Scaling your business with inbound marketing (2/4)

Landing pages that will land you customers

In the piece on inbound marketing, I first explained how difficult it is to attract strangers to a webpage. After you've managed to conquer that challenge, you need take advantage of this in the best way possible - by creating a top-notch landing page!

A landing page is a page on your website designed to prompt visitors into a specific action (download, sign up, form filling, etc). To drive traffic to your website and ease conversion rates think about the key elements to converting your website visitors.

Here are some useful tips to begin with:

  1. Create a roadmap and state your objectives
  2. Focus on customer-centric content
  3. Use a simple design & straightforward user experience

Create a roadmap and state your objectives

I've put together several mockups, site maps and coordinated website creations for clients in a range of industries like banking and retail. Before producing the content and landing pages I always asked myself: “What are the needs of the audience?” and “What actions do I want visitors to take?”. By mapping out the different steps your visitors will take you’ll be able to create:

  • A focused landing page in terms of content and design
  • Broader marketing mapping with actions aimed at turning visitors into lifelong customers

This will lead to a page that will better convert. Moreover, the broader mapping will help you maintain brand loyalty. After doing this, you can continuously optimize your conversion roadmap. 

Focus on customer-centric content to drive traffic

As I begin to create content, I think about search engine optimization (SEO) and users’ queries. Searching often leads the online purchase process. So, when writing, I bear in mind that relevancy with the needs of the audience is vital.

Firstly, I need to know which keywords and search terms are popular with the target audience. I then use those words in the content. This relevancy between search terms and website content (including title, headlines, meta) is the Holy Grail. 

At Odoo, we've created the promote tool. It helps businesses get an instant view of the most searched topics related to their keywords. The promote tool allows companies with a little or no search engine skills to achieve better visibility on the results pages of search engines.

When I had to create a landing page for the July promotion, I typed the keywords from my page and saw the results for the most searched topics. To be as relevant as possible, I used these keywords wherever possible on the webpage.

Exercise - Find a better page title

 Optimize Product Name for SEO

Once in the page:

  1. Click the 'Promote' button

  2. Set 5 relevant keywords

  3. Find a more attractive title

Use a simple design and straight to the point user-experience

Here's another tip I learned and want to share. Focus on the information your visitors need or the product they're interested in buying. Keep it simple. Research shows that to grab the visitors' attention and get them to click on a call to action, your page has to make an impact in the first eight seconds.

Here are some pointers for a landing page that packs a punch and that you can use to create your own page:

  • Remove the navigation bar to keep the visitor's attention on the primary information
  • Buttons or any other calls to action need to be above the fold, but give extra information below for people who want to learn more
  • Limit the number of fields (or required fields) on your contact forms. It’s better to add more fields later than starting off with too many
  • Make sure your unique selling proposition (USP) is in line with the visitors' needs and requests
  • Add customer testimonials or references to emphasize the value of what you're offering

In addition, you can add a social proof and validation section, with testimonials from your Twitter stream to show how happy your customers are.

So, that's a quick and simple introduction to effective landing pages. Why don't you have a go at creating your own landing page and show me what you come up with?

Exercise - Create your own landing page

 Create a landing page

Don't forget to include:

  • A clear and actionable benefit
  • A call-to-action
  • Customer testimonials

Finally, be sure to create landing pages that are fully mobile-friendly in terms of design, content, size, etc. A KISSmetrics infographic on “How loading time affects your bottom line” says that mobile internet users expect a web-browsing experience on their phone that’s comparable to what they get on their desktop or laptop. 

Test out multiple variants of your landing page

When you've successfully put all of this into action, you can easily track how well it's all working for you.The benefits you will see include:

  • Increase of website traffic 
  • Prospects' attention being clearly focused on your offer 
  • Increase in conversion rates 
  • Decrease in bounce rates and drop off in the acquisition funnel

Tools are available to A/B test different variations of webpages and therefore optimize each page based on different variants. I'll tell you more about A/B testing in another blog post.

Converting online visitors to buyers

This is a long but worthwhile journey. All the traffic in the world is useless if none of it converts. In the next blog post in the inbound marketing series, I'll tell you more about the next step of inbound marketing: CLOSE - how to convert leads into customers with email marketing, lead scoring and marketing automation.

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Scaling your business with inbound marketing (1/4)
An introduction to inbound marketing