How to Write a Copy for Landing Pages that Sells

Your landing page copy is the very first thing that prospective customers see of your brand. Consider landing pages to be like a first date. How you dress up your landing page determines whether you'll get a next date with the prospect or not. The objective of making an excellent first impression is to forge a lifelong relationship that both parties cherish.

A well-crafted landing page can help you generate brand visibility, engagement, leads and conversions. Studies show that landing pages, when used to address customer questions, confusions, fears and even interests, can increase your conversion rate by 80%. Suffice to say that you need to put a lot of thought and effort into writing a landing page that helps you achieve your goals.

How to Make Your Landing Pages a Roaring Success - 14 Tips to Rule Them All!

1. Identify your target audience and direct the messaging towards them.

Your landing page is akin to you speaking directly to your customers. When you talk to them, you need to speak in their lingo. This means, making your content understandable and engaging to the people who are most likely to visit your website. For example, if your landing page is specifically directed to parents of young kids, the content’s language/tone should reflect this. The landing page shouldn’t sound like you’re speaking to someone who doesn’t have the responsibility of caring for young ones.

2. Use relatable language - Don't sound like a bot

There’s a reason Siri is such a hit with Apple users. It’s not because the bot is efficient in helping you keep organized. It has more to do with the fact that Siri has a dynamic, human-like personality that’s fun to engage with. Tell Siri the craziest things, such as “Siri, talk dirty to me” and you’ll get a crazier, deadpan answer such as, “Humus. Compost. Pumice. Silt. Gravel” or “The carpet needs vacuuming”.

Landing pages are a lot like this. If you create content that people resonate with, you’ll see that more prospects willingly visit your site. If your landing page is boring, too complicated to understand and sounds static and dry, prospects may not be interested in engaging with you often.

3. Keep the content short and simple

The truth is only 20% of landing page visitors will read the words on your page, while 80% of them will watch a video or view an image. This is because visual images are easier to retain. And having fewer words on a short landing page can make your message more memorable and increase brand recall.

In fact, according to Neil Patel, these visual elements are the deciding factor for 92.6% of site visitors when it comes to purchase through landing pages.

4. List the benefits, not solely products features and services

Your landing page is a means to actively push prospects to visit your website, so they can be aware of what you have to offer. When you give them paragraph-upon-paragraph of content to sift through for valuable information, you risk boring them and discourage them from visiting you again.

Instead, your landing page should be to the point and should offer valuable features, benefits and other USPs of the product/service you sell. This way, when they see what you offer, their curiosity will be piqued, and they’ll be more likely to come back again to take a deeper look at your website.

5. Pepper in customer testimonials

92% of B2B prospects are more likely to purchase from your brand after they read customer testimonials. Having a couple of testimonials sprinkled into your landing page can be the encouragement they need to choose your brand over others.

In fact, you can merge and share customer testimonial landing pages as part of your email marketing campaigns and encourage prospects to click the link, visit your landing page and browse your site. Research indicates that using customer testimonials on your landing sales pages can increase conversions by 34%.

A tool like the CDP can help you here.

This platform is an intelligent Marketing Automation Service that empowers you with the capabilities to run a robust omnichannel marketing campaign. Designed for both small businesses and enterprises, the CDP can help you run, monitor and manage cross-channel campaigns with ease. The platform comes built with an easy-to-use editor that has tons of templates for you to use. Now you can easily create and implement everything from a dynamic email marketing campaign to an SMS or web-based campaign.

The system can make it exceptionally easy to run multiple campaigns simultaneously. The platform uses AI to track behavior-based triggers and automatically segment your audiences smartly. This allows you to deliver the right landing pages to the relevant people. The best part about it? It supports multi-lingual campaigns, allowing you to target a global customer base.

6. Use the inverted pyramid style of writing

The inverted pyramid style of writing is a technique that helps you create eye-catching, compelling content. Here’s how you can employ this style of writing:

• Start with the most compelling piece of content (i.e., the crux of the offer).
• Layer in the relevant important details surrounding the main offer.
• End by providing the general/background information.

When you use this style of writing for your landing page, you ensure that the visitors to the landing page see the most important piece of information when they first visit the page. This makes your main offer more memorable.

7. Take advantage of white space

White space offers numerous advantages to the landing page visitor. First, it makes the landing page layout look clean and classy. The white space reduces the stress on the visitor’s eyes, by offering a cooling, visual-free space they can rest on. Second, it allows you to highlight key features/sections on your landing page, which can otherwise get lost if there are too many graphics on your landing page.

When you use white space on your landing page, you’re allowing the visitor to take in the key marketing message, without becoming bogged down by aesthetic disturbance.

8. Draft headlines that draw attention

Did you know? Only 2 out of 10 site visitors read the entire copy. But 8 out of 10 visitors read the headline. This is why it's important to write magnetic headlines that draw interest.

• Here are a few tips you can follow to draft compelling headlines:
• Keep the headline under 6 words.
• Use the primary keyword once in the headline.
• Choose a key benefit/feature to champion in the headline (ex: price, quality, quantity, speed of delivery etc.)
• Use numbers in your headline – especially if it’s a saving that you’re offering.

Try these headline formulae:

• “Secrets of_______________”
• “Get 50% off_____________”
• “How you can/How I ________________?”
• "Give me _________ and I’ll __________”
• “The ultimate guide to ___________”

In fact, while we're on the topic of landing page headlines - note that having a good headline can make your Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn lead generation campaign successful.

9. Get nitty-gritty with numbers

Imagine what your landing page visitors would think if they read this statement on your page –

“Our coaching session on Road Safety has helped thousands of lives in the last year.”

It isn’t impactful, is it? It may even be considered a false claim.

However, what if you rephrase this as -

“In a survey, 30% of Road Safety coaching students stated that they did not receive a single traffic ticket/fine for a year after they implemented our tips.”

The presence of the statistic/number makes your claim more authentic.

10. Instill a sense of scarcity & urgency

Think about it. You visit a landing page and the product/service looks interesting. But you’re not fully convinced yet. You want to wait for a while before making a decision.

But then you spot a sign/button that says this offer is available only for 10 more hours. Or that if you don’t purchase this in the next 3 days, the price will revert to its original cost. Wouldn’t you be more inclined to buy the product/service because there is a sense of urgency and scarcity of the offer?

11. Tell the reader exactly what you want them to do as the next steps

Only giving your landing page visitors information about the product/service isn’t enough. You need to tell them or show them what they need to do next, to claim their offer. For example, if you have trackable QR codes pasted on your landing page, which can help the visitor buy the product, tell the visitor to scan the QR code.

Many times, prospects don’t buy anything from you because they don’t know how to. And they may not be particularly invested in searching through your site for the purchase link.

So, always add a CTA button both above the fold and at the bottom of the page, expressly telling visitors what they need to do next.

12. A/B testing on a continuous basis helps

A/B testing is a great way to constantly work on and improve your landing page. You can change minor elements of your page and then see what impact it creates. In fact, as a rule, do A/B testing at least once a month, with the testing period between 7-14 days.

To A/B test the copy, you can:

• Replace certain phrases/words to check their effectiveness.
• Change the location of where certain words appear.
• Experiment with the font size, style and color.
• Change paragraphs into bullet points or vice versa.
• Include explainer videos in the place of paragraphs of wordy content

……etc.

13. Build a content creation process for success every time

Studies show that brands with over 40 landing pages see a conversion rate over a whopping 500%, compared to brands that have fewer landing pages.

Many brands reuse parts of their landing pages when tweaking their pages for subsequent marketing campaigns. You may even want to use a specific collection of videos, audio files, images, content write-ups, etc. to mix and match for different landing pages. Having all these assets spread out in different folders and systems can make landing page creation a complex and cumbersome process. Wouldn’t it be much better to have a single workspace where you can store your assets in a single place, so you can access them whenever you need them? And maybe even have your copywriters and content creators be assigned tasks when the need be?

This is where the content collaboration and project management platform - Narrato Workspace can help. It's a nifty piece of software to supercharge your content production journey. The workspace makes it easier for you to bring all your content teams and processes under a single roof. With the Narrato Workspace, you can plan, organize, create and collaborate on all kinds of content including your landing pages' copy. You can assign content and tasks to your team members and content creators, and track project progress. Integration with Wordpress for publishing and ability to copy html off the editor is particularly handy.

14. Hire experienced copywriters and share clear guidelines.

Not every brand has an in-house content creation team that can help them develop engaging and dynamic landing pages. It can benefit you to hire experienced copywriters and content specialists who have significant experience creating compelling landing page content. In addition to writers, hire graphic designers from marketplaces like Upwork, who can create stellar aesthetic elements for your landing page. If you want to create infographics or other visual elements yourself, you can always use a tool like Visme.

After you hire your experts, be sure to share the in-depth specifications and guidelines of how you’d like your landing pages to be. This will ensure that your internal and external content creation teams are aligned and the communication is seamless. Plus, you get your landing pages out quickly.

Landing Page Content Mistakes You Should Avoid

Landing page mistakes can be costly, which is why I have listed some common ones below so you can actively try and avoid them:

1. Having too many & conflicting CTAs

Give your visitors a single action to perform. Giving them too many CTAs and links can only confuse them about what they need to do. It can also prevent you from reaching any specific marketing goal that you have. So make sure you communicate with your prospects correctly.

2. Badly crafted content

What are some ways to disengage landing page visitors?

• Poor grammar
• Terrible spelling
• Content that neither entertains nor educates
• Tone/wording that seems robotic

The best way to prevent bad content from ruining your landing page quality is to hire experienced copywriters to work on it.

3.Too much content crammed in

Landing pages should be a visual treat. Plus, they should be personalized and created for a specific market segment that you wish to convert.

This can only be achieved when you have a good mixture of words and images which the recipient of the landing page will respond to positively. On average, retain your landing page under 500 words and not more. And make sure you have at least 3-4 images and 1 video on your page.

4. Aesthetically poor and unreadable fonts/color

Using a font style, size and color that is unreadable can make your landing page unappealing. It can also actively discourage people from browsing through your landing page. Plus, people with visual health conditions may find it difficult to read a landing page that has a poor font choice. Regular A/B testing can help you find the correct font style and color.

5. Landing page not customized to the target audience

Customized CTAs have a 202% higher conversion rate than cookie-cutter CTAs. In fact, all content on the landing page should be targeted and customized to the specific audience group you want to sell to. A generic CTA won’t help you generate engagement, leads, or conversions.

6. No SEO

Keywords, internal links and meta can optimize your landing page for search and increase your page visibility. In fact, 48% of the best landing pages on maps and organic listings are rich in SEO. So, don’t forget to include SEO in your landing page. Once you add your SEO elements, be sure to test and optimize them for success.

7. Not device-responsive

Most people make their purchases on the go, using their mobile phones these days. You’re practically shortening your brand lifespan if you don’t make your landing pages device-responsive. Make sure your landing page is mobile optimized and enable push notifications on mobile.

Wrapping Up

Landing pages play a huge role in how well you convert your prospects and website visitors. By following the above tips, you can ensure that your landing page content is impactful and effective. So try these tips and let us know how they worked for you.