How to Create Engaging Landing Pages: 12 Tips

For many buyers, your landing page is the first time they get to know your solution and the value it can provide. If your landing pages are cluttered, boring, hard to navigate, and impersonal, they’ll be ineffective. Once the customer leaves your website, the odds of you converting them plummets dramatically.

Today, 65% of B2B buyers self-navigate through the entire purchasing process, which means your landing page needs to be capable of engaging them and getting them into the pipeline without your help.

How can you ensure your landing pages are up to par? Hushly has put together 12 actionable tips you can use to create engaging landing pages starting now.

What Is a Landing Page?

A landing page is a web page designed to convert visitors into leads. Digital marketing campaigns use landing pages to drive targeted traffic toward lead capture forms and increase conversion rates.

Landing Pages vs. Home Pages

Your landing page serves a very different purpose than your home page. Home pages are the main hub of your website. They facilitate navigation and provide a general overview of your company and purpose.

A landing page is far narrower in scope. They should be tightly focused on a single product or solution which is relevant to a targeted buyer.

What Makes a Successful Landing Page?

A successful landing page keeps a customer’s attention on your website and drives conversions. The best way to do this is to create compelling value statements and smoothly direct the buyer’s attention to lead capture forms that allow you to pull them through the sales funnel.

How Do I Make My Landing Pages More Engaging?

An engaging landing page includes limited navigation that eliminates distraction and keeps the focus on your message.

Your landing page should capture the customer’s attention with well-placed, compelling copy that directly addresses the problems they have. Then, paint a picture that shows how using your solution solves their problems. Finally, always explain how buyers can access your solution and direct them toward the next steps in the process.

12 Tips for Winning Landing Pages

Here are 12 tips for creating the best landing pages that keep a buyer’s attention and drive conversions.

1. Use Eye Catching Headlines

Your headlines should be clear and to the point. Try creating compelling headlines that directly communicate your company’s value proposition while indicating your company’s expert knowledge of the field you’re targeting.

2. Keep It Simple

Your landing page should be free of clutter. Keep the focus on your message by eliminating unnecessary information. Ideally, you’ll be driving attention from the headline through the content and toward your call-to-action (CTA).

3. Always Include a CTA

Every page on your website should include a relevant and contextual CTA. Your landing pages are no different. Aim to entice customers by first invoking their pain points, then presenting your solution as the best remedy. Your CTA should always provide clear next steps the buyer can follow on their way to becoming a customer.

4. Optimize for Mobile

You can use Google’s free tool to ensure your webpage is mobile-friendly.

In today’s tech-driven world, many B2B buyers are researching outside the office using mobile devices. A smooth mobile experience is critical to keeping these buyers engaged and converting them.

5. Include Media (Images and Sound)

High-quality media including pictures, video, and audio, help you highlight your value proposition and display your company’s products. They are also great ways to enrich the story you’re telling the customer. Use media to paint a picture of the customer’s problem and the ways your company will solve it for them.

6. Provide Value Up Front

Hushly is a big proponent of providing value to customers to gain trust and build lasting relationships. A great way to do this is to provide content up-front.

For example, a free eBook on a topic you’re an expert in can introduce a customer to complex problems and help you paint your solution as the best one for them.

7. Include Social Proof

If possible, include things like user testimonials, reviews, and customer comments that emphasize the value your company can bring. Pick comments that illustrate what it’s like to work with your company and how you’ll respond to customer challenges as they arise.

8. Use Personalization

Personalization is a great way to drive engagement and connect with buyers.

The best landing page builder includes tools that allow you to generate custom pages with just a few clicks. Designing custom landing pages for each campaign helps buyers feel like you understand them, their company, and the challenges they’re facing.

9. Focus on Benefits, Not Features

When writing copy for a landing page, you must emphasize how your solution benefits buyers, rather than simply listing features.

For example, let’s say your email marketing solution lets buyers easily create mass emails and track the open rate in a single screen.

Rather than just telling them they can do this, you could make your copy more compelling by explaining how they’ll increase ROI and reduce time spent on email marketing overnight using your simple interface.

10. Create Urgency with Action-Oriented Language

Your landing page should emphasize the value of acting immediately on the solution you provide. Action-oriented language such as “click here to…” or “sign up now so you can…” is effective at driving customers toward action.

You can also increase urgency by including limited-time offers that customers need to act quickly to take advantage of.

11. Automate Lead Nurturing

Every minute that goes by without responding to a lead is less chance you’ll be able to convert that buyer.

Your marketing platform should be capable of automatically nurturing leads whenever and wherever they crop up. AI-driven solutions like Hushly’s can capture leads and respond to them automatically so you’re always maximizing the chances of turning prospects into buyers.

12. Learn and Optimize

Our final tip is to capture lead data and constantly review it for opportunities to optimize your demand capture process.

The best platforms give you insights on channel performance, campaign performance metrics, and content performance, and help you understand your buyer’s conversion behaviors.

By constantly reviewing data and modifying your process, you’ll always be getting one step closer to the optimal landing page experience for your buyers.

BONUS TIP: Use a Marketing Platform Like Hushly to Easily Optimize Your Landing Pages Starting Now

There are a lot of great solutions to improving the effectiveness of your landing pages, most of which you can accomplish on your own as long as you’re not concerned with scaling your operation too quickly.

However, if you’re a larger business or are hoping to rapidly expand, you can save time and money by using a landing page builder like Hushly.

We believe in the value of forming relationships with our clients focused on mutual growth. Our philosophy on landing pages reflects this, which is why we emphasize the importance of providing up-front value via streamlined landing pages that help buyers understand your solution and put them on the path toward conversions.

Let Hushly build a demo for you and see how we can improve your landing pages to drive conversions and help your business expand.

Should You Rely on a Gated Landing Page? Everything You Need to Know

hushly ungated conversions

Should You Rely on a Gated Landing Page? Everything You Need to Know…

From a B2B marketing perspective, gating a landing page is the only choice that makes sense, right?

You don’t want website visitors to slip through the cracks and get lost forever in the massive internet void like an interesting Facebook post after your newsfeed refreshes.

You want to collect email addresses and follow up with leads.

The truth is, however, if all your content sits behind a form, there’s a good chance that you also struggle with massive data problems (both massive problems and problems with massive amounts of data).

60% of businesses say that their data is unreliable and 40% of their leads have bad data.

That’s what happens when you require an email address from everyone that steps foot into your website.

So, what’s a B2B marketer to do? Is a gated landing page the answer? It’s not that simple. Let’s weigh the pros and cons.

Pros of Choosing a Gated Landing Page

Keep in mind that gated content doesn’t exist in a void. It’s a part of your general strategy.

Here are the top benefits of choosing a gated landing page to connect with leads.

It Increases the Value of Your Content

When you put content behind a form, people tend to assume that the information must be valuable and thus, your brand value increases.

In our society, everything has a price including necessities like water and food. As a result, when you give something away for free, the perceived value drops.

It Helps You Collect Vital Information About Your Audience for Segmentation

Once a visitor converts into a lead, you want to offer them highly personalized content.

By gating your content, you can figure out which lead magnet sparked their interest enough to hand over their email address.

You can also learn more information about them through your form. Data like this is important for creating segmented email campaigns which can deliver 760% more revenue than generic campaigns.

It’s Easier to Track Your Marketing Strategy Performance

Gating your content can help you nail down your target audience and KPIs and track the success of your lead magnets and overall marketing strategy.

If people aren’t filling out the form to access your content, you know the problem isn’t the content copy itself.

You can also use a gated landing page to run vital A/B tests on specific elements.

Cons of Choosing a Gated Landing Page

A gated landing page isn’t without its own massive drawbacks.

You Risk Giving Your Leads “Form Rage” from an Unfriendly Mobile Experience

Do you like filling out forms on your phone? Well, your B2Bs don’t either.

According to Google, 70% of all business searches will come from mobile devices by 2020 with buyers spending an average of three hours each day on their phone.

You’ll Suffer from Bogus Data or Data Overload

Not only do 40% of leads supply poor data, but 65% of job titles and functions change every year.

Gating all your content puts you at risk for collecting fake email addresses, collecting more data than you can effectively use, and wasting resources on “leads” who aren’t even part of your target audience.

It Interferes with Your Sales Funnel

Adding a form – no matter how optimized for user experience – creates room for problems to arise.

Anything that interferes with your sales funnel is no good and forms are at the top of the list (especially for mobile users).

Think with Google

Source: Think with Google

Pros of Choosing Ungated Content

If the downsides to choosing a fully gated landing page strategy have turned you off on the idea, you may be wondering if completely unhindered content is the answer. Let’s weigh the benefits and cons.

Completely ungated content is the right choice for many industries, but what about B2Bs in your industry?

It Helps You Create a Seamless User Experience:

Google says that mobile searches influence 40% of all B2B revenue. Even if you’re not in the e-commerce biz, decision-makers are conducting research from their smartphone.

Dropping forms from that gated landing page is the best thing to do if you want to create a mobile-friendly experience and start the relationship with a good first impression.

Ungated Content is Useful for Brand Awareness and Engagement

Do you like sharing gated content on your social media accounts?

For many people, it can feel kind of dirty – like sharing clickbait or blatant promotional material.

Keeping your content barrier-free means that more people will share it, and you’ll get more website traffic.

Your Leads Can Nurture Themselves (and Speed Up the Buying Cycle)

When potential leads have unlimited access to your content, they can educate themselves at their own pace in a process called self-nurturing.

By the time they decide to contact you or supply their email address, they’re further along in the sales funnel.

Cons of Choosing Ungated Content

Completely ungated content is a scary thought for many B2Bs – and for good reason.

Barrier-Free Content Makes It Difficult to Track and Test Your Strategy

Is your marketing strategy working or are you missing out on valuable leads? Hard to tell. Your options for A/B testing are also limited because you won’t have much information to compare with your results.

You’ll Lack Information About Your Leads

Without any form, you’re at the mercy of Google Analytics or third-party software to tell you who’s visiting your website.

When a lead gives you their email address, you won’t know which topic sparked their interest enough to want more content.

Ungated Content Leads are Often Lower Quality

If anyone can access your content, you won’t know which leads and visitors are serious buyers so your retargeting campaigns on social media will suffer.

On the other hand, you may also fail to collect vital information from the most qualified leads.

So, What’s the Right Choice for Generating High Quality Leads?

Hushly can help you strike the perfect balance between an ungated and gated landing page. With features like content bingeing, self-nurturing landing pages, and lead verification systems, you can skyrocket leads by 51% almost instantly and ensure that you’re only collecting the highest quality leads.

Want to learn more about the halfway point between gated and ungated content? Check out the Hushly eBook here.

Why Do B2Bs Need Self-Nurturing Landing Pages to Turbocharge Leads?

How do you spend your free time away from work?

If you’re like most people, you enjoy watching your favorite Netflix or Hulu shows, listening to your favorite curated Spotify playlists, scrolling through Facebook, and shopping through your favorite app.

Top apps like these all have one key feature in common: endless streams of personalized content.

I’m willing to bet that when you visit a new website, you feel frustrated if it doesn’t live up to the UX and personalization standards set by tech giants like Amazon, Ali Express, and Facebook – even if you don’t realize it.

Well, your B2B buyers feel the same way about your website.

According to the latest research, 62% of businesses will consider switching vendors if a brand doesn’t even try to personalize its communication.

Self-nurturing landing pages are the answer to generating more (and higher quality) leads while meeting buyer expectations.

Why Your Form is Outdated

According to research from Google, 50% of B2Bs conduct searches from their smartphone with the average buyer spending an average of three hours each day on their mobile device.

By next year, this figure will skyrocket to over 70%.

self-nurturing

Source: Google

Your website might be optimized for mobile browsing with a responsive design, but what about your lead magnets and landing pages?

If you’re nodding your head “yes” but still using forms, your website isn’t completely mobile-friendly. Let’s get real: no one likes filling out forms—least of all B2B buyers on their phones. It’s just not a fun experience.

Sure, if there’s an emergency like time-sensitive concert tickets or event registrations, you’ll race through the form – but that’s the exception to the rule.

I promise that no B2B buyer is arriving at your eBook, report, or authoritative blog post and thinking “Awesome! I’m so glad I can give another company my email address, job title, and name just to access this piece of content!”

Forms are holding you back. Self-nurturing landing pages are the future.

Self-Nurturing Landing Pages: Your Roadmap to Generating Leads

Ditching forms needs to be part of a broader personalization strategy.

By implementing the following strategies, you can generate not only more leads but higher quality ones.

Boosting access to your content means that people won’t hand over their email address unless they’re 100% confident that they genuinely want to stay in contact with you.

Personalize Their Route Based on Weather Conditions

B2B marketers across the board say they struggle to leverage data across multiple sources.

That’s really the first step to creating a personalized self-nurturing strategy: getting your data in order.

With Hushly, for example, we can personalize content as soon as someone visits your website based on data from various sources. By showing them the best topics and types of content, they’ll stay on your website longer which instantly improves your brand awareness.

Let’s say a buyer visits your website and based on data from other sources, we can tell that they work for an NGO. Your website would then continue showing them similar content that other NGO workers may find interesting, for example.

Drop Dead Ends with Content Bingeing

When someone gets to the end of your eBook or case study, what happens?

If it just ends without other personalized content offerings, you need a new solution. Self-nurturing content bingeing features can help you clean up dead-end landing pages.

Why is this important?

B2B decision-makers like to educate themselves at their own pace and 78% say they consume at least three pieces of relevant authoritative content before committing to a vendor.

Are you allowing buyers to consume content at their leisure – or rationing it?

Put yourself in their shoes: would you rather browse and research an endless stream of relevant content or read one blog post, sign up for a mailing list, and receive content stretched out over an email sequence?

Probably the former.

self-nurturing

Source: Hushly

Supply a Few Route Options – But Avoid Roundabouts of Endless Choices

Roundabouts can help keep traffic flowing but when a city first constructs one, people initially hate it.

Why? Because it supplies too many options and drivers don’t know how to use it.

How would you feel if Netflix or Facebook started showing you random topics that you’ve never expressed interest in? You’d get angry. You may even take a screenshot and share your frustration with friends.

Choices are good. Too many choices aren’t.

By properly categorizing content and employing data-driven personalization tactics, you can create a mini-Netflix on your own B2B website.

Get Them Off the Expressway at the Perfect Time

The average office worker receives 121 emails every day.

The last thing your buyers want is more newsletters in their inbox that they know they’ll unsubscribe from later or just never open.

People don’t mind handing over their email address, but they need to be in control. Let your content speak for itself and let buyers give you their contact information when they’re comfortable.

Instead of using popups, use widgets and other tools that aren’t intrusive and don’t get in the way of accessing most of the content.

Skip the Toll Roads (Fully Gated Content with Forms)

If you haven’t noticed, forms are not enjoyable experiences on mobile devices – yes, even with Google’s autofill feature.

When you do attempt to ask for an email from your self-nurturing landing page, make sure you’re sticking with the bare necessities. At Hushly, we recommend only asking for an email address and country location – that’s it.

You wouldn’t tell personal info to someone you just met on a dating app, right? Let your buyers get to know you a bit before asking for more information.

Generate More (and Higher Quality) Leads Now

Beyond the strategies above, it’s also important to thoroughly vet your leads. Eliminating forms means that you’ll already deal with less fake email addresses, but human verification is also important to prevent non-business emails from slipping through.

Hushly can help you increase your lead conversions by 51% – guaranteed. See it in action now!