Unless your goal is to be a street corner clockmaker focused solely on craft, advertising for your business should be a concern.
After all, if you want to be relevant among your competition and increase your notoriety, you must invest in your marketing. That’s what everybody does now. After all, you lose 100% of the business from people who don’t know you exist!
Some businesses spend millions to gain more eyeball time and more paying customers. And even if you’re competing against small to medium businesses, most marketing budgets still average 11% of the total company budget.
If you were to take a moment to calculate what equals 11% of your budget, you might think to yourself, “do I have to use all this money to make sure I make the cut?”. More or less, yes. Long-term financial contributions in the marketing department are savvy business-making. But don’t mistake creating an effective sales conversion funnel with launching a paid search ad or increasing your social media ad spend.
Because spending thousands of dollars on ineffective marketing or campaigns resulting in low conversion rates is counterproductive. (Not sure how to calculate the marketing return on investment? We have an article just for that.)
Here’s a practical way of improving your return on investment by creating the perfect landing page that will generate leads and convert visitors.
How Can Landing Page Optimization Improve ROI?
Landing page optimization is part of what’s known as conversion rate optimization, and its objective is to increase conversions for a web page. It entails rewriting and reorganizing various page elements from your landing pages to amplify the number of website visitors that become actual customers.
The higher the conversion rates, the higher the ROI. You make the most of your online marketing campaigns while lowering customer acquisition costs.
And we have to make two disclaimers:
- We don’t have a prescription for crafting a good landing page, but we have recommendations for gradually refining on-page elements.
- Optimizing landing pages shouldn’t be your only method of improving ROI. This is one tactic amid a sea of tactics that you should consider.
With this in mind, we can move on to our next point.
The ‘Why’ Advises the ‘How’ in Landing Page Optimization
Before anything else, we try to find out why the landing page conversion rate is low.
Landing page optimization has never been about making uninformed decisions or changing multiple elements on a page, hoping that it will work. Do that, and you’ll be at risk of removing an already converting element instead of enhancing a flawed section.
But how do you learn why your landing page performs poorly?
Before optimizing landing pages, collect data from heat maps, scroll maps, and Google Analytics reports. Such tools offer valuable information about visitor behavior on your entire site or targeted landing pages. Visitor data tells you where people spend more time reading, what sections are of interest, or where people become disinterested.
User behavior is a good source of information, providing guidelines for creating high-converting landing pages.
Optimizing Landing Pages for Conversion
1. Shrewdly Construct the ‘Above the Fold’
The wise editing of newspapers brought this expression upon us. The most enthralling stories were above the midline, where traditional newspapers fold. This meant that the first thing passersby noticed in the newspaper were the most intriguing news, so they had to buy the paper to satisfy their curiosity.
On a website, above the fold refers to the upper part of the page — the hero image, the headline, the subhead, and the first call to action.
The above-the-fold usually doesn’t convert. Don’t design it with this goal in mind. It’s the first thing potential customers see, so it should absorb them and invite them to keep reading. Only the landing page copy persuades the reader into making a purchase.
To shrewdly construct the above-the-fold for your landing pages, clearly articulate who is the target audience and what it can gain from interacting with your brand.
Don’t be afraid to be bold, interesting, or, on the opposite, honestly simplistic.
2. Declutter the Page
If you feel like you should leave no white spaces because conversion rates might drop due to a lack of interactivity with your target market, consider the messiness of the human mind. Once you do that, you should feel free to approach landing page optimization with a ‘less is more’ mindset.
The best landing pages have a simple and weightless page design that seamlessly directs the attention of its visitors to the page elements that matter the most.
Whether you work on the homepage or dedicated landing pages, you can let go of unnecessary links and buffer content. Don’t focus on the page length but on the parts that argue the importance and usefulness of your product or service.
Optimize your landing page design by:
- Limiting the number of actions one can take on the page, including the number of functions of the CTAs.
- Minimizing the number of form fields.
- Using directional cues in your design to smoothly direct the reader’s attention toward a CTA or a form.
3. Rewrite Your CTAs
As you write your CTAs, you try to communicate what you want the user to do and, at the same time, dress up your invitation into something less transactional.
It’s no wonder why call-to-action buttons are one of the most common reasons landing pages fail. You either risk being extremely blatant or creating a convoluted call to action.
But what makes up a convincing call-to-action button?
- It’s unambiguous, stating clearly the benefit the user enjoys after completing the action.
- It is constructed using actionable verbs, like learn, discover, or download.
- As a rule of thumb, it is short, usually not longer than five to seven words.
- It is instantly visible, and the design makes it stand out.
4. Apply Landing Page SEO
Search engine optimization is, too, something you should keep in mind.
Landing page SEO is fairly similar to what you know about SEO, but here’s a brief list of optimization tips that will please the search engines:
- The landing page should match the expectation of your readers to avoid scoring a high bounce rate and a low conversion rate. So, use only the appropriate keywords for your business in the landing page content.
- You should aim to reduce page load time as much as you can.
- Make sure your H1 is text-based, not image-based. Crawlers have a hard time reading an image but are sure to understand the text.
Landing Page Optimization One Adjustment at a Time
Making little tweaks in the elements of a page can make a huge difference in how your page is performing. The design of your page, the structure of your CTAs, landing page SEO, or the effectiveness of your above-the-fold — all these make landing page optimization a complicated and rewarding endeavor. If this sounds like too much, and you just want to see your ROI improving, we have the knowledge and experience to take the load off your shoulders. Get in touch with our team to find out how we catalyze growth.
