The Inbound Growth Blog

The Inbound Growth Blog covers all topics relating to an integrated marketing strategy. We write about inbound marketing, social media, integrated marketing strategies and the sales process.

How to Generate Leads With Landing Pages

New Call-to-action

Posted by John Beveridge on Oct 2, 2012 9:54:00 AM

This blog post is an edited excerpt from the eBook, "How to Create an Effective Inbound Marketing Campaign"

Landing pages in an inbound marketing campaignIn order to start generating new leads from your offer, you need to place it on your website. You will do that by creating a landing page, a web page that features a description and an image of the offer and a form for visitors to fill out in order to receive the resource.

 This transaction is type of an information exchange, in which the visitor gets the offer they are interested in and you receive the contact information of your visitors. They transition into their next lifecycle stage, that of leads. This is the process of lead generation.

Here is an illustration of the lead conversion process courtesy of inbound marketing software provider, HubSpot.

Lead Generation Visualization

How to Make Effective Landing Pages

A good landing page will target a particular audience, such as traffic from an email campaign promoting a particular eBook, or visitors who click on a pay-per-click ad promoting your webinar. Therefore, it’s important to build a unique landing page for each of the offers you create. You can build landing pages that allow visitors to download your content offers (eBooks, whitepapers, webinars, etc.), or sign up for offers like free trials or demos of your product. Creating landing pages enables you to target your audience, offer them something of value, and convert a higher percentage of your visitors into leads.

There are several key components that make a landing page effective for converting visitors into leads. The major areas of importance are the headline, the content of the page, and the form. Let’s look at each of these, explain why they’re important, and discuss how to optimize them.

download-inbound-marketing-campaign-ebook

Headline

People’s attention spans are short, especially online. This means you need to make sure your offer is as clear as possible. A good rule of thumb is to make sure your landing page passes the “blink test” – can the viewer understand the offer and what you’re asking them to do in less than five seconds? Make sure your title makes your offer immediately clear so that the viewer understands what the offer is right away.

The Body

The body of your landing page should provide a description of what your offer is and why your visitors should download it or sign up for it. Make the specific benefits of the offer clear. Format the body of your page in a way that quickly conveys the value of the offer and the action visitors need to take. for instance, use bullet points and numbering to simplify the visual layout of the text, and use bold or italicized text to highlight the main points.

The other factor to consider is how the length of the form affects the prospect’s willingness to fill it out. If the form is too long, prospects are going to stop and evaluate whether it is worth their time to complete all of those fields. So you need to find a good balance between collecting enough information and not asking for too much information that prospects are not willing to give it.  In general, asking for less information will get your more leads and asking for more information will get you more qualified leads.

So what information should you ask for? Your goal should be to collect enough information through your form to enable you to both contact and qualify the lead. Fields such as name and email address gather contact information of leads, allowing you to put them in a workflow and nurture them in the future.  Research shows that asking for a phone number too early in the buying process will reduce the number of leads your landing page produces.

Design your form so you get enough info to contact and qualify the lead. We use this information to learn more about and qualify our leads before putting them into our sales funnel.

Marketing website assessment

Calls-to-Action

The goal of a call-to-action is to drive traffic to a landing page. In order to increase visitor-to-lead conversion opportunities, you need to create a lot of calls-to-action, distribute them across your web presence and optimize them.

Placement is one of the most critical elements of leveraging the power of calls-to-action. So how do you decide which call-to-action belongs where? Simple. Calls-to-action should be spread across your web pages. 

Your homepage should have a call-to-action. As your most frequently visited page, your homepage presents a huge opportunity to drive traffic to a specific campaign. Your product/service pages, About Us page and Contact Us page all need to include calls-to-action or the visitor will be deciding on their own what to do next. You need to help them decide what to do next.

While calls-to-action are usually thought of as images and text placed on a website, the concept of a call-to-action can be found across all types of marketing. In all of your marketing assets you should be trying to drive people to get further engaged with your company. If the goal of a call-to-action is to drive traffic to your landing page, think about the different ways in which you can achieve that. For instance, you can use marketing emails and social media updates to drive traffic to your landing page.

If you liked this article, download the full eBook here.

Topics: Inbound Marketing

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