Wondering how to create a landing page? It might be easier than you’d think.
For any company, entrepreneur, or freelancer, the first step in standing out online is having a great website. However, if you want to generate referrals, leads, and sales opportunities, you need something an extra: a powerful landing page.
Landing pages are the specialist tools marketing experts, and business leaders can use to drive visitors towards a conversion, by sharing specific information in a structured way. Landing pages can convince people to make purchases from online stores, sign up for an email newsletter so you can nurture your leads long-term, or simply reach out to you through a contact page.
According to some studies, companies can increase their leads by 55% just by doubling their number of landing pages. Of course, before you can start leveraging the benefits of an effective landing page for yourself, you need to learn how to design one.
Fortunately, we’re here to help
The first step in creating effective landing pages is understanding their purpose.
Landing pages are a distinct part of your online presence used to drive a specific action. Unlike a full-blown website, a landing page generally doesn’t have navigation or multiple pages to explore. The whole purpose of the page is to “convert” your customer.
In terms of content, a landing page has one simple message to convey, and the design of the page supports this objective and nothing else. The ultimate goal of a landing page is to drive a customer to action through the careful use of visuals, copy, and CTA buttons.
Creating a landing page is a little different to building a website, but it can actually be much easier for some, as there are fewer elements to design. Here are the 11 steps you’ll need to follow to create an impactful landing page.
Unless you want to code your own landing page from scratch (like a professional developer), you’re going to need a builder to help you bring your landing page to life. A landing page builder is essentially a selection of software tools created to help you quickly and conveniently design your page. These builders can come with various tools, including:
Landing page builders also allow you to design buttons for your call-to-action requests, sell products and services directly (in some cases), and track conversions through analytics and reports.
The exact number of features you’ll get from your landing page builder depends on the service you choose. Let’s compare two options:
Leadpages is a landing page builder perfect for people who want to create high-quality pages on a budget. This cost-effective tool comes with all the features you need to create incredible landing pages, such as a free custom domain (your website URL) free hosting for your landing page, mobile-responsive site templates, integrations with leading tools, and unlimited pop-ups and alert bars.
Alternatively, Unbounce is a landing page builder created for companies who might need a more extensive selection of features. This comprehensive landing page builder allows you to create comprehensive pages with smart AI-enhanced building tools, with in-depth insights into customer segmentation, analytics, and more.
Notably, some website builders also come with their own landing page features, though they might not be as comprehensive as a complete landing page building tool.
Once you have your landing page builder, you’ll need to decide when it’s necessary to design a landing page, and when you might need to consider using a standard website page instead. For instance, while you want people to convert when they visit your product pages, you don’t need to create individual landing pages for every product you sell.
Your product pages still need to give customers the option to go back and look at alternative products, or add more items to their basket if they choose. A landing page focuses on convincing your audience to do a single thing and nothing else.
You’re developing a page as part of your overall online experience for customers. You might want customers to act on your website pages, but you also want to give them options, like the ability to check out your “About Us” page and learn more about your products before contacting you.
You need a single page to encourage a specific action. Landing pages aren’t there to raise brand awareness or build relationships with customers, they’re designed to achieve a single goal, whether it’s getting more leads and sign-ups for your email campaign, or generating direct sales.
Landing pages eliminate the distractions of other web pages, like navigation and links to other content, but they also give your customers fewer options.
As mentioned above, the whole point of a landing page is to drive a customer towards a specific action, and generate a single outcome. To create an effective landing page, you therefore need to decide what specific action you want to encourage.
Some of the most common goals for a landing page include:
Having a specific goal for your campaign will show you what you need to measure to determine whether your efforts have been successful. A good goal can also direct you towards the right template for your landing page needs. Most page builders will have different templates for different landing page objectives.
One of the most exciting parts of building a landing page, is designing the ultimate page layout. Fortunately, since you’ve already chosen a landing page builder to help you at this point, you won’t need any coding or programming knowledge.
Instead, you can simply load up your landing page building tool, and choose from one of the existing templates they have to offer. As mentioned above, most landing page creators will sort templates by objective or audience, so you can browse through and find the one that makes the most sense for you.
Remember, you’ll also have the freedom to edit your template, so don’t forget to:
Don’t forget the basics of good graphic design while you’re editing. Every other element on your page should be pointing users towards the form or action you want them to take. Avoid using too much copy, as this can overwhelm your reader, and make sure there’s plenty of white space.
Now it’s time to write the copy that’s going to convert your visitor.
You can start with your copy before your design if you prefer, as this will help you to determine how much space you need throughout the landing page for your bullet points and paragraphs. The right copy is often the most important tool you’ll have on your landing pages. It needs to convince your customer that the thing you’re asking them to do is worth their time.
The best way to create amazing copy is to practice, and learn from your customers as you go, using analytics to see what kind of campaigns they respond to best. When you’re just getting started for the first time, follow these key rules:
Remember, when you’re done writing, set some time aside to go through your copy a second time and proofread for any errors. Grammatical and spelling mistakes can make it less likely your customers will trust your company.
Your CTA is one of the most important parts of your landing page, because it’s the final push your customer needs to take the crucial action you want them to take. A “Call to Action” tells your visitor what you want them to do next after they’ve arrived on your page and read your content.
CTAs can take the form of a click-through button, which leads your customer to another page, or brings up a pop-up. They can also come in the guise of short forms or fields where your customers can enter their information.
To get the most out of your CTA:
At this point, your landing page is really starting to come together. You have a structure or template in place, and the copy required to convert your audience. Now it’s time to choose your visuals. Companies that create custom visual content have around 7 times higher conversion rates, but if you don’t have your own in-house designer, any visual can make a positive difference to your landing page. Visuals help to guide customers through a page and make the design more engaging.
When choosing your images, you’ll need to:
While you don’t necessarily need a website for a landing page, you do need to connect your landing page to a host provider, your email system (if you’re collecting email addresses), and other tools, like a checkout page if you want to manage transactions.
Your landing page builder should help you with this, allowing you to:
Once you’ve got everything connected, make sure your landing page works exactly as its supposed to. Although it’s tempting to hit the “publish” button straight away, taking some extra precautions can save you a lot of time and money in the long-run.
Here are some of the things you might want to run through with your colleagues before you take the plunge with your new page:
It can be helpful to ask someone else to run through your landing page for you if you’re not sure everything is working properly yourself.
With your landing page ready to go, published, and hosted on the web, the next step is simply getting people to visit it. There are various ways you can encourage people to make their way to your landing page, including:
You’ll have a much easier time driving traffic to your landing pages if you take some extra time to understand your audience and build user personas before you start advertising. A good knowledge of your target audience helps you to determine where you’re likely to get the most attention.
Finally, it’s time to make sure you’re really getting the most out of your landing page. Duplicate the page you created using the tools you have built into your landing page builder, and create different variants testing things like body copy, headlines, colors, and CTA content.
Testing different elements like images and offers can give you some valuable insights into what kind of factors really influence your audience to make purchasing or conversion decisions.
Some landing page tools will even allow you to create dynamic pages which change according to the interests or behaviors of the person who visits your content.
No, you don’t need a domain for a landing page. You can use a landing page without a domain, but there are some benefits to using a landing page with a domain. For example, having a landing page with a domain can help you to rank higher in search engines, and it can also make your landing page look more professional.
Landing pages are designed to drive conversions, so they usually have a different purpose than websites. However, in some cases, a landing page can replace a website. For example, if you’re an online retailer and you’re running a promotion for a new product, you might create a landing page for that product instead of using your website.
Landing pages can appear in Google search results if they’re properly optimized. To optimize a landing page for Google, you need to make sure that the landing page is relevant to the keywords you’re targeting, and you also need to make sure that the landing page is linked to other websites.
There are a few different ways to drive traffic to your landing page. You can use paid advertising, social media, or email marketing. You can also try optimizing your landing page for search engines.
There are a lot of different landing page builders out there, and it really depends on your needs. If you don’t have any technical skills, then you might want to look for a landing page builder that is easy to use and doesn’t require any coding. Some popular landing page builders include LeadPages, Unbounce, and Instapage.
There you have it, everything you need to know about building your own landing page from start to finish. Keep in mind, landing pages are much easier to build today, thanks to the wide variety of tools we have available in the digital world. However, it still takes a while to figure out what kind of landing pages will drive the most conversions.
Take your time and experiment as much as you can, gathering information from your analytics over time. The more you practice, the better your landing pages will be.