What is A Landing Page?
A landing page is a page within your website that has a unique value proposition for a targeted audience. Let's say you want to sell or market a specific product. You want to set up a pay per click program, or create an affiliate banner to drive traffic that will only be interested in this one product. A landing page (where the traffic lands) serves this purpose better than a general page in your web. Think of a landing page as the "Golden Egg" of web pages, but just for this one product or service.
1. Start with a Marketing Plan
2. Test Your Landing Page Designs
The Most Common Landing Page Strategy and Design Mistakes
- Page content doesn't match the ads and keywords driving the traffic.
- Poor quality art. Misuse of art.
- Too much text to read.
- Text size is too small.
- Light text on dark backgrounds.
- No clear solution to a problem.
- Poor, or confusing copy that doesn't romance the product or service.
- No bullet points.
- Unnecessary or complex navigation.
- Not targeted at a specific audience.
- You're using your home page.
- Not testing different versions.
The best way to build a forward-thinking landing page is by building it backwards. Start with a simple marketing plan with realistic goals.
The best landing page is always the one that hasn't been made yet. We use best-practice designs, and tweak them until they hit the mark.
We Start with an Approved Marketing Plan
The ratio of paid, targeted traffic that clicks over to a landing page might be less than 1%. And those that are using one, aren't using a good one. Before we get our crayons out to design the perfect landing page, you have to ask yourself one very important question: What do you want this landing page to do?
A marketing plan identifies your budget and strategy. It also estimates your conversions, AOV (average order value) and cost per sale. Each week, you review the results and make changes to your ads and landing pages until the plan becomes a reality. Below is a sample marketing plan with basic metrics. The green column is the plan, the blue column is the results-to-plan after the first month, and the white columns show how you achieved plan.
We Design Your Ads
Designing creative ads is just as important as designing the landing page because success comes from converting lead generation into sales. We meet with the client, in this case an exercise program, and we convert a long meeting of who they are, and the goal they want to achieve, into 20 words for their text ads. We start with two versions.
We also want to leverage online advertising through pay per click and their affiliate programs. We will start with two 125 x 125 sized ads for the content network in pay per click. Pay per click allows us to target customer types, which will help us to create a higher quality lead. After a review of the client customer demographics, we start by focusing our efforts on middle aged females.
We Design Your Landing Page
As we said in the beginning of this page, your landing page is the last thing that gets designed.
- The page survives the 3 second rule by using the same art from the banners.
- The customer immediately knows they "landed" at the right place.
- The art is simple and identifies with the target market.
- The call to action is clear.
- The copy is presented in a "less to more" style as you read from top to bottom.
- Minimal navigation supports key points of interest the consumer may have.
- Bullet points identify key sales points.
- "Get the Body You Want" romances the result of using the product and solves the customer's problem.
Testing, One, Two, Three
It may appear our project is completed, but in reality, it has just begun. Rarely does a landing page convert its best and achieve its highest point of return on investment right out of the box. Factors that we would want to test with this design and concept would be:
- Is a 50% discount too big? Some buyers are suspicious of offers that are too good to be true. Would a 25% discount work better?
- Does the offer need a discount at all? Perhaps we would be more successful with a $149.99 price, without any discount, and include extra items like a diet planner.
- Test the color of art from red to dark green.
- Test a different model or test other types of art.
- Show pictures or clips of the free exercise video, not shown now but mentioned in the text ads.
- Add or remove bottom navigation links based on traffic flow.
- Redesign the landing page based on web orders vs. phone orders. Are phone orders converting with higher upsells?
The list of ideas is limitless, but the concept is sound. Testing and tweaking is what turns an okay marketing idea into a rock-solid landing page with consistent results. Why is that so important? Achieve the point of day-after-day steady returns and you know how much money your investment will make. Know that, and you can start gearing up "traffic in" and generate a self funded marketing campaign.
In week 5 of the marketing plan, after testing and tweaking, the client is spending $350 to make $1,350 in revenue. A 26% expense to revenue, which is calculated by dividing the total expense by the total revenue.
Assuming these results became the consistent weekly return, how much revenue would a $2,000 investment yield? On your calculator, enter $2,000 divided by 26%, and you'll get your answer: $7,692. How much would a $5,000 yield? The answer: $19,230.
What started out as a $125 media buy, turned into a successful revenue model with consistent results. This is what makes our Landing Page Design Service such an asset to your online marketing program.
Copyright 2009 All Rights Reserved
 | ||||
See a full size Landing Page Design.
Solution Web Designs
Online Marketing Success by Design
Landing Page Design
516-292-0122
