3 Tips for Building a Stand-Out Landing Page

If you own a small business, then you’ve likely invested a lot of money in building your audience through content marketing, by implementing the right SEO techniques, and maybe even by adding a PPC campaign to your marketing mix.

All of these strategies are good, but a truly savvy small-business marketing strategy is not just about driving traffic to your website. You should have a plan for profit optimization that includes strategies for more conversions, and for changing prospects into actual customers.

One way to accomplish all of this is to focus on your landing pages—the first pages that a client sees when he or she comes to your site. Potential customers have a lot of buying choices today, and they tend to make up their minds about your site and your products very quickly. The book Landing Page Optimization offers this as evidence:

According to a study by the Missouri University of Science and Technology, it takes less than two-tenths of a second for someone to form a first impression when they visit your website. And it takes about 2.6 seconds for the visitor's eyes to land on a part of the page that has the most influence on their first impression.

In less than three seconds, a visitor has already made a decision about your website. You need to make a good first impression—and fast. In this article, we’ll discuss three tips for building an effective landing page that will help you make a better first impression on your potential clients:

1. CREATE DEDICATED LANDING PAGES

There are many webmasters out there who do not have separate landing pages and homepages. This is a mistake. Your homepage potentially has a lot of noise that can ultimately end up distracting users from what you want them to be concentrating on.

When a potential customer visits your website, you want them to take a particular action. Make each landing page dedicated solely to that end. If you want a visitor to download an ebook, make sure that you have a dedicated landing page that clearly directs your visitor to that action.

2. CLEARLY DISPLAY YOUR LOGO

A logo is a way to build trust with your customer base. Having a logo tells your customers that you have a brand, and along with that brand is a promise for excellent service and high-quality products. The bottom line is that a logo helps your potential customers understand your brand promise, and to associate that promise with the content of each page that it’s on.

3. SIMPLIFY YOUR FORMS

Some businesses have clients fill out a lot of fields on their lead-capture forms. They figure that a serious client—a good lead––would fill out all of the fields. While that idea does have an element of truth to it, the book Landing Page Optimizationmakes this argument:

Some businesses add more fields to their lead-capture forms as a way to filter poor-quality leads. They argue that if someone is a serious prospect, they will make the additional effort to provide more details. While this is true to some degree, it can be shortsighted because the business may end up losing lots of high quality leads that are just at an earlier stage in the sales process and are not ready to buy yet.

Remember, every customer is at a different stage in the sales funnel, so don’t overwhelm them by asking for too much information. Some people may be potential customers, but they want to do more research about your business. Collecting some of their information and then providing them with great content will only fortify your relationship with them and gain their trust.