[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]If you want more leads, customized landing pages are one of the most powerful tools you have at your disposal. What is the main purpose of a landing page? Getting more of the people who come to your site because of your marketing efforts to convert.

With tools like LeadMaster Landing Pages, you can easily set up these pages. Here’s how it works.

What Is a Landing Page, and How Does It Work?

[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”33766″ img_size=”full”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Technically, a landing page is any page on which users arrive on your website. Often, these pages are tailored to a specific purpose, such as collecting leads.

In the case of gathering leads, a landing page is a web page you can use to collect visitors’ information through a conversion form. You can create custom landing pages tailored to your various marketing campaign. Whether you’re running a search engine optimization, pay-per-click, email or social media campaign or another type of online marketing campaign, the goal is to get people to your website. A practical way to get more of those people to convert is to use a landing page.

The elements used differ between landing pages, but a typical landing page structure includes a headline, copy, an image and a lead capture or conversion form. The anatomy of a high-converting landing page may also include social sharing buttons or links, hidden navigation and a video.

The lead capture or conversion form is a critical part of any landing page. This form can contain various fields into which visitors can enter information such as their name, company and contact information. When customers submit their data through a landing page conversion form, it typically goes into a database such as a customer relationship management system (CRM).

Landing pages are often centered around a specific offer, such as a free trial, e-book, whitepaper, online course or consultation. This free perk entices the visitor to give you information. They input their contact information to receive the offer. By using landing pages, you eliminate the distractions of your homepage and give visitors a clear course of action — for example, to provide their email address to get a free ebook.

By inputting their information, site visitors are expressing their interest in your company and products or services. By doing so, they become a lead.

Why are landing pages important? Because they help to grow the number of leads you get. Recent research shows that companies that increase the number of landing pages they use from 10 to 15 boost their leads by 55 percent.

What Is an Optimized Landing Page?

An optimized landing page is one designed to maximize the number of visitors that turn into leads or paying customers. Landing pages should also provide information your targeted users will find relevant — meaning the copy should effectively sell your product or service. You can customize landing pages for each campaign, so they have campaign-specific information and encourage the visitor to take an action that aligns with the campaign’s overall goal.

Landing Page Benefits

Using landing pages for your marketing campaigns provides many benefits, and optimizing your landing pages will help them deliver those benefits more reliably. Landing pages can:

  • Increase Conversions: Landing pages help you convert more of your site’s visitors to leads. Without a landing page, many people who click on your advertising would come to your website and leave without taking any action or giving you their contact information.
  • Increase the Efficiency of Your Marketing Spending: If people come to your website because of one of your marketing campaigns but leave without giving you any contact information, that’s a lost opportunity. There’s also a chance they won’t ever find their way back to your site, in which case some of your marketing dollars were essentially wasted. Landing pages can help you increase the number of conversions you get in relation to the amount of money you spend on your marketing campaigns.
  • Improve Keyword Integration: Landing pages also give you a chance to use longtail keywords that would be hard to integrate naturally into your site. These pages are designed for particular marketing campaigns, so they can more naturally include highly specific keywords.
  • Enable Local Content: Landing pages present an excellent opportunity to create localized content for your site, which can boost SEO when people search phrases that include “near me” or use their location-enabled mobile devices. You can create marketing campaigns that provide coupons, for example, to specific local stores. Visitors could download the coupons by putting in their contact information on your customized landing page.
  • Improve Your Understanding of Your Audience: Since people enter information about themselves on landing pages, they can be a great way to collect demographic information about your prospects. This data can help you better understand your audience, so you can more efficiently market to them and meet their needs. You can also see which types of visitors are the most likely to convert, giving you a better idea of which leads are most qualified.

How Do You Create a Successful Landing Page?

You can create a landing page with the same techniques and technologies you use to create any other website, although your design and copy need to be tailored to your goal of creating the landing page. If you’re making your page on your own, landing page development requires a web designer, copywriter, graphic artist and database expert.

You can also, however, use a third-party service or program, such as LeadMaster, for landing page creation. With the LeadMaster CRM Landing Pages feature, you get access to various templates you can use to create custom landing pages. Just add your copy, images and other content into the template. We will even host your landing pages on our servers. When you use LeadMaster landing pages in conjunction with our CRM solution, you don’t have to worry about how you’ll gather and access the data your leads enter, either.

With LeadMaster, you can easily make landing pages active or inactive. When a marketing campaign concludes, you can mark the corresponding page inactive, and it will no longer display for users. Then, if you start the same campaign again later, you can quickly make the page active again. You can also customize your landing page URLs using our wildcard function.

Landing Page Optimization Tips

[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”33770″ img_size=”full”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]To get the most out of your landing pages, you need to optimize them for achieving the goals you’ve set. The layout, copy and functionality of your page will all affect this.

Wondering how you can improve your landing page performance? Consider the following nine landing page guidelines.

1. Include an Enticing Offer

To create a high-converting landing page, you need to have an offer that aligns with your audience’s needs and is appealing enough for them to type in their information to get it. Make sure it’s something that will help them solve whatever problem or need they have and that’s it in a format that makes them want to consume it. This offer might be an e-book, whitepaper, exclusive video, free trial, free consultation or any number of other things.

2. Make It Visually Appealing

The visual design of your page is another essential factor to consider. Invest in quality design, as this will make the page more appealing to the user. Visitors are also more likely to trust a professionally designed webpage. Use colors, images and other elements that capture the user’s attention and bring their focus to your call to action. For some landing page design inspiration, take a look at our website.

3. Use Images or Video

Images and video content are visual elements that can attract readers’ attention and keep them interested. They also give you the chance to convey information in an easy-to-consume format and may increase the number of leads you get. According to video marketing company EyeView, including videos on landing pages can boost conversions by 86 percent.

4. Keep Branding Consistent

While you want to create a visually engaging page, you should also make sure the visuals you use are consistent with your branding. The language you use, too, should correspond to those in your brand guidelines. While you can use some unique elements, your visitors should be able to tell that the page belongs to your website and brand.

5. Create an Attention-Grabbing Headline

The headline should be interesting and engaging to encourage the user to stay on the page. It should also relate directly to the copy in the ad that’s bringing users to the website. This makes the transition from the ad to the landing page feel more natural and prevents people from getting confused.

6. Produce Easy-to-Digest Copy

Make your copy easy to scan and understand. Leaving white space and breaking up text into shorter paragraphs or bulleted lists can help make the information easy to absorb. Your copy should also be relevant to the reason people are on the page and clearly communicate the value of your offer.

7. Add a Clear Call to Action

One of the most important sections of text on any landing page is the call to action. A compelling call to action clearly communicates what step the user should take and uses words that describe the value for the user of taking that action. A short call to action is typically the most effective.

8. Utilize Clear and Concise Form Fields

Similarly, you want the fields you include in your form to be clear and concise. If you have too few, you might not get enough information. If you have too many, your site visitors might leave the site before filling them all in. Finding a balance between these two extremes will get you the best results.

9. Ensure Your Page Loads Correctly on All Devices

If a landing page loads too slowly, users may click away even if it only takes a few more seconds than pages on other sites. To increase leads, make sure your site loads quickly enough. You should also use responsive design techniques, which enable your page to adjust according to the device the visitor is using. A responsive landing page will look good whether someone views it on a laptop, tablet or smartphone.

Steps After Form Submission

[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”33771″ img_size=”full”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]What you do after someone submits information on your landing page matters, too. Once people give you their information, send them a message to confirm their submission and thank them for their interest. You’ll also need to send them any content you offered or give them the next steps for receiving those offers.

The copy and visuals in these emails should be relevant to your offer, easy to understand and engaging. You may also want to give recipients the option of taking another action that will move them further down the sales funnel.

Using AB Testing to Choose the Perfect Landing Page

While you can use landing page optimization best practices to boost conversions, the specifics of what performs best depends on the audience in question. To figure out what’s most effective for your situation, you can use AB testing.

AB testing, one of the landing page optimization tools that LeadMaster offers, involves creating two variations of a landing page and running them both. You then monitor how they perform and keep the one that gets the most leads. Some of the metrics you might look at include conversion rate and bounce rate. You can test various aspects of your page including copy, visuals, conversion forms and offers.

With LeadMaster, running AB tests is easy. You simply make a copy of your landing page, adjust the aspects you want to test and run the test. Our LeadMaster Marketing reports will give you the information you need to determine the page that works best.

You can run as many AB tests as you want to continue finding new ways to improve your page. Despite the benefits testing offers, only about 52 percent of companies that use landing pages test them to improve their conversion rates. So, landing page AB testing can put you ahead of your competition.

The Value of Optimization

[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”33773″ img_size=”full”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Landing pages are one of your most important opportunities for generating leads and may be one of the first impressions someone has of your brand. It’s crucial that you use this powerful tool and optimize your landing pages to help you achieve your goals.

Optimizing your landing pages also helps you improve the experience your users get with your company. It helps direct them to the information they’re looking for and ensures your sales funnel accepts only the most qualified leads. Ultimately, optimizing any part of the user experience will increase your ROI. In the case of landing pages, it can also help you gather qualified leads.

The landing pages feature from LeadMaster provides an effective, user-friendly way to create optimized landing pages. Use our templates to find the right design for you, perform AB testing to finetune your pages and easily gather lead data. When combined with other LeadMaster offers such as our email marketing system and our all-in-one CRM solution, our landing pages feature becomes even more powerful.

You can try our landing pages for free by signing up for a 30-day trial, or you can contact us to talk with a CRM and landing page expert to learn more about what LeadMaster can do for your business.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]