Are you looking to learn about landing pages and website design in Las Vegas? You’ve come to the right place…
We’ll start with the basics and give you great ideas on how to choose the right landing page design for your specific business need.
So, let’s get started!
What Is A Landing Page?
A landing page is exactly that — a page where your users land after clicking on something. For most B2B applications, specifically for what we’re going to be talking about here, the landing page is where a user lands after clicking on an ad. It’s going to be very focused around paid traffic and used in conjunction with ads to increase results.
Ultimately, a landing page is where the user enters your website, which rarely means your homepage. Instead, you want to create a very targeted page outlining and highlighting some specific points based on the specific use case.
Whether paid search and email, the purpose is getting them to land on a specific page. In most scenarios, this is much better than just sending them to the homepage or an About Us or anything like that. We work a lot with website design in Las Vegas and can assist you with your landing page needs.
What Problems Do Landing Pages Solve?
Your website’s homepage should be viewed as a catchall page for anyone and everyone, regardless of who they are and why they’re there. In most cases when a user ends up on your homepage, they’ll click around, view your About Us page, Team page, Services page, or whatever route they go down. But it’s going to be very hard for you to pinpoint exactly what they looked at and why they viewed it, after they fill out your contact form.
A landing page, in theory, will solve this problem exactly. You could have an email that you send out where you’re talking about a new service, with a link that sends users to a very specific landing page design for that service. The landing page could have a contact form on it, or you could use dynamic number insertion, which we’ll discuss more later. You’ll be able to see exactly when the user filled out the form and what page they were on when they did.
And it’s more than just being able to track back down to the URL. It’s understanding the intent of the user, which is really what we want to discover through this landing page.
So just to recap, we are sending traffic from our hypothetical email blast now to a specific landing page. With our analytics set up properly, we can know that a person came to our site on that exact page. We can then intelligently show them ads via remarketing on Facebook.
We can also know that when our phone rings, that the call came due to an email click. And it all gives us the ability to get super-targeted to how we can potentially show ads to that specific person for an ongoing basis. Solving problems relating to sending traffic to generic pages is important, and something that our las vegas web design services can help you with.
3 Key Steps & The Real Purpose of Landing Pages
- We want to increase the desire of the user by focusing only on what interests them and speaking to that interest directly.
- We want to decrease the work they are going to have to do before giving us all the information needed to take the next step. Whatever that step is, a form submission, downloading a white paper or infographic, making a phone call, etc., the landing page design should allow for a smooth transition to the goal.
- We want to make sure that we’ve eliminated as much of the confusion as possible before a user takes action and begin our follow up and sales process.
Benefits of a Landing Page
- Hyper focused messaging – allowing you to speak directly to your ideal customer avatar.
- Selling on your behalf – The landing page can explain many of the rout items that you find yourself having to explain regularly. This elevates the users understanding of your product or service and sets you up for more productive sales calls. You will find that a good landing page design will dramatically reduce the work hours and the follow up that your sales team typically must do before converting these users. Essentially, you are moving people more down the road, and you are only dealing with the higher-level questions.
Landing Page Design Must-Haves
CTA’s
This call to action can be whatever the desired outcome is of the landing page. Sign up for an appointment, download a white paper, make a phone call. Make it clear what you want the user to do.
Simplified (or totally removed) header
So you’ll notice that on most stores that sell anything online, you’re going to see the basic navigation up on top. You’ll see the product image on the left, and then you’ll have the product title. You’ll have reviews, you’ll have a short description, you’ll have a couple of call to actions, and then you’re going to have a price button. Pretty standard because that’s what people are used to.
So there’s no sense in making some crazy design for a landing page that’s going to throw the customers off. Additionally, for the sake of a landing page, we will often remove the header and footer completely, which does not allow a user to navigate away from the page, get lost on other pages, and not perform the desired action.
Value Propositions
One marketing lingo term that’s often thrown around is the word copy. Copy is just marketing jargon for text and the words can really be used interchangeably throughout. The sole purpose is to create and drive value for the customer. That’s the only benefit.
So what we will do is, we’re going to take this landing page and find a value proposition of whatever the customer is ultimately going to get. And sure, there might be other benefits, but there’s definitely going to be one sole purpose that they’re going to get out of that product or that service.
And we want to make sure that the value proposition is matched with that main benefit. What we’re going to do is we’re going to highlight the quality, the benefit, and then the value proposition.
Break your value propositions out into very clear, short and concise sentences where the user will be able to skim through it and understand the point. Start off with the most important up on top because the chance of them making it all the way to the bottom is not high.
Good Landing Page Design
Whether you are looking to convey a specific message to your audience, increase your conversion rates, get more phone calls and emails, or increase the effectiveness of your email campaigns, a strong landing page design can help. Our web design services in las vegas are here to help you with all of your landing page needs, and ensuring you get the right landing pages designed and developed for your business!
Homepage vs. Landing Page
- Homepage — The first page of your website, a place where people arrive after clicking on or typing in your root domain (for example, www.website.com). This is an umbrella page with navigation buttons and menus that link to every other page in the website, including instructions on contacting the company or how to follow it on social media.
- Landing Page — Targeted to the user’s original search, a place where people “land” after clicking on an ad or an email campaign. This is a focused page with a call to action (CTA) that usually doesn’t feature any navigation buttons. It may be part of your website, but more likely stands alone.
You Can Never Go Home Again
Most businesses we encounter will send all their traffic to their homepage. Usually, this is NOT the best solution. The homepage (not in all cases, but in most cases) is probably one of the worst places to send people. In many ways, you’d be better off sending people to the About Us page. For most businesses, if you’re looking to get any sort of return on investment (ROI), you’re going to want a hyper-focused landing page.
Visualize the Landing Page Design
First ask yourself:
- What is the purpose of this landing page?
- Who am I speaking to?
- What action do I want them to take?
- How do I want to convey that message?
Until you can clearly answer those questions and visualize your goal, don’t start building it.
Use Your Head(line)
The headline is probably the most important element of a good landing page design because it’s going to be what determines whether the user is going to click back and look for something else, or if they’re going to continue to read on. Think about it: Imagine you were about to read a magazine, or a newspaper or a blog post, and it didn’t have a headline. What’s it about? And why should you care to read on?
Words Have Power
Using vague headlines such as, “Sign up for our newsletter” or “Get the latest deals” — those days are long gone. You need to start with an attention-grabbing, engaging headline.
Get to the Point
Convey the story and explain to them, “This is who we are. This is what our brand is all about. This is how we can solve your particular issue.”
Simplify
Good headlines should be very clear and easy to read. People are not looking for gimmicks or looking to be sold.
Change the Font
You want the font to be larger and bolder and to stick out. You can italicize it or you can make it a different color, but you really want it to be easy and to have significant contrast from your background image or background color.
Stop with the Bad Stock Images
Oftentimes people overlook the importance of images. Make sure your images relate to your brand and convey the right concepts. When you use generic, tedious stock images of five people in a boardroom or people shaking hands, you completely miss the chance to inspire your audience.
There are plenty of sites that give you free stock images that can elevate your brand and show that you understand the importance of landing page design. Unsplash.com is a good one. I found one recently that I really like: twenty20.com. They convey a higher standard of quality, not the kind of cheesy image you see on a bad website.
The Almighty Call to Action
Whether you’re asking someone to:
- Sign up for an event
- Join your newsletter
- Download your PDF
- Request more information
- Call the business
- Come to your location
- Fill out a form
Whatever it is, you need to have a clear call to action (CTA) where the customer or the user is going to have no questions about what they’re supposed to do. So, if you want them to your call you, that needs to be the clear point of contact throughout the landing page. Don’t muddle the message with more than one CTA. It’s one thing to scream out “We do las vegas website design”, but that is not enough, we need to speak directly to our customer avatar, and offer them something meaningful in order to take the next step, and call us.
You want to hide the navigation buttons because that’s going to keep the focus on the content. It’s fine to make a way for people to navigate away from the landing page into your website if they want to (say, by clicking on the logo) but don’t make it obvious. In many cases, we will hide navigation buttons entirely and not even give the option to navigate away from the landing page. Then the only step possible to take is to follow the CTA.
Get in the Flow with Proper Landing Page Design
If you can’t easily guide your customer through the landing page, they’re going to end up abandoning it and most likely exiting your site. Instead, try to reduce friction and move them along the cycle by using good landing page design. We’ve seen people add social proof, testimonials, videos, a bio about the owner or whatever it is, and there are a lot of good solutions out there.
But we recommend making sure those elements are aligned in such a way that the user is going to feel that it flows well together. You don’t want them all to just be in a lump at the bottom. People need to be able to see in two or three seconds — without scrolling — exactly what the landing page does.
Don’t try to surprise people halfway down or put it in a sales pitch at the bottom. It needs to be very straightforward because people are coming to this page on purpose. Our las vegas website design services are tailored around ensuring you have the right solutions to your landing page and web development needs.
It’s Not Brain Surgery
If you try to build a landing page from scratch, what likely will happen is you’ll end up building out a micro site or a full-blown website because it’s so easy to get carried away. This is not necessary and could be a waste of time and money.
Landing pages are just to introduce people to the brand or to the product and to have them focus on a single item and to take a single action. Nothing more. Contact us for las vegas web design services.
How to Tailor Your Landing Page Design to Your Goal
If someone’s looking for a website and they do a targeted search, we want to make sure that they “land” on a page that answers all their questions and gives them exactly what they’re looking for. A landing page is a good place to answer a whole bunch of questions that are hyper-focused on this exact person who we’re trying to attract. It’s about creating a tailored experience. So, what is your business goal?
- Capture traffic from a paid search
- Sell more products or services
- Get your product or service out without investing in a website
- Grow your email list
- Save time and money by testing the waters
Types of Campaigns Where Landing Pages Are the Way To Go
Landing Page Design for Email Campaigns
With respect to an email campaign, we want to send out a targeted blast about an event we have, or special sweepstakes or a new great sale. If a user clicks on your link, it will not make much sense to just send them to the homepage. What are they supposed to do next, hunt around for the information they are interested in? No, it would much better to create some content that is hyper focused on what we are trying to sell or what our new services are and send them to that page instead.
Landing pages can be location based, service based, product based, highlighting a new feature, etc.
If I go to a website because I searched for something and it gives me exactly what I want, there is a good chance I’ll give them my email address. I’m going to want more info on the product, and stay in the loop about the other services or products they offer.
But if I go to a website and I cannot figure out what it’s about, or I can’t find what I’m looking for, I’m probably not going to type in my email address. However, if somebody is doing a search and they come to your landing page which is hyper-focused and about their specific search (not just your company in general), your chances of them joining your email list goes way up. If you need the right type of help with web design las vegas, nv we are here for you!
Landing Page Design for Paid Search Campaign
Here at Sage, we use landing pages as a place to capture traffic from a paid search campaign. If someone is searching for our services, why would we send them to a page where they won’t easily find what they’re looking for?
For instance, if someone clicked on the Sage website and we sent them to the homepage, they could spend their time navigating around the case studies or the testimonials, or they could keep clicking around to try to see if we have what they’re looking for.
However, if we send them directly to our Services page instead of the homepage, they will clearly see the email marketing, web design, paid search, SEO, and other services we offer. Then they could start drilling down and navigating deeper to get more information. Our conversion rate will then be much higher.
Landing Page Design for Remarketing Campaigns
Let’s say that user did come to the landing page. They did fill out a form or they did call. And we can register that as a conversion. We still use retargeting, but we use it in a different way because we’re able to know that they came to our landing page for a website, they looked at the content, they were comfortable, they’re ready to move forward, they gave us their information.
We can start showing them ads on the benefits of the website and we can start showing them ads of testimonials from customers who have had good success with their website and what it’s done for their business. And we can show that on Instagram. We can show that on YouTube. We can show that wherever we want, but this is all, again, before we even had the initial phone call with them.
But as they’re going through their day, they keep seeing the business, they’re going to be more and more comfortable. So what happens when someone gets on the phone with them? It’s going to be a much easier sales process because the selling’s already done. We’ve gone through the testimonials, we’ve shown them the benefits.
They’ve already seen the information of what they can expect. At this point, they’re ready to move forward and at that point the phone call can be really just targeted towards pricing or whatever else. Our web design in las vegas can help you achieve your goals with remarketing campaigns.
They are a much more informed potential client. It makes our life easier. It makes them more comfortable. Everything that you said, totally agree with.
Landing Page Design for A/B Testing
So we’ve already discussed how having a landing page can significantly improve your life with respect to how your conversions happen, your conversations with potential clients. Are we just creating a landing page and that’s the end of it? No.
AB testing, what is it? We have to be able to take our landing page, create some variation of it and then see which one performs better. Analytics can tell us “Okay, based on the traffic over the last 30 days, here is which one’s converted at a higher rate. We received phone calls at a higher rate or a lower rate based on this particular landing page.”
Now we can make informed decisions. We create our landing pages, we see which one is the better performing version. The inferior one we then update again and we make changes to on some cadence. And we continue to optimize this until we know that we have a highly optimized converting landing page that is doing the best job for us that it possibly can.
It’s certainly an evolving process. Just because a specific landing page design or a certain type of element doesn’t work at one point, doesn’t mean it’s not going to work later on down the road or you combine different elements. Just because you have a call to action up on top that gets a lot of clicks, doesn’t necessarily mean that the one on the bottom is going to get the same.
Now the difference between hire us or book a call now or schedule an appointment. Until you’re able to actually get in and test those, one of those is going to increase clicks and it’s going to drive more traffic and more conversions to the end goal. Our las vegas website design services are tailored to your specific needs, and we build campaigns based on your business, and your KPI’s.
Having a landing page and having the ability to AB test several versions seems to be the most optimal thing that we can do.
Then you’ll be able to really understand what your customers are actually looking for and what resonates with them. Potentially you could apply that to your main website if you so desire. Or you could apply that towards other services that potential customer is going to be interested in.
Sell More Products or Services
Landing pages will certainly help you sell more products or services. You can drive focus to a specific item, rather than just letting people enter your website through the homepage by default. For example, if you provide a specific service, maybe you’re an electrician, then creating a landing page about kitchen wiring or HVAC or something to that extent would be very valuable.
Save Time and Money by Testing the Waters
For a startup, landing pages represent a low barrier to entry to test something, to see if it works. Trying to get a new business off the ground? A landing page is something you can easily throw in the water to see what bites. You can put everything out there and track the data. You can run analytics on how people are responding, how much time they’re spending on the site. Are they coming to the page and leaving? What are they doing afterwards?
In other words, instead of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars building out a full website for something customers may not want, you can take all the analytics and figure out, “Okay, maybe this is a good idea. Maybe it’s not.” If it is valuable, you can then continue to input resources to build it up from your basic landing page design.
Before You Go Live
If someone cannot take a three-second look at your landing page and understand exactly the first image and text they see, it’s not optimized correctly. Take a step back, look at your completed landing page design, and ask yourself:
- Is it easy for my users to determine the single most important element?
- Who is this page designed for?
- Who is it speaking to?
- What exactly is it saying?
You might have the best web design in las vegas or landing page design in the world. However, if it doesn’t convert well then it’s rather worthless. Conversion is king.