Fast Thinking’s very own Jack Gillett introduces us to landing pages and reminds us of the important role they play in our campaigns. He also raises awareness of the KPI’s to look out for to ensure that you are optimising your activity effectively.
Where your ads lead and where they direct your audience to is as important as what they look like and where you place them.
Landing pages have a tendency to be ignored. There is a perception that they are complicated, take too long to make and some marketers don’t even think of them as their responsibility. A good landing page however, can transform a campaign from a cost vacuum into an efficient conversion machine.
To help with this, we have produced a short guide to creating a successful landing page.
What is a landing page?
A landing page is a place for people to enter your site. In the context of marketing, it is a place for your marketing to take people to.
What is a landing page for?
Your landing page exists to cater to the specific needs of the person landing on it.
How do I know what this person wants?
Context.
Think about how they came to arrive at your landing page. If they clicked on an ad, what did the ad say? Why was the ad shown to them?
Imagine you own an online chocolate shop. It’s the week before Easter and you have targeted chocolate lovers on Facebook with an ad that says “Buy Easter Eggs.” You can safely make the assumption that a person who has come to your site from this route likes chocolate and wants to buy chocolate Easter eggs. It makes sense therefore to show them a landing page focussed heavily on this and not the rest of your chocolate range which your homepage likely features for example.
How do I design my landing page?
1. Set a goal for the page
The landing page needs to exist for a purpose. Earlier we mentioned that it needs to cater to the person landing on it. This is true but, it also wants to do so in a way that drives value to your business.
Let’s continue the example above where you run an online chocolate shop.
We know the person wants to buy an Easter egg and that you want to sell chocolate. This is great news as the landing page can cater to the needs of both the customer (who wants to buy Easter eggs) and the business (which wants to sell chocolate).
The goal ‘Easter egg purchase’ serves both the needs of the customer and the needs of the business.
2. What needs to be on the landing page to achieve this goal
Now that you have a goal, your landing page needs to make it as easy as possible to achieve that goal.
At this point, you don’t know what kind of Easter egg the person on your landing page wants, so the landing page needs to facilitate the purchase of Easter eggs without limiting their choice to a particular type of Easter egg.
Use the page as a way of showcasing all the different types of Easter eggs that they are able to purchase.
If they saw an ad prior to arriving at the landing page that said ‘Buy Organic Easter Eggs’, then it makes absolute sense to take the person to a landing page dedicated to facilitating the purchase of organic Easter eggs and not to a generic easter eggs page.
Use clear and simple calls to action to help the person navigate to where they want to go. Don’t use ‘Purchase seasonal confectionery’ when you can say ‘Buy Easter Eggs.’
Don’t give them things they don’t want. Easter eggs are clearly what your customer wants, don’t try and sell them Advent calendars.
Apart from overcomplicating the landing page, you are ignoring what your customer wants. Selling advent calendars serve the needs of the business, but it doesn’t serve the needs of the customer in this situation. It makes it harder for them to achieve the goal you have set and therefore reduces the chance that the needs of the business will be met.
How do I know that my landing page is working?
Test and learn.
See how it compares to the existing page by driving half of the people to your existing page and half to your new Easter egg page. Find out which one leads to the best conversion rate and then try and improve on that with a new landing page. The more you do this, the more improvement you’ll see in your campaigns.
In summary, by taking a customer focussed approach and following a simple thought process, creating a successful landing page isn’t hard and they offer an additional lever to help you achieve the business KPIs.
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