Web Design Tips: How to design the perfect landing page

Landing pages are an essential part of any website and should be included as a high priority feature in your website design project. So, are you using landing pages yet? If not, you really need to get started. Businesses in the know are making effective use of landing pages to drive targeted traffic to their site and capture potential leads.

So, what is a landing page?

A landing page is a targeted web page designed specifically for capturing visitors’ details. They are often part of an integrated marketing campaign such as Email, Social Media, or AdWords and are built with goal conversion in mind.

Targeted landing page for lead generation

Effective landing pages tend to be simpler than standard web pages, with less clutter and distractions, and focused on a single goal. This goal will differ from campaign to campaign, but essentially you need to offer something of value to the visitor, in replace of his or her contact details.

So how do you go about creating a fantastic landing page?
There are many factors which play a part when constructing a successful landing page. Read on to find out the key to unlocking the perfect landing page design for your business.

What is the goal of your landing page?

The first and most important step on your journey is to determine the goal of your landing page. Spend plenty of time on this, as without a clear goal all other steps will count for zilch. The goal of your landing page will be decided on the needs of your business. Do you want to increase customers for a particular service? Build up your mailing list? Whatever your business goals, your landing page should be constructed as a tool to help achieve this. Once you have cracked this step, you will find the other steps tend to fall into place.

Who are you targeting?

Once you’ve determined the goal of your landing page, the next step is to establish who you will be targeting. This step is really important, as the audience you are targeting will help shape the design, style and voice you use within your landing page.

Who are you targeting?

Creating customer personas is a great way of determining your ideal audience. To do this you need to create fictional representations of your ideal customers. This can be based on age, gender, demographics, job type, salary, industry, education, or any other factor that you feel is important. Once you have created your personas, give them a name and a face. Seriously! The more real your personas are, the more effective the process will be. You can then start thinking about what you can offer them in exchange for their valuable details.

What are you offering?

Once you have your customer persona in the bag, you need to think about what you can offer them that will be of real value. There are no hard and fast rules here, be creative and think outside the box. However, there are some tried and tested content offers which tend to work time and time again. These include:

  • eBooks
  • Demos
  • Trials
  • Courses
  • Competitions
  • How to guides
  • Cheat-sheets and check-lists
  • White papers
  • Templates
  • Podcasts and webinars

What works best for each business will depend on the industry, your target customer and the quality of your offer. So be creative and get brainstorming!

The importance of great copy

As is true in all forms of marketing, your content will help seal the deal, so it is well worth spending the time to get this right. Remember, with landing pages you are writing content to optimise conversions, so certain rules will apply.

The importance of great copy

  • Killer Heading
    Your headline needs to be big, bold and concise. It should compel your visitor to read on and (hopefully) to convert into a lead. It needs to catch their attention, so identifying their problem and/or solution is a good place to start.
  • Subheading
    A subheading which elaborates on your ‘killer headline’ can be very effective, and can help lead your visitor to read on. Subheadings can be a bit more descriptive than the headline content and can act as a ‘clincher’ in converting those valuable leads.
  • Content
    Your landing page should have a short and sweet summary describing your content offer and how it will benefit your visitors. This info is likely to be skimmed by many visitors, so keep it short, make sure the language is easy to read, and consider using bullet points for easy skimming.
  • Call to Action
    Your lead capture form needs to be well labelled, with clear and easy to understand call to actions in the form heading and the submit button. It’s no good having a killer heading and great content, to then go and confuse your user with a confusing form.

A picture is worth a thousand words

Your landing page needs to be visually attractive to your visitors and the best way to achieve this is to use strong imagery. Remember, you need to capture the visitors’ attention straight away and an image will be noticed much quicker than headline text or bullet points. You need to make sure the image is relevant to your content offer, and relevant to problem your visitor is looking to solve. So, spend time selecting the perfect image for your landing page, because a picture really is worth a thousand words!

Promoting your landing page

So, you’ve set your goals, identified your customer personas, written some great copy and created an amazing landing page. What next? Well your beautiful landing page will be completely useless unless you can generate relevant traffic to convert into leads, so you need to start thinking about where your ideal customer likes to hang out. If you are targeting B2B then LinkedIn could be a good place to start. Targeting B2C millennials? Facebook could be a good option. It is also worth budgeting for pay per click (PPC) advertising, as relying on organic SEO for page visibility can take some time to achieve results and you may miss your window of opportunity. Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram all offer PPC advertising, which could get your page in front of your target audience in no time at all.

Landing Page Example - Get a Quote

Remember the goal of your landing page is to capture leads, so think about things from your customer’s perspective. What is their problem and how are you going to solve it? Crack this and you will be on your way to landing page success!


Want to find out more about landing pages and how they can be integrated into your marketing strategy? Get in touch and we can arrange a friendly chat at your convenience.