Why to involve great effort into designing a landing page?
Nowadays we can compare landing pages to brochures. The only difference is that they operate online. Landing page evolved into something more than just a place, where users start exploring your website. A superior landing page can increase conversion in the most powerful way. In other words, you need to design landing pages to optimize your marketing. The idea of a landing page is to focus your customer on a specific information or interaction, give specific information and call to action. A converting landing page can become the most important marketing tool for your business.
You shouldn’t confuse a landing page to a home page. Usually it is a separate unit from your website and even can have different design. The task of a landing page is to capture visitors’ information and contacts, generate leads and convert.
Why do you need conversion?
Conversion is a metric that figures out the success of your online marketing strategy. Usually a number of people that come to your website and take the desirable action determines it. Even if you have a huge traffic to your website, but people don’t buy from you, it means you urgently need to optimize your conversion strategy.
Conversion is applied as a process of transformation and can be used in different fields. If we think of a landing page that is converting, we understand it as something designed specifically for your business, proposal or event, fast and convenient for a user to understand and take action. It is mostly used in electronic commerce as a way of turning visitors into buyers.
Fast development of online business and services allows us to apply landing pages far wider than just in e-commerce. For example, you can ask users to sign up, register, download or go to your SaaS website with the help of call-to-action button on a landing page. In fact, a good converting landing page can make users:
- Go to a page with a detailed description of your business, product or service.
- Encourage them to try your product.
- Download a trial version.
- Subscribe to your newsletter.
- Go to your website.
- Share personal information with you.
- Take part in testing.
- Download a book or a sheet.
- Sign Up.
- Buy your product.
Indeed, we design landing pages for users to perform action. The result of their action – conversion – is a measure of all your hard work dedicated to creating online business. If users don’t convert into active, it means you need to adjust your design or a strategy as a whole. Engage and stimulate them with proper design, brief and clear information, amazing images and with ability to save. They can save their effort, time or even money.
Why landing pages should accompany every promotion or a campaign?
First of all, do not confuse a landing page to your website. A landing page is a stand-alone unit, designed to engage users, to solve their enquiry quickly and in a most efficient way. For example, you need to inform as many people as you can about an upcoming webinar that your company promotes. There are two options, which one would you choose?
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- Users come to your website; see lots of pages and interesting information. Soon they are distracted and overloaded with it and leave without paying attention to your upcoming webinar. Alternatively, they see it, but the whole procedure of signing in is long and tiring, so they just leave, hopefully not irritated.
- Users find your landing page according to their search; see the exact and bold information they need, clearly understand what they need to do and do it, which ultimately leads them to buying from you.
The basic idea behind the landing page is providing important information and making the user interact with you in a way you consider valuable. It is also one of the best ways to inform users about new products, contests, giveaways, invitations to events and more.
This is why it is crucial to consider designing a landing page for your future campaign. Try to make it aesthetic and low-key, appealing to your target audience patterns and desires.
Simple and easy to understand information provided by your landing page can add an indispensable value to your user experience. The traffic you get on your website is completely useless if it doesn’t generate leads and conversions. If your landing page also doesn’t generate conversion consider at least an A/B testing to find the most productive variant.
The landing page components
With a grit on our teeth, we confess that not every landing page can be effective. If this tool is not able to concentrate users’ attention on one specific action, you need to redesign it. The effectiveness of a landing page is measured by its value to users. Only value provides success. To understand how to incorporate value for users into your landing page design you need to know what the essential components are.
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- Basic information with a CTA.
A landing page informs users about your product and encourages them to buy or use your product by clicking the call-to-action button. - Real positive feedbacks.
Trust is important when making a decision. If you want to make users decide to your advantage, do it by means of relevant testimonials of your already existing clients. Build trust by adding your social network contacts and showing certificates and awards if any. - Beneficial features.
The idea is to make you beneficial comparing to your competitors. Tell your potential customers why it is you who they need to choose. Avoid diminishing your competitors. Instead, find and underline all aspects that people can gain from you. This block can make your landing page bigger, hence we recommend to study if it should be a separate block, or an incorporated one into the first component.
- Basic information with a CTA.
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Pay attention you did:
Target audience research
An efficient landing page is not just an amazingly designed web page representing your business or offer. In fact, it is a page constructed on the basis of thorough researched combined with bright ideas and your specific goals. Before you start designing your landing page be sure that you’ve conducted full target audience analysis. It means that you know who your buyer persona is. You know its age, social and financial demographics. Moreover, you are aware of psychological patterns of your buyer persona. Otherwise, your hard work might be lost among the unclaimed trash on the internet.
Market research and competitive analysis
If you want to achieve market advantage over your competitors, you need to spend time and efforts to thorough competitive analysis. An effective marketing strategy is always based on understanding how users see the market as a whole and what are the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors. A landing page, as we already know, is one of the most straightforward marketing tools you can apply. Understanding your market and your competitors’ abilities is crucial for developing an effective weapon as landing page. Your UI/UX designer must be aware of the interrelation between design and advertising basics.
Copy write
Undoubtedly, when you need to insert important information into a short-form page, every symbol counts. When talking about copy for a converting landing page consider your benefits. Do not write full description of your company, its history or else. Describe the benefits your customers will get, if they decide to involve. Also, consider an appealing and benefit reach headline that will drag attention of potential customers. Prove you are worthy of their attention and money.
Personal brand landing page
You already know that landing page is a stand-alone web page that is a tool of your marketing campaign but not an element of your official website. Nonetheless, be sure that your designer has incorporated all your personal branding elements into it. Your colors, logo or even the icons style should withstand on your landing page. Users should be able immediately associate this page with your brand.
Visualize data
It has been scientifically proven that humans are beings who perceive information both consciously and unconsciously. A person is able to perceive and process information recorded by symbols. And even faster our brain interacts with graphic and color elements. Your UX will improve significantly when you incorporate icons, color schemes and images into your landing page design. Attractive design and informative graphics allows people analyze information faster without spending a lot of time on reading. Don’t forget about user reading patterns while adding visuals.
Adjust USP and CTA
These are notions that produce effective landing pages. Emphasize the outstanding interest that you offer to your target audience and your competitors cannot give. And then nudge them to action with your CTA button. Try to avoid being bone-dry. The task of a CTA button is to convince users to interact with you the way you need. Consider a CTA text and button design. Try A/B testing to identify the most productive variant.
Minimize loading time
The time spent in the internet is something abstract from the real one. For example we can compare 5 seconds of the internet time to 2,5 hours of its real equivalent. When creating the design for your landing page, remember about it. The size of images influences the page loading time. If your page downloads longer than 3-7 seconds your users are not going to sit and wait for it, they most likely will navigate somewhere else. You will lose visitors and they might probably never come back to you again. This is why fast loading time is crucial considering not only the landing pages, but also all other pages of your website.
Explainer videos
The average attention span of a user on a webpage is not more than 7 seconds. If you want to boost attention to your brand, try creating a video that explains information about your brand, your offer and the benefits your customers can get. A short but amazing video about your product can become the best tool to stand out among your competitors. Moreover, a well thought and creatively done video allows users to get all information you want them to get without even reading the content of a landing page. The only nuance is that videos influence loading time greatly, so better make it valuable.
Responsive design
Landing page as a means of a marketing strategy must be responsive. Nowadays the variation of devices people use to surf the internet is great. In addition, if you make a thorough research you will know that your potential customers are divided into categories: those, who use desktop, those who use tablets and those who use smartphones. Clearly, you don’t want to lose a great part of your audience just because of a wrong design. Consider responsive design to be appealing to users.
Clear and understandable design
We already know that your landing page must contain an appealing headline, accurate information, graphics and probably a video. This is enough for a single webpage not mentioning the importance of a loading time. This is why it is crucial to avoid using unimportant and distracting elements. Concentrate users’ attention on your call to action.
Improve your landing page usability by testing
How can you know ahead which design of a landing page will perform better? The answer is simple – no way can you know it unless you try and test.
But before you start implementing different design decisions, you need to set your conversion goals. What do you want to achieve by a particular landing page? Then find the design variations that can help to achieve this goals and start testing.
It doesn’t have to be the overall design of the whole page. However, having different variants for a call-to-action text, or the place of your logo might be something to experiment with. Try testing for different headlines, to see which one will get more hits. Implement different colors to your CTA and see what you will get.
Chose those changes to which your visitors responded the most and not those, that you personally like. On this stage, the designer needs to forget personal preferences and pay attention to what people like the most.
Conclusion
Landing page is a real work of art and research. Its efficiency is measured by every landing and involved activity. It is a compilation of creative design and a set of rules that work every time you follow them. A landing page is able to bring you customers, generate leads and convert them into buyers, so you shouldn’t neglect this powerful tool.