One of the most important tools you can have in your content marketing arsenal is a great landing page or two. To be clear, a landing page is not the homepage of your website — it is any web page that a consumer can land on and is usually a standalone page. Landing pages are the next step toward a visitor becoming a customer because they let you make some sort of special offer in exchange for providing contact information.

Landing pages can be click through, leading to another page such as your e-commerce site, or they can be lead generation-based and offer items like an eBook, free trial, contest entry, or webinar registration in return for the submission of contact information. A good landing page will do its job by convincing a potential customer that your content is worth their precious contact info.

In order to get users to take action on a landing page, you need compelling, action-oriented copy. These tips will help you create engaging landing page content that can initiate valuable conversions on your website.

Know Who You’re Talking To

To write compelling copy, you must first know exactly who you are talking to. Define your target audience’s demographics and characteristics, so you are aware of their habits, what they want and need, and how they speak. Your copy will be much more focused, clear, and direct when you have one target audience in mind, rather than a largely undefined audience.

Frontload Important Information

One of the most powerful tips for writing landing page content is to convey important information right away. Online readers move around webpages quickly, so you only have a few seconds and inches of space to catch their attention. All of this information should be included “above the fold” (for non-marketing people, this means that this information should be visible before a user starts to scroll).

Position Features as Benefits

When writing sales copy, you should describe the features of a product or service by describing their benefits. In other words, you should describe the attributes of a product in terms of how they benefit the user.

A great example of this is when Apple released the iPod. Rather than describing that the iPod featured 1GB of storage, which makes sense to no one, Apple highlighted the benefit of its storage capacity with the tagline “1,000 songs in your pocket.”

Speak People

When writing for the web, you should use the second person, which means using language to speak directly to the reader. In other words, you should use words and phrases such as “you,” “your,” and “yours.” You should also directly tell the user what you want them to do by using sentences, such as “Sign up here,” “Take the first step,” and “Try this now.” The idea is to put the focus entirely on the reader.

As for SEO content, copy isn’t all about keywords and you should still write for the reader.  If you are going to incorporate keywords into your copy (and you should!), do so in a way that is natural and easily read.

Finally, unless you’re only trying to impress marketing people, you should avoid jargon, industry slang, or any other type of terminology your target audience may not understand or use. Speak to them in the language they know and use.

Make it Easy to Skim

Copy for the web needs to be easy to digest, so it’s important to pay attention to how you format the text. Copy should be easy for readers to scan and immediately find what they’re looking for.

When writing for the web, try a combination of:

• Bulleted lists
• Short paragraphs and sentences
• Font formatting that draws the eye to important information
• Quotes
• Headings and subheadings

Don’t be afraid to use non-copy elements to guide and engage readers. Break up copy using white space, graphics, icons, and images to draw the eye to important elements and avoid overwhelming them with text.

End Strong

Don’t just create content to create content. Close the deal by creating a sense of urgency and telling readers exactly what they need to do next in order to get closer to acquiring the product, service, or piece of content. Often, telling a reader that their access to this material has a limited shelf life can work wonders.

Put Your Content to the Test

Testing is a huge part of content marketing, so you should run tests to ensure your text is optimized to create the best results possible. I highly recommend performing A/B tests on all of your landing pages to see which copy is leading to the conversion results you want. You should also perform tests to check on-page SEO to make sure landing pages are appropriately optimized for SEO.

Not sure if your landing page is working for you? Contact me for a consultation, where we can talk about your landing pages or any other pages within your site.