There’s a lot of discourse about landing pages in the modern B2B marketing world. Everyone has their preferred styles and templates for a landing page, a site designed specifically to push visitors towards a single action.
But a lot of advice today regarding landing pages ignores an essential element of success with landing pages: understanding the customer’s intent and the customer journey. Your landing page needs to be well-crafted, but it also needs to speak to the customer where they are in their journey. In an ideal scenario, your landing page can drive conversions while also providing tangible value to help visitors meet their goals and overcome their challenges.
In other words, two landing pages can be constructed in dramatically different ways and still achieve good results. This article will provide a few tips on how to factor in your customer’s journey as you work to build your landing page.
Consider Intent
Understanding what your customer wants from your page requires you consider what comes before and after. Generally, if they are later in the journey, they need less information; earlier in the journey will likely require more enticing details. Consider the differences between a new prospect who has recently learned about your brand and a previous customer familiar with your offerings. Each has different concerns and objectives, so they’ll likely need slightly different approaches to move them through the sales funnel.
You should construct your landing pages with this idea in mind. A landing page attempting to drive sign-ups to a newsletter will look different from a landing page made to complete a sale or encourage prospects to book an appointment with a sales rep.
Intent also means staying mindful of what your customers need from you. When a prospect shows interest, some marketers make the mistake of overwhelming them. They bombard them with information requests or hoops to jump through, hoping to maximize the amount of data they can gather. After all, the more data you collect, the better you can serve both the individual and future clients like them, right?
The problem with this philosophy is that it ignores the individual prospect’s needs. Asking for too much time or information without providing sufficient value in return is an invitation for prospects to drop out of your funnel before they convert.
Provide Proof in the Right Context
How can prospects be sure you’ll provide what you say you will? Even if you do, how do they know it’ll give their desired results? These two questions are top of mind for people who haven’t done business with you before. Your landing pages are important for answering these two questions, leading to a sale or conversion.
Think about things you could include on your page to make new prospects more confident in you. A few common examples include:
- Video reviews are powerful because people are inherently programmed to want to respond to seeing other people speaking. Watching a person talk about the benefits of a product or service has more impact than just reading it as text.
- Testimonials can be text-based but, as mentioned above, are best in video format. A testimonial should also include measurable data about how your offering improved the customer’s business or results.
- Statistics and/or research can be important in certain fields of B2B marketing. Still, there’s a caveat: make sure it comes from a reputable source, ideally a trustworthy external organization like a university or research firm. If you plan to present your own statistics, be ready to back them up – most prospects will be inherently suspicious of data published by a company about its own offerings.
You should always calibrate the user and where they are in your marketing funnel to the specific elements of proof included on your landing page.
Find Ways to Add Extra Value
Most people are used to the idea of a landing page as a place where they complete a form to receive something in exchange. It’s one of the new standards we’ve developed after years of browsing the web and shopping online.
But what if a user reading your landing page could get more than just an opportunity to convert with a form? Your landing page could also offer them something in return. Even small efforts go a long way; try offering possible solutions for their challenges.
This compilation from the Search Engine Journal offers some great examples of this idea in practice. Check out example 8 from Persistent Systems – notice how the page includes a call-to-action button for conversion in addition to statistics, benefits, and testimonials from previous clients.
Asana’s signup page offers another great example. It’s clear that creating your account is the main focus: the page is largely blank white space, with a simple one-form field and sign-up box centered in the middle. However, you notice off to the right a list of features included with a free trial of Asana, including unlimited storage, tasks, and projects.
(Asana)
Doing this provides a great example of giving users a bit of additional value on your landing page without interrupting their journey, reducing the chance they will convert. Balancing the elements on your landing page to provide enough information to be helpful without overwhelming visitors is down to trial and error. It will take some time and experimentation to find a happy medium, and you’ll want to keep an eye on the data to make necessary tweaks that keep the page performing at an acceptable level.
Conclusion: Treat Each Page Individually
As marketers, we sometimes fall into thinking we can construct every page in the same way, as long as we address the same audience and offer the same kinds of products and services. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case for any page in your funnel, particularly landing pages.
Everyone understands the basic elements of a landing page – some form, a description of the offer, and a confirmation page, so users know they’ve completed the form successfully. Fewer marketers recognize that landing pages can be a great place to nurture prospects and customers further, as long as you do so properly.
You can get more benefits than you might have previously thought from your landing pages by staying mindful of what page visitors want. Help them increase trust in your brand and its offerings by providing additional details that can reduce their professional struggles. Don’t forget to rigorously test the changes you make so that your updates and landing page structure have the data to support them – rather than conjecture.
Looking for help optimizing your landing pages and placing them within the broader context of your marketing funnel? FunnelEnvy can help. Our team has years of experience helping all types of B2B startups and tech companies that want to tighten up their marketing funnels, improve conversions, and ultimately drive more revenue from their current investment in digital marketing.
Fill out this short quiz to learn more about our pricing and schedule a time to meet with someone from the team.
