Landing page? I Hardly Even Know Ya!

I attended a great webinar on landing pages recently from the good peeps over at Marketing Experiments– “Live Optimization: What we’ve learned from the last 200 experiments distilled into three basic principles – plus live-optimization examples.” The presentation was great, and the panel gave some really insightful advice they were able to narrow down into those 3 clear and concise points.

In sum, always remember that your landing page should immediately answer 3 questions for the visitor:

1. Where am I?
2. What can I do here?
3. Why should I do it?

These points can and must be answered with an effectively designed landing page which focuses on the content of the page. We typically design a landing page with the offer front and center, a form for a person to fill out, hopefully some visuals or an animation that really connect to your brand/ idea/ product, and finally, add some copy to make sure you know who we are.

The presenter brought up a point early on that really stuck with me. You must differentiate your advertising message to really connect with your customers. If an ad says you’re “The Best” at something, what does that really mean? The presenter likened it to being at a party and introducing yourself as the greatest marketer ever, puffing yourself up with as much gusto as your pay per click ads do (Free Trial? “Let’s do lunch tomorrow! I’ll give you 10% off!”) How effective will that really be at winning friends and influencing people? Same goes for winning customers. Not much at all.

Which got me thinking. We spend so much time and effort attempting to drive conversions through our landing pages. I understand it’s crucial to catch a lead through a form or a call to your sales team, but it’s also important not to abandon them in the process. Spend some quality time with the text on that landing page. Make sure you focus on that #1 question: “Where am I?” Chances are, not everyone spends as much time as you do with your brand. Stop for a second. Introduce yourself. Be polite… open the door for them! Remember your manners! Let someone get to know your company if they want, and then let them decide for themselves if they’re going to act on your call to action.

IN SUM: When it comes to designing a landing page, the content you put in that landing page is equally as important as your call to action.

During the webinar I was surprised to see the team analyzing web pages that seemed to me to be home pages. (All were submitted by webinar attendees.) I was expecting to see more pages that were of the “fill out this form” ilk and it struck me as quite interesting that sometimes we can forget that our most important landing page of all is the home page. Despite pointing our advertising efforts to hidden landing pages on a site, more times than not, an interested customer will end up on the home page, the biggest landing page of all. And my point applies here as well, if not even more so: don’t ever take the copy on your homepage for granted. You never know. Someone might actually read it.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user …-Wink-… under Creative Commons license.