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When you think about a landing page, you think of many different aspects combining to make one page. There is your product, your message, the images and the promotion or incentive you’re offering. The centerpiece of this page is your form. Ultimately, your goal of driving people to the landing page is so they will fill out a form. That is your chance to turn someone from a suspect to a prospect, so it is important to make your form enticing to those who come across it.

Things to keep in mind when creating a form are:

• Keep it simple - Just require the basic information. You want enough to be able to contact them, but you don’t want them to get frustrated with the length of your form or number of questions and have them skip over it. It is OK to ask some questions that will give you more information about them, but don’t require it. This way, when someone is willing they will take the extra time to fill out the extra questions, and if not they will simply fill out what is required, its a win-win situation.

• Make it easy to fill out – Nobody is going to spend 30 minutes filling out a form on your landing page, you are lucky if they even take 5. You need to make it clear and straightforward, no high tech special effects are needed. Impress people in other areas of your website, this is not the place, if they can’t just type there information up quickly there is a big chance they won’t do it at all.

• Balance friction and incentive – Friction is the consumer’s resistance to a given element in the sales process. It can be caused by many things, including filling out a form. The friction the consumer feels needs to be outweighed by the incentive they will receive after completing the desired action. Put simply, if you want a prospect to fill out a form, you’d better make it worth their while. It is not possible to have zero friction, that would lead to no information on the sales side, and no incentive would create no leads or extremely poor leads, so it is imperative that a balance is achieved that will generate interest and happy prospects.

Landing pages are the gateway to your lead nurturing process.  And a proper landing page can make or break you.  They can be the difference between someone becoming a lead, or walking away with a negative image of your company.  But building landing pages doesn’t need to be a tedious, bone breaking process.

Marketing automation enables you to create a landing page in just a few quick steps.  The process is laid out in simple terms with many benefits and features:

• No IT or webmaster required
• Reusable templates that can even be imported from an existing website
• Ability to copy previous landing pages and simply update content
• Easy drag and drop builder to build templates
• Use existing forms or create new forms with a drag and drop builder
• File hosting for images and logos

With such a simple process and easy-to-use features, you can knock out a few landing pages before you even finish your morning coffee.

The purpose of the landing page is to be marketer and sales person combined. It needs to attract the customer to the product, capture their interest, and push them to take some sort of action. While reading through SEOMoz’s Blog I picked up some tips and put together a short list of Dos and Don’ts for landing pages.

Do
1. List Resources and Testimonials

It is important to establish credibility. Allowing prospects to see past clients and their testimonials will help to create that. Putting a well known source on the page is a great way to set up trust between you and your prospect. Just knowing you have worked with a highly respected company in their industry will give them more confidence to work with you.

2. Conduct regular quality checks.

When you pick up a moldy bag of lettuce at the grocery store, you never want to buy from there again. The same situation applies to a landing page. It is your one shot to convert a prospect and if they see misspelled words, broken links, and distorted images they are not going to give you a second look, so be sure to take time and make your landing page as professional and polished as possible.

3. Be Consistent

From graphics to language make sure that everything shown throughout your website is the same on the landing page. You want all eyes that view both to know that they are promoting the same product. *Make sure your best “ad” is on the landing page, “One year free trial” will mean nothing to a prospect if they do not see it.

Don’t
1. Have long forms

The purpose of a form on a landing page is for a salesperson to be able to contact the prospect. Don’t let the form do their job. As long as enough information is gathered for them to make contact, all of the extra required info will just discourage the prospect. If the form is too long, there is a reasonable chance that they will not complete the form, leaving you with no prospect at all.

2. Visual Distraction

Having a few pictures or banners is fine, but too much will take away from the page’s purpose. Just remember, less is more.

3. Ramble on

Prospects on the landing page want to see what you are offering and how it will benefit them. Emphasize benefits, not features. It should be short, simple, and to the point.