Perfect marketing strategy, poor results….

Your marketing strategies are rock-solid, your plans are exceptional. You’re investing heavily in the latest methodologies and technologies. Your hopes are high, but results are still falling a little short.

On the surface everything looks good, but it’s not quite coming together. It’s quite likely there’s a devil lurking in the detail.

Let’s look at landing pages as an example. Despite your analytics reporting more than enough visitors reaching your site, your landing pages are not converting visitors into leads. They’re failing.

The lack of best practices and non-persuasive copywriting is often the problem. Does the headline include a strong, action oriented verb, have the navigation menus been removed, is there sufficient visual emphasis, does the length of the form mirror the value of the offer, are there too many or too few bullet points, and the list goes on.

Whether it’s Facebook advertising, email marketing, sales brochures, videos, remarketing or any other marketing tactic, the devil loves to lurk in the detail.

Fortunately, poor converting landing pages can be a relatively easy problem to fix, and we’ll explain how.

The 7 Steps to a highly converting landing page.

1. Write a clear, concise action oriented headline
• Tell readers exactly what they are getting, eg checklist
• Use a strong action verb
• Describe how to access it, eg download

2. Explain the offer clearly and place visual emphasis on the value
• In 1-3 sentences explain what the offer is
• Write another 1-3 sentences that detail how someone would benefit from the offer
• Use numbers, bullets and bolding to help visitors focus on what’s important with visual emphasis

3. Remove navigation menus and links
• Get rid of any distractions by removing links that could take visitors away from the page before they have completed the form
• Ensure the submit button is highly visible

4. The form length should mirror the value of the offer
• The more valuable the offer, the more information you can ask for
• Generally we’d suggest email, first name and surname
• If your offer is extremely valuable to the visitor, you could ask for more. One of the leading global marketing automation suppliers has 12 fields on some of their forms
• It’s also important remembering:
i. the fewer fields, the more the responses,
ii. the more fields, the higher quality the responses

5. Include a relevant image, animation or a short video
• This helps visually communicate the value of the offer to visitors more quickly and easily

6. Add social sharing icons
• Great offers should be shared – includes social icons that allow visitors to share your information

7. If there is a thank you page after the submit button has been clicked, then include the following
• Deliver promised content
• Display navigation menu back to the main website
• Potentially show another offer that might be of interest