Creating Offers and Landing Pages
By Joel Black on 03/25/2014
Your offer should be compelling enough to make the visitor want to take the action you desire. The “offer” can be anything that prospects would find valuable. It can be an eBook, online course, newsletter subscription, video series, white paper, phone consultation and so on. The key thing to remember is to provide an offer that will add value to your target audience.
After creating the offer, you need to set up your landing page. The landing page connects the visitor to the offer and should therefore “sell” the offer. Creating a landing page is easy. The difficult work is creating a high-converting landing page.
Creating a High Converting Page
Creating a high converting landing page is not something that you do the first time and get it right. You have to test and optimize the landing page to improve conversions. Below are some tips to keep in mind when creating your landing pages:
- Indicate the benefits of your offer on the page. Let your prospects know how they will benefit by taking action. What will they get from the eBook, free consultation or video series you are providing? How will the information help them?
- Use images or videos that are related to your offer but use them sparingly. Also, optimize them to load fast. You don’t want your landing page loading slowly. Slow-loading landing pages put off prospects and lead to a high bounce rate.
- Avoid distractions on the landing page. Eliminate any links that can distract the prospect from taking action. In particular, avoid putting navigation links on the landing page.
- Have a clear call-to-action (CTA) button. The CTA should tell the prospect what to do to take advantage of your offer. Do they need to “download now”, “call now”, “share now” or do something else?
To improve the conversion rate, you will have to test and optimize various elements of the landing page to see how they perform. For example, you can test the copy, images, CTA button offer and so on.
Compelling offers and landing pages that convert are two of the strategies outlined in our free “Can Inbound Marketing Help Me?” eBook and our “How To Optimize Landing Pages” eBook.
2 responses to “Creating Offers and Landing Pages”
Hi Joel,
This was a great article. I am working on my first landing page. I noticed that your landing page is directly on your website. What are your feelings about purchasing an optimized URL for landing pages. Is it worth the investment? As usual, you have added to my knowledge. Thanks.
Charly, many people have different URL’s for mini sites or landing pages. The reason I keep everything on one site/domain is for consistence and simplicity. I like to keep things simple for me and others. Take a look at this stat on the ranking impact of pages http://www.searchmetrics.com/en/services/ranking-factors-2013/. Look all the way down at the bottom and you’ll see how a keyword optimized URL is not really important as far as search engines go. There are other reasons for optimized URL’s besides SEO though. We did a fitness challenge for a client of ours (they were in fitness), and we built a landing page on a URL that was optimized for the company they were targeting. So that would be a good reason for a optimized URL.