In the previous chapters of this guide, we have covered the different types of landing page templates we can use. We have also explained how to drive traffic to your landing page.
Did you read Chapter 3 and want more tips on how to build a landing page that will convert? Here, we are going to discuss five-star recipes that make up the anatomy of a perfect landing page.
Think about your favorite recipe. Maybe it’s something passed down for generations in your family. Perhaps it’s something you came up with yourself. It may be a recipe for a filling, a savory dish, a batch of cookies or anything in between.
Let’s say you are baking chocolate chip cookies. What do you need to make them? All-purpose flour, salt, baking soda, vanilla extract, eggs, brown sugar, white sugar, butter, and of course, the chocolate chips.
Now, what if you wanted to dress up a chocolate chip cookie? You might add nuts or peanut butter. Sometimes you want to omit one or more of the ingredients. Perhaps you have a gluten allergy, so you have to make sure your cookies are gluten-free.
This five-star landing page recipe is just like the one for chocolate chip cookies. You can add to it or take away certain ingredients that don’t work for you. Keep tweaking it and making it better until you find your own formula to success!
So you’ve built a product or service, right? Congratulations. Now you want to sell it so your agency can start making some money. There’s just one little problem: not everyone who you come across would want to buy your product or service.
This isn’t anything personal. Your product or service is probably great, but not everyone wants it or needs it. Think about it - outside of essentials like toothbrush and toilet paper, people are divided on almost any other product out there. Even huge, renowned brands like Apple and Nike have detractors who don’t like their brands.
How do you find the people who will like your brand and be more receptive to buying your products and services? You have to determine who’s in your target market.
These are the people who are going to be most interested in your company and its offerings. You may break up your target market by demographics like age, location, or occupation. You might divide them up by pain points as well. Whichever criteria matters the most to you, use it to find your target market.
Now that you have your target market in your sights, you want to discover their unique interests. From there, you can segment them even further. For instance, let’s go back to the chocolate chip cookies example in the introduction.
Some of your customers might be interested in plain old chocolate chip cookies. Another set of your customers might prefer chocolate chip cookies with nuts. Yet another section of your customers might like gluten-free chocolate chip cookies.
How do you know what your audience is most interested in? Well, one way you can find out is with keyword research. If you have Google Keyword Planner (which, as a marketer, you really should), then you can use it to search for keywords that are relevant to your market.
It’s better to focus on long-tail keywords, or those that are four words or more. These keywords are often more specific. Take, for instance, a shorter keyword like “chocolate chip cookies”. It’s a general interest, but it doesn’t tell us much. Now, compare that to a long-tail keyword like “gluten-free chocolate chip cookies” or even “soft and chewy chocolate chip cookies.”
Now we’re getting somewhere. Once we know our audience segments’ unique needs, we can then create products and offers tailored to them. If you owned a bakery and you knew your customers wanted gluten-free soft and chewy chocolate chip cookies, then you’d be sure to add them to the menu. You would obviously sell a lot of other things as well. At least, you’d know your customers want to buy that product.
With your audience identified and segmented, you can now start working on your actual landing page. The backbone to any good landing page is strong copy. If you’ve read the four previous chapters of this guide, you know by now that the copy shouldn't be salesy.
There’s a concept called Soap Opera Sequences that was popularized by marketer Andre Chaperon. Essentially, it’s a way of writing email newsletters that gets people excited to read the next one. Chaperon would often end his emails with a cliffhanger.
Think about when your favorite shows have ended their episodes (or even entire seasons) with a cliffhanger. You just can’t wait until next week to see what happens, right? It’s the same way with a well-crafted story in your email newsletter or copy.
By using storytelling elements, you will get people eager to read to the end, even if you have paragraphs of copy on your landing page.
Another landing page element we’ve harped on a lot about, is Social Proof. That’s because it’s so important in establishing trust in the eyes of your prospective customers. As an evidence of that, think of how you’ve been swayed by testimonials and reviews. If you’ve ever seen a commercial on TV or online and decided to try a product, then you’ve been influenced by social proof.
On your landing page, you can add social proof in the form of text-based testimonials, videos, or reviews. Honesty is key here. If you ask someone to make a video review for your landing page, they should want to do it because they genuinely enjoyed using the product or service. They’re excited to share their experience and to encourage others to try your company.
The same goes for reviews. Use real, positive reviews that users wrote. Don’t alter the wording. It’s okay to edit down some of the review, especially if it's long, but leave all the original language in. Your audience can sniff out phony or overly positive reviews.
You know how essential a good CTA is. The CTA presents the lead a way to contact you, navigate to the purchase page, or otherwise take the next step. Without a CTA, they’ll find your landing page, read it, and then probably move on as they try to seek more information about your product or service.
CTAs come in all shapes and sizes, quite literally. Some are just a short paragraph at the end of your sales copy. Others are clickable buttons. The information you’ll want to include in your CTA varies depending on your goal. If, for instance, you want a lead to contact you, your CTA would include your address, phone number, and even your email address. If you want the lead to make a purchase, clicking the CTA might redirect them to your pricing page or a checkout page.
No matter the goal of your CTA, it needs to be as appealing as possible. This means short and sharp copy, good placement on the page, a readable font, and the use of appealing colors. You should definitely A/B test several versions of your CTA before your landing page goes live. We’ll get to that a little later on in this guide.
All that’s left to do now is showcase and present your offer, right? Since you’ve done your audience research, you know that some audience segments will be interested in what you’re selling. Do you want to ensure they’re even more interested?
Of course you do.
Making a limited-time offer is the best way to do that. You want to foster both, urgency and scarcity with your offer. Maybe you’re giving away a great package deal that’s only available for 24 hours. You might slash the price of your new product in half, but make it limited to just one weekend to invoke the sense of urgency.
Today, people are always talking about FOMO (the fear of missing out). No one wants to miss that next big thing because all their friends and family are already using it. If you don’t, you’re going to look like an outsider. People have a herd mentality, which is backed up by psychology. We want to be one with the group. We want to belong and not look out-of-touch.
By making a product or service available for a limited time, you trigger the FOMO in your audiences. They feel like they have to get your offer now before they run out of time. Everyone else is doing it, so they want to, too.
Before you get around to selling your products and services, though, you should A/B test every element on your landing page. We’re talking about everything from the background color of the page, its copy, testimonials, video, CTA, and any other elements. Don’t forget to test their placement on the page, too. This way, you can be sure everything is properly aligned so the lead can easily find the information they want.
Once your landing page is live, continue to A/B test it. You’re trying to get the max amount of traffic and conversions, after all, right? That means tweaking your landing page so it appeals to the most people.
Recipes are personal and beloved, passed on from one generation to another. They’re also customizable and modular. When it comes to the ingredients that go into your landing page recipe, it’s the same thing. You can make changes to the ingredients until you get a perfect landing page that works best for your company.
In the upcoming chapter, we’re going to discuss best practices for your landing page. Chapter 6 will be our final chapter in our landing page guide. If you’ve followed along to this point, then you’ll definitely want to come back to read our guide to the end.
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