The Ultimate Guide to Successful Landing Pages in 2021

The Ultimate Guide to Successful Landing Pages in 2021

From trying to gain conversions from a new audience to enticing previous customers back with compelling offers– a landing page has many great applications for your business. However, not all landing pages are created equal. There isn’t a “Big Book of Landing Page Strategies” sitting out on a coffee table somewhere for you to peruse. There is only you, high expectations, creativity, and probably coffee. Sounds intimidating, right? 

Wrong! You got this! While there are no explicitly defined rules across the market on creating the perfect landing page, there are some tools and tactics to follow to help achieve success. Will you hit roadblocks? Yes. Will some of your landing pages flop and be banished to a dark hole, never to see the light of day again? Absolutely. While we particularly don’t like to fail, with landing pages, failure is where we can truly identify the potential in what works and what doesn’t work. So, at first, fail a little, okay? But don’t take it to heart. Simply get yourself back up, surge forward, apply what you learned with your failures, and make it better for your next landing page. Always be trying, testing, and failing – and eventually, somewhere within that mucky cycle of failure – you will find a win, and it will be glorious!

While we encourage that sobering moment of failure as a learning experience, we want you to have landing page wins. While you can’t reach for that non-existent leather-bound book of all the landing page knowledge, we do want you to reach for this guide. Think of this as your digital leather-bound book and keep it handy in your digital toolkit. We all need help sometimes, and with landing pages, it can be the Wild West out there- anything goes.

What the Heck is A Landing Page?

With all this talk of wins and losses, let’s get to the nuts and bolts of this machine. What the heck do you even use a landing page for, and what is it? In its simplest terms, a landing page is a page on your website where you offer something of your business in exchange for something from the visitor. They are short, sweet, and designed to convert.

A landing page is typically customized to a specific campaign designed to guide visitors to make a single action, such as providing their name, email address, etc. Don’t confuse a landing page with a website, as they are not the same. They could be brothers or cousins, but they are not twins, and both are designed for specific purposes. A website is intended for information gathering, and exploration while landing pages are simple and designed only for conversion.

Why You Need Landing Pages

Don’t skip building landing pages. If you want to drive traffic, improve your SEO and continue to build exposure for your brand: build a landing page. If you want to lead customers to buy a specific product: build a landing page. If you want to experiment and build out new customer persona or try new products in different markets: build a landing page. If you want to experience some epic fails, but also feel that excitement when your campaign works: build a landing page. See where we are going with this? You guessed it: build a landing page.

Best Landing Page Strategies for 2021

With all this talk of failure, we really do want you to get some wins. Our hope is that you can take some of these strategies below and do just that. While you can build a landing page out as crazy as you want – you do you – we do recommend that you take some of our strategies to heart. As professionals, we have had our own epic fails to teach us how we can get our epic wins. With both wins and losses under our belt, we know that these landing page strategies will help you get those wins. Now it’s time to get building!

Know Your Target Market

Wait, don’t get building just yet. I know we said to get building and got all excited with it – but how can you build anything if you don’t know who you are building for? Would you build a china shop for a toddler? Hopefully not. Before you pull in the designers and start setting up mood boards and imagery, you need to know your target market. This will require additional research and data mining to determine the customer persona and journey map.

Identify Where Your Traffic Is Coming From

Identifying where your traffic is coming from is tied to knowing your target market. Much of how people search today can be generational. Younger generations use much more social media than others, while others, sorry mom and dad, typically rely on direct search and spoon-fed data and offers. Determining if your target market finds you via direct search, social media, or organically is what you need to identify.

Set Measurable and Achievable Goals

“We want to be on page one for this search term by the end of the year,” “We want to reach 1,000 conversions with this landing page,” “We want to leave work early and catch a few drinks with friends,” these are all measurable and achievable goals. To identify if a landing page is a win or a loss, you need to set it up against a baseline. For some, a single conversion is a win and a cause to celebrate. For others, the stakes may be higher, and a win could be conversions in the thousands. Determine what makes your wins and start there. Landing pages may cycle for many weeks or even months. Set measurable goals, such as checking back on your pages or running A/B testing on your pages to see if optimized areas will make a more significant impact.

How to Build the Perfect Landing Page

Okay, the time has come to design. With our data mined, personas gathered, and goals set, let’s pull out those colored pencils and get drawing! Well, more like your digital color pencils via creative software. If you are creatively inclined, this is your time to shine. Follow some of the guidelines below when drafting your landing pages and remember to tweak and experiment along the way!

• Remove navigation: Your landing page’s goal is to convert, and we cannot achieve conversions if our customers stray away from the page. To keep them on the page, take out every action except the one you want them to perform.
• Concise & Clear Copy: This is not War and Peace, and nobody has time for a 587,287 paged novel. Less is more. Get your offer across quickly and make it impactful.
• Clear CTA: You never want to confuse your customer or trick them into clicking anything. Be clear with what you are offering, and make sure that it is presented so that your intentions are known immediately.
• Relevant Imagery: While this seems obvious, how many times have you stumbled onto a landing page and the image was something completely different than the offer? It happens. While we could really get into the psychology behind images, we will scale it back and reiterate that you should pick an image in line with your offer and your brand. Period. Don’t get all crazy here. Keep it simple and keep it on brand.
• Compelling Offer: Your offers should already be laid out in your marketing plan and set when you made your goals. Compelling offers are a part of how you achieve your goals. The better the offer to your customer, the more likely they are to convert. Also, offers are typically an excellent way to A/B test your landing pages. Don’t like the offer for landing page A? No problem, make a different offer for landing page B. Repeat.
• Customer Capture: The pot of gold at the end of the rainbow and a dragon’s golden treasure. While (hopefully) not as elusive as these first two references, customer capture is a great goal to have. The more customer data you have translates into knowing more about your customer, which translates into you offering excellent and more individualized services.

When You Need A Helping Hand

When you want to be competitive in your market and keep upping your exposure- you need to build a landing page. As we have mentioned before, building landing pages will have its shares of wins and losses. It can also take some time to perfect. If a specific type of landing page layout works for you– awesome. If it works for one campaign but not another, you can take creative liberty and tweak it until it works. Tweaking and manipulating a landing page is both a boon and a challenge. While you can be as creative and as innovative as you want to meet your customers in a way that will get them to convert– there is also a delicate balance between offers, customers, and time.

The time it takes to create the perfect landing page is sometimes a skill that needs to be left to the professionals. Lucky for you, we know some professionals. Us! At 729 Solutions, our professional team has the experience and skills to create beautiful, on-brand landing pages that convert. With our design services and project management process, we deliver high-quality work at affordable rates. For more information about our design services, or if you want to look at our portfolio and see some of our landing page wins – check us out today!