Okay, so you need to build a landing page that converts but you have no idea where to start. You could leave this up to your web designer. But you’d likely get a page that looks great but won’t be a lead generating machine. Why? Because building a good landing page, despite what you may think, is not about creating a “pretty” page.
But first let’s talk what a landing page is and what it is designed to do. A landing page is an offer or promotion with a call to action designed to capture leads for a business. While a landing page may exist on your website as just another page, there are some distinct differences. For example, landing pages are meant to function on their own as a stand-alone page or website. Think of it as a mini-website. Some best practices of good landing pages disclude navigation bars and omit any other distractions that take your visitors eyes and attention off page. In order to keep them focused on the task at hand, so they complete your call to action, you’ll want to minimize any noise.
A landing page is designed to capture information from visiting traffic usually brought there via a paid campaign. Having said that, it’s safe to assume that money is being spent on bringing traffic to the page. Ensuring you get your monies worth is pretty important. To add even more stress, the landing page has the toughest job of all “pages” on the internet. It gets the least amount of real estate but has the most work to do. As you probably already know the goal is to get the visitor to take action, usually by filling in a form or by way of a phone call. Capturing a name and email address (sometimes phone) may not seem like much. While it may sound fairly easy, it’s anything but.
Hitting the Target and Grabbing their Attention
Believe it or not, your ad isn’t the only distraction a visitor has at the moment they land on your page. Most people have a plethora of pages open, a search bar at the top of the page yelling “Lets go!” while email notifications (that include a chirping sound) relentlessly pursue them. They are practically driven mad before finally giving in to one such notification spotted out of the corner of their second set of eyes. Maybe, just maybe your page will remain open but case aside the other 30, silently existing within her set of browser tabs.
So how do you capture a visitor’s attention without sounding a fog horn? Well it’s actually a bit more simple then I just made it sound. It starts with relevancy. Your message must resonate with your reader. Everyone, including you, has made a personal connection with a book, or an article, maybe even a poem. And its likely happened more than once in your life. Whatever you read, spoke to you, it stirred emotion inside you and well, it got your attention. You may have even thought about it long after, discussed it at length with friends or shared it with a significant other. These are powerful messages. The kind of messages capable of stirring action in an audience are messages that are most closely related to them. These messages hit home. But how do you speak with relevancy to people you’ve never met?
Relevant messages start by narrowing down your target market. Going niche could be understated here. For example, healthcare might be a niche, but it’s a rather large niche made up of doctors, nurses, radiologists, surgeons, and many more. When creating your landing page I urge you to continue narrowing down your audience to the smallest group possible. You should create multiple landing pages for each smallest group in your hyper-targeted market.
Increasing Your Relevance
Let’s say you are an eCommerce retailer who sells natural supplements. As you probably know, this is a massive target since the health industry has touched probably everyone at one time or another. It must be broken down in order to be effective at capturing attention. By looking at the diagram below we discover the different reasons why people might take supplements. As you can see, they vary to a large degree from illness recovery to, wanting more energy.
Once you have segmented your market, the most difficult part of creating a stellar landing page is complete. Any message you create for these smaller hyper-niched markets is guaranteed to get their attention. By nature of simple segmentation your message became personally relevant to each member.
Let me give you an example. Just the mention of an upcoming wedding will plant a bride to be’s eyeballs directly on your landing page and is nearly guaranteed to initiate a response to your offer. Here’s the first thought that will rush through her mind. “Oh my god that’s me?” She will not only read your message – twice, she will smile at the serendipity of it all.
Using the example above and diving a bit further down into the reasons why someone getting married might want to start taking supplements before the big day, we uncover those highly personal and sensitive characteristics of our market. To lose weight, look more youthful, feel energetic, and to avoid a disaster on the big day – like ILLNESS. These are flaming hot buttons, or perhaps, triggers, that will likely motivate the bride to be into serious action.
It’s here at this level of segmentation where you might begin to create various landing pages to target your market, but in this case, merely mentioning all those reasons on one landing page will provide maximum relevancy, for many reasons – I’ll let you ponder that one on your own. These are sensitive topics if you know what I mean? This is almost guaranteed to give your message the super strength it needs to convert like crazy.
Since we’ve captured her attention already just by mentioning the magic word, “wedding”, we are now going to drive it home by hitting an even more personal chord. HER WEDDING DAY. And what in the world could be worse than getting ill ON HER WEDDING DAY? The answer is NOTHING folks. Nothing is worse than that. The mere thought of an illness disaster on her wedding day is likely to initiate a lot more than a conversion. She’ll be stuffing gobs of supplements in her mouth, twice daily. The bottom line is, no matter what type of marketing you are doing, the process of segmenting your market is a worthwhile activity. You stand to learn a lot about what makes them tick, and in turn, how to get their attention.
Crafting the Message
I feel like the message at this point is a formality and you should too. The words from here should be free-flowing and take very little thought. If they aren’t you haven’t segmented your market properly. Further, the mere inclusion of those hot buttons, in any order is going to be powerful. So there is no need to spend hours crafting that perfect message. If you don’t capture their attention just by stating it, clever phrases and crafty statements aren’t going to do it. You need to put it in reverse and head back to the segmentation step. You haven’t reached a small enough market to make the message personal. Make them scream out. “Oh my god, this is me!” Okay maybe not scream, but you get the idea. Believe it or not, if you’ve done this right, all you have to do is SAY IT! SANS all the fluff. Nobody falls for that anyway.
One last thing I should probably mention. Don’t ask too much of your visitor. Segmentation is powerful but you still only get a few typed words before they are completely exhausted and onto something else. Don’t press your luck. You will open up the lines of communication at a later time. There will be plenty of time and opportunity to make that final sale. I’ve tested this more than once and each time it’s the same result. Make your call to action ridiculously easy to complete, for the best results. Good luck!