How to Create a Landing Page that Drives Results: 4 Tips for 2020

Did this title catch you off-guard a little? Creating a landing page is one thing; creating one that drives results is another. If you’re like most marketers, you may not know if your page is performing as it could (or should). And in 2020, we want you to have the resources to bring your landing pages’ potential to life.

What is a Landing Page?

If you’re unfamiliar with the purpose of landing pages, here’s an excellent definition.

Defined by HubSpot in their landing page best practices guide, “A landing page is a website page with a specific purpose — the objective of a landing page is to convert visitors into leads." In order to achieve this goal, you want to properly set up your landing page with components that drive results. After all, you’re asking the user to provide their information in exchange for your offer. Make sure it’s worth their time by following the four tips below.

1. Grab Their Attention

People are busy; they have important things to do. If you’re going to direct all of your efforts toward an offer for your business, then get their attention with a solid headline. Our Account Strategist & PR Lead, Dominique Bohler, found an opportunity in event marketing to do just that. The headline isn’t overwhelming or convoluted; it provides the user with what they’re exactly looking for — Need Help Creating an Event Marketing Plan?

And the numbers (and results!) don’t lie. Across traffic sources like organic and paid social media, direct traffic, and email marketing efforts, our team saw an average bounce rate significantly lower than industry standards of 70-90 percent for landing pages, according to HubSpot’s quick benchmark reference guide mentioned in our free Marketing Toolkit.

Average Bounce Rate

• Organic Social: 63.64%
• Paid Social: 66.83%
• Direct Traffic: 61.54%
• Email Marketing: 75%

Results: May 2019 to December 2019

2. Create an Offer Worth Their Time

What’s more — this offer had an overall conversion rate of 28.08 percent (317 page views with 89 submissions).

That caught some definite attention at Leighton Interactive. What was driving these results? At first, there was some concern that when we’d push this offer on paid social media, the view-to-submission rate would dramatically decrease (as it tends to do through this particular traffic source). However, that just wasn’t the case. Of the 89 submissions, 59 came from paid social efforts. With 224 page views from May 2019 to December 2019, the view-to-submission rate was 26.34 percent — a large indicator that we were onto something here. People want this offer; they find it worth their time. Not to stroke our ego — there’s been plenty of times where we don’t get it right. But we’re feeling confident in the value of this particular offer.

3. Strategically Place Your Landing Page in the Buyer’s Journey

Now that you’ve figured out what content you’re promoting has value, and interest, you also want to consider your avenue that leads people to the landing page. Primarily, this will affect the number of page views. If you’re pushing paid Facebook ads, why should people click on the link? We’ve tried a few variations of this for our Facebook ads.

If you’re viewing this Instant Article ad, does it speak to what you’re searching for? Why or why not? To be honest, we’re still testing the best pathway to lead the right people to our free Marketing Toolkit offer. We’ve also pushed video content and other media variations.

In Facebook ads alone, you can A/B test variations on everything from different media (images, videos, etc.) to testing responsive text options for each ad. Though the possibilities may feel and seem endless, it’s important to focus on one item at a time. After all, your job as a marketer is almost never white and black; we live in the grays. It's our sweet spot. 

4. Give the People What They Want

This closely aligns with creating a worthwhile offer. More important than creating valued content, make sure the content is valued not just to the general population but to your Buyer Persona as well. What are they looking for? When working with our client, Mead Metals, we sought out to answer this by designing a landing page that clearly displayed our knowledge of the user.

Our solution: the Quick Quote landing page. We discovered that not only did their Buyer Persona want an easy way to receive a quote on metal products from the Mead Metals team, they also care about the company’s on-time percentage rate, response rate, and quality percentage (accuracy of the quote). This further emphasized the value the user feels when filling out the form. Additionally, it helps build a level of trust showcasing both transparency and your commitment to their needs through exceptional customer service.

In 2019, the Mead Metals' overall landing page had the following metrics:

• Views: 3,741
• Submission: 1,272
• View-to-Submission Rate: 34%
• Average Bounce Rate: 66.83%
• Time on Page: 3 minutes

Of these metrics, the majority of the traffic came from organic search and direct traffic. The results further emphasized the importance of the design elements at the bottom that reassure the user of quality service with Mead Metals.

Don’t Overlook Your Follow-Up

They’ve visited your landing page through the right avenue; they’ve filled out your form; they have your offer.

Great. Now what?

The Buyer’s Journey doesn’t end with that offer. For us, we push the Event Marketing Workbook and pair it with our free Marketing Toolkit. Why? Because we believe if an individual finds value in the event workbook, then they’ll also find our overall, comprehensive marketing kit extremely useful. You can do this by creating an email workflow.

We send out this email to people who’ve downloaded the event workbook using HubSpot’s drag and drop email feature. This is what we open with:

And directly below, we place a fun, lighthearted GIF that leads to a video outlining the Marketing Toolkit on YouTube.

Following this is an outline of what’s covered in the toolkit so they understand what they’re getting.

You want to create a follow-up that’s unique, engaging, and thought-provoking. They’ve downloaded your first offer (and hopefully love it). Now, you want to continue to engage your leads further down the funnel.

Did you find this article on landing pages useful? If so, then we encourage you to download our free Marketing Toolkit that provides a wide variety of downloadable resources, like Buyer Persona and Content Calendar templates, that can help improve your overall marketing strategy.