There are no two ways about it: your website often serves as the first interaction that a potential customer has with your business. With this in mind, it is important to make the best first impression possible. After all, if your WordPress site does not convert visitors into customers, what is it there for anyway?
Writing a compelling and engaging landing page is not an exact science, but it does take more than a bit of time and energy. It doesn’t have to be complicated, but it can seem overwhelming at first blush.
A landing page is there for one purpose: to convince visitors to your website to become customers of your business. While we recommend taking some time to learn what engaging copy looks like, consider this a starting point as you jump into DIY marketing as a small business owner.
These three elements of optimized landing pages are not exhaustive, but they do capture what is most important when writing landing pages that convert for your small business.
Keep it Simple
Let’s be honest: in the Internet age, most people have a short attention span. This is doubly true when visiting websites. The truth is people rarely spend more than five seconds on a landing page before deciding if they want to learn more, contact the company, subscribe, or whatever the case may be.
With that in mind, it is important o keep your landing pages simple. Include a brief headline that highlights your service and keep the main text to a short paragraph with more details. Whenever possible, include bullet points, images, and customer testimonials. All of these have been shown to be more engaging for the customer.
Don’t try to include too much information on one landing page. Have one clear call to action or offer on the page – this is almost guaranteed to lead to more conversions than a page with multiple offers or no call to action at all.
Know Your Audience
The right voice can go a long way toward building a landing page that converts for your small business. If you are a business-to-business operation, it may be advisable to keep your language more professional. In contrast, if you are offering a service or product for individuals, it makes much more sense to keep your writing style more casual.
The rule of thumb is to write how you would speak. It may seem counterintuitive, but people are much more likely to engage with text if it is readable and relatable. Make grammar mistakes if it makes sound more natural. Use conversational phrases and write in the first person. In contrast, avoid cliché marketing phrases, since these can easily turn people off.
Kill Two Birds
You don’t need a fancy outline to make sure that you include every single element of your business on the landing page. Instead, all you need is a headline, a subheadline, and a little bit of text with more details. Within these elements you should do two things:
- Make a promise
- Outline the mechanism for meeting that promise
By including these two elements, you are telling a potential customer exactly what they need to hear: what you can do for them and how you can do it. It does not have to be any more complicated than that.