How to Build a Landing Page Guaranteed to Convert

Creating a landing page isn’t rocket science, but building one that brings in the bucks can  prove challenging.

It goes beyond simply presenting something that looks good or fulfills its basic purpose. Instead, you need to learn how to create a landing page that instantly captivates your visitors and makes them want to grab your offer right then and there. So building a high-converting landing page involves thorough planning right from the start, along with lots of testing.

This guide shows you the landing page best practices and steps that will help you create high-converting landing pages. Plus, you get to see these tips and ideas in action with some brilliant landing page examples.

A Quick Refresher on Landing Pages

First of all, what is a landing page, exactly? The simplest answer is it’s a dedicated webpage where you send your visitors to take a specific action. Based on your goal, this action could be anything from subscribing to your mailing list and downloading your ebook to signing up for your webinar and buying your product.

It could even serve as a gateway to the rest of your site. So your homepage could also be your landing page if you’re simply promoting your business in general. For promoting specific products or services, however, it’s wise to create a dedicated landing page for said promotion. As such, you’ll typically find businesses that build landing pages to use in tandem with their ad campaigns.

For example, take a look at the following LinkedIn ad inviting people to kick-start their career journey through the Salesforce Trailhead platform.

The ad leads to the following landing page that urges visitors to “skill up” for their career.

Why Landing Pages Matter

Landing pages are critical for your online business because they’re dedicated to fulfilling one specific goal. This improves your chances of converting visitors because you’re not overwhelming them with a bunch of different instructions. Instead, you’re providing them with information and directions, leading them toward one specific action.

Here’s a quick look at the top reasons why you need to create high-converting landing pages:

• It Effectively Promotes Your Offer – Whether you’re promoting a sale, a product, an ebook or even a newsletter, landing pages help you get one specific message across. This effectively promotes your offer by pushing it to the foreground, which then improves conversions.
• It Helps Deliver a Smooth Funnel Experience – High-converting landing pages typically follow a visual hierarchy that moves visitors seamlessly through the funnel. This makes the conversion process much more efficient while enhancing the user experience.
• It Helps With Your SEO Ranking – If you follow landing page optimization best practices, you’ll likely weave targeted keywords into your landing page copy. This search engine optimization (SEO) tactic helps move the landing page higher up in the search results for your target keyword, getting your offer in front of the right people.

How to Build a Landing Page That Converts

Whether you’ve been struggling with low landing page conversion rates or you’re creating one for the first time, you may want to know how you can create landing pages that convert. Let’s find out the most critical steps on how to make a landing page that drives impressive conversions:

1. Define Your Goal and Pinpoint Your Offer

What is it you want to get out of your landing page? Do you want people to buy your product or preorder an upcoming one? Perhaps you want to raise awareness about a certain aspect of your service and get people to sign up for a free consultation or a demo. Maybe you want people to download your new e-book or even register for an upcoming webinar.

Whatever the purpose of your landing page may be, clearly define it from the start so you can pinpoint your offer and consistently promote it throughout the page.

For instance, you can see that the goal of the following Airtime’s landing page is to get people to sign up for a free trial.

The goal remains consistent throughout the page as it continues to establish the product benefits and use cases.

It even showcases success stories before repeating the call to action (CTA), i.e., to start a free trial.

2. Decide on Your Target Audience

Whom do you want to attract with your offer? Perhaps you want to target young professionals who need some direction and upskilling to build their career, for instance. Maybe you want to target people in the creative industry such as artists, musicians and writers. You might even want to reach successful middle-aged women who would be interested in luxury fashion, for example.

Having a clear idea of the kind of people you want to convert will help you narrow down on the kind of design and language that would appeal to them. You might even be able to identify and address possible pain points through your landing page.

If you have several product offerings, each with a different target audience, you could even create a separate landing page for each group of audience you want to target. For instance, Udemy shows you the following landing page when you’re looking for upskilling courses in general. Since you don’t specify which field you want to focus on, the landing page asks you, “What do you want to learn?”

But if you search for something specific such as a personal development course, it takes you directly to a dedicated landing page for the course. Here’s an example:

3. Plan Your Visual Hierarchy

To create high-converting landing pages, you need to follow a clear visual hierarchy that skillfully guides visitors through every aspect of your page in a logical order. Visual hierarchy refers to the process of arranging elements strategically in order of importance.

So for instance, your heading would usually be bigger than other text elements because that’s what you want your visitors to focus on first. Your CTA button would also stand out with a bigger size and a bright color, directing visitors toward the action you want them to take.

See the hierarchy in the Microsoft Dynamics 365 landing page. You can see that the main goal of the landing page is above the fold, instantly directing visitors to watch a demo.

The most important elements such as the headline and the CTA get the spotlight either with a larger font or an encapsulated button. The visual element showing prospects what the platform looks like barely comes above the fold, so anyone who wants to learn more can simply scroll down to see it.

Before you start designing your landing page, make sure you have a clear plan for how you want the information and other elements to flow. Planning ahead will make it easier to visualize how the landing page would look and where you want to place various elements.

The idea is to maintain a logical flow of information and gradually guide your visitors through the funnel as they learn about your offer and then finally convert. You might want to check out the landing page templates on popular sites like Unbounce and Instapage for inspiration.

4. Craft Compelling Copy

Whether you want to keep it short and simple with just 5 words or you want a detailed explanation of your offer, you need copy that sells. Words are the best way to get your message across and convince your visitors why they should take a particular action.

While it’s different for every business, landing page copy typically consists of 3 sections: the headline, the subhead and the explanation. Some may even have just a headline and a subhead along with a video explainer.

Regardless of how much or how little you plan to write, use the landing page best practices below to write compelling copy:

• Keep your text clear and succinct. Try to get your message across in as little words as possible without being too vague.
• Use bullet points and graphical elements as much as possible to break up your text in bite-sized bits. This makes it much easier to process and understand what you want to say.
• Focus on what the audience will get out of the offer and how they can benefit from the product. When explaining the features, tilt it in favor of the audience so they can clearly understand not just what your product does but what it does for them.

Check out the landing page for Genially, for example. The copy quickly sums up what the product is good for and what users can do with it, so the focus is on the audience. Even the CTA copy encourages you to create “your” free account, not “a” free account.

5: Include Captivating Design Elements

Design is equally important to instantly draw in your target audience and visually engage them. You need to carefully select powerful imagery and other design elements that will add some substance to your page. Here are a few design elements you need to consider when creating a high-converting landing page:

• Add Eye-Catching Photos and Graphics – Visual aids such as photos and original graphics can be a powerful way to get your message across. A study by Unbounce and Luca Tagliaferro even found that more than 35% of high-converting landing pages had a high-quality image close to the headline.
  
  Photos and graphics help your audience visualize how your product benefits them. So make sure you use visuals that are relevant to your offer. For instance, Ecwid helps its target audience visualize how their online store could look.

• Consider Informative Explainer Videos – While not mandatory, explainer videos could be a great way to minimize clutter on your landing page. If you have a lot of information you want to provide, you need a lot of text, which could look messy on a landing page. So, create a short explainer video instead to visually inform your audience about the offer. Alternatively, you could even use animated explainers and video testimonials instead.
• Perfect Your CTA Button – Your CTA button is one of the most critical design elements on your landing page as it’s the action element. It should be prominent so people don’t have any doubts about what they need to do. That means you should use a color that stands out from the background.
  
  Placement is another important factor, so make sure it’s visible above the fold where people won’t miss it. For longer landing pages, you could also add the CTA again toward the end of the page and somewhere in the middle.
  
  See how the Flock CTA button clearly stands out from the background without clashing too much with the rest of the page. Plus, it’s above the fold so visitors can’t miss it.

6: Establish Trust With Social Proof

An optional step to create high-converting landing pages is adding social proof such as case studies and testimonials. Highlighting how other people have benefited from your product or service could be a great way to establish trust in your brand and win over prospective customers. While this isn’t an essential step, it could add an instant lift to your landing page credibility and possibly help you drive conversions.

Check out how Tidio promotes its live chat app by including a client testimonial on the landing page. Displaying the client’s photo along with her name and position further helps to strengthen the claim.

7: Don’t Forget to Test and Optimize

It often isn’t enough to learn how to create a landing page that converts. You also need to run tests to see how certain changes affect your performance. Whenever you apply new changes based on landing page best practices, measure the results to see if it’s a good move. Some changes may not necessarily work for you, so keep testing and optimizing until you get the results you want.

You could test different design elements, form fields, copy, CTA buttons placements and more. Even a minor change could make a huge difference in your landing page conversion rates, so you don’t want to skip this step.

Ready for the Big Bucks?

Make the most of the best practices and tips above to learn how to create a landing page that drives impressive results. Don’t forget to use the landing page examples for inspiration on how to do it right. You could even use CRO tools, including landing-page builders, to help make your job easier. Need a hand? Reach out to the Kantaloupe team for help with your next landing page design.