Are you using landing pages in your company’s digital marketing? A landing page usually refers to a simple sales page aimed at attracting visitors through digital campaigns. Landing pages combined with advertising are an extremely effective way to build your company’s mailing list, or promote a specific offer campaign. So, how do you create such a sales-oriented landing page, and what should it include? Next, I’m going to share five tips with you that I’ve found to be really effective when using landing pages in digital marketing for businesses.

Create a need and fulfill that need

The most effective way to maintain a visitor’s interest on a landing page is to immediately tell them what problem your product or service solves. With attention-grabbing headlines and clear, straightforward text, you can certainly get your customers to read your sales copy for longer. Once you’ve sparked their interest, it’s easier to justify why the customer should buy your product or service.

Good examples of selling landing pages that get straight to the point can be found especially in the online coaching and fitness industry. Most of them start with headlines like: “Lose 5kg in Two Months – Online Coaching X.” The goal of the headline is clearly to address the customer’s need and immediately offer a solution if the customer’s goal is weight loss. Additionally, the simpler and more easily understandable your message is, the more likely it will work. Especially if your product involves “specialized terminology” that your potential buyers might not understand, it’s good to keep the text as simple as possible. A helpful mindset is to imagine selling the product to a kindergarten student, which helps keep the text concrete and simple. However, overly salesy text full of superlatives should be avoided, as it erodes the perception of credibility.

Here are two headline examples, one made clear and straightforward, and the other difficult to understand:

• Lose 5kg in 2 Months – Online Coaching for Men
• Boost Your Metabolism – Join the Coaching Now!

Guide the customer to achieve their goal (CTA)

When a customer lands on your landing page, they should have one clear goal to achieve. This is called a Call To Action (CTA), which could mean that after reading the page, the customer joins your mailing list, requests an offer, or even makes a purchase. The key is to structure the landing page in a way that the goal is as effortless as possible for the customer to achieve.

A cornerstone for facilitating customer conversion is clarity. The landing page should offer only one thing, so the customer’s attention doesn’t wander and the conversion doesn’t go unfulfilled. One effective way to achieve this is by removing menus and navigation from the landing page. It might seem a bit restrictive to trap the customer on a landing page without a way to navigate to other pages, but it works. Additionally, it’s a good idea to remove any chatbots and pop-ups from the same page, so the customer can convert peacefully without distractions.

The page should only present your product or service clearly, along with the CTA you’re encouraging the customer to take. In the Call To Action, it’s important to remember that few people give away their contact information for free without some form of reward or benefit. Common and widely used incentives for conversion include offering discount coupons in exchange for contact information or providing some free digital content that the customer can benefit from.

I’ve also found it effective to clearly outline the reciprocity process for the customer on the landing page. That is, explain what happens, when it happens, and for whom it happens when the customer submits their contact information or completes another conversion action. For instance, if you’re offering a discount coupon in exchange for the customer’s contact information, it’s good to pre-inform the customer whether the coupon will be sent via email and how long it will be valid.

Simplicity and social proof

Regarding the visual appearance of the landing page, it’s best to keep it as simple as possible and limit the amount of text. The structure should allow the customer to immediately grasp the most important points you want to convey. Alongside concise text, attention should also be paid to layout and the visual aspect of the page. While illustrative videos and images communicate more effectively than text, different text boxes and elements like bullet-point lists with icons or numbers also help convey the message.

If you want to easily set up an appealing and simple landing page, my strong recommendation is to use a popular page builder, such as Elementor (compatible with WordPress), Divi (compatible with WordPress), or Wix. Using these popular page builders has become quite user-friendly, and you can achieve a lot without having to code CSS for the page yourself. The landing page example image below was created with a graphics editing program like Canva, but you can certainly create a similar one using the aforementioned builders.

Links to the mentioned builders:

• Elementor: https://elementor.com/
• Divi: https://www.elegantthemes.com/
• Wix: https://www.wix.com/

When your landing page starts to resemble a website, you can also enhance it with concrete customer feedback that your company has received. New customers find it easier to relate to your product and service when they can see the experiences of other customers, i.e., social proof. Genuine testimonials and quotes from real people also enhance the perception of credibility. If you want to go all out, a customer experience video would be a solid ten as social proof.

Track results and optimize

Top-notch results aren’t always achieved on the first try, but often on the second or third attempt. When it’s time to drive traffic to your landing page and test its performance, it’s good to have a few tracking tools in place. Monitoring the results and functionality of the page from multiple perspectives is crucial for identifying potential issues and bottlenecks.

How should you track the effectiveness of your landing page? Your arsenal of tracking tools for landing page performance should be chosen based on whether you want to push traffic through social channels, search engines, or both. I’ve already covered tracking Facebook ad results in a previous article, which you can find here. For instance, if you want to see how traffic from Facebook converts, the Facebook pixel should be in place, and for Google-driven traffic, particularly Google Analytics. These tools are relatively easy to install on WordPress-based landing pages. If you’re using a less popular content management system than WordPress, installing tracking tools might be trickier or require direct addition to the site’s code. Next, I’ll list examples of tracking combinations for traffic driven through Google and Facebook, which should cover a lot of ground.

If you’re using Facebook ads to direct traffic to your page, use these:

• Facebook pixel
• Google Analytics
• Hotjar

If you’re using Google ads to direct traffic to your page, use these:

• Google Ads conversion tracking
• Google Analytics
• Hotjar

Mobile Optimization

No matter what aspect of digital advertising you’re working on, it’s always important to check how your output appears on mobile browsers and tablets. Nowadays, the majority of people use their mobile phones for web browsing rather than computers, so neglecting the mobile version of your landing page would be careless. If you’re building your landing page using the aforementioned page builders like Elementor, Wix, Divi, etc., all of them should have the feature of automatic mobile scaling for the pages.