The Landing Page and Call-to-Action (CTA) are two of the most important elements of your website that help in converting visitors to leads.
These two elements add value to visitors and direct them on what to do to enter your sales funnel. Online marketing is a wholesome process that includes a variety of activities such as content research, production and promotion. However, marketing does not end with promotion; your end goal is to have leads or sales.
You can promote your content through various ways including search engine optimization (SEO), social media marketing, email marketing, content syndication, and others. All these methods will help to drive visitors to your blog. However, you don’t simply want visitors to read your blog and leave. Rather, you want them to stay longer and possibly give you their contact information for future communication. This is where landing pages and CTAs come in.
Generate Highly Qualified Leads with Landing Page
Your landing pages are the gateways for generating qualified leads and segmenting them based on their interests for better relationship building. Before you set up your landing page, you should have an offer that is valuable to your target audience. The offer should help your visitors improve their lives or business. Alternatively, it should address something that your visitors care about.
eBooks are arguably the most common type of offers on the Internet. However, they are not the only lead generation offers you can use and neither are they the most effective for all businesses. Understanding your audience and their needs is key to determining a winning offer that will help you generate qualified leads that are ready to buy when you ask for a sale. Your winning offer may be:
i) An invitation for a free business consultation/coaching call
ii) A series of free videos on how to do something
iii) An audit of something that is important to your target market
iv) An invitation to a webinar, podcast or offline industry event
vi) A discount coupon/code that your visitor will find valuable
When creating your offers, think about what will make visitors want to take the offer in exchange for giving you their email addresses. Ask yourself this question: if I was the visitor, would I provide my email address to get this offer?
Make Your Landing Page Work For You
When you have a great offer, you need to pre-sell it to visitors to make them want the offer. There is a lot of information online and visitors will not simply provide their emails for your offer if they don’t know how they will benefit. Pre-selling it makes visitors confident that they will get something that is valuable to them. Here is where landing pages come in.
Landing pages are simply pages that are dedicated to educating and enticing readers to get your offer. The pages provide three important pieces of information:
- What your offer is about
- How visitors will benefit
- What visitors must do to get the offer
Given that landing pages are intended to pre-sell your offer, they have to be designed differently from the other pages on your blog. Usually, you will want the page to have concise copy that is bulleted for easy reading, have supporting audio, video or graphics content and have a lead capture form. The landing page should also not have distractions such as navigation links.
The most important information your landing pages should convey is how readers will benefit from your offer. Avoid the mistake of outlining how your offer is good without showing how it will benefit your audience.
After providing all the information you want your audience to know about, direct them to take the next step to get the offer. Here is where you will need a CTA.
Craft a Winning CTA
The call-to-action is simply a message that tells prospects what they need to do to get the offer presented on the landing page. The message should be clear, concise and conspicuous from the other copy on the landing page.
To create a good CTA, use an action verb that will motivate the reader to take action. Perhaps the most commonly used CTA on the Internet is “Download Now!”
But don’t just provide a hanging message. Tell the prospects what to do and tie it to the offer. For example, instead of simply saying “Download our EBook”, you can say “Download our EBook and Learn how to Increase Leads Today!” A more descriptive CTA can mean the difference between high and low lead conversion rates on your landing pages.
Make the CTA stand out by using a larger size and different font. Alternatively, make the CTA an image that is domineering and different from other images on your blog.
CTA Placement
You can place the CTA anywhere on your blog where you feel your visitors are likely to be prompted to take action. Most marketers advocate placing the CTA above the fold i.e. on the upper part of your website. Others prefer having the CTA on the bottom of the landing page.
Generally, the CTA placement should not be a cause of concern. You should aim to place the CTA where it will result in the highest conversions. To get the best conversion rates, you will have to split-test your landing pages with the CTA placed at different places.
