How long do you think you have to convince someone to stay on your website? If you answered in the minutes, you are wrong. 30 seconds? Wrong. You have 10-15 seconds – at the most. In those ten seconds, you have to communicate your value as a company and your ability to fill their needs, wants or desires. Your landing page is the space you have to communicate all of this information in seconds, so it had better be a good one.
It doesn’t matter how good your company is or how much money you spend on pay-per-click advertising; if your landing page isn’t up-to-snuff your business is going to suffer. How do you make a landing page that people want to stay on? Glad you asked! Let us tell you…
Strategize
Like communications and marketing operations, if you haven’t formulated a strategy, why are you bothering? Without a plan in place, your landing page is never going to be at the top of the game, because it doesn’t even know what game it is in. At the very least you should have a good grasp of your primary audience and have a clear set of goals in mind.
Clean and modern
Your landing page should be clean, modern and organized. An overabundance of colours, too many pictures, or shocking amounts of words is going to instantly turn off the visitor, sending them straight into the waiting arms (website) of your competitor. It’s tempting to try to communicate absolutely everything about your business on your landing page but don’t. People don’t have the time, energy, or desire to learn everything about your business. They just want to know what you can do for them, which is why it’s so important to strategize and know who your primary target audience is.
Limit Navigation
Remember two seconds ago when we said that it is tempting to throwing everything, including the kitchen sink, onto your landing page? Yeah, don’t. Try to limit the amount of navigating people have to do. Be ruthless, take away your excess buttons. Take. Them. Away. Have you ever gone to a restaurant with a giant menu and been overwhelmed by the options? It’s like that – on steroids. People don’t want that many options, they just want the 4 best ones.
Headline and Subhead
Clean and modern means that you want to use as few words as possible to get across your meaning. The best way to go about this is to think like a journalist and find a headline that is clever enough to attract while also stating your value with less than six words. The subhead should relate the headline and expand on it. Catch your visitor’s attention and tell them why they should stick around your website. The End.
Visuals
Your brain processes visuals tens of thousands of times faster than they do words. Up to 60,000 times faster. Crazy fast. For a landing page, your visual should be large and striking. Don’t have 14 good pictures. Have one insanely good one or a super visually appealing video. Pro tip. Everybody’s internet speed was not created equally and is fairly dependent on how they are accessing your website, make sure that the images and videos have great resolution but are as small as you can physically make them to ensure that they load swiftly. Remember, you have 10-15 seconds to impress them, if your image takes 20 seconds to load, you’ve already lost a potential customer/client.
Of course, there are many more landing page secrets. We can’t give away all the trade secrets for free! If you need help with conversions and you think your website is the place to start, come chat with us! We can help get your landing page (and your business) where it needs to be.