Instapage.com platform, which provides us with a lot of: We will also discuss Instapage in a future article. Until then, let’s talk about the last step in building a successful Landing Page, namely: Optimizing a landing page is, in fact, a set of measures to be taken to increase the percentage of visitors who become customers, that is, more directly, to increase the conversion rate. As the focus of attention is to find solutions to improve the visitor experience on the page, the optimization process focuses on elements that can make the page more appealing to users who end up interacting with it. In principle, the process starts with: Well, look, that’s why we love these 7 steps and inadvertently wanted to share them with you. 🙂 The result obtained after completing the first 6 steps listed above transforms a simple landing page into a true experiential ecosystem that adopts the user, following their browsing behavior step by step and anticipating their needs, based on this behavior. In this contentaxt, once you reach the 7th stage, the optimization stage, all the data will already be at your disposal and you will know which optimization strategies to tackle to improve your conversion rate. While we’re on the subject of optimization strategies, let’s move on to the last chapter of this comprehensive article, which is of course: There are two major ways to optimize a landing page: This type of optimization presents 3 distinct methodologies to follow, namely: The landing page content is optimized based on information obtained about the visitor’s search criteria, geographic information of the traffic source or other generic parameters that we know and can use without necessarily performing a precise audience segmentation. The content of the page is optimized following a process of correlating known information about the visitor, such as specific segmentation data related to previous buying behavior, demographic or psychographic information, browsing patterns and other data, in an attempt to predict their future actions based on predictive analytics. The landing page content is optimized based on relevant information obtained from public sources such as reviews, ratings, labels, recommendations, etc. This distinct type of process proposes 6 strategic methods for optimizing a landing page: Also known as “A/B split testing”, this method involves sequential or parallel testing of two or more versions of the same landing page (either totally different, or different in terms of graphics or text elements present on the page). The most widely used method of A/B Testing is sequential testing, which involves the gradual publication of different versions of pages over a defined period of time. The parallel method, on the other hand, involves publishing the versions of landing pages involved in the testing at the same time, splitting the total traffic between the two pages and monitoring it to determine which page performs better. Multivariate optimization of a landing page focuses on testing some graphic or copy elements (title, background color, logos, icons, button color, form design, form structure, etc.) , alternatives to the pre-existing ones. This method, based on user experience, involves creating a diverse set of distinct visitor experiences placed within the same landing page structure and monitoring visitor preferences. In this case, the Heat Map function is an efficient solution for measuring results. “F-like” Layout is a term that defines one of the most commonly addressed navigational behaviors displayed by visitors when they arrive on a web page. More specifically, once on a page, the visitor tends to scan the content in the following way: up -> left-up -> then the scanning continues downward with each line of text or graphic element present on the page. Rightly so, taking into account this navigation habit, it is recommended to place the content with the highest potential to stimulate a conversion at the top and left-up side of the web page. This optimization method involves symbiotically aligning the message received by the user, before accessing the landing page, with the message received by the user after reaching the landing page. Approaching this optimization method strengthens the visitor’s confidence in the decision they initially made. Design matching involves the same strategic action as that found in the method presented above, the difference being that here the reference is to the design elements. The approach of this optimization method generates the same reaction from the visitor as the “Message matching” strategy. This is it. 😀 These are the steps we follow in building a professional, quality landing page capable of delivering generous conversion rates, like the 31.2% we achieved in our last campaign. I end this article with the certainty that you have found in it extremely useful information, that we have given you the clarity you needed to build the landing pages you want and that, from today, you will move to the next level in understanding, planning, implementing, measuring and optimizing this essential step in a digital marketing campaign, namely the landing page. If you have any questions, I’ll be happy to answer them, so please feel free to message me on our official Social Media accounts. P.S. If you want to deepen the 7 steps presented above, I invite you to subscribe to the re7consulting newsletter (if you are not already subscribed) and, in the next period, you will receive from us all the information you need. Take that! Cit and:1. Defining objectives
2. Defining the target audience
3. Wireframing
4. User Experience (UX) Design
5. Copywriting
6. Measuring results
7. Optimization
Landing-page-optimization-strategies
1. Targeting-based optimization
2. Experiment-based optimization
