Are you thinking about launching a new product online? Building a dedicated landing page is the best way to attract hordes of qualified traffic to your site – sound interesting?

There are tons of ways to build effective landing pages for your site. Startups can benefit from free drag-and-drop builders like WIX, or companies with the budget can invest in a WordPress CMS and add landing pages to their website.

Whichever method you decide to use, a dedicated landing page is one of the best ways to boost your conversion rate and help you sell more products online.

Landing pages and lead generation – The heart of your marketing strategy

Your landing page acts as your biggest lead generation tool for your marketing strategy. This "inbound" marketing tactic involves letting the leads come to you rather than searching for leads yourself.

While a large percentage of your traffic won't purchase your product, they're more than willing to leave you their email and name if you provide a value offer that creates a fair exchange.

Those leads that enter your opt-in strategy through your contact forms are the bread and butter of your marketing strategy. Sure, we all wish the prospect would convert on the first visit, but that usually not the case.

Visitors that enter your landing pages are "qualified traffic." That means they came to your page because they thought you had the solution to their problem. They might not take action on your page for various reasons, but that doesn't mean they're not interested.

However, if you capture their details using a lead magnet, you can add them to your sales funnel and keep marketing to them until they do convert.

How to create a landing page that converts

Follow this process to develop a landing page that converts more traffic.

• Define your buyer persona

Do you know your target audience? What kind of people buys your product? These questions are critical to your marketing strategy.

Defining your buyer persona helps you identify what these people are searching for online. That research gives you an idea of how you can put your landing page and product in front of them.

Your buyer persona includes demographics like your ideal prospect's age, income level, location, and lifestyle information.

Use this information to create your ideal buyer persona, and build your marketing strategy around that data.

• Research target keywords

Your keyword research forms the foundation of your marketing and SEO strategy. You need to know what your target audience is searching for online and use keywords to put it into their search results. If you need assistance with understanding the topic of keyword research, find a free tutorial on YouTube.

As a digital marketer, you might find the process of locating your top keywords tiresome and time-consuming, but you need to do it right. If you identify the wrong keywords, you could be months into your strategy before realizing things aren't working as you expected.

When choosing your keywords, it's a good idea to focus on long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords are less competitive, and they bring you a higher ROI on your marketing budget in PPC campaigns.

Adding location keywords to your keyword strategy is an excellent idea for local businesses. For instance, let's say you own a legal firm in New York.

Instead of focusing on the keywords legal advice or legal assistance, you could add "legal assistance New York" to your keyword, and it will perform better.

Related: Guide to choosing keywords for your website's SEO strategy

• Build a lead magnet

A lead magnet is a critical component of your inbound marketing strategy. There's no need to go out and purchase lists of qualified leads when you can make them come to you.

A lead magnet is a value-offer you present to your prospect on your landing page. Most of the traffic opening your landing page will not take action and purchase your product; that's the reality.

However, with a good value offer, you can entice the qualified traffic to leave you their details. The lead magnet could be a variety of virtual or physical products, but its purpose is to get your prospects to take action and leave you their details.

An example of a lead magnet is an exit pop-up. Have you visited a site, and as you navigate towards the return arrow in your browser, a window pops up asking you to join the company's email list?

Let us ask you this; how many times do you leave your information?

If you navigate away without leaving your details, that means the website's value offer wasn't strong enough to entice you to leave your email address and name.

So, what would it take for your prospect to take action and opt-in?

That answer is going to be different from industry-to-industry and niche-to-niche.

However, some of the value offers people like to take action on are the following.

• Free trials
• Discount coupons
• Webinar registrations
• Newsletter subscriptions
• Free ebooks and virtual courses

Related: How to build a website that generates leads in 2020

• Add compelling calls-to-action

The call-to-action (CTA) is a command that you give your prospect when they finish reading a piece of content on your landing page.

For instance, if you have your opening statement offering your product, you can leave a clickable button underneath the copy with a CTA asking the prospect to buy your product or leave their information with your lead magnet.

The CTA is a phrase designed to entice your prospect to take action. You can test various texts in your CTAs and use analytics tools to see how they perform.

Your CTA is only a few words at most, but it must make an impact with the prospect. The best CTAs let your visitors know what you want them to do. They provide your prospective customer with the push they need to take them into the next sales cycle phase.

Some of the best phrases to use in your CTAs include the following.

• Take action now
• Buy this product now
• Click to buy
• Click to join our email list

The point of the text in the CTA is to tell your customers what you want them to do next. It might seem pushy, but sales psychology shows that going for the close with your prospect works. If you manage to provide enough value in your landing page copy, the prospect feels obliged to click on your CTA.

Your CTA should include vibrant colors that stand out from the site copy and background, catching your prospect's attention. Make sure you create a contrast that matches the theme of your site.

For example, if you're a lawyer, then neutral colors work best for your site. Contrasting those colors with other neutral colors is a better option than using bold, bright colors.

The effect of the neutral colors on the website template provides a professional look, while white CTAs or other light, neutral colors provide the right color contrast without looking too loud.

Related: Clever call-to-action examples that guarantee clicks in 2020

• Use high-quality images and video in your design

Your landing page needs to load fast and offer easy navigation through your CTAs. However, it also needs plenty of visual aids to keep your visitors attention.

Research shows that the average human attention span is only eight seconds. That's not long. You need to make a striking first impression, or your visitor will bounce back to the search results.

Video sliders are an excellent way to attract visitor attention as they land on your page. However, you need to ensure that you compress the files properly to prevent the slider from slowing down your page speed.

Google penalizes slow-loading pages in the search ranking, and your prospects won't hang around. Research shows that the average visitor bounces back to the search results if the web page takes longer than 3-seconds to load.

Your landing page should also include high-quality images to hold your prospect's attention. Invest in stock photos for your site, or hire a photographer to take professional shots of your products.

• Show social proof

If you visit a website and you're thinking about signing up for a service or investing in one of the products, what do you look for to confirm your purchase decision?

Chances are you look around for some on-site or off-site social proof about the offer before you buy. We don't like to purchase products and services if we think we're the only person using them – how do we know if it works?

It's the same thing with the prospects visiting your website. Adding forms of social proof to your landing pages can dramatically increase your conversion rate.

However, you need to be careful with testimonials. Always ensure you're using real-world testimonials and not fake reviews.

It's a good idea to set up a Trustpilot account and ask your customers to review your landing page or website after purchasing.

• Include Google Analytics to track performance

You need to know what your landing page campaigns are doing to build your business. The only way to capture that data is through using analytics software.

Google Analytics is an excellent platform to measure the efficacy of your PPC campaigns, your A/B testing, and your overall marketing and SEO strategy.

Website analytics help you understand the actions people are taking when they land on your site and where you need to make changes to improve your conversion rate.

Google analytics provides easy-to-read reports that help you understand what's going on with the traffic when it opens your landing page.

Related: How to use Google Analytics

• Optimize your landing pages

Optimization is another critical part of building the best landing pages that convert traffic at an obscene rate. Optimized webpages draw more traffic to your offer, making it easier for people to find what they need on your site, and convert.

The search engine algorithms monitor all this activity. When it notices more people finding your site and using it for its intended purpose, they start pushing it up in the rankings.

To optimize your landing pages, adhere to the following best practices for optimal results.

• Title Tags: The first content people interact with your website. Make it count with an impactful title featuring around 60-characters.
• Meta Descriptions: Another potent marketing tactic, a meta description, summarizes what the visitor can expect from your page content.
• Page Title and Header Tags: Using your main keyword in header tags and page titles improve page visibility with search engines.
• Content strategy: Ensure your page content targets your keywords. Images are effective at drawing eyeballs, but the search engines don't care. The bots need descriptive, high-quality content that's keyword-rich and easy to read.

Wrapping Up – Use B12 to create affordable and functional landing pages

The one aspect we haven't covered about creating landing pages that convert – is the pricing. Sure, you could use a free landing page builder like WIX if you have a low-quality product offering and want to appear like you are scared of spending money on your website design.

If you're on a shoestring budget, a free builder is your only option, unless you know how to code. If you have coding experience with HTML, you can customize more functionality to your free site or consider a WordPress CMS.

However, if the only experience you have with code is watching it fall down the Matrix movies screen, you need B12.

B12 is a comprehensive and complete end-to-end website and landing page solution for your business. Where a WordPress site could cost you more than $8,000 for its development, B12 offers you a fully functional site for an affordable monthly subscription fee.

It utilizes AI-assisted design processes to produce website and landing page templates with elegant and functional design. The B12 template integrates with Mailchimp and other email marketing tools to boost your marketing and SEO strategy.

B12 also creates a landing page experience for your prospects that's easy to share on social media. You also get website management included in your monthly subscription.

Visit the official B12 site and start building your landing page template. The powerful AI has a free draft ready for you in less than 5 minutes.