The PPC ads and your social media game have been bringing people to your website. Awesome!
Your traffic is hanging around and clicking on a few pages when they visit. Even better!
But, after those first few clicks, it seems like people are visiting your site and getting a little confused once they get there. And the more time you spend looking at your ads accounts, the more you can’t help but feel like you should be getting more bang for your buck.
If any of this sounds familiar, it may be time for you to create a landing page.
BUT — you don’t want just any landing page. You need a kick-ass landing page that will actually convert.
How can you make sure that you’re not wasting your time? Is there some way that you can roll out a landing page without having that uncomfortable will-this-actually-work tension hanging over your head?
The good news is that if you’re asking these questions, we’ve got answers!
Keep reading to learn how to create a landing page over the course of your lunch hour.
Table of Contents
What Even is a Landing Page?
Even though marketers are generally nice people, the industry does have a tendency to throw around words. What can we say? We’re human.
But for the sake of keeping everybody on the same page, it’s important to understand that a landing page, or an LP as the cool kids say, is a page that’s designed to be the first thing that people see when they click on your ads or visit through a guest post link.
Not only do landing pages make the transition from Facebook feed to Your Site less jarring, but they also give you a nice opportunity to show people how your product or service is the answer to their problems.
And with a list of perks that includes:
- Higher conversion rates
- Greater control over your marketing funnel
- The ability to speak directly to your many buyer personas
It’s clear that landing pages aren’t just another bit of marketing buzz. They’re money-making machines!
Before You Build Your Landing Page
1. Know What You Want the Page to Do
Landing pages can come in many shapes and sizes. They could be a page that’s announcing a major sale. They could be an out-and-out sales letter. Or they could even be a comparison article that allows you to articulate all the reasons why your product is better than the competition’s.
To get a solid sense of what your landing page should look like, you need to understand the reason why you’re creating the page.
Do you want to collect people’s email addresses? Are you asking for the sale? Would you like people to book calls with you?
In the grand scheme of things, we already know that your end goal is to generate more revenue for your business.
But you wouldn’t use a full-length sales letter to ask for an email address. Think of this stage of your landing page process as your method of going from point A to point B.
2. Sort Out Your Tech Stack
We’ve just gone over the why of building a landing page. This step is your opportunity to sort out the how.
There are plenty of companies and independent services, like Unbounce or LeadPages, that specialize in allowing individual business owners and marketers to create beautiful landing pages with all the bells and whistles included. In addition, some email marketing companies may also offer landing pages as a service add-in.
In our experience, however, you really don’t need much more than some custom buttons on your WordPress site to build a website landing page that gets the job done.
While You're Building Your Landing Page
You’ve figured out what form your landing page is going to take. And you’ve sorted out the logistics of how you’re going to use it to take your landing page from “An idea that I had during my lunch break” to a full-blown, client-grabbing operation.
Now’s the part where you get to actually creating the page. Here are some of our best tips:
Use a (Relatively) Clean Design
Whether you’re going for a page that says, “Please leave your email address.” or one that says, “Buy now while supplies last!”, your landing page is your last stand.
The last thing you want is to have flashing images all over the place or multiple “Click here!” buttons that lead to different pages.
Sure, you’ll want to showcase your offer and include mockups and other pieces of information that can let people know what they’re getting.
But as a general rule of thumb, you’ll want to avoid distractions if you can help it.
The cleaner and simpler you can make your landing page look, the better!
Don't Pull Your Punches
Back in the 90s, the Evil Overlord list became an internet sensation, in part because Hollywood villains were all suffering from the same affliction:
They were always pulling their punches.
In one movie, maybe the villain creates a complicated system that will kill the hero eventually instead of right away. In other shows, the minions working for the villain attack one-by-one instead of all at once. How much shorter would the trilogy have been if Darth Vader had simply taken care of business?
In 2016, the Washington Post reported that six out of ten people would often share links without reading the full article they were linking to. What this means is that you don’t have time to waffle around with your landing page. You need to hit your emotional triggers and you need to start with a punchy headline that grabs your prospects by the throat and says, “You need to sign up for this!”.
This may require some preliminary work. You’ll have to know what you’re really selling to clients.
But when you’re able to articulate these benefits, like the back of your hand, the copy on your business website landing page will practically write itself.
After the Page is Published
You got the landing page off the ground. It’s written. It’s published. And it’s driving sales.
Congratulations! Here’s how you can keep the momentum going for your landing page funnel.
Be Prepared to Do A/B Tests
Even if you’ve got the greatest landing page ever created, if you do say so yourself, there are always things that could have been done differently.
And, depending on the people you’re trying to reach for your business, those tweaks and adjustments could potentially take your landing page conversion rate from “Pretty good, for a business page.” to “Wowza! I might need a pool for all this money.”
Maybe your social media traffic would be more likely to convert if you used a different headline that emphasized a different benefit. Or maybe, your target demographic is in the middle of a surprisingly serious love affair with long copy and equally long CTAs.
You won’t know until you test.
They say that landing page optimization is a process that never ends. And as long as you can come up with new ideas for your page, there’s no reason why you can’t keep testing and tweaking for better results.
Be Ready to Do It All Over Again
Let’s just say that you’ve perfected your landing page and you’re pretty much ready to put it on if-it-isn’t-broken-I-don’t-want-fix-it status.
Cool.
Now’s your chance to start expanding your landing page empire.
Taboola pointed out a while back that companies that had over 40 landing pages were bringing in 12 times as many leads as businesses that only had 15.
So what does that mean for a business owner like you? It means landing pages are more of a numbers game than anybody cares to admit.
If you can identify another demographic or another benefit that seems to be resonating with your audience lately, you can put up another landing page and keep watching as the sales fly in.
Want More Business? Create a Landing Page
While it’s true that you can definitely get a landing page written, published, and up in under an hour, there’s something that you need to know about landing pages:
There’s doing them fast. And then there’s doing them well. Plus, if we’re being honest, running split tests on a website can be complicated.
Instead of taking more time out of your busy schedule to throw a landing page together, you can let our kick-ass team do it for you.
We’ll create a landing page for your business website that’ll bring in sales while knocking your socks off. Book an appointment with Brashberry today! We’d love to hear from you.
