A key part of inbound marketing is capturing lead information in return for an offer such as an ebook or webinar. And in order to get that lead information, you need to have an effective landing page that encourages people to enter their information while conveying the value of the offering without distracting them or overwhelming them. Here are five things you can do to make sure your landing pages are doing their job effectively.
1. Emphasize the benefits of the offer
Make sure you let your visitors know why they would want to download your offer and what benefit they will receive. You want to make it worth their while to give you their contact information, so be sure the benefit of doing so is clear.
2. Keep it simple
But while you want to be sure you convey the benefits of your offer, you don’t want to overwhelm your visitors with information or confuse them. Don’t clutter the page with too much text or too many images; the last thing you want to do is distract visitors and keep them from signing up. You should try to stick to a headline, a short paragraph of explanation, and a few bullet points detailing the benefits of your offer.
3. Remove the main navigation
Your visitors arrive at a landing page because they are interested in your offer. Since you are trying to capture their information, you want to keep them there until they fill out the form, so you’ll want to remove any menu navigation or links that might send them elsewhere before they can do so. Keep the page simple and focused, and remove any distractions that might keep visitors from filling out the form and downloading the offer. Removing these distractions will also make it clear what the visitor needs to do in order to get the offer, leading them directly to the action that is necessary to obtain the content they want.
4. Make landing pages and CTAs consistent
Your goal with a landing page is to attract potential customers, people who are interested in your products and services. Visitors will reach landing pages via calls-to-action (CTAs), so to ensure that you don’t confuse them and that you aren’t wasting your time by capturing leads who aren’t actually interested in your products or services, you want to make sure the language in your CTAs matches that on the landing page. Ideally, the headline of the landing page should contain some of the same words used in the CTA, and you’ll also want to make sure you don’t mislead visitors, such as by offering a free download, then including some sort of catch.
5. Keep the form short
Finally, you want to encourage visitors to fill out the form and provide their contact information, allowing you to communicate with them in the future. While you might want to try to get as much information as possible from them (it would be nice to know their demographic information, industry, budget, etc. right?), you don’t want to scare them away, so it’s best to keep the form as simple as possible, asking for just the basic contact information, such as name, email, company name, website, etc.
Hopefully, these tips will help you create rock star landing pages to capture the ideal lead information for your sales team. Do you have any tips of your own, or examples of what does and doesn’t work? Any questions for us about what else you can do to generate leads? Let us know in the comments below.
