Draw your target audience in
You won’t have long to convince your target audience to stick with your landing page. People aren’t patient creatures when it comes to web pages. If they can’t find out who you are and what you do fast enough, they’ll simply click the back button and find what they want elsewhere. It’s vital you lead your landing page with a descriptive title about what your service is, and ideally make it benefits/USP driven. Follow this with a succinct summary of your company, the services you provide and throw in some references to why you’re credible, for example mention awards or indications of your companies scale, some impressive statistics or if you’ve been established a long time highlight your experience. Doing this will ensure you engage your target audience to read on, and vitally- not click ‘back’!
Tell them why they should use your company over the competition
People will likely be weighing up their options when choosing which company to go with. You’ll need to convince them that you can provide a better service than the competition. Think about what separates you out, what you do differently which they wouldn’t get elsewhere, exploit weaknesses in your competition. Make them engaging, easy to scan and succinct. A great way to do this is to use visually interesting bullet points. With each USP bullet; have a short title, followed with a line or two which goes into more detail, such as:
Break down your services and its benefits in more detail
Your target audience may be looking for something specific within the general service you provide. Ensure you address your services in adequate detail. If you don’t spell these out, they may assume you don’t do it. The best way to approach this is to recall common questions you’ve had about the specifics of your service from interested customers and include them on the page. This copy again needs to be engaging and easily scanable, either with bullets or clear titles. If however, your service if very complex and difficult to convey without large amounts of copy, use this to your advantage – address the main areas and promise more detail can be obtained in a downloadable brochure (behind a lead capture form) or by contacting you. Make sure you spell out the benefits of the service as well, there may be all sorts of reasons they should take up your service that they haven’t even considered.
Eliminate any potential anxieties they might have
People often will have reservations/concerns/anxieties during a purchase decision. It’s important you address these concerns to put their mind at ease. The best place for this is within the USP’s or the breakdown of the service. Again, a great way to approach this is to consider the concerns potential customers have highlighted when you’ve spoken to them.
Educating the target audience may be necessary
Take into account the potential knowledge level of your target audience. This may vary wildly. If you have a service which may not be necessarily fully understood by your target audience, explain in simple terms what the service is and why it’s beneficial.
Convince them you’re a credible company
Your target audience won’t just take your word for it, you’ll need to highlight third parties who have backed up how great your company is. Try using testimonials from your customers, ensure their statements reinforce your USP’s, reviews from credible sources are also good for this, as well as case studies. If you have any awards and/or accreditations highlight these as well. Maybe you have large clients you can shout about, if you can – use their logos. Make sure these credibility indicators are prominent on the page.
Present tempting options to get their contact details
This is probably the most important aspect of the landing page to consider – the calls to action. You need to cater to the needs and wants a potentially diverse target audience. They may have varying positions within their company, or be at different stages of the buying process. What’s relevant about the potential audience profile? What do they want in the immediate? If they’re early on in the buying process, they may not want to be too committal, so a great call to action for them could be to offer your services brochure, maybe a price list or possible a highly relevant and interesting whitepaper they would likely be interested in. Put these documents behind a form so you have their details and can chase them up. If their further down the buying process, and have done their research you may find they are open to requesting a full discussion with you, so offer a ‘book a consultation’ or ‘get a quote’ call action. Maybe they have extra questions that they want a quick and simple answer to, so a contact us form and telephone number would be appropriate. Don’t go overboard with calls to action or it may confuse them as to what they should do, but do make sure you cover the main bases. Make sure these are very prominent on the page, and reference them regularly throughout the page.
Make dealing with you look easy
The buying process for selling certain services is not always immediately obvious to potential customers. If they are to give their details they may not what happens next, which may make them dubious about filling in a form. Put their mind at ease and simplify the process in their mind. Try splitting the process up visually with 1,2,3 steps, a simple example of this would be:
Don’t let them go anywhere until you have those details
In many cases, it can be very beneficial to limit the users options when it comes to navigating away from your landing page. It may be tempting to include the navigation to the main company website on the page, but this isn’t necessarily a great option. The problem with doing this is you then lose control of what your target audience reads as they disappear off to other parts of your website, and all the benefit of the well optimised page is lost, reducing your chance of getting their details. Try stripping out the navigation, and limit their navigation options to the calls to action. Keep them in the same place by including the lead capture forms direct on the page or using ‘light box forms’ (a form which appears over the top of the page when you click a call to action button or text link).
Stick to these rules and you’ll soon find your getting a significant increase in leads, with potential buyers scrambling to take up your service. If you have any other useful hints please feel free to share them in the comments below.
Insights
