5 Things You Need to Know Before Creating a Landing Page for Your Business

Featured article by Habib Khan, Independent Technology Author

Building a landing page for your business for the first time can be intimidating, especially if you’re a small business or a start-up and you don’t have the support of a larger IT team. After all, your landing page is an important element of your website. This is the page that most visitors will see when entering your website and if they’re not impressed by what they see, they’re not likely to use your services or buy your products.

That is why it is important to have a plan in place before you begin working on your landing page. Here are five things you absolutely need to know before creating your page.

What your goals are

If you’re planning on quickly throwing together a page and then changing content as needed, you’re going to find yourself losing out on potential customers. From the very beginning of your landing page’s existent, you want it to clearly reflect your goals. Think about what you’re trying to achieve with your page. What is the action you’re trying to get your visitors to perform? Are you trying to get them to purchase your e-book? Or maybe you want them to enter their email address so that they can access the rest of your content? Whatever it is that you’re hoping to achieve, write down what your goals are and brainstorm what you need to do to achieve it.

What visitors need from your landing page

After you know what your goals are, think about what you need on your page to allow your visitors to achieve that goal. Most visitors don’t need a lot of lengthy content because they’re not going to read it. They need to know what you’re trying to sell and why they should invest in it. If you want them to fill out your forms, you’re going to need to quickly sell them your product or service and make it clear to them what the next step is. A good landing page will effectively lead your visitors down a sales funnel. If you’re not sure how to go about creating a good sales funnel, consider using Clickfunnels, a service that allows you to easily build sales funnels from existing templates. Hustlelife.net offers a great review of Clickfunnels.

What content can help tell your story

Now that you know what your goals are and what your visitors need from your landing page, think about the content you need to collect to make your vision possible. Visitors need to quickly trust you and your brand. One of the ways to do this is by providing testimonials from other happy customers on your page. Testimonials help to target your specific audience because they help potential customers see that there are other people that are just like them using your services. If you do decide to use testimonials, make sure to use only the ones that effectively sell your business.

What layout you’re going to use

Landing pages don’t need to be overly complex. Their goal is to quickly draw visitors in so that potential customers will dive further into your website. Most landing pages have a strong header, some need to know info and a call-to-action area. Look at examples of other landing pages to see which ones are most visually appealing to you and think about if a similar layout would work for your business. It is also important to think about whether your layout is optimized for mobile users. With so many people accessing the web from cell phones and tablets these days, you don’t want to use a layout that doesn’t convert well because visitors will be unable to fill out your form.

What you need to do to track performance

You’re going to want to track analytics to see if people are coming to your landing page and if they’re continuing to click through to the next page. Knowing how to track this information before your landing page launches is important because you don’t want to launch your page and suddenly realize you have no way of tracking data. Most businesses are using Google Analytics to track their performance since their reports allow you to see which pages visitors entered and how long they spend on each page.

Conclusion

The more you can plan out in advance of creating your first landing page, the less intimidating the process will be. If you’re feeling uncertain about creating your own page, consider using a service that will take you through all of the necessary steps. Having a solid strategy from the beginning allows you to create a great page.