Say you’ve got an offer you want to promote. You’ve got a particular audience for it in mind. And you’ve heard that a landing page is likely the best way to get that audience to take you up on that offer.
There’s just one missing piece …
What exactly do you put on that landing page?
Sometimes the question didn’t hit you until you’ve logged into your landing page builder and realized: you have no idea what kind of landing page content you need.
Sometimes, the question stops you in your tracks. You might even put off launching your offer because of it, figuring you need to sit down and map out your landing page content before you can put your offer out there.
Sure, you know the basics: a headline, a call-to-action button, a little bit of description.
But most landing pages require a bit more content than that. (Click below to get quick tips on implementing different kinds of landing page content.)
If you have LeadPages™, you don’t need to download this template – it’s already available to you inside your LeadPages account. Just log in and you’ll see how super easy it is to customize this page in seconds with no technical knowledge or skills, make it mobile responsive, integrate it with your email service provider or CRM, run A/B split tests, and publish it to Facebook, WordPress, or your own server.
They might need that extra content because …
Your audience doesn’t know you yet. If your landing page is receiving traffic from ads, visitors may have little to no idea who you are or why they should trust you. They might click through from an ad for curiosity’s sake, but unless you provide some context for your offer on the landing page, they’re unlikely to take action.
Your ad platform requires it. Ad platforms like Google AdWords and Facebook Ads want you to be successful—really. Most any advertising platform will have quality standards all landing pages must meet, and they require a certain amount of content. For instance, AdWords might reject your page for “lack of usefulness” if Google perceives that you haven’t included enough content to present a clear benefit to visitors.
Your visitors aren’t impulsed buyers. Even an opt-in for a free download or registration for a free event requires a certain level of commitment—they’re giving away their email address and their time even if you’re not asking them to pull out a credit card. Accordingly, you need to earn their trust and make a case for what you’re asking them to do.
Your visitors have different content preferences. People have diverse habits when it comes to gathering information online. Personally, I’m happy to read through detailed information but have to be really committed to a topic if I’m going to sit through a video; others might immediately tune out if they’re faced with a lot of text, no matter how informative or well written. Knowing your audience means including the kinds of landing page content that will best convince them to opt in.
So what counts as content? I’d define it like this:
Content is what happens when information—substantive, valuable information—meets a particular format.
Let’s look at the formats that persuasive information can take on your landing page. Along the way, we’ll help you spot the kinds of audience-appropriate content you’ll want to use on your landing pages again and again.
I’ll keep things brief here—each one of these kinds of content could take up an entire post on its own. But we’ve also created a quick-reference guide you can turn to whenever you want to double-check that your landing page content is calibrated to convert. Download a free copy here:
If you have LeadPages™, you don’t need to download this template – it’s already available to you inside your LeadPages account. Just log in and you’ll see how super easy it is to customize this page in seconds with no technical knowledge or skills, make it mobile responsive, integrate it with your email service provider or CRM, run A/B split tests, and publish it to Facebook, WordPress, or your own server.
Which of these 19 kinds of content will you use to convert your landing page visitors next? Read on for our advice on what kinds of pages and audiences different content types benefit most.
1. Bullet Points
Bullet points are an excellent type of landing page content for all sorts of offers because they cater to an ingrained tendency we have as online readers: the tendency to scan.
Open a webpage you’ve never seen before and your eyes are likely to take in the first few lines of text, then drop down and dart out into the middle of the page here and there, looking for anything interesting enough to make you stop and dig in.
Bullets naturally follow this F-shaped reading pattern, so your audience is more likely to take in all the important bits first. They make complex topics digestible and make the benefits of your offer pop.
At Leadpages we’ve found that certain formatting and wording choices make bulleted lists convert even better—download our bonus guide to get our top three tips for bulleted text:
If you have LeadPages™, you don’t need to download this template – it’s already available to you inside your LeadPages account. Just log in and you’ll see how super easy it is to customize this page in seconds with no technical knowledge or skills, make it mobile responsive, integrate it with your email service provider or CRM, run A/B split tests, and publish it to Facebook, WordPress, or your server.
Good for pages that … offer anything that can’t be summed up in a few lines. Sets of 3–7 bullets are especially useful to promote “medium-weight” opt-in offers for things like free ebooks and webinars.
Good for audiences that … prefer to get all the most important details up front and make a quick decision.
2. Numbered List
Say you’re a tropical fish enthusiast, and you’re thinking about setting up your fish tank at home. Would you be more likely to respond to a headline reading:
“How to Shop for a Home Aquarium”
… or:
“5 Questions to Ask Yourself Before Setting Up a Home Aquarium”?
Our brains get excited about numbers—they seem to satisfy our inherent acquisitive streak. It’s nice to be able to tick off the things you’ve learned on your fingers, and numbered lists can be a good way to promise that satisfaction.
Package components, product features, multi-step processes—all can benefit from a numbered approach. But because a numbered list is a bulleted list that likes math, it works in many other contexts, too. If you can quantify something you’re offering, try one out.
Good for pages that … advertise a signature service, promote a particular package, or break down a complex information product.
Good for audiences that … want to understand exactly what they’re getting into.
3. “How It Works” Section
By this point in the history of marketing, people tend to be a little skeptical of vague promises of wonderful (and equally vague) benefits.
If you’ve done much user testing for any business website, you’ve probably heard some variation of this common complaint:
“Okay, but what does this do?”
Oof.
All your careful branding and inspirational messaging are for nothing if visitors can’t answer this basic question right away. On a targeted landing page, it’s even more crucial to lay out exactly what you’re offering in terms that visitors can understand.
Adding a “how it works” section can let you do just that. Here’s an example:
In this case, the landing page is promising visitors a new way to make more money selling on Amazon. There’s no shortage of spammy marketing claiming to have discovered new “get rich quick online” schemes, so breaking down the process helps convey transparency and legitimacy.
Good for pages that … are trying to a direct sale, offer an especially complex service, or are making a bold and potentially hard-to-believe claim.
Good for audiences that … tend to be skeptical, or may not be highly familiar with what you do.
4. Sales Letter
So far we’ve covered kinds of content that can take a bunch of product aspects and make them easy to digest via quick snippets of text.
The sales letter is different (though it doesn’t have to be extremely long). A holdover from the days of direct mail and classic print advertising, it still has the power to move and motivate digital audiences through a compelling, unified narrative.
It’s a marketing truism that effective copywriting addresses one ideal customer, and a sales letter takes that notion to its logical conclusion. It’s a chance to address visitors’ problems and show them that you truly get it by telling a very personal story.
In this example, one entrepreneur tells a story about her family to demonstrate how buying her starter kit could change readers’ lives:
If your brand is powered by one key figure and you have one major product or service to sell, a sales letter might make a unique emotional impact.
Good for pages that … are selling a big-ticket item directly or rely heavily on the entrepreneur’s personal story.
Good for audiences that … are already familiar with you to some extent or are highly likely to respond to emotional appeals.
5. First-Person Video
Sometimes the best sales letters aren’t letters at all. They’re videos.
If you’re not a natural-born writer, consider setting up a camera (or your smartphone) and making your pitch that way instead. A simple script, a quiet and well-lit corner, and a lapel mic are all you need to get going.
In this example, a page making an emotional appeal about what visitors feed their families gets a boost from a video from a farmer involved with this nonprofit’s cause.
Good for pages that … are making a big announcement or an emotion-based pitch, are powered by a particular personality, or promote a video-centric offer (such as a webinar or a video course).
Good for audiences that … prefer videos to text, or are already familiar with your multimedia web presence.
6. Quick Quiz
Quiz
There’s something so elementally pleasurable about taking a quiz; I wouldn’t be surprised if cave paintings turned up showing our ancient ancestors how to tell if they were more of a Thod or more of an Ogg.
Though it doesn’t allow people to vote, you can build similar intrigued by posting a quiz question in the copy and asking visitors to watch a short video or opt into your list to learn the answer.
If your first forays prove successful for your audience, you could even invest in a dedicated quiz tool and deliver results by email, as marketer Taylor Welch did to great success (as he explained to the Leadpages team in a ConversionCast episode).
Good for pages that … make a simple opt-in offer, especially if the offer involves “how-to” content of any kind.
Good for audiences that … are short on time and enjoy “gamified” approaches to learning.
7. Mini Blog Post
Content like this serves two functions: it teases the kind of knowledge leads will get when they download your lead magnet, and it reminds them to seek out your blog on a regular basis for more insights. Plus, if you add a publish date, it tells visitors that your page is up to date and reflects the latest information on the topic.
Good for pages that … provide a comprehensive introduction to who you are and what you do, and ask for a simple subscription opt-in. Also great for minisites and blog welcome pages.
Good for audiences that … are discovering your site and your business for the first time.
8. “Our Story” Section
Often relegated to a corner of a well-hidden “About” page, a company’s story can in fact be a powerful element of a landing page.
Don’t have a long track record in business? Lack credentials in your area of expertise? Don’t have enough customers yet to provide testimonials or other kinds of social proof?
For most landing page offers, you’ll want to find some way to establish your authority with content. Using your landing page to sum up your story as a business in an engaging and authentic way can do the trick.
And of course, the next chapter in your story starts when the visitor says yes to the offer on that landing page.
Good for pages that … provide a comprehensive introduction to who you are and what you do, and ask for a simple subscription opt-in. Also great for minisites and blog welcome pages.
Good for audiences that … don’t know you well yet and like to patronize businesses that make them feel good.
9. Comparison Chart
Got competition? You have two options: ignore it and stick to talking about what you do best, or tackle the topic head on.
Either can be valid, but if you go the second route, there is a right way and a wrong way.
The wrong way: tear down your competitors and build your own business up with wildly hyperbolic statements about how great you are. This tends to make you seem insecure in what you have to offer.
The right way: try a more balanced, neutral tone. Sometimes, this doesn’t require many words at all—a comparison chart can convey all the convincing data you want to present.
You could even try this kind of content if one of the main alternatives to your service is “doing it yourself”—that is, use a comparison table or chart to spell out expenses or pitfalls that customers avoid by choosing you.
Good for pages that … sell one feature-heavy product or service directly.
Good for audiences that … do a lot of research before making a purchase.
10. Accolades
Have you received any press attention? High-profile clients? Business awards? You’ll probably want to present these somewhere on your website anyway, but content like this can be a useful addition to sales and opt-in pages, too.
The easy route is to give this kind of content its own section on a longer-form landing page, but you can also select one particularly strong testament to your business’s quality to build a shorter landing page around. A TV appearance or rave review in a well-known publication could fit the bill.
Good for pages that … are either selling a product or are presenting an opt-in offer that depends heavily on your expertise.
Good for audiences that … don’t know you well yet, or tend to make purchase decisions based on recommendations from trusted sources.
If you have LeadPages™, you don’t need to download this template – it’s already available to you inside your LeadPages account. Just log in and you’ll see how super easy it is to customize this page in seconds with no technical knowledge or skills, make it mobile responsive, integrate it with your email service provider or CRM, run A/B split tests, and publish it to Facebook, WordPress, or your own server.
11. Testimonials
Similar to other kinds of accolades, testimonials are often included on a website but not positioned to make the impact they could. Rather than corralling them on their own page, try adding them to relevant landing pages.
An in-depth testimonial can sometimes tell the story of what you have to offer even better than you can. Or, if you have a lot of testimonials, you could let different users present a well-rounded picture of your product on a longer sales page.
One brief, believable testimonial from a customer can do more than a thousand words of persuasion when it comes to your landing pages.
Good for pages that … aim to get product sales, opt-ins for a substantial piece of content, or blog subscriptions.
Good for audiences that … put a lot of stock in user reviews when making a purchase.
12. User-Generated Content
A special kind of social proof, user-generated content signals that your offer or business has attracted an interested, engaged community.
That content can be curated or not. The testimonial sales page above also contains space for you to add your favorite tweets from customers; you could also add reviews from places like Facebook or Yelp if you’re a brick-and-mortar business.
If you think your audience will use it responsibly, and you’re committed to keeping an eye on it, you could also add a Facebook comments section. This can be worthwhile if your page naturally invites a lot of questions, as when you’re promoting a course or an event. You can also use a comments section to generate content for a FAQ webinar directly from the people who’ll attend.
Good for pages that … promote a complex offer, include blog-style content, or lead up to a webinar or event.
Good for audiences that … are inclined to crowdsource advice or are interested in a high level of interaction.
13. Staff Profiles
Staff Profiles
So your business is filled with “top experts” and “professionals who care about every customer.”
But who are they?
If the human resources on your team are a major selling point for prospects, show them off! Customers may feel better about your offer if they can imagine talking with the real people behind it. It’s unlikely to be the main focus of your landing page.
Good for pages that … promote your services, or function as a central hub for newcomers to your business.
Good for audiences that … enjoy making an in-depth connection to companies they purchase from.
14. Interactive Content
Interactive maps. Special calculators. Calendars and Scheduling tools.
Content widgets like these give visitors a very concrete piece of information about your business while drawing them closer to a purchase or a real-life interaction.
With the arrival of Leadpages’ drag-and-drop landing page builder, you can now use an HTML embed field to drop in iframe code for widgets like these—for an instant extra dose of engagement potential.
Good for pages that … drive visitors toward personal interactions, especially for service-based or brick-and-mortar businesses.
Good for audiences that … have enough existing interest in your page topic to spend a few moments interacting with these tools.
15. Photo Spread
At Leadpages, most of our landing page templates are designed so that you don’t have to have tons of original imagery on hand. That said, if you do have high-quality, relevant photos, a longer-form landing page can be a wonderful place to flaunt them.
Ideally, you’ll use photos less as a gallery and more as a guided tour through your offer. To that end, you may want to consider a left/right array of photos and text.
If you’re selling event tickets, an experiential service package, or a product that becomes clearer in context, try finding or taking some photos to use in a content section like this one.
Good for pages that … promote something with real visual appeal.
Good for audiences that … like lots of visual information.
16. Icon Set
Feature sets and process steps alike gain extra clarity when you assign each part an icon and quick description. And you can easily adjust this kind of content to fit your landing page. Three icons might be plenty for a simple lead magnet page, while three rows of icons might be fine on an “our services” page.
Good for pages that … list all your primary services or break down a complex package or product.
Good for audiences that … want to quickly locate the most relevant parts of your offer.
17. Illustrations and Diagrams
Sometimes your offer doesn’t lend itself to real-life visuals … but you still suspect an illustration could help make things clear.
In that case, it might be time to start making diagrams: flow charts, process illustrations, mind maps.
You can show part or all of images like these on your landing pages. If the diagram itself is complex, you’re likely to get more opt-ins if you leave a little to the imagination.
Good for pages that … promote one particular info product or service, especially anything based on a “formula” or a special process.
Good for audiences that … are looking for repeatable results they can eventually master on their own.
18. Schedules and Syllabi
Got something to teach? You’ll want to make sure you’re fully communicating the value of the guidance and information you have to impart.
For online events, in-person events, and information products alike, a detailed schedule or course syllabus can be an ideal way to conceptually “bulk up” what you’re offering. (Personally, I’m very unlikely to commit my time to an event or training if I can’t tell how much of what’s being covered will be news to me—maybe you and your audience are the same.)
One note: don’t necessarily expect every visitor to read all the way through your breakdown. For many customers, the important thing will be that the information is available, and it looks meaty.
Good for pages that … promote a course, event, webinar, or training.
Good for audiences that … like to know lots of details before they commit.
19. FAQs
A FAQ might sound like it’d be the driest part of your landing page, but in fact, it can be a powerful sales tool.
Think about it: you have the chance to anticipate points of confusion and objections, and then answer them outright. No need to weave them into a clever narrative or worry too much about the order—just field them one by one.
While a FAQ can’t stand alone on a landing page, it can support and flesh out a simpler description of your offer.
If lots of your best page content appears only in your FAQ, make sure your design choices draw attention to it. However, if you don’t necessarily need everyone to read every answer, try using a section with hideable answers (which you can find on several Leadpages event pages).
Good for pages that … promote a course, event, or in-depth information product.
Good for audiences that … like to know lots of details or are hoping to have specific objections answered.
Now, the next time you’re scrambling to plan out your landing page content, you have 19 options to skim through—and don’t forget, we have one more resource to help you make sure whatever types of content you choose are compelling.
If you have LeadPages™, you don’t need to download this template – it’s already available to you inside your LeadPages account. Just log in and you’ll see how super easy it is to customize this page in seconds with no technical knowledge or skills, make it mobile responsive, integrate it with your email service provider or CRM, run A/B split tests, and publish it to Facebook, WordPress, or your server.
How Do You Build a Funnel? Start at the End.
What’s a funnel?
I couldn’t have answered that question with confidence when I started out in the digital marketing field. A funnel was a household object that, in this context, felt pretty foreign.
Since then, I’ve heard from some entrepreneurs and small business owners—people who come to marketing simply because they have a product they need to sell, and there’s no one else to do it—who have had similar trouble finding value in that concept.
Now, a sales or marketing funnel is just the series of steps you set up to turn prospects into customers. The idea behind setting up a funnel is that when you understand exactly what you want potential customers to do next, it’s much easier to get them to do it.
A funnel itself can be long and complex, but the concept should make things easier for your marketing—not harder.
Lately, I’ve been wondering: is it hard to understand funnels because we’ve been looking at them upside down?
That concept clicked when I heard about one of our support specialists’ experience guiding brand new Leadpages users through their first marketing campaigns.
To build a funnel, start at the end.
Hearing about that was a lightbulb moment for me, too. In a way, it was so obvious. And yet it’s the kind of simple statement that you can forget to make explicit when you’re deep in marketing-land.
The typical sales funnel diagram can be accidentally deceiving. (Which is one reason you’ll notice our “funnel” diagrams at Leadpages aren’t remotely triangular.) When you’re looking at one of these, it’s only natural to pay the most attention to the biggest, brightest thing on the diagram: the top of the funnel.
But when you’re first starting out, that’s a big mistake.
Instead, you should start by focusing on something that’s often left as blank space at the bottom of funnel diagrams: the end goal.
In this post, I’ll explain more about what I mean by that. To put the rest of your funnel together, I’d also recommend you download our free pack of 6 campaign-funnel diagrams (with clear explanations, of course) designed to accomplish different goals. You’ll also get a video walking you through setting up a Micro Funnel (more on that later).
The Light at the End of the Funnel: Your Business Goal
What do you want your marketing to achieve?
To sell things, probably. But when you’re figuring out how to build a sales funnel effectively, you’ll need to get a little more specific than that. It’s a time-honored if slightly counterintuitive principle of marketing: past certain limits, the broader you make your target, the less likely you are to hit it.
Your specific funnel goal will look different depending on how your business operates.
For instance, maybe you run a service-based business that depends on attracting long-term clients who will regularly use your most profitable services. In that case, your primary goal may be to land contracts from those ideal clients.
Or maybe you sell a variety of products. It may seem hard to find a focus for your first sales funnel when your business covers a lot of territories, but if you’ve ever thought to yourself, “Man, if I could only sell more of these, I’d be set”—you probably do have at least one key product that’s worth marketing more carefully.
Once you know what you want your campaign funnel to achieve, it’s time to make that goal measurable. How many of those valuable new clients or high-ticket sales do you need each month to turn a profit, or to grow at the rate you desire?
Write that number down. It’ll help you make decisions in constructing the rest of your funnel, and it’ll let you track your success.
Congratulations! Conceptually, at least, you’re at your goal already.
Now, it’s time to peer back up into your funnel and determine . . .
The Last Thing Your Leads See . . .
Before they become customers, that is. How do you make the sale?
The most obvious last stop before your customers reach their destination is a checkout page. But it doesn’t necessarily need to be a web page at all. For instance, if you make your sales at the end of a free consultation, the consultation serves this function.
By now, you should be sensing a pattern. You probably know what I’m going to ask next. Say it with me: What do they see before that?
In a well-constructed funnel, there’s one overall answer here: they see something that engages them enough to buy.
At this point, your funnel can either stay simple or become rather complex, so let’s spend a little time here.
The Middle of the Funnel: Rules of Engagement
Say your goal is to sell an e-book. Now, you could simply give people a link to a web page about your e-book, from which they can click through to your shopping cart and purchase.
That strategy might work for someone who has a huge existing following. But unless you’re already a bestselling author, you probably need to give people more context for what you’re offering. You need to find ways to engage them.
Often, one of the best ways to engage people is to give them a free sample of what you have to offer. If they like it, many of them will be motivated to make a purchase.
So for your e-book, you may want to take a step back from the product page and create a landing page that lets people opt in for a free download of your first chapter (in exchange for their email address).
Take another step back, and perhaps you decide to write a blog post about your e-book topic, which links to that free download landing page.
Landing pages and blog posts aren’t your only options for engaging people, and in fact, they’ll rarely stand alone. For instance, if someone opts in for your free chapter download, you’ll want to use the email address they provided to email them with information on how to buy your full book. You may even want to create a series of emails, depending on how much additional engagement you think your audience will require.
With each step you take back from the end goal, your audience should be getting broader (since it’s unlikely that any tactic will have a 100% success rate)—even though you’re still keeping a narrow focus on the one action you want those people to take.
Ultimately, that brings us all the way back to . . .
The Top of the Funnel: Laws of Attraction
There’s one major question we haven’t answered yet: who are these people reading your blog posts, viewing your landing pages, and making purchases? Where do they come from?
They come from the top of the funnel—your traffic sources.
A traffic source is anything that attracts people who weren’t previously familiar with what you’re promoting. It turns strangers into engaged prospects.
Traffic sources can be paid or free, online or offline. They include things like:
Pay-per-click advertising, such as Facebook Ads or Google AdWords
Web search results
Social media
Press attention
Mastering any one of these traffic sources can be as big a job as you want it to be—there’s always room for further learning and fine-tuning. But if you’ve been working backward from the end goal, you’ll know the most important thing: where this traffic should end up.
That alone puts you way ahead of most new marketers. For instance, you’ll know that you probably shouldn’t be directing traffic to your home page or a huge product inventory page, because those kinds of pages don’t usually present a clear opportunity for engagement.
Instead, you’ll direct traffic to the point of engagement, such as a focused landing page. Which leads people to the next step in your funnel, which leads to the next step . . . Right on down to your big goal at the end.
Great, I Mapped out a Funnel. Now, How Do I Turn This Thing on?
Once you’ve figured out the goal, bottom, middle, and top of your sales funnel, it’s time to fill in the details. In keeping with our method of starting with the biggest pieces, I’d recommend you first turn your attention to one important (but refreshingly easy to create) building block. We call it the Micro Funnel.
A start-to-finish campaign funnel can have any number of components, but the Micro Funnel always has 3:
A landing page: Whether they arrive from one of your traffic sources or engaging content, leads wind up here to accomplish one of two things: opting into the next stage of your funnel, or making a purchase.
A Leadbox™ or purchase point: Leadboxes® are the best way to facilitate that opt-in. They’re simple, 2-step opt-in forms that allow your visitors to sign up for whatever you have to offer while passing their contact information on to you. Of course, if you’re ready to make a sale, you’ll want to substitute whatever point of payment you use instead of an opt-in form.
A thank you page: This may seem optional, but you’re forgoing a big advantage if you don’t present thank-you pages after each key step. We like to call these “thanks, and . . .” pages, because they’re an excellent opportunity to ask new leads to taking the next step right then and there. For instance, you can use a thank you page to link to your product page and bring visitors to the end of your funnel, or create more top-of-the-funnel action by asking your new leads to sharing your offer on social media.
The nice thing about using Leadpages is that the Micro Funnel is built into every page you create. The default options on each landing page include a Leadbox™ and a thank you page. You’ll want to modify them to suit your business, but all the necessary architecture is there.
So when someone arrives from one of your traffic sources to your first landing page, they move swiftly through a Micro Funnel.
When, later, someone clicks through from an email to a product page, they move swiftly through a Micro Funnel.
At every point, whenever you need someone to say “yes” to something online, you present them with a Micro Funnel.
Add in your traffic sources, emails, and any other connecting elements, and you have a funnel that moves people toward your big goal at the end as logically and efficiently as possible.
To explore complete diagrams of 6 different campaign funnels—some of which you may be able to lift completely for your own campaigns—click below to get a free PDF guide:
More Resources on How to Build a Sales Funnel
Free: Funnel Building: The Re-Education—The New Way to Understand and Build Campaign Funnels That Convert
Check out this 8-part post when you’re ready to take a closer look at every element of your campaign funnel.
Paid: Sales Funnels Rebuilt Course
For in-depth, hands-on guidance on building sales funnels for your business, consider our new 13-part course. It even comes with free coaching.