Landing pages are one of the most important elements of digital marketing. They help you generate leads, gather all kinds of information about your customers, and refine your offers. Plus, they provide the kindling you need for all of your other marketing tactics (from social media marketing to blogger outreach).
However, having any kind of landing page is not enough. You want one that is designed well, one that stands out in the plethora of other landing pages competing for the attention of the same audience segment, and one that ultimately drives results.
Let’s take a brief detour before we jump into landing page design and focus on the “driving results” part first.
Setting Goals for Your Landing Pages
Your landing page should be designed based on the goals you want it to achieve.
You might be looking to:
- Gather emails and other contact information
- Offer a solution
- Promote a product or a service
- Promote a new product or service
- Promote and offer registration for an event
- Promote a downloadable
- Et cetera
Once you’ve determined what the page should ideally achieve, you can move on to writing and designing it with the goal in mind.
If this is your first stab at creating landing pages, you might find it difficult to write and design for different goals. What usually helps is checking out some examples of pages similar to the one you want to create. Now let’s look at some examples and tips that will help you get on the right track.
Engage Your Audience Immediately
The key to a great landing page is engaging your audience as soon as possible – preferably immediately. Humans have incredibly short attention spans (and the internet is not helping much), so the faster you can capture someone’s focus, the better your chances of achieving your goal.
Fast Loading Speeds
Speaking of short attention spans: if a visitor (or should we say potential visitor) has to wait more than a couple of seconds to access your website – they are more than likely to just give up and go somewhere else.
This is true for both desktop and mobile users, so ensuring both versions of your website are optimized for speed is absolutely crucial. There will be all kinds of tweaks and changes you can make, so find a reliable checklist and ensure you have ticked off all of the steps.
Awesome Headlines
The headline you use at the very top of your page (also known as the hero section, or above the fold) is what will keep your audience wanting to scroll down and learn more, or what might allow them to exit your page without taking it in fully.
Your headlines should cover two very important bases:
- Appeal to your target audience – Speak in their language, appeal to their pain points, and establish an instant rapport.
- Be authentic to your brand – Represent yourself the best you can, and communicate a message that is in line with who you are and what your own goals and aspirations are.
Here is an interesting solution for an awesome headline by ZenMaid – they actually have a dynamic headline that keeps changing. The core message remains the same, but different pain points are addressed with each version. This is an amazing way to communicate more within a single message, as well as to keep visitors present, wondering what the next message will be.
image source: zenmaid.com
Getting to the Point
Sticking to our point of keeping users engaged and getting to the point as soon as possible (something that ZenMaid does so well in the example above), let’s touch upon another important marketing term: value propositions.
Your value proposition is, in short, the reason why someone should engage with your brand and do business with you. It is the promise of the value you are providing to your customers.
You need to get to this point as soon as possible – ideally, within your headline. Otherwise, you are asking people to commit more and more of their time to get to know you – and why should they get to know you if they don’t know what you’re all about?
Keep Them Engaged
Now that you have attracted the attention of your visitors and they are still there, you need to work on keeping them on your pages.
Persuasive Subheadings
Just like you have devoted plenty of time to coming up with a heading to spark interest, you now need to stoke the fires of that interest with your subheadings.
You can never fully communicate the features of your product or service or the way they help solve a certain issue in a sentence or two. Your subheadings are thus there to help you expand on your original message, highlight some other key points of your value proposition, and provide a bit more of an in-depth explanation as to why someone should do business with you.
Here is a nice example of the clever use of subheadings from Drip – they use a mixture of both sales wording (marketing made easy) and explain what the product can do (unite store data).
Stoke the Pain
Another great way to keep your visitors engaged is by stoking the pain that they are trying to solve, and describing the solutions you offer for that same pain. While you may have already outlined it previously, now is the time to go into more detail and examine the pain in more detail.
InFlow does a nice job of explaining what the pain is and how they are going to solve it with their own images and headings – which is another point to be made here. Don’t be afraid to use images to illustrate the pains and solutions you are describing, as images tend to communicate messages better and faster than words.
image source: inflowinventory.com
Highlight the Pleasure
Naturally, as you are examining the pain points of your audience, you should also be very clear about the solutions you offer. Marketers will often tell you not to focus on the features, but to focus on the solutions.
A nice example here is Bay Alarm Medical, whose landing page features clear sections describing the pain and their solution. They also highlight some unique features to their product, like the fact that they offer support in over 170 languages. Definitely not something you should highlight at the top of the page, but also definitely not something you want to omit.
image source: bayalarmmedical.com
Engage with Visuals
Visuals are an incredible way to add credibility to your claims (especially if you are selling a physical product for which you can show images). Even if you’re selling a service, you can still use images of happy customers, before and afters, or images of the service being conducted to illustrate the pain points and the solutions.
Here is a cute little example from I Done This, whose homepage has some very engaging visuals. They are an amazing way to add some color and inject some fun into an otherwise boring page.
image source: idonethis.com
Keep it Simple and Don’t Go Overboard
Finally, now that you are aware of all of these options – try not to go overboard and bore your customers with too much information. Keep it as simple as possible, with a minimalistic design and with as simple a copy as you can.
Action, Action, Action
Since engagement and presence are not quite enough, you also want your visitors to take some kind of action. Here’s how you can inspire it:
Great Call to Action
Your call to action is your best friend when it comes to boosting conversions. A great CTA is short and to the point. It stands out visually from the rest of the page, and it is a bit different from other CTAs you are used to coming across. This might not always be possible, but as long as you communicate the value well, your CTA will work.
Here is a nice CTA by Bark Box – simple, easy to understand, stands out, but nothing over the top and too fancy. Which is what you should be aiming for as well.
image source: barkbox.com
Overcome Objections and Provide Social Proof
You want to prove to your visitors that they can trust you. They may have certain objections about your offer, they might have qualms about safety, they might wonder about your processes or if your solutions are right for them.
By using social proof and carefully addressing the objections you know someone might have, you will be inspiring more trust and proving you understand your customers well.
Abodo does this extremely well, with a bit of social proof and a bit of proof of legitimacy – they clearly show how their apartments are verified, making it easier for users to trust them.
image source: abodo.com
Provide Some Sort of Guarantee
You can certainly never guarantee complete success or ensure that your product or service will provide 100% satisfaction to 100% of customers. However, providing some sort of guarantee, no matter how insignificant it may seem to you as the business owner, can go a very long way.
This might be showcasing your past successes; it can be social proof, case studies, testimonials – anything you can think of that is legitimate and that will resonate with your audience.
Here’s a simple yet effective example from Best Spy: with only the one sentence in the hero section, they manage to convey the fact that they get thousands of visitors and that these visitors make purchases based on their recommendations – purchases they are ultimately satisfied with.
image source: bestspy.co.uk
To Conclude
There you have it – hopefully, our tips and examples will help you design your own landing page that is able to drive the results you’re looking for without too much stress and overthinking.
