How To Create a Landing Page? 10 Design Tips & Examples

How to create a landing page? Step zero - set up a clear goal

You launch your landing page to achieve something. To make visitors sign up for a newsletter, buy your product or try your services for free. In the jargon of marketers - to cause conversion. This is why you must attract their attention and lead their actions towards a specific behavior you expect from them. Landing pages are not (only) about informing people, they are about achieving a certain goal. As soon as you know what you want them to do, you are ready to design your own landing page.

1 - Make your headline catchy and compelling

So you expect a concrete behavior from your website’s visitors? To achieve this, you have to provide them with a clear benefit right away. The headline of the landing page is a perfect place to communicate it. Out of the multitude of advantages of your product, choose the one which is the most important. You promote a tutorial on how to get started with coding? Show them they will learn. Does your brand new mobile/web app make the information exchange within a team or company? Tell them it will improve it. Having said that, don’t forget about getting your message across in a cool and creative manner. Let it be both informative and entertaining.

2 - Highlight benefits

Impress your visitors with the product’s or service’s advantages. Communicate what exactly they will gain by doing what you want them to do. Coding tutorial - tell them they will know the basics faster than they think and can further develop their skills. Another benefit? A strong asset in a viewer’s professional CV. And so on. Or take Uber as an example. Their landing page highlights easiness, all-time availability and specifies the range of the service: from low-cost to luxury. Be as specific as possible. To make it more convincing, you can use bullet lists. They will strengthen the impression that you are offering something of real value.

3 - Readable content

When preparing copy for your landing page, remember that a visitor comes to gain a specific trophy - be it knowledge of certain topics, a test run of a product, etc. Not to extol your elaborate writing. Don’t overwhelm them with information. Quite the contrary: reduce, cut, shorten paragraphs to a readable minimum. In this case, less is more. And the ability to practice this is also a huge skill.

4 - Strong and direct call to action

Make sure the visitors of your website know exactly what you want them to do. A call-to-action button is a perfect way to communicate the aim of the landing page. You want them to create an account, download a free coding tutorial or sign up for your newsletter (be aware of the GDPR, though) - address it directly. Avoid general calls to action, always be specific about what your visitor is about to get. And yes, the button has to be visible right away, so make it stand out a bit from the rest.

5 - No distractions

Distracting the visitor and letting their attention fly somewhere far from the purpose you want to achieve is a perfect way to lose them. To make sure they are going to complete the whole process, do not include any external links which could be an unintended emergency exit. The golden rule is: one landing page corresponds with one purpose. All roads lead to Rome. Period.

6 - High-quality pictures

One picture is worth a thousand words, the old saying goes. In the case of landing pages that convert, let us be more specific: one good picture is worth a thousand words or more. A readable and engaging copy is only a part of success as most of us want to take the easy way and watch rather than read. This is why you need to take high-quality pictures - if you are not confident enough in your talent, hire a pro. If possible, avoid stock photography. Individualized pictures will make your landing page and product/service look more genuine and trustworthy.

7 - No lengthy forms to fill

Again, if you want to lead your customers through the entire conversion process, you need to make sure that the action you want them to take on your landing page is simple and won’t take too much time. Lengthy forms, requiring too many fields to be filled with too much data are one of the easiest ways of overstaying your welcome and, consequently, losing customers. Let alone the issues resulting from the recent GDPR regulation. People nowadays are busy, overstimulated and expect immediate results. Don’t complicate things for them.

8 - Social proof

People tend to underestimate the power of word-of-mouth, although it is the driving force behind the success of many businesses. Personal recommendations are also a highly effective tool of online marketing. Whereas sharing viral content in social media has been one example, a landing page with testimonials in which real people share their positive experience with the product/service may be a serious boost for your business and highlight its overall reliability. Also, adding the logotypes of your most notable clients will be of huge value.

9 - Let it complement your newsletter and social media

Coherence is a great virtue of your product’s communication. Make sure your landing page, social media channels and newsletters you send to your customers talk to each other. Let their design be consistent: share certain features like color, font or any other element of visual identification. Also, think of your landing page as the final link in the chain of activities: if you send a newsletter asking your customer to perform a certain activity, make sure it will redirect them to your product’s landing where the entire operation will be completed.

10 - Make it mobile friendly

The number of people accessing the Internet through their phones, tablets and other mobile devices is increasing day by day. In order for your business to succeed and landing page meet its purpose, you simply cannot ignore this fact. While designing your landing page, take into account its mobile version and test it until it looks awesome on both your laptop and mobile. It will raise its conversion stats. Otherwise - you will be missing a huge number of potential leads.

Still wondering why people are leaving your website? Well, we may have some additional hints for you.

Photo by Sergei Akulich on Unsplash