How To Design Amazing Landing Pages That Convert
Regardless of your industry or your audience, there’s simply no excuse not to have an amazing landing page that converts.
If you’re not familiar with digital marketing vocabulary, you may be asking what’s a landing page? And what’s a landing page that converts?
A landing page is a term used to describe an individual page on a website that was created for a specific advertising or marketing campaign.
Smart companies will create a unique landing page that matches their advertisement instead of sending all users to a generic homepage. Doing so improves sales and email captures.
An example of this is Nike running a Facebook ad special for 20% off running shoes during the weekend. When users click the link from the Facebook ad, it takes them to a landing page that reiterates the 20% off special and has a catalog of running shoes that match the offer.
Without that specific landing page, the advertisement would confuse users who click from Facebook to the generic Nike homepage and see nothing about 20% off for running shoes. That’s poor marketing.
And creating and maintaining a page like this has never been easier or more accessible. Plus, customers increasingly expect legitimate businesses to have a page that matches the ad, social media link, or email newsletter link they just clicked on.
But just because landing pages are mandatory doesn’t necessarily mean they have to be a labor-intensive project.
A simple one-page website can be extremely effective at making an impression with consumers and even driving sales. Every small business should be excited at the thought of this.
With a little design know-how and a clear strategy, a clever and concise landing page can be the perfect way to make an impression. This is one without spending dozens of hours or thousand of dollars on a more traditional web presence.
Looking for the right place to start? You’ve come to the right place: just following these simple instructions will help you start developing your landing page the right way to maximize your new marketing campaign.
Creating Amazing Landing Pages That Convert
1. Know How You’ll Measure Success
It can be tempting for business leaders to grab a new domain name put together a site as quickly as possible. This is more prevalent with the dawn of incredibly intuitive web design tools like Squarespace.
However, even a simple landing page is worth investing strategic thought into. It’s much easier to make sweeping changes at this early stage. And by spending a little extra energy before you start to implement your vision, you’ll be ensuring that the final result is far better at achieving your goals and helping you grow your business.
Like many branding projects essential to a small business, I encourage approaching the design puzzle that is your new website by starting from the outcome.
A good starting point is to ask yourself or your team the following questions:
- Ideally, after interacting with your landing page, your potential consumers will do what, exactly?
- What about the design and organization makes them feel strongly that they have to do that thing?
- And when they do that thing, why is that useful to your company?
- What happens after they’ve done it?
Until you can answer these questions in a concise and specific way, you shouldn’t even start thinking about layout or functionality.
This is really the core of what will make your landing page either a critical tool for your business or a waste of your time.
A lot of business don’t think strongly enough about the emotional experience of their users when starting web design. And the overwhelming majority of the time, it’s obvious (in a good way) when they have.
These pages will provide the usual value that any good website does. But they will also take additional calculated steps. Companies who succeed in this manner will remember why customers value their services and then incentivize those users to behave in specific ways.
If you can nail this step, it’ll maximize the impact of everything else you do as you build your site.
2. Maximize The Bare Minimum
Maximizing the bare minimum is actually something that I find myself reflecting on incredibly often. Both in design meetings with customers and also while interrogating my own creative process.
Matias Duarte, who currently serves as Google’s Vice President of Design, offered this pearl of wisdom when introducing the then-revolutionary Material Design to the team at The Verge.
“One of the design practices that we like to follow is try to design the simplest possible thing for the user first. See if you can get away with that, prove that you need more complexity before you add it.”
This minimalism mindset applies to just about everything in design. But is especially potent when designing a landing page.
Now that you understand the specific feelings and behaviors your website needs to evoke from your consumers, it’s time to narrow down to the absolute simplest, most concentrated method of engineering those outcomes.
What are the fewest elements you can use to create this impact?
Creating a landing page with at least some degree of complexity isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But details that do not provide actual value to your consumers are wasteful and distracting. They water down your offer and limit the effectiveness of your design.
Remove them: nothing should be off limits.
In this section, I am challenging you to engage to create something that embodies your vision so perfectly that to change even a single element would threaten to tear the entire thing down.
If you go through the difficult process of revision and re-revision, you’ll develop an incredibly persuasive landing page.
3. Differentiate With Design
At this stage, you should have a clear mission for exactly what your landing page does, how it does it in the most efficient and elegant way, and why doing what it does is a good thing for it to be doing. You’re in the home stretch. Now it’s time to make the damn thing.
On a basic level, you already understand exactly what needs to be done here thanks to your detailed work thus far. But one thing I haven’t touched on yet is design.
As I’ve repeated before on this blog, the medium is the message. And this landing page is absolutely no different.
If you don’t bring an impressive aesthetic sensibility to the table here, you face the threat of undercutting all the hard work you’ve already done.
With luck, you’ll already have thorough brand guidelines for your business, including colors, typography, and brand tone in your copywriting.
In any case, your focus should be on creating something distinctive (this is your webpage after all, it should stand out) that also feels well at home within the context of your brand’s other output.
Maintaining continuity by using colors and logos in your existing branding is a great way to make this connection visually.
If you’re looking for inspiration, there’s plenty of free resources available for you on the Web. The Awwwards archive of single-page websites offers incredible design direction that ties into your existing branding and stops users dead in their tracks. Or look at some of your favorite sites across the world, like Apple’s iPhone, for their landing pages.
And with your design direction set in stone, you’re ready to start executing. Go ahead and share that URL far and wide.
4. Keep Refining
So, you’ve shared that URL far and wide. Hopefully you’ve received some really thoughtful compliments from friends and even potential consumers about your hard work. That’s awesome, you’ve earned them.
But what you should be really interested in is the negative stuff. Not because you’re a masochist.
Because those negative comments (combined with your own analysis) are the raw materials from which you might start to construct the next version of your landing page. And this will make this one look like kids’ stuff.
By approaching this task in this manner, focusing in with excruciating detail on a careful analysis of who you think your consumers are and your brand should be, you’re bound to have made mistakes.
Learning about those mistakes, which can sometimes come from deeply-held assumptions about your product, your company, and your consumer base, at this stage in your website launch process, has the potential to prevent mistakes that would otherwise be extremely costly.
Realistically, there are thousands of ways to build a landing page that require less time and effort. Just grabbing a Squarespace template and going to town for 25 minutes would get you most of the way there.
But those landing pages won’t really help you run a better company. They don’t require you to think about your brand. Or consider the relationships it embodies from new ways. Nor think through the lenses of user experience and visual design to persuade the most visitors to buy from your business.
And most critically of all, they won’t show you the things you’re doing wrong as you try to tailor your product or service to the market.
Really, that’s how you end up getting the conversions that matter. By consciously iterating not just your product offerings and website layout, but your understanding of the marketplace itself and how you fit into it to the point of maximum value.
That’s next level strategy. And what follows are unique profits.
Ready to get started building your new landing page? Our PPC agency will make you more money.