5 Elements Of Any Good Landing Page
Whether we’re talking about a lead generation page for your consulting agency, or an eCommerce product, it all starts with getting the ‘essential ingredients’ together to give your landing page the best chance at success.
1. Page Design
First and foremost, is distraction-free design. As previously discussed, people are visiting this page for a reason. So keep it at that! Have one primary goal, and one primary message on the page, without a lot of extra elements that distract people from signing up on your form or hitting the Purchase button.
Removing menu links and navigation help to focus the user on the most important page elements by reducing the options they can take. The principle is driven home in the classic usability book Don’t Make Me Think, which proves time and again that the best usability tips for website visitors is to reduce confusion in favor of simplicity. While in some cases it’s fine to add another link or two, the point is to try and keep things as straightforward as possible by limiting available options.
2. Headlines and Value Propositions
Headlines are really concise value propositions in disguise. The idea is to boil down what your product or service offers with a simple, straightforward message—one that focuses your main benefits or differentiates your selling points.
Another way to create this is to think about what people get from your product or service. That means the outcomes or end-results, which can be perfectly summarized with a case study or testimonial where a happy customer helps prove your case for you.
3. Images and Video
Your ‘hero’ image or video is just that: it expands on the value proposition by showing what the visitor could get or look like with your product or solution.
Think about some of the best commercials, like a Nike one, where the person is running up flights of stairs and seemingly conquering all evil. Incorporating compelling images and inspirational videos also help make the intangible concrete for your visitors. It’s not always easy to explain, in written text alone, how your services benefit people. But a simple story (similar to many explainer videos) can help crystalize exactly what you do, and why your solution is so valuable.
4. Calls-to-Action
Calls-to-Action should be big, obvious, and compelling. Sticking with the theme of reducing cognitive stress, it should be immediately obvious to everyone what they’re supposed to fill out or where they’re supposed to click.
One of the important, yet often overlooked, aspects here is how you use design to help differentiate between multiple CTA’s on a page. For example, the ‘primary’ action you want someone to take should be more noticeable and emphasized on a page, while a ‘secondary’ action can be deemphasized with placement or maybe a text link (as opposed to a big button).
5. Credibility Indicators
You know that what you offer has value. But how do other people know that?
The best way is to use third party validation, so that you’re not just making the same baseless claims as the rest of your competition.
That means incorporating customer testimonials that illustrate the benefits customers have seen, logos of prestigious clients you’ve worked with, awards that you’ve won or press that has lauded your work, or case studies that show a certain percentage improvement other clients have gained. You can even use the corporate locations and number of customers you have as a way to demonstrate that your operation is first class.
