A landing page is a page created without links to your core website. The sole purpose is getting a visitor to act, like signing up for a newsletter, sharing content, buying a product or downloading a white paper. Taking steps to optimise landing pages gives your campaign better structure and delivers better results.

Create A Campaign Goal

You should always have a goal in mind when creating any website page. This is doubly important when creating landing pages. Why? Because the likelihood is that you are spending money to acquire traffic, and you have to be able to measure ROAS (Return On Ad Spend).

Goals can range from increasing report downloads, customer signups, social media awareness or sales of an actual product. This naturally depends on your business, where you are targeting and your overall company mission.

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Define Landing Page Campaign Success

Defining success is harder to quantify than setting goals. If you have the data, set low, medium and high targets and set them over a month-by-month period. If you’ve never set up a campaign, you don’t have targets or hard results to benchmark against. Run some initial tests or ask for assistance.

Choose Landing Page Promo Channels Wisely

Where are you promoting the campaign? The most obvious question. But every single channel needs to be approached differently. Different channels are used for either increasing the funnel or nurturing the funnel.

Optimise landing pages for users' buying mindset.

Are they in ‘active buying’ mode’?

PPC, Retargeting, Email Marketing

Or are they in passive ‘browsing’ mode?

Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google Display

Customise Messaging For Landing Pages

Writing compelling copy that doesn’t bore your audience to death is very important. No matter if you run a yoga studio, are launching a b2b SaaS company or are gearing up to build the hype around a new pair of snazzy trainers.

Your messaging needs to be uplifting and approachable, occasionally witty and to the point.

Few people are willing to invest time in long-winded, tiresome copy anymore.

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Create Landing Page Variations

Landing pages allow you to create many, many, many variations of the same page (with slight alterations). Targeting specific keywords, create a landing page for each one or cluster similar keywords together.

These pages can then be used to test different ad variants for performance and ROI. But this can take time and can make things quite complex in a relatively short space of time.

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Track Everything On Landing Pages

It is essential you track each of your campaigns. No matter if you are using Hubspot, Heap.io, Google Analytics or GoSquared. You need to make sure that every customer interaction is being recorded and if you want to get really interesting info around how to optimise landing pages, I recommend recording your users when they visit the page using HotJar.

Tracking interactions and actions can increase your ROI dramatically in a very short space of time. It means you can spot weird user patterns and spacing issues, add CTAs where users are scrolling and more.

Keep Landing Page CTAs Consistent

A landing page should focus on one key action you want the visitor to take. CTAs (Call To Action) could include Sign Up Here, Download Now or Subscribe.

If you do, add additional CTAs to the landing page. These should link back to the specific goal, for example, facilitating more report downloads within a similar but different theme.

Add these at your peril, as they will likely decrease your conversion rates.

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Keep Landing Page Design Simple

As you can see from this article, I have tried to keep the design as minimalistic as possible. This is to help you focus on the content within the article itself and avoid distractions.

When creating your landing page it is important to add only what is important. Making the experience relevant, targeted and hyper-focused on the topic at hand.

Optimise For Mobile & Tablet

Back in the early 2010s, you could get away with a slightly dodgy-looking landing page. Unfortunately, this is no longer the case. Screens come in all shapes and sizes. As a marketer, this presents many, many, many problems.

To increase your landing page performance. Diligently check your page is properly adjusted for the different types of screen sizes to ensure proper responsiveness.

Design & Customise Forms

Ugly forms are one of the biggest hurdles with landing pages. An ugly form can make your landing page, almost unusable, as so few users will actually fill out what you are asking them for.

When it comes to creating forms on your Landing Page:

• Ensure that they are the same size if you use them several times.
• Ensure they are using your brand colours
• Don’t add too many fields
• Always check for responsiveness.

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Speed Is Essential

Many websites and landing pages are slow.

This slowness is caused by a number of things (bloatware, image file sizes, too many plugins, too many tracking codes). Speedy pages increase the likelihood of your landing page converting your customer.

Put simply the more bulk you add to your landing page, the longer it will take to load.

Create A Post Action Experience

When you want to create a campaign, do you ever think about what the user will be downloading, signing up for or experiencing after adding their details? Is it in a similar-ish style, and have you mapped out the complete user journey?

The post-action experience is as, if not more important than, the landing page itself. Content has to deliver value and build your relationship with the customer. Otherwise, the lead will never be nurtured, and they will likely not buy off of you.

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Offer Something Of Value

Not everyone can share anything as majestic as a golden pineapple. But, if you create and optimise landing pages without offering anything of value, then there is no point in running the campaign.

Setting goals and defining success at the beginning of any campaign is so critical. Think about what you offer and how you can deliver value to your customer segments. It can vary between an allocation of your time, a report or study, a competition or a new product.

Why You Should Optimise Landing Pages

Taking steps to optimise landing pages can take time. But they can dramatically improve your landing pages' performance while decreasing your CPL (Cost Per Lead) or CPA (Cost Per Action), saving you money and increasing your deal flow.

Hype around creating experiences to customers within B2C environments has been around for a long time; the same now goes for B2B brands.

Being boring and sharing basic content doesn’t cut it anymore.

You need to innovate, create and excite.