How to Design Your Landing Pages Like a Pro

Are your best prospects being dumped off at the front door with little direction, not sure what to do next?

Its extremely valuable to give your prospects a sense of direction to avoid losing their attention.

Your landing pages should be at the heart of your lead generation strategy. The main point of your each landing page is to engage your visitors, providing them a reason to convert and download your content.

Unfortunately, there seems to be a major disconnect between the importance of landing pages and their use. According to MarketingSherpa, 44% of clicks for B2B companies are directed to the business’ homepage, not a special landing page . Furthermore, of the B2B companies that are using landing pages, 62% have six or fewer total landing pages .

No one wants an outdated landing page to be the reason why they’re losing conversions and customers.

Ask yourself these questions to determine if your landing pages are outdated:

• Is your headline compelling and relevant?
• Is your Call-To-Action convincing and motivational?
• Do you have a good balance between your images and your text?

Another way that you can determine if your landing pages are outdated is by checking your page performance. You should specifically be looking at bounce rates and conversion rates for each page.

We’ve put together six tips to help you redesign your underperforming landing pages, cause who doesn’t want to be a pro.

6 Tips to Design Better Landing Pages

Landing pages are a great way for your company to generate leads. According to HubSpot, research shows that companies with 30 or more landing pages actually generate 7 times more leads than those with fewer than 10. There’s no reason for you not to create more pages on your site, not only does it improve your conversion rates and generate leads but it also improves your search engine rankings.

1. Keep it Short and Sweet

No one has all day to read the content on a landing page to download an eBook, especially if its as long as a Charles Dickens novel. They don’t have time to read all that, especially when most people only read the beginning and the end of your landing page copy. It’s important that your visitors understand the benefits and advantages of filling out the forms on your landing pages within those two short paragraphs.

Keep your content simple. the first paragraph of your copy should be no longer than a sentence or two. Each paragraph after that you should vary the length to create visual dissonance, making it easier for your prospects to read your copy. And no paragraph should be more than 4-5 lines at any time.

Consider utilizing:

• Bullet points
• Making important / key words bold
• Headings 1, 2 and even 3 to break up your text

Make the most important information in your copy easy to identify and read.

2. Add a Call-to-Action

No landing page is complete without a call to action. Whether you use a button, graphic or linked text, tell your visitor what they need to do. What are they going to get once they fill out your form? Will they receive a demo, an eBook, or a FREE assessment??

Your call-to-actions can look something like these:

Use action words such as download, request, click here, indicating what action they should take next. Think of designing your landing pages like a process. You want to be able to take them step by step from the moment that they read the headline to the exact second they enter their information into your lead capture form and follow the action stated on your call-to-action.

3. Above the Fold

On every page of your site, the most important information should be located above the fold. This is especially important when you’re designing your landing pages. This might sound repetitive but get right to the point, don’t add a lot of nonsense and useless copy.

Check out our FREE Inbound Marketing Assessment landing page.

4. Use the Correct Format

The format and layout of your landing pages is extremely important. According to the Nielsen Norman Group, “Eyetracking visualizations show that users often read Web pages in an F-shaped pattern: two horizontal stripes followed by a vertical stripe”.

If you take a closer look at the three images above, you will notice that all three  heatmaps show the pattern of the letter F. The red colored areas indicate the areas of a webpage that are consistently viewed more than the rest of the page. The F pattern is a rough image that shows a behavioral trend rather than a uniformed “pixel-perfect” shape because everybody looks at a webpage slightly different. 

Now that you know how your visitors are viewing web pages, you should layout the design of your landing pages to match that pattern. If you need some help, a great trick, is to take a piece of paper and frame-out where your text, buttons, and design elements will go and then how much space will be allocated to your copy.

Utilize these elements in the layout of your landing pages:

• Emphasize the highest priority task
• Use examples or excerpts to reveal portions of the content
• Bullet points
• Photo
• Social sharing buttons

5. Remove all Unnecessary Elements

One thing that most people forget is to omit the navigation bar on their landing page. However, according to Marketing Sherpa, only 16% of landing pages are free of navigation bars. What a fantastic statistic, considering that one of the essential basics of designing a landing page is to remove your navigation bar.

If you’re apart of the other 84% of companies you might be wondering why navigation bars should be hidden. Well, let me ask you a question, don’t you want your visitors to convert? Everyone should be saying YES!

When you add your navigation bar to your landing pages, you are giving your visitors the option to go somewhere else. When looking at your landing page your viewers most likely have an attention span of around 8 seconds.  After those few seconds, it’s likely that your viewer might click away and move on to something else.

Besides being navigation free, remove these elements:

• Visual clutter, use only one photo
• Clipart, showcase your eBook or product
• Links to other parts of your site

6. Only Ask What you Need

You don’t want to ask new visitors 500 questions on your lead capture forms, they aren’t taking the SAT’s. Don’t make the process unbearable and only include questions that are necessary. Not every lead capture form on every landing page or even every company will look the same. You only want to ask what is absolutely necessary for you to learn more about each lead and to nurture each lead.

Also keep in mind that you don’t have to ask the same questions on every landing page with the help of progressive profiling, which recognizes the IP address of your leads, changing the questions on the form which will enable your company to learn more about the lead, rather than asking the same 2, 3 or even 10 questions every time.

Include these questions in your lead capture forms:

• First name
• Last name
• Email
• Phone number
• Company
• Website URL
• Number of Employees
• Job Role
• Best describes me