How to create an effective landing page for your Northern Irish website
An effective landing page can be the cornerstone of a successful online marketing campaign. The look and the feel of the page can impact heavily on whether the brand is perceived positively or negatively depending on the quality of the landing page.
We cannot emphasise enough the importance of good quality web design, especially when we are talking about your website’s main page. Today we’re going to have a look at how to create an effective landing page for your Northern Irish website.
What is a landing page?
Generally speaking, any web page is a landing page, when your goal is to drive people to visit your page, the easiest way to direct your audience to a certain page is to link it on your social media account. A blog post, or your website’s homepage may serve this purpose.
On the other hand, in a more specific digital marketing strategy, a landing page is a web page with a specific and single focus where you send visitors. The goal for a landing page is to improve the conversion rate for your website, turning visitors into clients.
According to The Landing Page Course, “Landing pages live separately from your website and are designed to only receive campaign traffic. As we’ll see, this separation allows them to be focused on a single objective and makes analytics, reporting & testing a simpler task.”
Why do you need a landing page?
An effective landing page is among the factors for a successful online marketing campaign. A well designed and persuasive landing page will grab the attention of your website’s visitors once they land there, leading to a high number of conversions.
For example, we created a specific landing page for the 2020 Advent Giveaway campaign alongside sharing daily updates on our social media channels. There can be many reasons to create a specific landing page. For example if you are looking to grow your audience on your email list, or you want to promote a product, a discount or a service and so on.
Generally speaking, you need a landing page if you want to achieve a particular goal.
How to create an effective landing page for your Northern Irish website
1. Killer above the fold section
We start with the content above the fold, which is the most important section of the landing page. The main reason is simple: human’s attention span is around 8 seconds, and this is due to the primary role of smartphones and generally technology in our lives. So, when we design a landing page, we have to remember that most of our visitors won’t have the patience to read long content, or spend time on our page if they don’t find what they are looking for within 8 seconds.
2. Awesome images
So, what’s the easiest and, most important, fastest way to get the visitor’s attention? Simple – images! Studies suggest the brain processes images 60,000 times faster than text. Yes, 60,000 times! This is impressive data, and this also explains scientifically our daily experience with social media platforms. The same process applies to websites, first the eye processes the images, and only then the titles and text. Obviously we are talking about milliseconds, but considering that our visitor’s attention will last around 8 seconds, every second counts!
So, if we want to catch the eye with our images, we need to remember that:
- the pictures need to be of the highest quality
- the pictures should be relevant to the service/product. If you are selling a product, provide an image of the product. If you provide services, you could use an image to demonstrate how useful your service could be for the visitor.
3. Attractive headline
You grabbed the attention of the visitor with an awesome picture of your product or service. But you are not there yet…
When we build a well-working above the fold section, we must provide content that can emotionally and rationally impress the user. Images are helpful in terms of immediate and emotional response, but from here we need to build up a rational and informative content.
Actually, the main headline is somewhere in the midst of all this. The reason is pretty simple, a good header for your landing page should be short and sweet (less than 10 words) to grab the reader’s attention. It is not about the service, nor the specifics, it is about what it can give to the user.
Let’s look at the new iPhone 12 Pro landing page as an example, as it is very effective both in terms of image and headline. We all know the simple but extremely elegant style of Apple’s website.
In this specific landing page, the image makes us feel we are in front of a high quality and high tech device. We can really feel it.
The title just re-affirms the same concept in just 5 words: “It’s a leap year”. “We are setting the standard for the future” they are telling us “it is up to you to be part of it or not”.
Above the main title, they have used just the name of the products.
Yep, that’s all! Looking at this page we can see how simple it is, but let us not be deceived. After all we are talking about Apple, so we can also imagine how much it took to achieve such a powerful image and a killer headline, both in terms of planning and realisation.
Apple has an easier life than many brands out there due to their bespoke branding, as everyone knows that the iPhone is a smartphone, so there is no need to explain this with unnecessary text. But generally speaking, this is a first class above the fold section for a landing page.
4. Persuasive subheads
We used the iPhone’s landing page example to show that in some occasions an image and a header can be enough to get the greatest results. But there are many occasions in which sub headlines can be useful, especially if you want to provide elements of persuasiveness.
Using the same example above, iPhone 12 Pro’s landing page displays a subhead scrolling down the page.
Apple provides useful information in terms of what’s new on their latest smartphone, with a simple, friendly but appealing copy.
There are occasions in which you can use the sub heading in the above the fold section, i.e, Samsung Galaxy 5G landing page is built with a subhead in the above the fold section.
So there’s no right or wrong choice here, it all depends on what you are aiming for, where you want the focus to be, if the design is better overall with just a few elements or not.
5. Divide in sections
While scrolling down the page we have to keep in mind all the rules we mentioned above while we think about the other sections of the page. Of course we can provide more written content, but a landing page is not a blog post or an article. If we want to keep the attention, we need to divide the content into different sections. Each one with a short and attractive title, possibly an eye catching image, subheadings to strengthen the idea and well-written copy.
6. Provide useful information… Think of the user.
Ok, pretty obvious this one, but just be sure the content is not excessively self-promotional. If someone is visiting your landing page it is because they want to know more about your product or service. While providing the information you must consider how you can help users, what are their needs and what can be the main reasons for them to contact you.
Conclusion
There are many general rules on how to create an effective landing page for your Northern Irish website, as highlighted above. An optimised landing page will lead to an increase of conversions on your website. Generally speaking, a website built using a UX and UI oriented web design, high quality images and great copy can help your business grow in terms of both branding and website conversions.
If you think your website needs improvement in terms of mobile navigation, here at Rapid Agency we deliver our bespoke Web Design, SEO, Digital Ads, Copy services that will help to improve visits for Northern Ireland websites and the user navigation, getting you the results you are looking for. Get in touch with us, we are happy to help!