You have different parts of the funnel that you want to lead people down in order to get them to convert. Our end goal down here at the bottom is a conversion, which for a lot of you could mean money. If you’re an e-commerce store, your end goal for conversion is to get people to buy your product. If you’re a service-based business, maybe it’s getting someone to make an appointment or schedule a demo.

But let’s talk about the top of the funnel because when you are guiding people into landing pages, a lot of times they’re going to start up here. If any of you follow a company called HubSpot (great resource, check out their blog sometime), they refer to it as TOFU, which means Top of the Funnel. So when we’re talking about people who are at top of the funnel, these are people that go to your blog, who visit your website, general stuff like that. People who are just out seeking information and maybe they find your company through social media, find you through a Google search, or something like that.

Eventually, you get to these MOFU people, Middle Of the Funnel, and then eventually you get to the BOFU people, Bottom of the Funnel. These are the people who you want to guide to your landing page.

A Landing Page is where your consumer is going to take action.

Where landing pages fit in is usually going to be at the middle or the bottom of the funnel. They’re a little bit further along in the funnel—their buying journey—than people at the top. People at the top are just explorers. We have so much information at our fingertips these days with the internet, that a lot of times when we start even trying to figure out if we have a problem that needs solving or we’re looking for something, we’re all up here just doing Google searches.

And we start getting down here, maybe we clicked on someone’s advertisement and so it’ll lead them to a landing page. Maybe we get there through an email campaign we signed up for on a particular company’s email list, and once we ended up on that email list, they sent us to a specific landing page for a promotion they’re doing. A landing page is a place where people are really going to convert.

 

Your landing page is not the run of the mill, normal webpage that’s visible on our navigation menu on our website.

Most companies put landing pages in place because they want to convert people on a specific action. Think of it this way: it’s beneficial to use a landing page for a specific conversion goal rather than sending them to your normal webpage because you’re kind of leaving it to chance for them to explore and for them to land where you’re hoping they will land.

Most people, especially if you’re a small business owner, who think about our websites, we often think that people are taking the same chronological path that we would take because we maybe created the website, right? I think someone is going to go to my Homepage, and then after they go to my Services page, and then the About Us page. And it really just doesn’t happen that way. Your visitors can land on any given page at any given time.

So if that happens, why not put a little bit more control in your hands by sending them somewhere and directing them to a product or service that’s really important to you at this moment in time. Landing pages can help you achieve that.

 

What are some of the fundamentals or the elements that go into developing your landing page?

1. “When I’m building a landing page, should I have a navigation menu on it? Yes or no?”

I think it’s optional.

Traditionally, there’s another term for landing page that sometimes gets used interchangeably, called a “squeeze page.” Usually there is no navigation on a squeeze page. If there is navigation, it’s minimal. Some marketers are saying that’s a trend of the past, that we should consider putting navigation on landing pages nowadays. I’m somewhere in the middle. You can, but I would limit how much navigation I put on a landing page still. Because again, when we think back to that funnel image I just showed you, you want to guide people down the funnel. And if you leave it too open, you may decrease the opportunity to lead them down the funnel the way you want.

If you have navigation, here are some of the navigation menu items you might have:

• I’ve seen some landing pages link people back to a company blog, if you want to share more information.

• It could be as something as simple as linking people to your terms and conditions or your privacy policy. Why would you do that? Because that just helps you adhere to advertising guidelines and things like that that don’t get you as a company into trouble.

• You could lead people to another page that just lists out all your services in a nutshell.

It’s totally up to you.

For companies creating a standalone landing page, often they will link back to the blog or service pages on their main company website. You’re not building an entirely new site when you create the landing page; the landing page will still link into your regular website.

So, no navigation or should you have it? I think it’s up to you. My stance is, “Yes, but limited.”

2. Every landing page needs to have a CTA.

CTA stands for call to action. We always need to make sure that we have a call to action in place. A call to action is your very simple, yet blatant, out-loud statement of what are you asking people to do when they land on that page.

If I’m running a Facebook ad campaign or a Google ad campaign – I’ll use my own digital marketing firm as an example – offering social media management services, and someone ends up on my landing page, the copy needs to say the same thing my ad does. Then, my CTA needs to be maybe sign up for a free consultation, sign up for a free meeting, sign up for a free social media analysis. Whatever it is, I need to be very clear what I’m asking people to do. I’m not leading people to my landing page for informational purposes, I’m leading them there to take action.

3. Your most critical content needs to be above the fold.

The most critical information that you want people to see needs to be above the point where they have to scroll down, because guess what? Not everybody scrolls!

Critical information that you want to communicate includes that call to action, your promotion or whatnot, in copy that’s very clearly written that people can understand, all above the fold. Because if you rely on them to scroll down, they may never see the information you have below that. Now, there’s not anything wrong with having a landing page that requires people to scroll down, you just want your most pertinent information and your call to action above that point, okay?

Make sure, if someone’s developing it for you, you’re getting that tested out on different screen sizes because you must nowadays. We’ve got mobile devices, we’ve got tablets, we’ve got desktops, et cetera, so you want to know generally where the fold is across devices.

4. “Does my landing page need a dedicated domain or URL?”

Should your landing page be something totally different than your regular website URL?

My answer is: it doesn’t have to be. To show you what I mean, I’ll use my company again, so gogettergroup.com.

You could do subdomains. It could be, for example, again, if I’m running an ad and we’re offering a free social media analysis, it could be socialanalysis.gogettergroup.com. And then I use that in the ad campaign to guide people.

If I felt really strongly about buying another domain, then I could and it maybe that domain is socialmediaanalysis.com. It’s totally up to you, but I don’t think it’s necessary to buy a separate domain. Point being, I think you can work really well by doing subdomains. Even just doing a regular gogettergroup.com/socialmediaanalysis and building the landing page as part of my regular website but doesn’t have to be visible to the public on my navigation menu.

5. You need to have a contact form on your landing page.

That way, it’s easy for people to get in touch with you. You could put contact information like a phone number on there, too. That’s a great way to get people in touch if you want to drive phone calls, but you need to put the contact form as well. And again, ideally, that’s also visible above the fold.

My recommendation is: don’t ask for more than three to five pieces of information on your contact form. If you need a lot more to make a sale, do what we call a “double opt-in.” Get all the critical information up-front (name, phone number, email address). Then, after you capture that, you can always send a follow-up to get more information if you need it.

 

Here are my favorite resources for where you can get landing pages built.

• One of my favorites is leadpages.net. I’ve used it for years, and it’s filled with pre-tested templates that you can use to build your landing page.

• Another great resource is unbounce.com, they help with building email campaigns and landing pages.

• A third one, especially if you’re selling a lot of information-style products, is going to be ClickFunnels.

All of these different services vary in price range, and you don’t have to use them, but these are simple independent builders. They’re great for people who don’t know how to build a full website. If you want to quickly create and generate your own landing page, they’re a great resource.

If you have the resource of a developer, work with your developer, develop something custom that would work well for your branding and your business, and keep those things in mind when you do create the landing page. Don’t create something that’s totally off-brand, make sure it stays within your branding, and that’s a great place to start for building your landing page.

 

I hope you all enjoyed today’s lesson. You can always check us out our website for more tips, gogettergroup.com or sonjacrystal.com, and if you ever have any questions, always feel free to message me and we’ll talk about these topics based around your questions. Until next time!