VIEWPOINT: Landing Pages 101: Devising a Strategy For Takeoff

You’ve just spent weeks defining the social posts, the digital ads, and the copy for all the platforms for your latest campaign. The FizzBuzz 3000 (recently updated from the 2000, which is so 2000) is about to hit the market, and so is your campaign. Then your media coordinator asks: “Where are we going to send them?” Then it hits you: you need a landing page. You need to refresh the website. You need to make sure the tracking is set up. Oh no. Yeah, you could just send them to your company home page. There will be a highlight carousel there, or a featured post or, well, something to tell the user why they just clicked on your ad, your email, your post. Right? How about a landing page? When your customers do decide they’re going to click the link, they want to end up on a page that has meaning and value to them. Because up until they spend money with you, the most valuable thing a prospect can give you is time and attention. We can’t squander that. Let’s think about a great user experience for our audience.

Content

The content of your site’s home page is often more about defining your brand, and helping users navigate to the content they’re seeking. Most businesses have multiple audiences they’re delivering content to — existing customers, prospective customers, employees, and job-seekers, just to name a few. There are likely segments within each of those broad categories that are all looking for something different. Unless your company is narrowly focused, your home page probably isn’t the best landing page for a specific campaign. Instead, think about your campaign’s strategy and goals. Are you creating brand or product awareness? Are you educating on the problem that your offering solves? Or are you trying to get the potential customers that are about to buy clicking a “buy now” button? Each of those phases of the buying cycle comes with its own content strategy. Knowing that your campaign is targeting a focused segment will help you realize conversions more efficiently, because you will be speaking to that segment, rather than trying to catch-all.

Call to (the best) action

Embedded in your content should be a relevant call-to-action. There are many actions that your prospect might take, and again, which you are looking for is highly dependent on what phase of the buying cycle they are in. Brand awareness? Sign up for our newsletter. List-building is a great way to help early-stage prospects get to know you, start engaging with your brand, and be receptive to your message. The call-to-action is going to offer a simple (read: one box, one button) newsletter sign-up form. Consider that a conversion for the purposes of tracking as well. List-building might not have direct monetary value, but it does increase your company’s potential energy — a sign the campaign is working. Getting them to buy now? Well, the call-to-action here is going to be an “Add to Cart” button, ideally. For a service, it might look more like signing up for that free trial. It’s not going to make sense, though, for the brand-awareness campaign to land on a free-trial pitch. That customer isn’t ready, and actually, might just look at that as being pushy. Similarly, the customers who ready to buy aren’t here to sign up for your newsletter (and if you want them to sign up, you can always add it to the checkout screen). Nailing the call-to-action based on the group you’re targeting shows your prospects that you know what they’re looking for, and you’re putting it right in front of them.

Design for all the screens

Social media is predominantly experienced on a mobile device. If you’re posting on social or placing ads on social platforms, a mobile-friendly, responsive design is needed to accommodate those users. The design methodology that works best is mobile-first. Starting from a narrow, phone-sized mobile design will really test your content and call-to-action regarding what’s most important. What message will users see first, and how far will they interact before they get to the call-to-action? How much content do you really need to place before users can move ahead? As you expand to tablet and desktop sizes, you can always shift the content and layout to make use of all the space available. If you start with a desktop layout, you may find yourself making unsatisfying decisions on where to stash the content as the screen size shrinks. It’s folly to design for an experience that less than a majority of your customers will have. Design for the phone first, and expand it to the desktop second.

Speed

You’ve got solid content, you have a great call-to-action, the design is beautiful — now let’s get just a little technical. In public speaking, they say you have 7 minutes to get your audience’s attention. On the web, you’ve got more like 30 seconds. So, it’s critical that your page loads quickly to get your prospects content while they still have interest and before they swipe away to another site or app. Google recommends 2.5 seconds to the Largest Contentful Paint — the time it takes the largest image, text block, or video to become visible before the user scrolls the page. It strongly correlates with the user’s perception that the site has loaded (even if it’s not yet fully loaded). There are many ways to help your site load faster, with various caching solutions, content-delivery networks, and improved image or video compression to deliver the site’s contents more quickly. A tool like Google Lighthouse can assess your landing page load time. It will produce a report with technical recommendations for improving everything from server-response time to image optimization. Ideally, you should set up a recurring scan using a tool like Lighthouse, so that as you make adjustments and changes to the landing page over time, you don’t accidentally introduce slowness. How fast your page is isn’t just about the speed of the server or the code; it’s also about how heavy the content itself is. Be judicious with the use of large assets like videos. They are certainly compelling, but keep them short and compress them well, or your audience will just move on before they get your story.

Step zero

Even before your landing page goes live, have a clearly defined campaign strategy and goals. A campaign strategy informs everything else in a campaign. Who are we targeting? What part of the buyer cycle are they in? Where are we going to find them? How are we going to reach them? And once we do reach them, what do we want them to do? Starting with campaign strategy is the most important part of the process. Without it, you’ll waste time and money. You’ll end up with worse than expected results, and you won’t necessarily be able to build a plan of attack to make an improvement. Your goals aren’t well-defined to make an informed correction.

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Paul DeLeeuw is a tech lead at ddm marketing + communications, a marketing agency for highly complex and highly regulated industries.