You’ve devised a brilliant marketing campaign, and you’re bringing in a ton of traffic to your key landing page. But those people aren’t sticking around, handing over their contact information, or buying from you.In short, you need to generate more leads, which means building high-performing landing pages that actually convert. It’s the key to making money from any of your marketing activities, really – from your landing page to an email marketing campaign.

But what benchmarks are we working toward here? What is a “good” conversion rate?

Well, according to Wordstream, the median landing page has a conversion rate of 2.35%. However, some websites are faring much better. Indeed, the top quartile sees conversion rates of 5.31% or above – more than twice those of the median site – while the top tenth of performers enjoy rates of 11.45% or more.

Imagine what a difference it would make to your business if you were converting one in every nine visitors to your landing pages, rather than one in 50!Here’s how to improve your landing page’s lead generation in six simple steps.

Step 1: Figure Out What Your Audience Wants

Let’s start with the basics.Unless they’ve accidentally clicked a link, every single person who visits your landing page has done so for a reason. It’s your job to figure out exactly what that reason is.

Why’s this so important? Because it dictates everything else that happens on your landing page, including:

       
• The language you use
       
• The key features you highlight
       
• The trust factors you incorporate
       
• The visual elements you include
       
• The calls to action (CTAs) you use

“But I have a diverse audience,” you might be thinking. “How can I figure out one single reason for each of those people to visit my landing page?”

Well, those visitors might come from different industries, or different sizes of organizations, or different locations. But at its heart, your product remains the same. So there has to be one unifying reason that brought them to you. To figure it out, ask yourself:

       
• What’s their job title?
       
• Who do they work for?
       
• What stage of growth are they at?
       
• What pain points exist within their market?
       
• What pain points exist within their own organization?
       
• What happens if they can’t overcome these problems?
       
• How does this make them feel?
       
• How can you demonstrate empathy for them?
       
• How can you demonstrate authority and credibility in your ability to solve the problem?
       
• How, specifically, can you make things better for them?
       
• Why would they choose you over one of your rivals?

You need to answer all of these questions before you start writing a single word of copy for your landing page, or begin considering layout and visual elements.

This is called creating a buyer persona.

Each company should have a unique buyer persona – even those in the same industries. For example, although they’re both in the legal industry and are personal injury lawyers, the Law Offices of Jay Knispel and Lavent Law target slightly different audiences.

For example, Lavent Law offers website visitors the option to view the site in Spanish or Russian instead of English:

This is possibly because he is catering to an audience of Spanish or Russian speakers.

Step 2: Write An Eye-Catching Headline

You’ve done all the groundwork. Now you can start working on the practicalities of your landing page – and an eye-catching headline is the best possible starting point.

Your headline doesn’t just need to draw attention. It has to feed naturally into everything else that’s on your landing page. For instance, if you help Amazon FBA sellers increase their revenue, there’s no point having a headline that promises to maximize Amazon sales unless you can back up your claim through the copy, features, and trust factors on your landing page. Otherwise, people will just bounce straight back off.

A good example is ShowMojo’s landing page that includes the number of properties they have enabled and the number of leads they have captured. They also include a helpful video explaining what they do and how they do it.As marketers, we often make the mistake of overcomplicating our headlines.

That’s understandable.

With just a handful of words in which to stand out, we strive to be too “clever”, believing that this is the only way to compel visitors to read on.

In reality, simple is almost always best.

Let’s take a look at a simple but effective example from personal injury lawyer Attorney Brian White & Associates:

There are no bells and whistles here – it just gets straight to the point. If someone lands on that homepage after being injured in an accident, they’ll instantly know they’re in the right place. And if they weren’t injured in an accident, they’re not a valuable lead for Attorney Brian White & Associates anyway.

Step 3: Concisely Communicate Your Value

By this point, you’ve got a good understanding of your audience, and you’ve written an effective headline. Congratulations! Now it’s time to demonstrate the value and expertise you provide.

To do this, you first need to tap into the factors that feed into buying decisions.

Think every purchase boils down to pricing? Sure, that’s important, and you need to have an effective pricing strategy if you want to drive sales. After all, if you’re twice as expensive as your competitors, you’ll have to work super hard to convert leads into customers.

But the price isn’t the only factor – in fact, it’s not even the most important.

As we can see, the biggest driver of buying decisions is the strength of your brand. That makes sense. If you’ve got a reputation for delivering terrible service, it doesn’t matter how dazzling your feature set or cheap your price, you’re not going to close a lot of deals.

The second most important factor is the features you provide. That means if you’re going to build landing pages that convert, you need to be able to concisely detail the value you offer in a way that helps you stand out from the crowd.

Doing so not only sets you apart from your competitors, but it also motivates your targeted prospects to choose you. In other words, it assures them that you offer all the features they need and more, so they’re constantly supported in their journey.

For example, there are now countless SEO courses, SEO agencies, marketing companies, marketing agencies- you name it- promising to scale a business’s traffic and profits.

But companies like LawRank are differentiated from the crowd because – not only do they provide the same services as other SEO agencies – they specialize in supporting lawyers in their internet marketing journeys.

So, why’s it so important to do this “concisely”? Because research shows that in our increasingly digital world, information overload is narrowing our collective attention span. In 2013, the average global Twitter trend would last for 17.5 hours, but three years later, that figure had dropped to just 11.9 hours.In other words, it’s hard to get people’s attention in the first place – but it’s even harder to keep it!

As with the previous step, simplicity is key to effectively communicating the value of your product. Let’s take a look at how talent acquisition platform Recruitee does it:

In just 13 words, Recruitee explains how its product helps customers take ownership of their hiring process, launch and scale their hiring campaigns and processes, and drive their business forward. Those are exactly the things anyone wanting to run their own talent acquisition campaign would want to hear.

Step 4: Add Visual Trust Factors

Obviously, you don’t want your landing page to be anything more than a big block of text. Even the most basic-looking landing pages make effective use of visual elements and negative space.

At the same time, you don’t want to add imagery for the sake of it – all that does is distract the user’s attention from the things you really want them to see. Your visual elements need to add real value, support your messaging, and drive visitors toward conversion.

A lot of thought should be put into the design of your landing page – because it can make or break it.

One of the most effective ways to do this is by adding visual trust factors to your landing page. From review scores to testimonials and partner logos, trust factors are how you tell your visitors: “We really can do what we say we’ll do!”

These trust factors are super important because as a general rule, potential customers are disinclined to believe what they read on your landing pages. In fact, websites are seen as one of the least influential and trustworthy sources of buyer information.

That means anything you can do to demonstrate your trustworthiness in a compelling, believable way will play a big part in creating landing pages that convert.

Twine, a platform that helps businesses looking to hire a freelancer, does this really effectively:

Those visuals on the right of the screen aren’t just there to look pretty – they also draw attention to the client testimonials below. This is crucial because:

       
• 97% of B2B buyers say user-generated content such as peer reviews is more credible than other types of content
       
• 88% of consumers say they trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations

Step 5: Create a Clear, Compelling CTA

You need to make it as easy as possible for landing page visitors to convert. Buyers are busy, and they’re likely comparing you to several other companies. If your path to conversion looks like it’ll give them a headache, why would they bother?

One of the most important things you can do here is write clear CTAs that compel people to take action. That way, they understand precisely what you expect them to do next.

To give another example from the world of personal injury law, here’s how Rosenbaum & Rosenbaum does it:

The legal industry is complicated. Unless you’re a lawyer, you likely don’t have a good understanding of the terminology involved, or the inner workings of the legal process.

Rosenbaum & Rosenbaum understands that not everyone is a legal expert and that visitors likely have a lot of uncertainty around their query. At this early stage of the user journey, those visitors are looking for advice and reassurance.

That’s why it incorporates a “free consultation” CTA, which works in three key ways:

       
• The “free” element removes price as a potential barrier to conversion
       
• The word “consultation” suggests you’ll be talked through the process, offered advice, and generally supported along the way
       
• Additionally, the word “get” makes this CTA actionable, which compels people to click it

Step 6: Add a Chatbot

You’ve drawn users in with compelling copy, engaging imagery, and a strong CTA. But you still aren’t bringing in enough leads or sales. What more can you do to turn things around and build a landing page that converts?

Well, there’s a good chance the problem lies in your lead capture form

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Web forms are overwhelmingly the most popular tool marketers use to capture the names and contact details of potential customers.

But just because they’re popular, that doesn’t mean they’re good! In fact, forms can often be a turn-off to leads, demanding too much information upfront for too little return. This is demonstrated by a study from HubSpot that reveals completion rates drop off dramatically when forms have more than three fields.

Simply including fewer fields might not be an option for your business. Once you’ve captured a lead’s first name, last name, and email address, that’s three fields already. For a lead to be valuable, you might also need to know their job title, or the organization they work for, or their budget (or countless other pieces of information).

Of course, this also depends on your industry and product. For example, an employee recognition software company like Nectar will likely need more information from their leads than one that sells individual products, like capsule fillers.

However, there’s an alternative – replacing your lead forms with chatbots.

Conversational forms, powered by chatbots, overcome the issue of gathering information from your potential customers by turning the process into a genuine back-and-forth, just like you’d get from speaking to a customer service representative or salesperson on a phone call.

Significantly, even if that conversation gets abandoned part-way through, your efforts haven’t been wasted, because chatbots are still capable of capturing and saving partial data.

Let’s take a look at how this works in practice when used to capture leads through gated content:

This page could easily be just another dull lead capture form, with little to compel the user to hand over their personal data in return for a piece of content.Instead, it’s presented as a real conversation that:

       
• Reinforces what brought them to the landing page in the first place
       
• Highlights the key benefits of engaging with the form and downloading the content
       
• Compels the user to take action right now

It even allows for visual elements to be added, making the whole thing look like an instant messaging conversation with a friend or colleague. It’s a world away from a generic three-field form demanding your name and email address.

Wrapping it Up

As you can probably see, building a landing page that converts stems from that all-important first step – understanding your audience and knowing what brought them to your site in the first place.

Once you have that understanding, you can craft copy that speaks directly to your prospects, referencing their specific pain points and goals.

What’s more, you can identify the features and benefits they most want to know about, and present these in a way that effectively showcases the value you provide.

Then, it’s just a matter of refining your craft and adding those extra conversion-boosting features – from adding visuals to using a chatbot.

By putting your audience first, you can create a landing page that resonates with people who fit your ideal customer profile. That way, converting doesn’t seem like a chore, because your visitors will be desperate to find out more about how you can help them.