Building Landing Pages that Sell, by Chris Hawley

Editor's Notes

• #2: Present myself/my role at Acumatica Introduce topic
• #4: Landing pages are an essential component of inbound marketing. Essentially, they’re where your visitors “land” after clicking a call-to-action offer from your website, blog, social networks, etc. Takes time to plan and build, but in a flashy digital world, it’s more important than ever to design landing pages that immediately interest visitors. Include lead forms, which allow you to convert campaign prospects into leads. Visitors provide contact information through the lead form in order to receive the offer you’ve presented. Upon submission, they become a lead in your database. Landing pages can and should take different forms for different offers—may build differently for a page offering a whitepaper than for a page offering a demo. Create distinct pages for each promotion you run so that users can immediately access the offer. Sending them to your homepage forces more work on them and turns potential leads away. Landing pages are your means of achieving your conversion goals. Once you figure out where you want potential customers to go, landing pages help you get them there. According to Interactive Marketing Inc., keeping useful information on a single page can increase conversion by 55%. Have a dedicated page for each step (or a series of similar steps) of your conversion path.
• #5: Headline is the first thing people see, and with an average online attention span of 8 seconds, you must communicate your offer as clearly and concisely as possible. Don’t just state the title of your ebook or whatever—tell visitors exactly what the offer is. The body of your page should expand upon the offer mentioned in your headline. Specifically, it should outline why the visitor should claim the offer. Convey the value of your offer by explaining how it can address a specific problem or interest your target audience cares about. Include relevant details, but keep the page as crisp and brief as possible. “Get rid of half the words on each page, then get rid of half of what’s left.” --Steve Krug Write your copy with SEO in mind by using popular keywords for your topic where appropriate (Google’s Penguin algorithm punishes overuse). Hubspot ranks the failure to do this as the #1 mistake companies make when redesigning their SEO strategies. Users can only buy your product if they can find your product, and organic searches are overwhelmingly the most common method of webpage access. Relevant images attract attention—use them. 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual, and the brain processes visuals 60,000x faster than text. Don’t overload the page—one or two simple, related images should suffice.
• #6: Form is arguably the main event because the information it collects is what reclassifies your visitors as leads. It indicates direct interest in what you have to offer. Your form should appear above the fold (i.e., it shouldn’t require scrolling to view). Form length depends on the lead quantity and quality you’re seeking. Shorter forms generate more leads, but longer forms generate more targeted leads. Remember that length can try patience. Staples: name, email address. Supplement with questions about their profession and business size to help you understand how likely it is that they’ll become a customer. Link to privacy policy below form to alleviate concerns about information misuse. Client testimonials and certifications also instill trust. Generic “Contact Us” forms rarely succeed—they’re too vague and don’t address the needs of specific visitors, and they often attract spam. CTA is the button that lets visitors submit their information and claim what you’ve offered. It’s the trigger. Default text is usually “Submit,” but data shows that landing pages with buttons labeled “Submit” have lower conversion rates than those that do not. Try to label your buttons with something more engaging and relevant to your offer—for example, “Learn more.” After submission, provide buttons for social media sharing: facebook, google+, twitter, linkedin, etc. Remember to include sharing and forwarding options for email as well.
• #7: Layout should be simple and clear. Guide visitors through page to form. Convey the top three or four most important pieces of information up front. Bullet points, numbering, and bold or italicized text are useful tools for emphasizing these main focus points. Your page should make it as easy as possible for visitors to understand the offer, the value, and the action they need to take. To reduce the likelihood of your page visitors clicking away and roaming other parts of your website before they complete your form, remove most navigation and links from the page. This cuts away distractions from completing your form. Avoiding top navigation and links will help conversion rates on your landing pages. Exception: a link near the form to your privacy policy. This tells viewers how you’re going to be using their information and paints you as a transparent, credible, and trustworthy company. Responsive design is Google’s preferred configuration for mobile-optimized websites. With responsive design, all of your website’s URLs are the same across all devices, and they all serve up the same HTML code. The only thing that changes across devices is the styling (which is controlled by CSS). This configuration makes it easier for Google to crawl your pages and retrieve your content. To quote Google, “This improvement in crawling efficiency can indirectly help Google index more of the site’s contents and keep it appropriately fresh.” The meta description is a text snippet that summarizes your web page. These are usually pulled by search engines and coupled with the page links that show up as search results. Meta descriptions are limited to 150 characters, so make them short and clear explanations of your offer. Optimizing your meta data and keywords is important. The meta data and keywords are both factors in how Google’s ranking algorithm determines the relevance of your ads and where your website shows up in search results. Also, the description is the text that is shown and shared in social media. Make this text concise and convincing enough to attract visitors to your landing page. Like the searchers themselves, search engines prefer URLs that make it easy to understand what your page content is all about. When creating URLs, use dashes (-) between words instead of underscores (_). Google treats dashes as separators, which means it can return results when you search for a single word that appears in a URL and when you search for a group of words that appears in a URL. In contrast, Google treats underscores as connectors, which means it will only return results when you search for a group of connected words that appears in a URL. The bottom line: using dashes creates more opportunities for your pages to be discovered. If you change your site structure, be sure to set up 301 redirects from old landing pages. A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect from one URL to another. Whether you’re restructuring your URLs or consolidating content, setting up 301 redirects ensures any “SEO juice” from your old URLs gets transferred to your new URLs. Example: Let’s say your current site has a “Team” page (at site.com/team) as well as a “Culture” page (at site.com/culture). However, you decide to consolidate those two pages into a single “About Us” page (at site.com/about). To transfer the SEO authority of those pages to your new page, you’ll want to set up 301 redirects so that both old links send folks to the new URL.
• #9: Each building platform has different advantages. Hubspot is very user-friendly—even the technologically challenged can work their way through its template builder. Tracking code is embedded in all of Hubspot’s page creations, so you don’t need to worry about acquiring one remotely and plugging it into your pages. It also lists suggestions for SEO optimization on each of your pages, allowing you to quickly adjust your content to better fit the digital world. However, it might not offer the degree of customization an advanced designer wants. Constructing pages yourself requires significantly more labor but allows significantly more room for aesthetic and functional changes. Explore your options and select whichever’s best for your current business. When your webpage goes live, double-check that the search engines are allowed to look for it.
• #10: Ensure that the look and feel of your brand comes through in your landing pages. Keep your language, colors, text, and logos uniform across site. Maintaining brand consistency will lend additional credibility to your pages and increase the likelihood that your visitors will fill out your form. The landing page should make it very obvious what your visitors will get out of your offer. Tell your visitors exactly what they are receiving, what benefits will come from it, and why they need it now. When visitors clearly understand the value of your offer, they will be much more inclined to fill out the form and convert. A good rule of thumb is to make sure your landing page passes the “blink test” – can the viewer understand the offer and what they need to do in less than 5 seconds? A conversion occurs when a prospective customer takes some measurable step toward purchasing. In the context of landing pages, conversions occur when visitors submit their information through the pages’ forms. The conversion path is a process of clicks that your visitors take to travel from one step to the next, ultimately ending with the action you intend for them to take. To understand your conversion path, you first need to identify what kind of conversion you’re aiming for. After you get their information, follow through by delivering what you promised. When you consistently provide your visitors and audience with quality content, you’ll turn them into advocates for your brand. Once leads submit a form, redirect them to a “Thank You” page where they can receive the content (or confirmation of the agreement) that you have promised them. You can include access to your offer, social media sharing links, secondary calls-to-action, and auto-response emails.
• #11: Determine effectiveness of your landing pages by tracking them with analytics. You don’t need to track every data point immediately, but make sure you set up your tracking to measure the success of your landing pages over time. Hubspot has tracking built into its framework. If you’re using Google Analytics or another evaluation tool, remember to paste the tracking code into your page. Different tools have different tracking specialties—dig around before focusing on one. For those just beginning to delve into landing page analytics, you probably want to focus on a few key data points, namely your traffic and conversion rates. Traffic: # of people who’ve viewed your page. Can offer some insight into size, composition, and motivations of audience. Conversion rates: % of visitors converting on your landing pages. Monitor to help determine which techniques have increased/decreased that number. Here are some other key metrics you may want to consider: Number of visits/visitors/unique visitors (monthly average) Top performing keywords (in terms of rank, traffic, and lead generation) Number of inbound linking domains Total number of total pages indexed Total number of pages that receive traffic Check your progress at least weekly to identify trends in traffic and conversion rates.
• #13: Good things Form included Bad things Difficult to determine what the offer is from glance and headline—fails 5-second test. Form is “Contact Us,” but copy mentions a demo. Poorly formatted—break your text up with bullets, bolding, and the like to avoid overwhelming readers Sloppy copy—grammatically deficient, excessive, and unfocused Full navigation bar is still included—remove these distractions to keep attention on your form Form omits the email field and could probably add another entry without overburdening the user “Submit” as a CTA button performs worse than many alternatives No images or other media to capture user interest Unprofessional attempt at assuaging privacy concerns—link to privacy policy would be better Overall verdict: confusing and unappealing
• #14: Good things Easy on the eyes Text is parsed and formatted appealingly Clever use of imagery to spice up the browsing experience Enticing CTA text Page eliminates unnecessary navigation and focuses on the form Copy explains value of offer and outlines the process for receiving it Bad things Might benefit from a more focused offer or from more clearly outlining the offer in the headline Consider including an additional field in the form to learn more about the kinds of leads you’re attracting Copy could use slight polishing A link to the privacy policy would be helpful
• #15: You now know how to define your conversion goals and intended conversion path and how targeted landing pages can address specific segments of your leads. You also learned how to optimize those pages for conversion. Use clear titles, descriptions, and layouts to quickly convey value and incentivize your visitors to fill out your forms. Keep your visitors focused on filling out your form by removing extraneous navigation, and keep your form length balanced. Finally, we talked about ways to track these numbers and use them to improve your future landing pages. Plenty to keep in mind, but remember Hubspot’s #1 and #2 SEO rules: Always add value and be yourself. By following the guidance in this presentation, you’ll be able to build some beautiful, focused landing pages of your own. After that, lead conversion and sales are sure to follow.