PRODUCT LANDING PAGE AND LEAD GENERATION – DOES ONE REALLY LEAD TO THE OTHER?

■Creating landing pages as part of your product marketing efforts is one of the most underrated tasks ever. ■Let’s take a look at some of the top misconceptions: ■It’s just going to be one page ■All you need is a form, a set of content, some images, a possible form, and a call to action ■You just need to determine the messages you are going to pass on to your target audience and you can fill the rest of the page with words and data that build a larger- than-life impression on the customer. ■That’s all! Right? ■Wrong!

■Landing page is one of the most critical initiatives that organizations take for specific lead-generation activities. It’s usually one of the final stages that help gain your audience’s trust before they hit on that call to action button or fill that form, confirming that they are convinced to move to the next level of engagement. ■Hence, the more organized this approach is, the better the results you can reap from the effort. ■A landing page has three crucial elements – strategy, content, and design. In this article, we will focus on planning your landing page content and how it ties into the overall strategy. ■As always, before defining the solutions, we need to first deep dive into the problem areas. So here is the list of common complaints you will hear and observe after your landing page goes live:

■Irrelevant, poor quality content: ■Achieving simplicity is possibly the most complex job! This statement is especially true for landing pages. While generating loads of content for marketing collaterals is achievable, using just a few relevant words to convey every concept in a landing page is not that easy. ■Monotonous, generic push marketing content hardly provides any scope for differentiation. Heavily worded content, misleading claims, or unclear headings confuse the audience and drive them away from your landing page. ■Landing pages usually focus on specific aspects of the business; hence the content too must not meander away from the zone of focus. ■Similarly, the power of genuine content too is valuable, and helps garner qualified sales leads.

■Poor user experience ■Whether it software marketing such as enterprise asset management software, J2EE business consulting, or consumer-oriented businesses such as furniture, the number of words you can use is restricted. Hence grabbing your target audience’s attention with every word you use and the manner in which these words are presented are critical. ■Without engaging with the audience, what results is often a landing page laden with content, scaring them away. This phenomenon in web jargon is called poor user experience in terms of content. ■Your visitors primarily reach the landing page looking for some confirmation of what they’ve heard about you. They then need to take definite decisions while on the page. Poor quality of design, low quality of info-graphics, and exhaustive information hence tire them out.

■Disorganized Information architecture ■Even the best of content is lost when the flow of thought and content structure is flawed. Well-organized information architecture helps visitors find the details they are looking for with ease. As easy as this sounds, often content structure threatens to get out of hand with repetitive concepts and confusing content structure. ■Poor landing page maintenance ■Landing pages with outdated events and offers can be quite an embarrassment. In addition, poor hygiene checks such as broken links, excruciatingly slow loading times, disconnected page link, and factual and content errors are immediate put-offs. A common unfortunate trend is to start out with truckloads of dynamic contents and marketing resources that dwindle into oblivion as months go by. Your audience’s interest levels also decrease proportionally. ■Ever heard of the SEO? ■So you now have a great landing page, yet it is not bringing you the desired number of visitors – it’s probably because your content is not SEO friendly, which does not really make it discoverable. Not doing homework on the most popular keywords that the target audience searches for to reach you can be detrimental to being found easily. ■Elaborate forms ■Well forms are a popular feature of landing page, but your form could even be the reason that drives away your potential audience. Probably, your form pops on every visitor’s face without permission or it’s way too long. Ensure that your forms are not intimidating to your visitors. ■All these factors lead to one of the most dreaded phenomena in landing page – high bounce rates!