How to Create a High-Converting Landing Page: Best Practices

Using a high-converting landing page can significantly impact the success of your marketing campaigns. But you can’t just whip it together and hope for the best. You should focus on designing high-converting landing pages using best practices.

This is why landing pages matter and what you should be doing to experience the greatest value from your marketing efforts.

Why You Need Landing Pages

Before we get into best practices for designing landing pages, here’s a look at what a landing page is and why you should be using it.

A landing page is a webpage with a design and content focused on getting prospects or customers to take the action you want. Landing pages focus on conversion more heavily than standard web pages, which can be more focused on education or engagement. 

Because a landing page is a single web page, it also prevents your prospect from getting lost on your site or distracted by your value-added content that is less focused on conversion. That’s not to say value-added content has no role in your marketing. But when you’re running campaigns with a focused goal in mind, it helps to have a similarly focused high-converting landing page that communicates your value.

Landing Page Contents and Functionality

Best practices make more sense once you know how a landing page should function and what it should contain.

• Hero image: Use this space to engage your prospect. Consider your audience and showcase your product or service in this space accordingly.
• Attention-grabbing headline: Within the hero, you should also have an attention-grabbing headline. This should summarize what you’re offering, speak to a customer’s pain point, or guide your customer toward overcoming their objections to your product or service. Knowing your audience through buyer personas will help you do this effectively.
• Overview of what you’re offering the customer: When drafting your copy and creating your visuals, ask yourself what the customer gets from your offering. That’s what you should be focused on in your content. The more you can do with visuals, such as images, videos and gifs, the easier it will be for your customer to envision your offering. That said, don’t make all your content graphics and video as some viewers might not be in a setting where they can listen to video content or they might have certain media blocked on their device. Offer options for how to browse your landing page.
• Social proof: You can spend time telling the customer how great you are, or you can allow your customers to do so. Social proof is far more compelling than anything you have to say. It also helps create social proof. Use testimonials, reviews and case studies to showcase your customer experience.
• Include clear calls to action: Tell the customer what they should do next. And while you don’t want to crowd the landing page with calls to action, you should have more than one opportunity for the customer to convert.
• Highlight your market differentiators: If you’re in a crowded industry, make sure you’re communicating to your audience your market differentiators. This will demonstrate your value and further instill confidence in your audience that they should take the next step with your company.

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Landing Page Best Practices

Whether you’re new to creating a high-converting landing page or looking to update your strategy to be more modern and in line with what your customers expect, here’s a look at what you should do to encourage conversion.

1. Write a Strong Headline and Ensure It’s Viewable Without Scrolling

Your headline should appeal to your target audience and their interests. While you want it to be short and snappy, you also want it to summarize the purpose of your landing page or tease what’s to come if they keep reading.

Keep your headline within your brand’s voice and tone while keeping it interesting. Make your message clear and avoid complex language or jargon that the customer might not know.

The best headlines do one of three things. 

1. Speak to their pain points.
2. Showcase that you have a solution.
3. Intrigue your audience and make them want to read more.

And do your best to keep that headline around seven words or less. If you need more space to communicate your message, use a subhead to elaborate.

2. Tell Stories

We’re naturally wired to engage with stories, which can help you get your readers to keep scrolling and feel compelled to complete the action you want from them.

Stories within marketing can be scenarios that help your prospects envision what life would be like with your product. They can be case studies that explain what similar customers went through and how you helped them. Or a story can be a situation description that speaks to pain points and your customers’ desires. 

3. Personalize the Content

Landing pages should be specific to a campaign and your audience. The more personal the experience based on what the customer has shared with you, the better your results will likely be.

Designing various landing pages based on segments of your audience might feel like more time than it is worth. But it can have an enormous impact on your conversion rate.

Delve into how to improve your website’s conversion rate by reading our article:

Practical Ways to Improve Your Website Conversion Rate

That’s because each segment will have different pain points and needs. Use their interests and goals to see the best results from your marketing campaigns.

4. Keep it Mobile Friendly

The better your landing page performs on mobile, the higher your conversion rate will likely be. Not only do search engines give priority to mobile-optimized websites and landing pages, but your customers will have a better experience.

Ensure that your landing page loads quickly and formats appropriately on devices of all sizes for best results.

Keep the landing page simple and free of annoyances like popups and content that is difficult to view on mobile.

5. Include Various Media Types

Media helps break up your content and make your landing page appear more inviting. Custom imagery is better than stock for communicating your market differentiators and value proposition.

Everyone is different in how they like to learn about a product or service. Include these types of media to resonate with your audience.

• Charts
• Videos
• Gifs
• Videos
• Images
• Graphics
• Video testimonials
• Video demonstrations
• Animated videos
• Explainers

6. Share Independent Research or Insights

If you want to be at the top of your field, you need to demonstrate a deep understanding of your industry. Independent research or unique insights can help you do that. This can be costly, but if you have research you can share or build into graphs, it can be quite compelling on a landing page.

7. Break Up Your Content with Headings

Make your content more appealing to your reader by summarizing your message with headlines with short paragraphs underneath. This will make your content less intimidating. 

Keep your paragraphs to just a few sentences and try distributing that content under headings every few paragraphs.

8. Keep it Simple

Less is more when it comes to landing page design. Don’t get trapped in the idea that to look impressive, your landing page needs to be complex, lengthy or flashy. Simple design allows your message and media to shine.

Use A/B testing to learn a design that works best for your audience. Test heavy use of color alongside lighter use of color to see what resonates with your audience. 

Expert Landing Page Design and Implementation

If you’re unsure of how to get more out of your landing pages or even where to get started with using landing pages, schedule a free consultation with New Light Digital. Our team includes website development, design and content experts. Experience higher conversion rates and greater ROI from your ads and marketing campaigns with a high-converting landing page strategy.

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