Best Practices for B2B Landing Pages
Technically, a landing page is just the first page a searcher sees after clicking on your ad.
Ideally, a PPC landing page is targeted to a group of search terms, and created for the purpose of converting visitors to a desired action. In lead generation campaigns, well designed landing pages often convert at 3-4 times the rate of homepages or product pages.
Most B2B sites were created to inform, rather than to convert visitors to leads. People in “search mode” have little patience and are actively comparing you against all of the other paid and natural listings they just saw on their search results page, most of which are probably from your competitors. You only have moments to grab their attention and convert them to an actionable lead that you can market to.
Here are some tips for creating good landing pages:
- Have a Form on the Page. The most obvious way to increase conversions is to put a lead form on the landing page. If your forms are playing hide and go seek, it’s unlikely that your visitors will spend the time looking for them. Bringing your forms into plain view generally results in higher conversions.
- Offer Something of Interest. Of course, you can lead a visitor to a form but you have to motivate them to fill it out. Some prospects need the extra motivation of “lead bait” – something of value in exchange for their information. The best lead bait not only seems valuable to the visitor, but also promotes your service. Whitepapers, webinars, free trials of software and similar offers can both motivate visitors to become a lead, and improve their perceptions of your company.
- Keep It Simple. Another way to increase the likelihood of the desired behavior is to minimize the number of distractions on the page. The copy on your landing page should be clear and concise. Although there needs to be enough content on your page to explain your product, service, or lead bait, long copy on a landing page rarely performs as well as short, simple copy.
- Only Use Relevant Navigation. Depending on your audience, you may also want to remove some or most of your navigation. Some pages benefit from removing all links except for a clickable logo in the top left corner, whereas other pages perform better with additional links.
- Keep Forms as Short as Possible. Respect your visitors’ time. Forms should be kept as short as possible while still remaining actionable for your sales team.
- Build Confidence with a Privacy Policy. Reassure visitors that by giving you their contact information, they won’t be subjected to a deluge of spam. Have a link to your privacy policy near your form, or simply state that you will not rent or sell their contact information to anyone, with a link to privacy policy at the bottom of your page.
