How to Create Landing Pages that Convert

We asked our team to share their best recommendations on creating landing pages that convert. We thought their suggestions were very insightful and wanted to share them so you can achieve greater success.

Laser-Fouced Content

One of the keys to increasing conversion is to make sure that you create landing pages that are laser-focused on your target audience and optimized to drive conversions. Here are some best practices for building high-converting landing pages:

Know your audience: The foundation of any effective landing page is a deep understanding of your target customer. Who are they? What are their needs, goals, and pain points? What motivates and inspires them to take action?

Do your research to develop detailed buyer personas. Survey your existing customers, analyze your website and social media analytics, and look at industry reports to gather insights. This information shapes your landing page messaging, imagery, and offers.

Have a clear, singular focus: The most effective landing pages are hyper-focused on a single offer and conversion goal. Don't try to cram in multiple products, links, or calls-to-action (CTAs). This only creates confusion and choice paralysis for the visitor.

Strip your page down to the essentials: Decide on the one specific action you want people to take, whether it's filling out a form, starting a free trial, or making a purchase. Then, build your entire page around guiding visitors toward that singular goal. Remove or minimize navigation, links, and any other extraneous elements that could distract people or pull them away from converting.

Craft A Compelling Offer

Craft a compelling value proposition: Your landing page needs to immediately communicate the value of your offer and give people a reason to care. Develop a clear, specific, benefit-focused headline that grabs attention and conveys your unique selling proposition (USP). What sets your product or service apart from competitors? How will it make your target customer's life better? Distill this down into a succinct statement.

Provide Proof: Back up your value prop with supporting subheadlines, bullet points, and a brief copy that expands on the key benefits and explains precisely what the visitor will get. Avoid vague fluff and empty marketing speak. Be concrete and specific. Quantify value with numbers, data, and social proof where possible.

Write Customer-centric Copy

Don't make your landing page all about you. Yes, you need to provide information about your product or company but always frame it in terms of how it helps your target customer. Address their needs, wants, challenges, and objectives.

Use the word "you" liberally in your copy to keep the focus on the visitor. Engage them with questions. Mirror their language and phrases. Make them feel like you understand them and can relate to what they're going through. Adopt a friendly, conversational tone as if you're having a face-to-face discussion with your ideal buyer. Avoid stiff, formal language. Keep sentences and paragraphs short and snappy to make your copy easier to scan and digest. Break up long blocks of text with subheads and formatting.

Leverage social proof

Modern consumers are increasingly skeptical of traditional advertising and marketing claims. They trust the opinions and experiences of their peers far more. That's why social proof is such a powerful tool for increasing landing page conversions.

Showcase glowing testimonials, reviews, and case studies from your satisfied customers. If possible, include their names, photos, job titles, and companies to boost credibility. Feature trust badges from industry associations, awards, and security certifications to ease concerns. Display client logos to leverage the halo effect of respected brands. If you have impressive usage numbers or notable clients, highlight those, too. Knowing that many others are already using and benefiting from your solution makes prospects more likely to convert.

Provide a Clear Call-To-Action

A landing page without a prominent, compelling call to action (CTA) is like a car without an engine—it won't get you very far. Your CTA is the linchpin of your entire page. It's what convinces visitors to take the next step and convert into a lead or customer.

Your CTA copy should be action-oriented, beginning with a strong command verb. Focus on the benefit the user gets by clicking, not just what they have to do. For example: "Get My Free Ebook" or "Start My 30-Day Trial" instead of "Submit" or "Download". Use a contrasting color for your CTA button, so it visually pops off the page.

Make it big and place it above the fold so no scrolling is required. For longer landing pages, consider repeating the CTA in multiple locations down the page. Always position your CTA close to your most persuasive copy, like your value prop, benefits list, or testimonials.

Reduce Friction

Look for ways to make converting as quick, easy, and risk-free as possible for your visitors. Reduce form fields to the bare minimum. Offering a free trial or sample? Don't ask for credit card info upfront. Simplify your checkout process.

Proactively address common questions, concerns, and objections that could make prospects hesitate to convert. Provide FAQs, guarantees, links to customer support, and other trust-building elements. Add microcopy to your forms to clarify confusing fields and ease anxiety around sensitive information. Be upfront about what will happen after the visitor converts. Assure them you won't spam them or share their data.

Create relevant, targeted messaging: The more relevant your landing page content is to your visitors, the more likely they will stick around and convert. Align your messaging with the ad, email, or link that brought them to your page. Deliver what you promised. Use the exact keywords and language.

Highly Targeted: Create separate, targeted landing pages for customer segments, buyer personas, and marketing campaigns. Dynamically adapt your page content to the visitor's industry, company size, role, or other key attributes.

Personalize: Your landing pages should be personalized as much as possible using the data and insights you have about your visitors. Greet them by name. Reference their past interactions with your brand. Recommend products or content tailored to their interests. Show different page variations and offers to new vs. returning visitors.

Keep it Simple: Optimize your forms. The length and design of your landing page forms can have a big impact on your conversion rates. Shorter forms tend to perform better. If your form is too long or complicated, many people will abandon it.

Limit Information Requests: Only ask for the information you truly need to follow up with the lead. Every extra field you add will reduce conversions. If you need to gather more qualifying information, consider doing it progressively after the initial conversion or on your thank you page.

Make your form stand out visually so it gets noticed. Place it high up on the page and give it plenty of white space. Use color and directional cues to draw the eye toward it.

Optimize CTAs: Optimize your form buttons with compelling, action-oriented microcopy. Avoid generic labels like "Submit." Remind people what they get and reduce anxiety with copy like "Download My Free Ebook" or "Get My Customized Demo."

Pay Attention to Technical Marketing

Page Speed: Speed up your page load time. A slow-loading landing page is a conversion killer. If your page takes more than a few seconds to load, many impatient visitors will click away before seeing your offer. A 1-second delay in page load time can reduce conversions by 7%.

Optimize images: Compress your photos and other media files to minimize load time. Avoid bloated design elements like auto-play videos and animations. Enable browser caching and use a content delivery network (CDN) to improve speed further. Regularly test your page load times with tools like Google's PageSpeed Insights. Set a performance budget and optimize relentlessly to stay within it while providing an attractive user experience.

Offer Something Valuable

Create compelling content offers. The days of filling out forms to access generic whitepapers are over. To convert today's savvy, time-strapped buyers, you need to offer them something truly valuable.

Develop original, substantive content assets that address your target audience's key questions and pain points. Offer ungated resources like blog posts, videos, and tools to build trust and demonstrate your expertise. Then, gate your premium content behind landing page forms to generate leads.

Some examples of high-converting content offers include:

• Industry research reports and surveys

• Comprehensive ultimate guides and ebooks

• Templates and checklists

• Interactive tools and calculators

• On-demand webinars and demos

• Free trials and product samples

• Discounts and special offers

When choosing your content offer, consider what will appeal to your specific audience and where they are in the buying cycle. An in-depth case study might resonate with a late-stage buyer, while an educational ebook may be better for someone just starting their research.

A/B Test Continuously

Test and optimize: There's no universal template for the perfect, high-converting landing page. What works for one company, industry, or campaign might flop for another. The only way to know for sure is to test. Implement A/B testing to experiment with page elements like your headline, imagery, copy, form fields, and CTA.

Create two or more variations and split your traffic between them. Let your test run until you have enough sample size to reach statistical significance. Then, analyze the results and optimize your page based on the winning version. Don't just test once and call it a day. Continuously iterate and try new ideas to improve your conversion rates over time. Even small tweaks can sometimes lead to big lifts. Some key elements to A/B test on your landing pages include:

• Your headline and subheadlines

• Page layout and design

• Hero shot and other images

• Copy length and messaging

• Content offer

• Form length and fields

• CTA copy and design

• Social proof and trust elements

• Media like videos

• Mobile responsiveness

Beyond A/B testing, you can gain valuable insights from user testing, heatmaps, visitor recordings, form analysis, and customer surveys. Use a combination of quantitative and qualitative conversion research methods to identify opportunities for improvement.

Conclusion

Your landing page is often the prospect's first interaction with your brand. It's your chance to make a strong first impression, communicate your value, and persuade them to take action. By following landing page best practices and putting your target customer at the center of your strategy, you can craft high-converting pages that cut through the noise and consistently generate leads for your business.