Landing pages can play a central role in nearly any successful online sales strategy. On the surface, the customer journey seems straightforward enough. They arrive on the landing page, engage with the call-to-action, and complete the desired behavior. Indeed, landing pages can serve as powerful lead generation tools, which lead to increased sales and bigger profits.
But, as with everything else in business and in life, the devil is in the details. Whether you’re thinking about adding landing pages as a new customer touchpoint or you want to improve the performance of your existing landing pages, make sure that you nail all five of these critical components if you want those landing pages to perform the way you want them to.
Attract the Right Kind of Traffic
Your initial inclination might be to drive as much traffic toward your landing pages as possible. You must fight this urge. If you seek out traffic indiscriminately, you’re simply throwing your resources (and your budget) out the window. It’s a waste. It doesn’t make sense to drive millions of page views if only a tiny fraction have even the remotest of interest in what you have to offer.
And when it comes to knowing who your target audience is, it’s all about the offer and value that is being presented.
A perfect example of this can be seen through accessiBe, which is an automated solution for helping websites and online businesses become ADA & WCAG compliant.
And this is important to note, as their obvious target audience is business owners and brands that have a website in place that isn’t fully accessible to all audiences. This also means that pretty much all of their marketing and paid advertising should be focused on obtaining only that audience type, while not focusing on a general audience.
To further stress this point, when it comes to the actual landing pages and content found on it, accessiBe has done an excellent job here. Not only have they covered the basics and necessities of compliance, they’ve also listed free trial, demo, and user chat right on the same page.
And as we continue to see more site owners and brands searching for keywords relating to “ada compliance,” it’s important to have a great first impression and sales page in place, while also showing offer exactly how the site and solution works.
Leverage a Smart Sales Strategy
Just as you need to be mindful about how you might spend your paid search marketing budget, you need to be equally strategic with your sales strategy as a whole. This means, in many instances, that you may need to fight against your gut instinct and let the data do the talking.
To this end, developing the best sales strategy means tapping into the best sales intelligence. A great example of this is what you find from a service like SimilarWeb. Use the digital insights of the tool to “find, close and retain more business.” Using the context of B2B, this sort of sales insight and intelligence empowers you to filter through relevant opportunities from over 100 million potential companies.
The interaction between your landing pages and these emerging opportunities is very much a two-way street. When you better identify exactly who your ideal customers may be, you can better optimize your landing pages to address their “pain points” more directly. It’s an old adage that still holds true. Sell the benefits, not the features.
When you know your customers, and you know the problem they’re trying to solve, you can better articulate the benefits and value you can provide. This is how you can craft the perfect sales pitch and implement it into your existing or new landing pages.
Focus Your Call to Action
Just as some beginning marketers might take too broad an approach in targeting keywords, they may also be tempted to throw everything at the wall in an effort to maximize their chances of success with a landing page. Sign up for a free trial. Subscribe to our newsletter. Follow us on social media. Buy this product.
That’s far too many calls-to-action (CTAs). The truth is that having too many CTAs will not give you the “best chance” at getting something out of a visitor. Instead, all it will do is confuse and distract the visitor. When there are too many options, the visitor is likely to interact with none of them at all. In other words, clearly define what your goals are before you even get started.
Take a look at this example for the upcoming Nissan Pathfinder SUV. Yes, it has multiple CTAs, but the intent isn’t really diluted. Two of the most prominent red buttons are for “build & price.” They want the customer to envision themselves buying and driving this vehicle.
Both “view offers” and “reserve yours now” encourage a similar step forward in the buyer’s journey.
Offer an Immediately Enticing Incentive
As much as you would like a visitor to read through the entirety of your cleverly crafted sales copy, most of them won’t. You’ve got literal seconds to grab their attention and entice them to act. So, make it obvious and make it immediate. Act now. This is a good deal. Look how much you can save right now.
You must clearly articulate your value in a way that is immediately obvious. Take this example from Audible.com, particularly for Prime Day.
You can see the yellow button to “try Audible Premium Plus free.” That might catch your eye, but it probably wasn’t the first thing to catch your eye. Featured even more prominently, even though it’s a bit further down the page, is “save 53%.” You’ll notice that “save 53%” is larger than “on your first 4 months” too.
Amazon is making it immediately obvious what benefit it is offering. Here is an incentive for visitors to act now. Depending on context, you can also create a sense of urgency with “act now” or a countdown timer for a “limited time offer.”
Keep Accessibility and Usability in Mind
When putting together a landing page as a cornerstone touchpoint for your larger sales strategy, you might think about your keywords, your traffic sources, your visuals, and your offer, among other considerations. One aspect that many marketers overlook is accessibility.
The W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) strives to develop “open standards to ensure the long-term growth of the Web.” One big part of that is the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). You might think that people with disabilities and other challenges make up a small proportion of your potential customer base, but it’s likely that you’d be mistaken. Even that aside, accessibility and usability are important for all users everywhere.
If your landing page doesn’t quite render properly on a certain mobile device, you’ve already lost a customer. If the text is hard to read, you’ve lost another customer. It is absolutely in your best interest to be as vigilant as possible in this regard.
What’s more, accessibility can indeed be a ranking factor. It’s “good for SEO and sales,” according to Roger Montti of Search Engine Journal. Accessibility plays into many factors, including SEO, bounce rates, sales and more.
Prepare to Pivot and Adapt
The five elements or considerations discussed above will continue to be critically important to your sales strategy generally, and to landing pages in particular, even if certain specifics change in the future. They serve as core principles, building a foundation for a sound sales strategy. As web design standards evolve and search algorithms adapt, so must your approach to customer acquisition.
Your landing page is not a static entity. It also needs to improve, grow, and optimize over time. Take the right sales insights and metrics to heart, and adjust accordingly. Let the data be your guide.