In digital strategy, your landing page is your brand’s elevator pitch delivered in milliseconds.
A high-performance landing page captures your audience’s attention from the get-go, fosters engagement, and drives conversions.
However, nailing down a publish-ready landing page can be difficult (especially considering customers’ attention spans and behaviors are forever changing).
Enter landing page optimization, a concept that’ll help you always stay in tune with your prospects’ needs and wants, and develop landing pages that result in conversions.
On that note, let’s dive in and find out what landing page optimization is, why it is important, what the steps to optimizing landing pages are, and which elements require special attention.
What is landing page optimization (LPO)?
Landing pages are a prospect’s first impression of your company, and they dictate the following actions.
For example, if you have a not-so-great landing page, chances are you’ll lose the trust of prospects. If you have a great landing page, you’ll win their trust (and even their sale).
So, you need to optimize your landing pages to ensure they’re ready for first impressions—also known as landing page optimization (LPO).
To successfully complete this task for B2B landing pages, you might need to change various elements on your pages, such as headings, images, CTA buttons, content copy, and more.
Why is landing page optimization important?
A well-optimized landing page can increase visitor engagement and help you reach specific marketing strategy goals.
For example, even simple changes to your copy, visuals, and headlines can help you optimize your landing page, which in turn will improve conversion rates, enhance user experience, and elevate overall website performance.
8 steps to building a landing page that converts
Let’s explore the 8-step process for building a landing page that converts.
Step 1: Keep lead conversion top of mind
The first step is to keep your goal for LPO in mind. In most instances, folks optimize their landing pages to improve lead conversion.
If you’re in the same boat as them, it might be beneficial to explore some strategies that can make lead conversion on your landing page more effective, such as:
- Investing in lead magnets (such as research studies, e-books, expert interviews, etc.)
- Creating targeted call-to-actions (e.g., instead of writing “Click Here,” you could write something like “Click here to learn landing page optimization secrets.”)
- Conducting A/B tests on landing pages to see how each element performs.
- Getting prospects’ email IDs to nurture them further through targeted ad campaigns.
- Use a powerful website hosting platform to ensure your landing pages have ultra-fast load times to prevent users from bouncing.
Step 2: Analyze traffic sources
Next, finding out which marketing channels your traffic comes from will help you invest more in those sources (and influencers active in those places).
To find your traffic sources, you can use your CRM (customer relationship management) tool or analytics tools like Google Analytics. All information is under the “Acquisitions” tab; from there, locate “Traffic acquisition” for a detailed breakdown.
Step 3: Empathize with your target audience
At this stage, learn more about customer attributes, pain points, and goals/motivations that led them to this point.
You can do this by:
- Having an honest conversation with your prospects
- Getting the insights of customer-facing teams like sales, customer success and customer support
- Leveraging social media listening tools to access customer information
This will not only help you polish your offer and copy, but it will also help you understand the hiccups customers face when they’re on your landing pages and what you could do to improve their experience and avoid any distractions.
Step 4: Create an Ideal Customer Profile
If you have enough information about what makes your customers tick and stick, it’s now time to create ideal customer profiles (ICPs).
Creating these ICPs will help you finalize which lead types to target, making your marketing campaigns more focused on a particular subset of customers and their wants and needs.
To create an ICP, we recommend supplementing your existing customer information with other resources, such as customer journey mapping and the Breadcrumbs Reveal tool (which uses all your customer data to create ICPs for free).
Step 5: Utilize lead scoring
Lead scoring models will optimize lead conversion by assigning numerical values to indicate the interest level and engagement of inbound leads.
For example, any time someone interacts with your social media or email campaigns, visits your pricing page, requests a demo, or makes a sales call, it counts as an interest level.
Based on this, lead scoring models help you find which leads are most likely to convert; hence, you can focus all your attention on them.
Solutions like Breadcrumbs Copilot not only help you assign the values to each activity in your lead scoring models but also consider multiple factors you might have in mind (e.g., demographics, customer behavior, engagement frequency, etc.)
Step 6: Build a creative brief
At this stage, you can develop creative briefs based on the information and insights you have and create a strategy that aligns with your user and business goals.
These briefs (even if they’re as long as half a page) will help your marketing team better understand your end goals. Supplemented with the necessary data, they now have all the resources they need to make strategic decisions and make your campaigns stand out.
Step 7: Perform competitor analysis
Every marketing strategy benefits from keeping a close eye on your competitors’ activities (ultimately, this kind of snooping allows us to gain inspiration, find new ideas, and innovate).
For this same reason, we’d recommend checking out the sources your competitors get traffic from, understanding which kind of leads they target, what offers they make, and how they structure their landing pages.
Doing this will help you learn from your competitor’s successes and mistakes and will also allow you to create better offers, visuals, and landing pages.
Step 8: Remember to retarget
Lastly, once you’ve found customer information and optimized your landing pages, the only thing left to do is retarget prospects who were not converted the first time. The key to this is personalization based on customer behavior data.
You could run paid PPC (pay-per-click) ads on the platforms your prospects most often visit or collaborate with influencers they look up to. You could also engage them with new offers or incentives (like free shipping or discounts) to close the sale.
Elements of a landing page that convert visitors into leads
Here are some elements of a landing page that deserve special attention, as they’ll help you convert your leads into customers.
Message consistency
Suppose your leads visit your landing page from other sources (e.g., social media or newsletters). In that case, you’ll need to ensure the message and the offer you sold on those particular channels remain consistent with the offer/message you have on the landing page.
For example, suppose you advertise a 20% sale in your newsletters and get customers interested in the offer to click on it and go to your landing page. In that case, the landing page must also have the same offer to ensure their interest results in a sale.
Benefits, not features
Many companies, when selling their products to customers, focus on the features of their product/service and not the ultimate benefit the customer might get after buying their product.
This doesn’t allow customers to visualize just how much impact the product/service can make in their lives; hence, they don’t buy it. This is why we recommend focusing on the benefits of your product/service in your landing page copy rather than only talking about your features.
Customer reviews
For leads to trust you, you must provide them with social proof. This could include product images, ratings, awards, press mentions, client names, etc., but customer reviews will make the most impact.
Multiple studies have proven that customers trust what their peers and other customers say about a product much more than what a brand says about its own product.
Need inspiration? Here’s a great example from Henry Meds, which proudly showcases Trustpilot reviews (with a TrustScore of 4.7) on its weight loss medication and semaglutide diet plans.
Including positive customer reviews near your CTAs can increase your conversion rate tenfold.
Effective CTAs
Last but not least, to have impressive click-through rates, you’ll need to have remarkable CTAs. Here are some tips you can consider for making impressive CTAs:
- Highlighting the benefits the customers could get from the product/service in the CTA
- Including action-oriented verbs that make the CTAs witty and easy to understand
- Ensuring your CTAs are crystal clear (in terms of both design and copy) and telling the user exactly what action they need to take
These are just some ideas! Optimizing CTAs is an essential part of the entire customer acquisition and conversion process. We suggest A/B testing and innovating your CTA offers and designs to see what works best for you and your brand.
Convert your landing page visitors with Breadcrumbs
We previously discussed how focusing on your ICPs and investing in a lead-scoring model will help you become laser-focused on the most important customers who are ready to convert.
Breadcrumbs can automate the entire task of finding ICPs and scoring leads so you can focus more on marketing strategies and important decisions!
Check out Breadcrumbs Reveal to build your ICPs for free, and sign up for Breadcrumbs Copilot to automate the entire lead scoring process!