The Complete Guide to Successful Landing Pages

For B2B marketers with long, complex sales cycles, landing pages are an essential tool for generating new leads. However, despite being very straight forward tools, landing pages are rarely optimized to their full potential. The typical landing page loses over half of it’s visitors immediately. This leaves a company with only a tiny portion of visitors being converted to leads. So how do you not only keep visitors on your page, but successfully convert them into leads?

 Optimize (and convert)

• Design
  Keeping the look and feel of a landing page consistent with your brand will help capitalize on familiarity and perceive value.
• Forms
  Forms can make a user uncomfortable. Creating forms with the user in mind helps minimize this feeling and maximize lead generation.
• Value
  Users have to be enticed to provide their information. Providing an appropriate incentive will dramatically increase conversions.
• Analyze
  Perfecting a landing page can take numerous tweaks and revisions. Spend time finding out what works and adjust accordingly

Design & Layout

When you only have a few seconds to capture a prospects interest, a well thought out and optimized layout can make all the difference to a pages success or failure.

• All branding, colors and styles should be consistent with the full website.
• A call to action and value proposition should be clearly visible to visitors.
• Forms should be simple, easy to complete, and displayed prominently.
• Navigation away from or around a landing page should not be provided.

Less is More

• Call to Action
  It should be immediately clear to visitors which action a companion would like them to take.
• Value Proposition
  A short paragraph or list starting the value in providing information provides a clear incentive to visitors.
• Form
  One prominently displayed form prevents any confusion for the user on how to complete your call to action.

Form Essentials

Although simple, the structure of a form effects a visitors perceived notion of value, risk, and even credibility.

• Get the Essentials
  The information collected by a form should be valuable and relevant to a specific goal.
• Limit your Fields
  Minimize the number of fields will aid in completion.
• Email Delivery
  Sending an offer via email instead of a redirect helps you begin a relationship

Provide Value

A landing page must offer the right incentive to be successful.

Is The Offer:

• Relevant?
  Is it something a potential client would be interested in? Does it pertain to the appropriate industry and space?
• Valuable?
  Does it provide a direct benefit to a potential client? Does it help them reach a goal or improve their situation?
• Timely?
  Is it appropriate that stage in the sales cycle? Does it help move a prospect closer to buying?

Create Value:

• Reward
  Visitors need to feel like they have made the right decision in providing their information. Provide them with something that will reward them and keep them coming back.
• Target
  A prospect’s needs change constantly. Target consumers more effectively by developing a wider variety of content for different phases of the buying cycle.
• Specials
  It always comes down to the bottom line, and providing special pricing or promotions can be an easy way to convert leads and keep visitors coming back to a site.

Analyze & Revise

Tracking usage statistics and adjusting strategy are key to achieving landing page success.

• Set Goals
  Landing pages should always be designed with a specific purpose in mind. Explicitly stating goals and determining how they will be measured will make it much easier to monitor the success of a landing page
• Adapt
  Industries and users are constantly changing and a landing page strategy needs to keep up. If a landing page is not performing, it may be time to make a change.

Identify Key Metrics

• Visits
• Conversions
• Downloads