When designing landing pages, there are a couple key challenges that you’ll face when optimizing your pages for the highest possible conversions. First, you’ll face various visitors from difference sources, whether through paid, social or email campaigns.  Remember to use the same language used in the campaign.  Visitors see this as “message match”, and this helps to develop trust with the customer and eventually convert them.

People who visit your landing pages need to be persuaded to purchase through the use of targeted messaging.  But with all of the different visitors, campaigns and locations, how can you set up landing pages specific to all of different targets?  They key is to generally define audience ‘types’ and then create landing pages with specific messages to these targets.

The next challenge is to capture the data that you need from the site visitor in the hopes of creating a conversion.  This usually involves having some kind of form on the page.  Asking visitors to fill out a form can be challenging, so the less fields to fill, the better.  Remember that people don’t give their information easily, so designing the page with branded visuals helps in portraying trust and authority for your brand.

Why take time to optimize your landing page?

It expedites the sales process.  Capturing data from your prospects helps you to expedite your sales process.  One you have their information, you can place them in to your sales cycle and eventually turn them into customers.

It will lower your cost per lead.  When your landing pages become more successful, your cost per lead goes down.  It’s important to drive traffic to your landing pages to promote their success.  A lot of time and money goes into creating your campaigns, be sure to make them pay off as much as possible.

What do you need to include on your page?

Here is a short list of items that should be on every landing page:

• Logo
• Offer.  The images and text on the page should answer this one question for your visitors:  “What can you do for me”.  This should be the first thing they see when they visit the page.
• Large, beautiful image.  The image should relate to the text and offer in some way. 
• Call to action.  Your call to action should be clear and concise.  Be sure to make the steps obvious and easy to do.
• No Navigation.  If possible, remove any non-essential navigation on the page.  You want page visitors to focus on your offer.
• Form.  The length and usability of the form is crucial in getting conversions.  Remember that the lower the number of fields in your form, the greater number of leads you’ll receive.

Landing pages should be usable, readable, and persuasive and appear trustworthy. 

If you’re a small business, integrating social media into your site is essential.  Integrating social media into your site can be a challenge, especially if you don’t know what to do or how to do it.

Your social media channels should work with your site to help your brand gain exposure on the internet.

How do you do this?

Use visible social media buttons on your site

While this may seem obvious, double check.  Make sure that your social media buttons appear on every page of your site.  Also, so that users don’t navigate away from your site, make sure that when the user selects the button, the social media site opens in another window.  The goal is to increase the interaction the user has with your brand, not to lead them away.

On the image below, The Empress Secret has chosen to add their social media icons on the top right of the site:
 

Integrate social media posts into your home page

Google and other web search engines crawl the internet looking for updated content continually.  If the home page of your site contains a ‘feed’ of your twitter or blog content, the content is being updated every time that you blog or tweet.

Next, if there is a feed to your home page, make sure that you’re updating your social media on a consistent basis.  Showing old material or content dates on your home page does not show well for your brand.    New, relevant material on your site shows your customers that you take your business and your product seriously and you’re providing relevant, up to date material.

Below, Diginomica shows a series of recent conversations from their social media on their site:
 
Include Share Buttons

Think of Share buttons like this:  If you take the time to write and post content, why not also make sure that your followers can share it with their friends?  If you don’t, you could potentially be missing out on a ton of business.

To do this, check out apps like http://www.addthis.com/ or http://www.sharethis.com.

Internet Retailer shows the social media “share” buttons in the left column, beside this article.  When you scroll down on the site, the icons follow as you scroll.
 
Look to Google Analytics for Help

Google analytics can help you to track how people are using your social media buttons.  They suggest setting up Event Tracking in your Analytics account.  If you don’t know how to do this, Google provides a easy to use guide, just select the link above.

Allow social log ins to make it easier to connect to you.

With social log ins, users don’t have to create an account on your site.  Instead, they use their own log in information from their favorite social media site to log into your site.

Using social log ins helps to create a community for your brand quickly.  From here, engage with your followers for more sales.

There you have it.  Some quick ideas on integrating social media into your site.

Do you know who your customers are?  How old are they?  How much money do they make?  What kind of car do they drive?  Do they own a home?  Do they have children?  

Understanding this kind of information will help you to create a Buyer Persona.

A buyer persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers.

This information provides great insight for you and your company.  The information can be used to guide the development of your products and services, and can help to lead your company for the future.

The more detail in the Buyer Persona, the better.  Here are some things to include:

• Customer demographics (age, income, occupation, home ownership).  Demographics are the known facts about your customers.  
• Psychographics (behavior patterns, motivations and goals).  Psychographics is the study of personality, values, opinions, attitudes, interests, and lifestyles of your target audience.

The more detailed you are, the better.

Sample Buyer Persona

Wink Online Marketing created a great basic template to assist you in creating a basic buyer persona:

Here is their sample completed persona from the Buyer Persona Institute:

Depending on the number of products or services that you offer, you may develop several buyer personas for your target customers.

Why Buyer Personas are Important

Developing Buyers Personas are important because it will help you to better understand your target.  Developing a better understanding of your target will help you to better define their needs, leading to more sales.

• You can develop key words based on your buyer personas.  This will help to attract customers to your site.
• Identify the type of content that they like best.  Your audience will gravitate toward that content — and it’s this type of content that you should focus more of your content marketing efforts on.  This includes everything - blogging, images, social media, videos – should all be created with your persona’s in mind.
• Over time, they help you to develop a personality and style that are attractive to your target audience.

What now?

Refine.  Refine.  Refine.    Your Buyer Persona is a work in progress.  As your target audience ages and changes, your Buyer Persona will have to continually be updated to ensure that you’re providing the right product or service for your target.  

This is something that you really don’t want to lose sight of.

When working with clients, one thing we notice is that many are focused on site design.  Equally if not more important to consider prior to starting any new site is function and usability.  A nice site design is great, but understanding how your customers interact on your site must be understood first.
 
Typically, the purpose of any website is to prompt a sale (product/service/information).  Understanding how customers navigate through that process is essential.  
 
Here are three essential rules that will help you to think through the process:

1. Make it Easy.  Confusing navigation is a deal killer. Make it easy for customers to find the products or services they are looking for.  Think about the multiple ways someone will look for something.   Create an outline and test it.  Make sure it’s easy to navigate to everything on your site.  In thinking about your navigation headings,  don't say (for example) "pumps" when you really mean "shoes".  Think through the hierarchy of the selection.  
2. Make it Obvious.  Don’t hide the customer service essentials, such as links to shopping carts, phone numbers or other relevant contact information.  The easier it is to find, the more it will be used.  Put timely information up front.   
3. Make it Relevant.  It’s a drag to go back to a site that’s not updated on a regular basis.  Ask yourself what makes you keep coming back to a site over and over?  Relevant and timely information.  That takes work and time.  If you don’t have it, find someone to help, it’s that important.  Check for broken links and invalid pages.  Simply adding a blog feed will help to provide consistent, timely info to your home page.  Update home page articles regularly, especially if you're retail.

Finally, once you have your site set up and running, give it some time and then go back and study how users are interacting.  Are they getting stuck and leaving pages?  How are they navigating to your products or services?  Can you make this quicker for them?  Is the information on that page relevant to what they are searching for (does the page have a high bounce rate)?  If not, it's time to revise the copy on the page and then measure again.  Yep, it's the old "wash, rinse, repeat" cycle again.

This time, you'll be able to see your improvement, because you know what you're measuring.

Keeping these three guidelines in mind when creating and managing your site will save you time and also help to gain sales. 

Over time, we’ve developed a complete ignorance towards website banners. So ignorant are we, that when studying banners through the use of eye tracking software, this study found that users blocked out the banners entirely. So if our filters are so sophisticated, how do we combat banner blindness and get our messages into the mind of our users?

Why Did We Use Banners?
Banners were the first form of advertising online and were born through developers and brands aiming to monetize the then new-fangled platform of the internet. However, the inbound nature of the internet is at odds with the outbound character of the banner ad. As the internet has developed, as has our knowledge of what to expect online, as well as our defensive filters designed to steer us clear of threats or, in the case of the internet, irrelevance. 

We have the same subconscious ignorance when it comes to the typical homepage carousel. This was proven by a study reported on Business Insider, which found that users don’t pay too much attention carousels, as they’re perceived as intrusive or ads.  With carousels, lots of competing messages in the same place, usually the home page, leads to focus being lost.

Why Do We Still Use Banners?
Perhaps there’s an element of complacency, as website owners continue doing what they’ve always done in maintaining the status quo. Alternatively, maybe brands continue to believe that banners work. Maybe they’re content with receiving the advertising revenue from their banners. Whatever the case, it doesn’t change the fact that banners still plague our screens and still have the impact of using a toffee hammer to break down a fire door. 

But what should you do instead?
The alternatives to banners will depend on the reasoning behind the inclusion of banners in the first place. 

If you use banners for advertising and revenue generating, there a more effective ways of generating income via your website. For example, you could:

• Write product reviews 
• Include ads in the body of your pages as opposed to in the header or side bar 
• Affiliate schemes, including links to sponsored websites
• Guest blogging 

If you use banners and carousels for your own benefit; to promote new products, highlight company news and developments or cross-sell services, then instead of using banners, you should consider these two significant things:

• Timing. A banner is a generic shout at every website visitor. A catchall bellow will always fail to attract the attention of users with specific needs. Your first objective should be to serve your customer with what they came to your site for. Then, once you’ve met their needs, you can show them what would have otherwise been in the banner. Include this information on after sales confirmation pages, your form thank you pages or even underneath product descriptions or blog posts.
• Placement. People tend to ignore the right-hand side of the page, as they’re aware that, on most websites, this area contains ads. So you need to position your offering in a place where the user is going to focus. Within the content itself could prove profitable and, in particular, at the foot of the page. Not as many people will see something hidden at the foot of the page, but for those that do make it down there, they’re searching for something else to do, a next place to go. As a result, attention tends to increase at the foot of web pages, which will give your offering more chance of being noticed and clicked.

As with most things regarding web design, it’s all about testing and iteratively improving. Try the above and see if it works for you. 

We certainly can’t reverse banner blindness, but our job as designers and marketers is to find alternative ways to make things work for both our customers and our business. Increasingly, we’re finding that banners aren’t the best way to do this these days.

Do you use banners or carousels? Do they work for you? It would be great to get your feedback in the comments below.