Getting traffic to a website isn’t easy.

Many marketers spend months on SEO, or thousands of dollars on paid ads, trying to grow their customer list and make more sales. Unfortunately, even if you receive thousands of visitors to your site every day, there’s no guarantee that they’ll end up signing up or buying from you.

For most online businesses, 98% of their traffic going to waste is an unavoidable reality. In fact, many consider 2% of their traffic converting a pretty good number.

However, if you create a high-converting landing page, you can achieve conversion rates that blow the 2% figure out of the water.

So how can you create a landing page that makes your audience do what you want them to?

Let’s explore what a landing page is, as well as some of the most important things to consider when creating it.

What is a Landing Page?

A lead generation landing page is an integral part of any successful marketing funnel. It acts as a gateway that gets a specific group of people that are interested in what you have to offer to sign up to your email list, where you can nurture them and turn them into loyal customers.

Instead of directing website visitors to generic pages, you can funnel them to a landing page, which can often be stripped of navigation and any other distractions to maximize the likelihood of subscribing.

Because of how complicated designing a landing page can get, many people seek out the services of professional landing page builders who have the experience and know what tends to work best.

However, that doesn’t mean that with practice, you can’t start creating landing pages yourself that skyrocket your business and rapidly grow your audience.

In the end, how you succeed with it comes down to a few key factors. Let’s explore them below.

Figure Out Who You’re Targeting

Before you can start designing your landing page or implementing various strategies that have worked for others, you will need to answer the most crucial question for any online marketer:

Who are you trying to reach?

Figuring who your audience is and why they are more likely to be interested in your offer is a crucial step that you simply cannot skip. Unfortunately, many marketers rush through it because they want to launch sooner, which often produces mediocre and unfocused landing pages that don’t succeed.

Luckily, if you’ve been operating in your industry for a while, you likely have a pretty good understanding of what groups of people tend to become your best customers. You might even know the most pressing issues that they are facing, which will provide you with invaluable insights about how to hook site visitors and grab their attention.

If you want to gain more insights about the people that you want to target, you can perform research online, or talk to them directly.

By conducting interviews with your current customers or even setting up a questionnaire, you may discover unique approaches for setting up your landing pages that you wouldn’t have had any chance of figuring out on your own.

Grab Attention Immediately

When trying to appeal to web users, you will rarely have more than a fraction of a second to make a good first impression.

Online audiences are incredibly impatient, which means that if your landing page doesn’t grab their attention and pique their curiosity, you won’t stand a chance and will waste a lot of effort on a campaign that doesn’t produce any results.

But how exactly can you make the first impression of your landing page more memorable?

Well, depending on the traffic you’re sending to the page, that process might start before people click through.

With paid ads, you will need to use visual elements and copy to get people to click through to your site, and even SEO-driven landing pages will require an appealing headline if people are going to bother with what you want to say to them.

So, before everything else, you should look into three things that will play a vital role in your success:

  1. The headline
  2. The subhead
  3. The image

When these three elements work in harmony, you will have no problem attracting even the most sophisticated audiences in saturated marketplaces. When they are lacking, you’ll have a hard time getting anyone to pay attention, even if your offer is rock solid.

But you will need to work on each of them individually and be willing to make adjustments until you find a combination that works as well as it can.

For the headline, try to make it as relevant as possible for your audience by calling out a problem they are facing or something they desire. It would help if you either made a strong promise, entice curiosity, or offer a solution that gives readers what they are looking for.

You can keep the headline short and catchy, but consider using a subhead that expands on what awaits next, giving that extra nudge that will get people to click through and eventually do the action that you want them to perform.

Finally, the image should be something that will get them to stop what they were doing and take notice. It can be something incongruous, but it should ultimately be relevant to your offer and create an additional layer of intrigue.

Combining these three elements isn’t easy. Those that master it will have a huge advantage over the competition and will not only get the best results on their landing page but will also have a much easier time drawing traffic from paid or organic sources.

 

Design an Appealing Landing Page

The landing page’s purpose is to drive conversions, so every design element that you use must serve that primary goal. Otherwise, they will have the opposite effect and be little more than distractions that lower the page’s performance.

Usually, that means that a simpler design with a straightforward layout will work best, as you will then have an easier time directing the reader’s attention from the top of the page, through the content, and to the call to action.

However, in some instances, you may find that you will need the landing page to match your brand image and contain visual elements that will make the page visitors feel secure and identify with your message.

It’s important to remember that even though the message itself will be crucial, you will also have to instill trust by creating a consistent professional appearance throughout the page.

If you’re unsure of how to construct a beautiful page that combines colors, images, and other visual elements that draw and direct attention, you can use various landing page plugins and other design tools that can make the task easier.

You will also need to make sure that every visitor has a convenient experience, no matter what device they are using. Consider adopting a mobile-first design approach because it’s much easier to work through the process from the perspective of the smaller screen.

Conclusion

Developing an effective landing page is a complicated process, which is why many companies struggle with getting their audiences to convert or subscribe.

However, even though there are plenty of things you need to consider, the majority of the process can be broken down into actionable steps, so even someone with less experience can achieve great results.

The most important thing is to figure out who you want to reach, make sure you grab their attention, make your page consistent with your brand, and continually tweak until you achieve the results that you want.

About the Author

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Mirko Humbert

Mirko Humbert is the editor-in-chief and main author of Designer Daily and Typography Daily. He is also a graphic designer and the founder of WP Expert.