Inbound Marketing: Landing Pages

Most of us are familiar with this feature in a website. So, what is a landing page? A landing page is a web page that allows you to capture visitor's information through a lead form. Basically it is a page that links your visitor directly to your offering. This is where the visitor will either view your offering, download an ebook, webinar and other similar type of content. How do you know you are on a landing page? You will know when you find yourself filling in your personal or business details and usually you have to submit, to get the offering. And this is not to be confused to a contact us form, but they generally perform the same function.

If there was one thing that could improve your marketing and increase your return on investment, it would be to use landing pages on your website. Too many companies send their email, social media and search traffic to their homepages, and when the client gets to the homepage, they get confused and they don't know where to go, to get the offering you advertised. The client get disinterested and leave your website, and you have lost a lead. You could capture these leads at a much higher rate simply by sending them to targeted landing pages. Put yourself in their situation, when you have seen a good offering online, and when you click on the link and you get to the homepage, you become confused on where to go and there are not links on the homepage to link you to the offering you want.

Many companies put a "Contact Us" form on their website in order to capture leads. While this is indeed a way to collect information from your website visitors, it is not the best way. The reason is because "Contact Us" pages are not targeted to specific traffic, and they are more likely to attract spam and sales people.

The form that people are going to fill in their details is very important, since this is the ultimate goal to get your visitors to complete it. The formatting and design of your form have a direct impact on conversion rates, I would advise that you think seriously on the approach you intend to use. Maybe you also want to involve your sales team and ask them what type of information they would need from visitors in order to convert them into  leads.
Firstly, you should make sure that your form appears above all pictures, adverts and other text, in other words you do not want your viewer to scroll down on the page in order to see it. It is very important that it is the first thing they see as you want to draw attention to the form. The biggest question when designing a landing page is, how long should it be. There are landing pages with four fields and some with ten and eleven fields. There is not really a magic number that is perfect, but it is a balance of quality and quantity. The shorter your landing page, the more people who are willing to fill it out, and the longer the landing page, the fewer people are going to fill it. Therefore, shorter forms usually leads to more leads, however mostly less qualified, but the longer the forms, fewer people will fill the form, but you will have quality leads. It is a trade-off and you can choose which is more viable for you.

Just a little piece of advise, often companies ask for too much information and the wrong information and when this happens, the visitor asks themselves if completing the form is worth their time and this is when companies loose leads. The goal is to collect information using the landing page form and for you to contact and qualify the lead.

 The trick is to qualify the lead before you can follow up. Have you filled in a form and while you completing it  you've asked yourself, why is this information important, this is because they are qualifying you as a person who is most likely to buy. If you own an IT company and you designing a landing page, the fields you should have are fields like, role at the company, website, number of employees and some background information. When you gather this information you will know their role, determining if you are the decision maker or not, website, you will know what kind of services they offer through the information they posted, number of employees, you will know the size of the company and you can decide whether the lead is qualified or not. When you are deciding which fields and question to include on our form, remember that you should only be asking for information that is essential to be able to contact and qualify them.

The last major component of your form is the button that the visitor must press to complete the form and send you their information. It is the "Submit" button, but studies show that landing pages with buttons labeled "Submit" actually have lower conversion rates than those that use other wording. The top-performing variations in this study were, "Click Here" and "Go." Compared to "Submit," these buttons feel much less committal and imply a lower investment of time and effort. Be creative when designing these buttons to optimize your conversion rate.

When someone is done filling out the form on your landing page, this is a great opportunity to send them to a "thank you" page. This is where you bring back the navigation and direct them to other parts of your site or more offers in which they might be interested. Use calls-to-action to suggest such things as "Subscribe to Our Blog," "Read Our Newsletter," "Connect with Us on Facebook," or "Share This Offer With a Friend." Further you can also set up an email response for visitors who fill out your form, and use this email as an additional way to follow up with them and suggest another offer they might enjoy.

Remember that you need to track and review your landing pages on a regular basis and keep testing to find areas for improvements. Use your metrics and test results to optimize your landing pages so they continue to generate an increasing number of leads. Do not be afraid to take risks, because you can always change and redo your landing pages and when you find a perfect balance, use it and keep your conversion rates up.