Landing pages have become a ubiquitous subject over the past few years. Once the province of only sophisticated marketers, every entrepreneur online now has multiple ways and reasons to set up landing pages.
What is a landing page?
A landing page is a web page that attempts to convince visitors to take a particular action.
Why have landing pages?
Depending where your clients or potential clients are situated within your marketing funnel, you may have different reasons for implementing a landing page.
Here are three common types of landing pages:
1. Lead Capture Page.
If you're are a new business owner or are finding that your mail list is not growing at the pace you would want through other means, a landing page can help. Content should be straightforward on these pages and contain these four elements:
a) Your offer;
b) Benefits of the offer;
c) How your offer will address their pain points; and
d) A simple call to action.
Be sure your copy is clear and to the point, using the kind of language your audience will expect.
Lead capture pages typically offer an incentive or lead magnet to visitors to offer up their email addresses (knowing full well they will receive emails from you). What kind of incentive depends on where your visitors to the page are in the buying cycle. Whether they are already customers or have never heard of you before, your mission is to provide a lead magnet that addresses a specific pain point that you know that audience is experiencing.
An SEO checklist or Ebook on making money with your membership website might be appropriate for experts in their field who want to monetize their knowledge online. If your audience is already familiar with you, a free coaching call or bonus pack might be something that would interest them.
Another hallmark of a good landing page is a lack of navigation links. With no other links to take visitors off your landing page and onto something else, you have limited their options to one: responding to your call to action. There is no point in allowing your potential client to get distracted and go off to browse the rest of your website. In fact, many experts say that having no navigation can increase conversions dramatically (up to 100%!).
2. Sales Page.
In the previous discussion of a lead capture landing page, brevity is your friend. Offering clear, concise copy and a simple call to action that visitors will jump at to alleviate their current problem will be your best bet. However, with a sales page, you want to get into all the nitty-gritty details of your offer. You may provide some bonus material for signing up, but the purpose of this page is to sell your solution.
Typically, visitors will be in the final stages of the buying cycle, have done their research, and are now looking to be convinced that your service is right for them. You'll want to include testimonials, awards, videos, and very detailed benefit statements, including a money-back guarantee. A clear call to action to 'Sign up' or Buy Now' should be sprinkled throughout the page.
3. Click-through page.
An excellent example of this is an offer of a free trial. The visitor clicks the button to, for example, start the free trial and is then directed to a sign-up page. Likely there will be more to complete than simply an email address, which is fine because the visitor should be ready to take this step after being somewhat familiar with your brand.
Now let's look at how best to drive traffic to your landing pages. Of course, you can investigate paid PPC ads with Facebook or Google, but first let's focus on free avenues to create traffic to your pages.
1. Social Media Marketing
If you have a following, social media is a perfect medium from which to send followers to your landing pages. For example, if you have social media followers who are not on your mailing list yet, a free offer can entice them to sign up. Facebook Lives and YouTube webinars could lead to either a click-through free trial page or to your sales pages.
Social Media sharing strategies:
-Encourage your team to share your posts on their accounts
-Consider less traveled social media platforms that you hadn't considered before such as TikTok and Reddit
-YouTube videos and webinars containing links
-Podcast audios on established podcasting sites like Spreaker.com and Podbean.com
2. Email Marketing
Once your leads are in your email marketing system, they've given you permission to contact them in the future. That doesn't mean you're going to start sending links to your sales pages right away, though. These folks are simply not ready to buy yet. But it does allow you the opportunity to offer them a click-through type landing page for a free trial or a discount. That will take them into the middle of your sales funnel. Now you can start sending them emails. Emails are an excellent place to inform your tribe of upcoming webinars or new case studies. You can also provide the opportunity for feedback.
Ways to send viewers to your landing pages via email campaigns:
- A welcome email sequence following a newsletter sign-up leads to a click-through landing page offering a free trial
- A tutorial series of emails designed to help the user get the most from their free trial, pointing to a sales page
- Use personalized emails to offer exclusive deals to current customers to reward them for purchasing and encourage engagement
- Foster further engagement by responding to email replies
3. SEO
Include a Blog
It can be difficult to search engine optimize a landing page because there is not much content on the page. But there are remedies. Having a blog on your own website can boost SEO for your page. At the end of each blog post, offer a link to your landing page.
Establish Authority
You can enhance SEO for your landing pages by establishing yourself as an authority in your field. This is done through link-building and exposure on external websites.
Guest Posting
Providing guest blog posts gives you exposure in other (hopefully related) markets. Keep an eye on social media postings, blogs, and forums dealing with your area of expertise and strategically offer input. Submit business listings on industry-related directories on the web. These might be association sites, Google My Business, Yahoo, and Yelp for local businesses. These are excellent opportunities to share a link to a lead capture landing page.
Link Outreach
With the importance of being ranked competitively in Google, many companies now exist which offer link-building services. Most are legitimately reaching out to existing websites in your niche to request backlinks in exchange for payment. Be aware, this is a time-consuming process. But most established link-building services have amassed a network of reliable sources and can establish linking to your site in a reasonable time frame. Just make sure you know what kind of methods are being employed. The best bet is to hire someone based on a trusted referral.
How to SEO your landing pages:
- Use "long tail" keywords on your landing page. Short popular phrases will be difficult to rank for, so stick to the particular purpose of the landing page as your primary keyword phrase.
- Check your page load speed. The faster your page loads, the better for SEO purposes
- Build authority and backlinks by posting on other websites (being mindful of their posting policies)
- Utilize SEO tactics such as title tags, meta descriptions, H1 through H6 headings, and adding alt tags to all images on the page. For an extra SEO boost, be sure to include keywords in the URLs of your image files.
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