5 Steps to Powerful Landing Pages

Are you incorporating landing pages as part of your online marketing strategy? How effective are your landing pages at converting visitors to leads?

Developing landing pages that convert at a high rate requires planning, testing and measuring. To better understand the key steps to follow to make your landing pages a success, let’s look at the 5 steps to powerful landing pages.

5 Steps to Powerful Landing Pages

1. Get Started

Before you begin creating your landing pages or worrying about conversions, you need to first build a solid foundation. This means you need to gather your team and write-up some essentials, including:

• Define your audience – Who's your target market?
• Look at your needs – What are you trying to achieve with a landing page?
• Create specific, but reasonable goals – Without goals, how do you know if you succeed?

2. Creating and Measuring Traffic

Now that you've got a solid foundation, how are you going to get people to your landing pages? Remember how we outlined goals and the reasoning behind your campaign? Without this information, you wouldn't have a clear path to plan out how you'll bring in targeted traffic.

When it comes to what areas bring you traffic, there are quite a few, including:

• PPC ads
• SEO
• Social Media
• Email Marketing
• QRCodes

No matter which one or combination of these options you choose, you need to be able to track each medium to know which one will bring in the most qualified traffic to your landing pages.

3. Segment Customers

When you segment your customers, you can give them a more targeted experience. Not all landing pages work for every visitor – this is where segmentation comes into play. Consider creating a multi-page experience, like conversion paths that ask your visitors to self-segment into more specific groups.

When you gather enough segmentation data, you can move your spending towards the vehicles that give you the highest quality leads and away from the vehicles that deliver the highest percentage of bailouts.

4. Create Offers

Now that you have defined the what, why and how, it's time to create the offers and content that will drive traffic to your landing pages. Remember, offers should be valuable and specific to each segment.

Consider brainstorming your offers based on things, including:

• Demographics
• Organization
• Industry
• Affiliation

Once you have your strategy mapped out, start writing some copy. Keep best practices in play for ads to your landing pages.  Message matching, good positioning, and persuasive calls-to-action are just a few elements to great copy that will appeal to visitors and develop them into conversions.

5. Conversions

The end result we all look forward to is the conversion. Landing pages have one focus, and that's to convert visitors into leads. Conversions won’t come to you magically; you still need to work at it. Follow these steps to get the conversion on your landing pages:

• Ask for it – Make sure you have a strong call to action on your landing page directing people to your conversion action.
• Warm up to the conversion – Make the conversion action valuable to the visitor too. Consider something, like a white paper, webinar or other premium content to demonstrate value before asking for their business.
• Keep the forms simple – Don't complicate things and ask for their life story; just ask for the basic information you need and gather the rest later.
• Value buttons – Often times overlooked, the button and what it says plays a huge role in conversion. Tie your messaging and promise to what entices visitors into clicking the button.

Powerful Landing Pages

Building and benefiting from powerful landing pages takes time, planning and execution. Don't take anything for granted and remember to test everything!