The Internet is crammed with landing pages for all manner of goods and services. Sadly, most of them are terrible. Here’s how to make yours NOT terrible. You might even say it is good!
We’ve all seen trully terrible landing pages. You may have even been guilty of creating a few of your own. They shout in your face with their bold, multi-coloured text, poor images and text that screams at you to BUY NOW!
Guess what? That approach doesn’t work.
If you want your landing page to be effective you have to give careful consideration to your audience’s wants and needs and probably the most important element of your page.
Want to know what that is?
It’s your headline. Get that wrong and no one will read about your great offer.
Of course, the rest of your page has to be top notch, but if your headline fails the rest of your content doesn’t matter because no one will read it.
Crafting the Perfect Headline
Writing headlines is tricky; I’m not going to lie to you. You’ll probably take a few attempts until you find an approach that works for you, which is why testing is so important.
However, to get you started on the right lines, in general every powerful headline has 4 main qualities:
- Focus – it gets straight to the point
- Relevancy – it must relate to the offer you’re making
- Benefits-led – tell you reader how you’ll help them
- Urgency – time or supply limited offers force a buying decision
I agree that’s a lot to fit in, so rather than creating a ridiculously long headline try a combination of eye-catching headline and sub heading.
Let’s look at an example so you see what I mean.
OK, let’s say you deliver milk to local businesses. Your landing page is there to get them to sign up for a week’s free trial. Now let’s brainstorm using the 4 qualities listed above as a guide:
Focus: You offer milk deliveries to local businesses
Relevancy: Your offer is a week’s free milk to try the service
Benefits: It’s simple; customers can order and pay online and because it’s delivered to them they won’t run out or lose productivity because no one has to nip down the shops anymore
Urgency: You decide to only run the offer during September and October
All the important stuff that will make up the headline is underlined. Using that, here’s the headline:
Free fresh milk delivered to your door
Order and pay online so you’ll never run out of milk again
FREE 1 week trial during September and October only
OK, it’s a bit rough, but it gives you an idea of how to construct a headline.
Once you have a headline you’re happy with, it’s time to think about the rest of your landing page.
Each page you create must only be for one idea, so in this case it’s the free milk delivery trial. If you try to cram in more than one idea your page will become confused.
Oh, and make sure you concentrate on the benefits your customers will receive – this is not an opportunity to shout about how great you are.
Your reader only wants to know how you’re going to help them, so keep your message simple and finish it off with a clear and compelling call to action so they know how to sign up/buy from you.
As you can see, landing pages can be tricky customers, but if you follow my advice and create a strong headline and keep the focus of your page on your single offer and customer you won’t go far wrong.
About the Author: Sally Ormond is an independent professional copywriter and owner of Briar Copywriting Ltd. For tips on copywriting, marketing and social media, you can also read her words of wisdom on Briar Copywriting’s Blog and Google+
