What Does a Landing Page Need in Order to Generate Quality Leads?

Landing page vs. a form at a different URL

A lot of landing pages are really just a form: a headline, an image, three fields, and a button. They make it very easy to submit your details, and that’s exactly the problem. Plenty of leads come in, and most of them don’t know what they signed up for. I showed an example of a page like that in my post on leads that don’t turn into customers.

A good landing page offers one thing: a chance to hear more from the business owner. There’s no one size fits all formula to do that, but a few thumbnail rules raise the odds that a visitor will want to reach out:

• Don’t push. Don’t go for the hard sell. Offer a chance to hear more.
• Avoid using superlatives and white noise. Give visitors real reasons to want to get in touch.
• Ask yourself: could my competitor say the same thing, like “15 years of experience” or “hundreds of happy clients”? If the answer is yes, I recommend framing that information in a way that makes visitors want to hear more: “15 years of experience taught us a lot. We’re confident we can solve your problem with ease” or “We’re tired of talking about ourselves. Here’s what our clients have to say,” with video testimonials placed right under the headline.
• Talk to the visitor, not about your business. Instead of “Industrial lighting installation experts,” try: “What do we do? We help you make your business safer and more productive with precisely planned lighting.”

Sometimes one page isn’t enough, and you need to build a funnel. That’s what we did with the ARTZONE simulator ARTZONE: visitors get a rendering of a stretch ceiling in their own living room in exchange for an email address. The rendering is also sent to their inbox, with a button that brings them back to the site. That way, even people who weren’t ready in the moment can come back when they are. I wrote about the simulator in my post on getting more inquiries without raising your budget.

Because people who won’t read a landing page probably aren’t a fit anyway. A page that asks for a moment of attention filters out people just passing through and keeps the ones who are actually interested. Fewer leads, but more calls that go somewhere.

How should the ad and the page connect?

The page should pick up exactly where the ad left off. Someone who clicked an ad asking “Still looking for the switch?” should land on the answer, not the company’s generic homepage. Someone who searched for a symptom should land on a page that explains that symptom, as I described in my post on people who are still researching.

When the ad promises one thing and the page talks about something else, visitors feel misled and leave within seconds. So if a campaign runs several different messages, it’s worth building several pages, one for each message.

How should the page look and sound?

Three things I check on every page:

• Look: A page that looks like it was designed in 2012 makes the business seem outdated, even when it’s completely current. It’s worth refreshing the design about every two years.
• Amount of text: According to a classic study by Nielsen Norman Group, only 16% of users read word by word. Most people scan. So write headings that tell the story even to someone who reads only them, and keep paragraphs short.
• Tone: Eye level. No “the best,” “a smart investment” or “a work of art.” One concrete sentence about what actually happens does more than any superlative. And leaving room for doubt, like “this might be right for you,” invites readers to check for themselves.
• In languages where verbs change with gender (very common in Hebrew and Arabic), you need to find wording that speaks to both women and men. It’s a challenge, but it’s worth the effort.

Short form or long? And what about WhatsApp?

The real filtering happens on the page, not in the form. Extra form fields slow visitors down by a few seconds, but they don’t make them think. Anyone who read the page has already thought it through.

For me, it depends on the client. I start with the basics: name, phone and email. If the business needs more information to prepare for the call, we add a field or two. When the list starts getting long, I alert the client, because every extra field is one more reason to abandon the form.

WhatsApp works well inside the page, as a step after the visitor has already read it. What doesn’t work for a high-ticket product is WhatsApp as the destination of the ad itself, because then you get a flood of shallow questions from people who haven’t read anything. More on that in my post on choosing a campaign objective.

Campaign not working? Maybe it’s the page

Quite possibly. When a campaign isn’t delivering, most people tweak what’s inside the ad platform: budget, keywords, bidding. The page itself stays as it is.

But if people click and don’t submit their details, the ad probably did its job. The problem starts after the click. So my first step in a case like this is to open the page through the eyes of someone seeing it for the first time and ask: Does it pick up where the ad left off? Does it look current? Can you get the gist from the headings alone? And does it talk to you at eye level? I also wrote about this in a post on search campaigns that bring clicks but no inquiries.

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