Land your Lander with these Optimization Hacks

They’ve been circulating since 2003 and over the years, went from relative obscurity to becoming the staple tool for performance marketers the world over. What are they? Why are they and why do you care? All this and more shall be revealed. If you’ve been in the game a while and converting on them consistently, bear with us as we cover the basics and make our way into the optimization stuff as we go. Starting with…

What is a landing page? 

If done properly? Landing pages are conversions! Plain and simple. They’re the first point of contact between you and your audience. A “digital handshake” between advertiser and consumer, and the last line of defense for making sales. Landing pages answer questions like…

1. Who you are.
2. What you offer. 
3. Where to get in touch. 

Marketers create their landers with two goals in mind, depending on where they are in their own sales funnel. They’re either optimizing for brand awareness or pushing for lead generation. 

Brand/Product Awareness 

If you’re courting new prospects or experimenting with new verticals, then a little brand awareness can go a long way. Bring undecided prospects into your world by describing your brand, product, or services and giving your audience all the core information they need to make an educated purchasing decision. Be sure to Include any unique functions or discerning features for what you’re selling as well as your company logo, links to further reading, and, of course, the next steps needed to convert. 

The goal is that your product/service stays top of mind in the event of your prospect being ready to make a buying decision. The task is to get them through the gate first. However, with so much competition for audience attention and consumer time limitations becoming a standard challenge in all marketing endeavors, most online advertisers tend to go straight for the kill and opt for… 

Lead Generation

Your ads are hitting the right audience. Your offer is lighting up and the clicks are piling in. Welcome to “make or break” mode. At this point, you’re either sealing the deal or losing leads to your competitors. It’s time to shout, and shout LOUD!

Your online ad will be clicking through to your landing page, where your audience will expect to see a variation of the below.  

• A form to capture their information in exchange for the desired offer you’re advertising.
• A freebie/incentive or discount of some sort, be it a reduced monthly subscription, a 2 for 1 special, or any other “hard sell”  with the capacity to tip your site visitor from interested, and excited, to fully committed. 
• A download link where you can track the number of conversions generated along with a payment portal for customer banking details.
• A strong Call to Action that nudges your audience to enter into the sales funnel, be it subscribing to a newsletter, filling in their contact details, requesting a callback, buying the service outright, etc. 
• A few key customer testimonials and/or reviews (not crucial, but super effective when done right).

Strong online marketers will use a combination of company/product information and various calls to action to capture as many conversions as possible in a given period. These selling mechanisms go hand in hand with each other, and a combination of the best elements is sure to yield sure-fire results. 

So, to sum up, a high-quality landing page that generates strong conversions will look something like this, in descending order. 

• A strong H1 headline with a supporting description. 
• A unique selling point that immediately captures the attention of your audience. 
• The core benefits/advantages of your offer.
• Eye-catching images that show the product or service in use.
• Where applicable, a video demo showing how the product or service works.
• Proof of concept in the form of customer testimonials and ratings
• A reinforcing statement. A one-liner that eliminates any lingering doubt. 
• And finally, an ultra-strong call to action that results in lead generation, conversions, click-throughs, or any other sales metric you are looking to track down and secure. 

Cool. So how do you make it happen?

Find a landing page builder

Streamline your working life by simplifying your landing page creation process. Create the above components in half the time by outsourcing your workflow to a Landing Page Builder. These digital sidekicks will help you create top converting landing pages from a variety of market-proven templates. They’re reusable, get the job done, and place all your key marketing elements top of mind for easy audience navigation. Software differs, so do your research beforehand. But, to get you started, check out Unbounce, PureLander, and/or InstaPage. Compare and contrast services and find the best solution for your own working style. 

Keep your landers mobile friendly. 

If your landing page isn’t geared to mobile traffic, you’re losing out on conversions. The global volume for mobile conversions continues to climb and recently, with the world on lockdown, surpassed desktop traffic for the first time in the last 20 years. Added to this, our favorite search titan, Google looks out for sites/landing pages that aren’t adapted to mobile traffic, and have subsequently started to downrank them, (in line with their latest algorithm changes). Keep your landing page as mobile responsive as possible by making sure that…

• No important text/visuals get cut off from mobile view.
• Pages load as quickly on mobile as they would on desktop. 
• Image file sizes are fitted to accommodate mobile devices. 
• All video formats are playable and show no errors.
• There are now irrelevant cross-links or faulty redirects.

You can head over here right now to check if your landing page is mobile-friendly not.

Time to ace your SEO

Visible content is content that ranks (and vice versa), and the only viable position your landing page should be (um…landing on?) would be page 1 in Google rankings. 

Aim to get your website as high up in search engine results as humanly possible and your offers will start to fly off the virtual shelves.

A few easy SEO hacks, that take little to no expertise include: 

• Making sure your landing page contains relevant keywords – both long and short phrases that customers use when searching for relevant products and services. 
• Applying website SEO plugins such as the Yoast SEO WordPress processor. 
• Extracting valuable website data with top of the range website crawlers like Screaming Frog. 
• Check your site’s indexing status and optimize visibility with the Google Search Console.

For more SEO insights, check out the ultimate SEO guide for in-depth SEO strategy. 

And lastly, AB test your content 

Make sure you don’t go through all the hard yards of landing page creation, just to fall short when it comes to post-campaign analysis. That’s where some good old fashioned AB testing comes into play. 

Testing your CRO (conversion rate optimization) is the most important element of a great landing page! Don’t forget to test out different offers, colors, images, copy, and calls to action to see what works best for your audience.

Try creating two different landing pages that run simultaneously to one another. Analyze your results and pinpoint what worked and what didn’t. Run the best results in your next campaign and keep refining as you go. 

Testing can be as simple as using a different title, color, or format. Try and keep the CTA the same from lander to lander. You will quickly see if it’s working or not. If the results are the same or similar for each of the two pages, then do a CTA override and find something more powerful. 

AB Testing software like Hotjar and CrazyEgg display heatmaps and simplified analytics to gauge audience activity and behavior. This, in turn, will help you test and optimize in half the time. 

Also, keep on tracking your results and checking your page analytics regularly, for visitor numbers and the length of time they are staying online. Your best friend should be Google Analytics. From these insights, you can make changes that continue to make your landing page creation, effective, productive, and ultimately conversion-centric. 

Added to that, a lot of our affiliates are using powerful trackers, such as Voluum, PeerClick, and RedTrack, giving them a full understanding of their campaign’s top performance metrics. 

That’s it for now. We hope you found this useful and, all the best for your 2021 landing page creation!