Technically speaking, a landing page is any website page where a visitor “lands.” If the exit rate from your own landing page – probably your home page – is high, it means that you’re not capturing the attention of potential leads. Should you create a new “dedicated” landing page? What does a landing page need? Keep reading, and you’ll find some suggestions for effective landing pages that will engage your visitors and pique their interest.
For most professional and small business websites in 2017, the home page generally also functions as the landing page, but you might want to reevaluate that function, especially if your analytics are indicating a high bounce rate. A home page has a number of functions – it introduces your brand, reflects your values, and links to the other areas of your website. It encourages your visitors to explore rather than convert.
Most professionals and small businesses fail to convert visitors because they don’t have a dedicated landing page – the home page is trying to do too much. And for that very reason, a number of professionals and small businesses are starting to experiment – and to find success – with dedicated landing pages.
HOW CAN A DEDICATED LANDING PAGE HELP YOU?
Creating a stand-alone landing page with the single, focused objective of retaining and converting your visitors can lower your bounce rate and increase your conversion rate. How can a “dedicated” landing page retain and convert its visitors?
Listed below are some tips that can make a dedicated landing page work for you:
Tip #1: The landing page’s text must be compelling. Even “good” writing with colorful phrases, perfect grammar, and no typos may not be compelling enough to trigger your visitors to action. The best website text incorporates the subtler elements of advertising and marketing that psychologists have been explaining ever since Freud – tapping into the average consumer’s fears and desires.
In his book, The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies, Yale professor Robert E. Lane writes that the function of advertising and marketing “is to increase people’s dissatisfaction with any current state of affairs, to create wants, and to exploit the dissatisfactions of the present. Advertising must use dissatisfaction to achieve its purpose.”
WHAT SHOULD YOUR LANDING PAGE TELL YOUR ONLINE VISITORS?
Humans are social creatures, and many have observed that we have what might be called a “herd” instinct. Your landing page’s text should very subtly, delicately, and vaguely imply to visitors that without your product or service, they’ll somehow be “left behind,” stigmatized in the eyes of their peers, and lose social status – or something even dearer.
If you are a professional like a doctor or an attorney, your visitors are likely already in a position where they might lose their health or mobility, their family, their property and assets, their freedom, or even their lives. Without making any specific promises that can’t be delivered, the text of your landing page should indicate to your visitors that they can put their concerns and fears in your trustworthy hands.
Tip #2: Unlike your website’s home page –with its multiple purposes – a landing page exists for one reason only, and that’s to generate a response to your call to action. Keep the text short and simple, and get directly to the point. Make it easy for visitors to respond and don’t clutter the page with anything that doesn’t function to generate the visitor’s response.
SHOULD YOU USE A CHAT BOX?
Without a dedicated landing page, most visitors will check out your home page, maybe two or three other pages, and go back to browsing. Your links or your contact form on a landing page must be easy to see – in fact, make them unavoidable. You should also consider using a chat box with a live operator on your landing page. A chat box gives your visitor immediate feedback and a genuine, direct, and personal connection to you.
Tip #3: The relevance of the page should be immediately obvious to the visitor. When someone arrives on a dedicated landing page, that person usually has a specific goal. Convey immediately that your visitor has landed in the right place. Make use of the page’s title, heading, or headline to tell visitors that they’ve landed where they need to be.
For example, a bankruptcy lawyer’s landing page might use this heading: “We protect families like yours from foreclosure.” A plastic surgeon’s landing page might tout, “This is the revolutionary cosmetic procedure you’ve been waiting for!” Understand what your visitors are looking for, and let them know at first glance that you can provide it.
SHOULD YOU CONSIDER MULTIPLE LANDING PAGES?
Tip #4: A landing page must maintain a single focus, so you may need to consider creating multiple “independent” landing pages. For example, a criminal defense lawyer might dedicate one landing page to DUI or DWI, a second page to juvenile crimes, and a third page to robbery, burglary, and theft crimes. Let nothing on a landing page distract from its single, dedicated purpose.
Tip #5: Including several brief, glowing testimonials on your landing page will substantially boost the page’s credibility. Testimonials can make the difference between a visitor who bounces and a visitor who converts. Use real testimonials from real clients, and place their pictures next to the testimonial text.
Tip #6: Use only relevant and pertinent images or video. Spotify, the online music service, can do this easily – their landing page shows a customer lounging with the headphones on and a look of relaxed satisfaction. If you’re a doctor or a lawyer, you’ll want visual images on your landing pages that convey ideas like health, longevity, freedom, and justice.
CAN AN INTERNET MARKETING AGENCY HELP WITH LANDING PAGES?
When your visitors are prodded by your landing page to create for themselves a mental image of health, freedom, and relief from want, you’ll make it almost impossible for most visitors to bounce without contacting you. Dedicated landing pages can help you get the clients you want, and an internet marketing agency can help.
An internet marketing agency can create your videos, graphics, and text, design your landing page or your entire website, and coordinate your marketing with review sites and social media sites across the internet. In fact, your internet marketing options – and possibilities – are virtually unlimited. And the best time to consult with internet marketing professionals about those options and possibilities is right now.
