Originally published February 16, 2021 , updated on January 20, 2023

No matter what industry you’re in, you need at least one lead generation landing page. These pages do all the hard work of grabbing your audience’s attention, and convincing them to sign up for your offer. All in all, that’s a lot to ask for from just one page. 

Unfortunately, lead generation landing pages are easy to set up, but difficult to perfect. And there’s nothing worse than pouring your heart and soul into creating what you think is a great landing page, only to see a super high bounce rate. Seeing your hard-earned traffic leave the page without converting can be completely demoralising. 

Creating an effective lead generation landing page takes some finesse. There’s a fine line between providing enough information to tantalise leads, and completely overwhelming them. Each element on your page needs to work together flawlessly to successfully convert your visitors into leads.

Luckily, we have a few tips and tricks for optimising your lead generation landing page to boost your conversions. 

What is a Lead Generation Landing Page?

Though we hope that by now you’ll know what a landing page, there isn’t any harm in a little refresher. Generally speaking, landing pages come in two main flavours:

• Click-through landing pages
• Lead generation landing pages

In a nutshell, click-through landing pages are designed to qualify a visitor before they convert. They are there to ‘warm up’ your visitors before they make a purchase. They come in all shapes and sizes, and everything from product descriptions and white papers to case studies and blog posts work well as click-through landing pages. 

A lead generation landing page, on the other hand, is designed to generate leads. Shocking, I know. These are single-purpose pages, with only one goal – getting users to convert. Often, they offer something valuable in exchange for a visitor’s contact details. Ebooks, newsletters, white papers and case studies all make excellent ‘lead magnets’. 

Lead Generation Landing Pages Aren’t About Sales

A lead generation landing page isn’t designed to close any sales. That would kind of be like asking someone to marry you 10 minutes into the first date. However, while you may not be asking a user to pull out their wallet quite yet, you are asking for some kind of commitment. In this day and age, people don’t give away their contact information lightly. 

You’re still asking them to complete a transaction. Only, instead of exchanging money for goods or services, you’re asking them to exchange their contact details (and their permission for you to follow up with them) for some kind of offer or information. 

This initial transaction is a vital part of the sales process.

Now that you have a better understanding of what a lead generation landing page is, let’s talk about some of our tips and tricks for optimising your page’s conversion rates. 

12 Tips For Creating a Lead Generation Landing Page That Converts

No matter what industry you’re in, or what you’re generating leads for, the core elements of a lead generating landing page remain the same. According to Aaron Orendorff, VP of Marketing at Common Thread Collective:

“The industry doesn’t really matter. What matters is that your landing page is written directly to real people with real problems in search of real solutions. At the end of the day, people are people. We all have universal desires as well as universal fears. It’s always about finding the pain — the hell — your audience is experiencing (right now). Leaning into that pain. Bringing it to life. And then delivering your solution as the answer — the heaven.”

So obviously, being authentic and honest with your audience is key to improving conversion rates. Great in theory, but how do you put it into practice? 

1. Carefully Define Your Target Market

The first step to creating a killer lead generation landing page is to clearly define who you want to appeal to. Don’t make the mistake of trying to create a page that appeals to everyone. Maybe your business serves a wide audience, but your landing page should appeal to as narrow a group as possible. 

To begin, create a buyer persona, or ideal potential customer for the offer you’re creating. This way, you can make sure that each element on your page speaks directly to your audience. Obviously, this might mean that you’ll need multiple pages to appeal to all your different potential customers.

2. Create a Relevant and Enticing Lead Magnet 

As we’ve mentioned before, people don’t like to give away their contact information for nothing. When planning your landing page, plan what you’re going to entice them with. Using the information you gathered for your buyer persona, decide what would be a valuable and relevant resource.

Free or low-cost trials do well, as do in-depth reports and white papers. 

According to GrooveHQ, trials had an 8.4% of visitor-to-trial conversion rate in a study of 712 small businesses.

If you choose to go with a report, be aware that Contently found that many readers spend fewer than 30 seconds engaging with long blog posts. That’s tough when the average length for a downloadable is around 13 pages. Find an appropriate length for whatever downloadable resource you’re offering. Make sure that it’s valuable enough to entice visitors, but not so overwhelming that people don’t even bother reading it.

Neil Patel covers this well in his blog:

“Brainstorm on the major pain points of your target market. Then, plug one into the Google Keyword Planner and ask it to deliver its number magic. Let’s suppose that I’m a fitness trainer and want to develop lead generation for selling a digital product. 

For help with finding the right subject for an eBook, I turn to the Keyword Planner. I enter ‘flat abs training’ and find long-tail keywords that I can use as subtopics for my PDF. Then, I offer it to my visitors and it should lead to improved conversion rates.”

If you have multiple landing pages for different audience segments, you’ll also need to create multiple lead magnets to appeal to each segment. HubSpot is the king of this. They offer a wide variety of templates, tools and PDFs to attract the different types of customers that they target. 

By offering a valuable lead magnet to your customers, you’re relying on reciprocity. Users will feel compelled to give you their details if you’re offering them something they want. 

3. Only Have One Goal, and Eliminate All Other Distractions

Your landing page should have only one goal. Whether you want people to sign up for free trial, download an ebook or subscribe to your newsletter, that should be the only focus of your page. To improve conversion rates, this should also be the lowest amount of commitment a user will have to display on the path to becoming a paying customer. 

• Some common goals for lead generation landing pages include:
• Subscribing to your newsletter
• Downloading a free ebook or whitepaper
• Scheduling a call
• Signing up for a webinar

Each element of your landing page should play some kind of role in moving visitors closer to achieving this goal. To do this, you need to eliminate all possible distractions, or other paths a user could take. If you want people to fill in a form to download your ebook, you shouldn’t also ask them to subscribe to your newsletter, or offer them 10% off their first purchase. This means removing all navigation and any outside links – including links to your social media.

We call this ‘forcing people into the funnel’. Basically, you need to give your visitors one option – fill in a form or leave. Navigation and links to social media just give users an opportunity to leave your landing page without converting. 

CrazyEgg does an excellent job of forcing people into the funnel. Their page guides visitors towards the goal of creating their first heat map, giving users only one option – enter their website’s URL or leave. 

Aside from completing this goal, there’s nothing else for a user to do on the page, other than enjoy the pretty illustrations. 

4. Grab Attention with a Benefit-Driven Headline

According to research, you have about 15 seconds to grab a user’s attention once they hit your landing page. In those 15 seconds, you need to let them know exactly what you’re offering, and convince them that they need it. No small feat. You need to convince them immediately of how your offer will benefit them.

Though crafting benefit-driven, attention-grabbing headlines may sound like a difficult taks, it’s actually quite simple once you know the formula. Many of the best headlines follow the same three principles:

• Ask a question related to your product or service
• Promise the user some kind of value
• Explain how they can reach their goals with the help of your product or service

SEO tool MOZ challenges users to “up their SEO game” by signing up for the software, creating an excellent example of a catchy and attention-grabbing headline. 

5. Use Imagery That Reflects Your Offer

Human beings are extremely visual creatures. A user’s eye will take only 2.6 seconds to land on the area of your landing page which will most influence their first impression. And user’s spend around 5.9 seconds looking at a page’s main image.

Make sure you’re using good visuals to express the main crux of your page and offer. This also helps to build trust with your visitors. 

There’s a reason why so many marketers use high-quality, relevant visuals on their landing pages. Faces, especially, work wonders, and this is why Pat Flynn uses his signature and photo on his home page. 

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