Landing Gear: A Crash Course in Effective Landing Pages

March 2007

Your online ad caught the attention of a prospect, who clicked on it for more information. Congratulations on a successful online ad campaign. Hold on. Not yet. If you think about it, the clicking of an online ad or link in an email is more like the take-off of the sales process than the landing. Your prospects have made it to your website, but they haven’t bought anything. In BtoB, the sale likely won’t be immediate, or online, but your prospects have made it to the “I’m interested, give me more information” phase of the buying cycle. Whether the prospect continues on through the sales funnel is reliant on the pilot – your website – to bring home a safe landing.

But your home page is too general to be the landing. Visitors coming to your landing page have already been screened by your ad. They expect a very specific message. Which brings us to rule number one of effective landing pages:

Get to the point
Distractions kill conversions. Strip any unneeded elements from the page. This is not your home page. Make your points quickly and directly. The landing page content should be easy to scan. If your ad promised specific information, such as “10 marketing trends for 2007” make sure your landing page keeps the promise, or you instantly lose trust and credibility.

Keep to a minimum drawn-out paragraphs of company philosophy. That said, a little context is important. The landing page is the introduction to your company, and should coincide with the company's message and branding as a whole. A great way to do this without adding extra words is through the landing page’s look and feel. An effective landing page is consistent with your overall brand’s creative look and feel.

First impressions are everything
The landing page is, in many cases, the introduction to your company. It’s the first page a visitor sees after clicking on your ad, so if you think about it, it has as much impact as your home page, if not more. Your landing page should be just as attractive and carefully designed as your home page.

Visitors should never click on a page in your site and wonder: "Where am I?" Consistently use the same look and feel (colors, fonts, etc.) in your ads, HTML emails and landing pages as on the main site pages to create a visual connection with your brand.

Make campaigns separate but equal
Remember, the best landing pages are targeted to specific advertising campaigns. If you’re running a banner ad targeted at HR managers, but also sending to CIOs an HTML email addressing the technology side of your product, you need two separate landing pages: one targeted to HR managers and one specific to IT professionals. The messaging and vernacular differs greatly between audiences . Don't hesitate to create a separate landing page for each ad campaign. You spent significant time and money to create online ads, so don’t waste it by not putting the same effort into what visitors find once they arrive at your website.

Define a conversion
In BtoB, a conversion is often defined very differently from its BtoC counterpart. For an engineering consulting company, registration might count as a conversion, whereas for a seller of high- priced products like CRM systems that won’t be purchased online, a direct inquiry for more information may constitute a conversion. BtoB sellers in markets where products are lower priced, such as office products, might count nothing less than an online sale as a conversion.

The point is to define the conversion before you design your landing page, because what you want to accomplish with the visitor – i.e. what action you want them to take – contributes greatly to the content of the landing page.

Navigate the landing
One way to guide visitors down the desired path is through navigation. One reason home pages don't work well as landing pages is because they have too many navigational choices. Landing pages should have fewer links on the page. The afore-mentioned sellers of office supplies might completely remove their navigation bar and provide only links to information that will help prospects complete the action.

Make the navigation prominent, and consider elements like buttons or images to add visual interest while encouraging the visitor to do what you want them to do: Register now. Download a white paper. Get more information. Buy.

Get in perfect form
If the desired action requires the visitor to fill out a form of any kind, make sure it doesn’t overwhelm or discourage. Request only the information you need. A scrolling page of fields is enough to turn a prospect away. But visitors will accept the task of completing a brief form in return for something valuable to them, like a white paper, case study or in-depth product information.

The form should take a minimum amount of time to complete, so make sure it is optimized. After the user finishes the current field, automatically hop the input cursor to the next field, and auto-populate any fields you can.

Feed the spiders
Search engine spiders love pages that contain keyword-rich content. So get a double benefit from your landing pages by submitting them to search engines. In fact, landing pages are great for search engine promotions because they are so targeted.

To succeed at landing pages, just remember: Landing pages lead the prospect to complete the desired action. The time spent perfecting your landing pages is an investment in success.