Generating Leads Through a Landing Page: Why You Should Be Doing It

For B2B marketers, lead generation is crucial to success. We've talked before about the importance of lead scoring and lead nurturing to ensure that your sales team gets the most qualified leads possible, but without an effective lead-generation tactic, you won't even get that far. That's why generating leads through a landing page is an untapped resource that will boost your business.

So where do you start? How do you ensure that you get enough leads into your marketing automation pipeline that a healthy amount of them end up as customers? As it turns out, it all starts at your landing page.

"Wait a minute," you might say, "doesn't the process begin with your first marketing touch or message to your audience?" Well, technically, yes. But if you don't direct that message toward a landing page that actually convinces the visitor to take that first crucial step of inquiring about you and becoming a lead, it could be a wasted effort. That's why successful lead generation has to start with an effective landing page.

Which brings us to the topic of this blog: what makes a landing page effective? There are three main factors that every successful landing page has:

1) INTUITIVE LAYOUT AND DESIGN

Before you even think about what content to put on your page or what information to ask for in your form, it's important to make sure the landing page is laid out correctly.

According to a MarketingSherpa study, out of all possible factors potentially affecting your landing page performance, page layout has the single largest impact.

That makes it crucial for you to get the layout just right, which includes figuring out just where to place your sign-up form. In the age of responsive web design, placing content above the fold may no longer be as important as it once was, but your form should absolutely be placed high on your page with as little scrolling as possible.

Design also matters. Using contrasting colors (all within your company's color scheme, of course) can make the page appealing, easy to navigate, and the form easy to fill in. Visual clutter, on the other hand, can have the exact opposite effect. Research has shown that a single second of added page-load time (which happens when you clutter up your landing page with too many or too large images) results in 11 percent fewer page views, a 16 percent decrease in customer satisfaction, and a 7 percent loss in conversions.

2) ACTIONABLE CONTENT

Next, you'll want to be sure that your content is convincing enough for your visitors to click that sign-up button. To achieve that goal, content should be action-oriented and concise. Consider Dropbox, whose page text, "Your stuff, anywhere,” became a legendary example of great landing-page content.

That's not to say that you should always keep your content to a single sentence. In fact, if you can spare the space, implementing social proof by sharing the testimonials of your current customers can be incredibly effective in increasing your conversions.

3) THE RIGHT FORM LENGTH

Last, but certainly not least, it's time to consider the heart of your landing page—the form itself. Much has been written about the ideal length of your form, but as it turns out, that length depends entirely on how far along in the lead-nurturing process your potential sign-ups are.

If you're trying to generate new leads, anywhere between four to seven fields should be perfect. But as those leads nudge closer to becoming sales qualified, they'll be willing to give up more of their information in exchange for your content. Generally, the rule "the more [content] you give, the more you can ask for,” applies here.

Finally, it's important to have just the right call-to-action button at the bottom of your form. Oli Gardner, a leading landing page expert, is famous for his dislike of "submit" as the word on the button. Instead, he encourages marketers to use verbiage that actually describes the action a lead is taking: "sign up" for a newsletter, "register" for a webinar, etc.

Optimizing your lead generation efforts is about more than just increasing your promotions. You have to get the landing page just right, which includes optimizing your layout and design, content, and form. Of course, as is the case in all of marketing, the best practices we listed above for each step are a good guide, but they may not work in every scenario. Continuous evaluation of your landing page performance and an occasional A/B test to find the perfect form length or design choice are crucial to increasing your lead generation and ultimately your customer base.