A Guide to the Best Practices of Landing Pages

Why landing pages matter

When it comes to paid marketing, how crucial is your landing page? Can’t businesses just send traffic to their homepage? What are landing pages for?

Landing pages can be crucial for any form of marketing or promotion, but they are particularly useful for paid marketing. This is because you need to measure your ROI to ensure you can get approval for your budget. Your website homepage is often a generic starting point for people looking to know more about your company – by contrast, a landing page is much more focused.

Your homepage is likely to include information about many different things, with many different links and paths your customers can follow. This means that the chances of them finding the path you want them to are slim. A specific landing page will enable you to track conversions associated with a single marketing campaign.

Very often, landing pages seem very distinct in design from a company’s website. Is this separation recommended?

Ideally, your landing page shouldn’t have too distinct a brand or style from your main website. You need to keep your online brand consistent so that people are familiar with it and know what to expect.

One thing you need to look out for is called the message watch. This is a two-part process. It applies to the similarities between an ad and your landing page. For example, if you put out a Google ad talking about bananas, your landing page does, too. As well as this, the message watch concept also applies to the link between your main website and the landing page. Let’s look at this in more detail.

For example, let’s say you’re doing an ecommerce landing page designed to get people to ‘click through’ so they can learn more about your promotion before clicking through to your website/shopping cart. If you do this then you need to keep related visuals and brand details on both pages because if a user clicks through to a site and finds something entirely different, it can significantly damage their trust – which is bad for business.

If you’re working with a landing page for lead generations, this is often the destination point for the user. This means that your brand matching isn’t quite as important, but particularly if your company is well-known, you still need to take people’s brand memory into account or else you risk losing them.

Best practices for landing pages

If you want to create a high conversion landing page, what are the most vital aspects?

Make sure you focus properly. Ensure your content is clear and simple. Have a good, clean design that is very clear and easy to navigate. Make sure you have a good call to action, the purpose of which is easy to see.

There are two main things to look at for high conversion landing pages. Firstly, create a headline that can be read in 5 seconds. Then make sure it’s clear what the site’s about and include the call to action.

If you had to fix something that was performing below par on a landing page, what should you go for?

The thing that many companies get wrong with their landing page is the ‘message match’, so you are likely to need to be careful about this. This is where you promise someone one thing but then it turns out you’re actually offering another. As long as your message matches what you’re actually doing, you’ll be on the right track.

Ideally, you should put yourself in the position of your customer and think about what they might think about your landing page.

How long should your landing page be? How do you get the balance between too sparse and uninformative and too long and distracting?

There is a long-standing debate has to how long or short landing pages should be and there’s no precise answer to give. It really depends on the goal of the landing page. You might find that some things require a bit more description than others, while others might require so much description they’re not really suitable for a landing page at all.

You need to make sure you have enough information on there for people to be inspired to take further action – but not so much information that they switch off or can’t work out what the point of your page is.

Richard - June 14, 2012