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Chapter 3 How to Build Landing Pages That Capture High-Quality Leads

In 2003, the IT department at Microsoft invented landing pages in response to poor online sales of their flagship business product, Office. Microsoft.com had become bloated with information, so they extracted the content about just Office and put it on its own dedicated page and URL. As legend has it, sales of Office immediately skyrocketed by 30%.

The reason landing pages are so effective for lead generation is simple: they are simple. They only have one goal. Compare that to your website, which may have dozens of navigation options or categories to choose from, and you can see why professional marketers use landing pages for any lead generation campaigns involving ad spend. Because as Wikipedia perfectly puts it, “The general goal of a landing page is to convert site visitors into sales or leads.”¹

Unlike the website traffic that Google sends you through searches and ads, where the “preview” of the content is text-based, social media and email marketing allow you to be very visual and descriptive about the lead magnet they can access if they decide to click. This technique, called coupling, increases the conversion rate of the landing page you send them to because they head there with a crystal-clear expectation.

Before you start sending traffic to your landing pages, just like we did with your website's design, you probably need to clean up the landing pages you are already using. More likely, you need to start over and build new ones.

There are many proven best practices regarding landing page design that I will cover ahead. Keep in mind, though, even if you have no design or technical skill whatsoever, there are countless companies (like Leadpages and Unbounce) that make building an effective landing page a couple of clicks. Be sure to search their existing templates by keyword (e.g., “real estate”) to find prebuilt, industry-specific designs.

You could also head back over to Dribbble (or Behance or MarketerHire or Toptal or even *gasps* Fiverr) to hire a designer who will build them for you. The bottom line is that all the bells and whistles in the world on a website won't convert leads at a higher rate than a singularly focused, well-designed landing page will.

THE MICROWAVE MINDSET

People used to sit through two-minute commercials, and believe it or not, couldn't fast-forward them. They listened to the radio, and if an ad came on, they could only change the station to another one with ads. Today, thanks to our phone and social media addiction, our attention is everywhere, while simultaneously nowhere for very long.

Case in point, TikTok and Instagram Reels both exploded in popularity using 100% micro-videos. Even YouTube launched Shorts, vertical videos, all under one minute in length. This new condensed format is not going to go away.

Studies have shown that 58% of viewers watch business-related videos to the end if they're less than 60 seconds,² but that number plummets as the length of the video increases (Figure 3.1). If bite-sized content is not already a big part of your marketing strategy, it better be soon.

Figure 3.1 How a Video's Length Affects Completion Rate

Our brains process visuals 60,000 times faster than text. My daughter can consume 20–30 TikToks in the time it takes me to read one blog post.

Words and long-form content still matter, sure. I wrote an entire book (with Phil M Jones and Jimmy Mackin) called Exactly What to Say for Real Estate Agents. It was instantly a best-seller. I believe in the power of words. I think copywriting should be an obsession for every business and that to show your expertise, you need to go deep and not just wide.

However, writing great quips of copy for social media, websites, landing pages, and emails is a new skill most are still learning. Regardless of your ability to craft clever copy, you need to take a visual-first approach if you want as many people as possible to actually read what you write.

This microwave mindset is another reason why using landing pages is so important: they cut to the chase, fast.

Whether you decide to DIY or outsource the design of your landing pages, I want to make sure you have a checklist of what a “perfect” landing page includes.

NINE KEY ELEMENTS EVERY LANDING PAGE SHOULD INCLUDE

Headline: Make it clear, concise, and “coupled.” The headline of your landing page needs to be an extension of the ad, email, or link that brought them to it. If what brought them was “Get an instant offer on your home” or “25 Facebook Ads Templates for Seller Leads,” you would repeat that as closely as you can with your headline.

Sub-headline: We want to continue them down the path the headline started them on with the sub-headline. Using the aforementioned headline examples, a good sub-headline would be “Find out if your home qualifies” or “We spent millions of dollars testing these templates. They work.”

Description: Make sure you triple-check all your grammar, punctuation, and spelling (I'm obsessed with Grammarly). Crossing every t and dotting every i should be mandatory for all marketing and sales copy. If you want a lead to answer the phone when you call, the words in your description matter. Use a scalpel with your copy, not an axe.

Testimonial: The goal of your landing page testimonial(s) or reviews is to establish trust. Using an icon from a well-known and trusted source, like Yelp (restaurants), Zillow (real estate agents), Google (small businesses), or G2 (SaaS), can really have an impact. Many companies are still touting their BBB (Better Business Bureau) credentials more than their public-facing reviews.

Adding things like “verified by” or “trusted by” can also increase conversions. For example, when eyeglass company AC Lens started displaying a VeriSign badge, they saw a 41% increase in conversions.

CTA or form: When the visitor is ready, your primary CTA to click a button or complete a form must be prominent and contain the right copy.³

What your buttons say makes a big difference in conversion rate. When you use the word “Submit” on a landing page, the overall conversion rate decreases by 3%. Both “Click here” (33% better) and “Go” (20% better) outperform “Submit.” Meanwhile, “Download” (25% worse) and “Register” (50% worse) underperform against “Submit.”⁴

Mozilla, makers of the popular Firefox browser, increased conversions by 3.6% by simply changing their button copy from “Try Firefox 3” to “Download Now—Free.”⁵

Clickable button(s): A conversion button should stand out and be near or directly below the CTA, either accompanying the message or reiterating it word-for-word. Formstack advises, “The button should be big, bright, and above where a user would have to scroll to it. Orange or yellow buttons for a CTA help to catch a viewer's eye.”⁶

There are no universal truths for button colors (meaning green buttons or red buttons can also work). Typically, the overall design of your landing page will dictate the best color for its button.

DO THIS RIGHT NOW

Canva has a very cool (and free) tool where you can get color palettes instantly by uploading an image (Google “Canva color palette generator” to try it).

Remove links: Landing pages have one purpose—to capture a lead—so there really shouldn't be many (if any) links to other things. Links take the visitor away, defeating the purpose of getting them there to capture their information in the first place.

Sometimes, you have to add a link back to your home page to be compliant when running ads. Other than that, in most cases, you will not want to link to anything else.

Image or video: Think of your images or videos on your landing pages in this context: If someone were on their phone and saw it on social media, would it cause them to stop scrolling? If so, run with it. If not, keep looking for a better option.

Surprisingly, when videos were used on landing pages, in most cases, and for most industries, the conversion rate went down.⁷ That said, I think less leads overall in exchange for them having watched a video before completing a form ultimately produces a higher quality lead.

If you need help finding photos and videos to use (legally) on your landing pages (or website) that aren't super-cheesy, try Burst by Shopify or Pexels.

Stay above the fold: Considering how many people visiting your landing pages will be on a phone, you need to optimize what appears above the fold (above the fold is what they can see and click on without scrolling). There is a time and place for long-form landing pages with extensive sales copy, but for the most part, what is above the fold is the gold.

One of my favorite features from Leadpages is that you can sort all of their landing pages by highest converting. Choose one of their highest-performing templates from your industry, quickly edit it to make it your own, and you're done. This does not ensure that you will have success, but this is an example of data being truly useful. You will find that many of their top performers follow most, if not all, of the nine key elements I went through.

When a lead fills out a form on a landing page, don't forget to customize the confirmation page. Usually, the confirmation page mentions that they should check their email for the information they requested. I also recommend that you use it to get them to another piece of content that will further warm up the lead.

For example, a real estate buyer lead might register to access a list of foreclosures. As they do, you include a CTA on the confirmation page that takes them to reviews of people you already successfully found a foreclosure for. You could add a CTA with your phone number, suggesting they text you the ZIP codes they are most interested in, or a CTA to watch a video you made with the six secrets to finding the right foreclosure. In my experience, the CTR on confirmation pages that use this technique is astronomically high.

LANDING PAGE-LESS LEADS

One of the most underused tactics for lead generation is not driving your clicks to a website or landing page and instead having them message/DM you.

Usually, our goal is to capture someone's information via the form on a landing page so that we can add them to our database and stay in front of them long term. There will be times, however, where bypassing this and sending them into a private message can produce a higher-quality lead.

I'm sure you've heard it goes down in the DM. It does. Conversations create customers. Messages are digital conversations. Send some of your ads that target the middle and bottom of the funnel there instead of to a traditional landing page.

“Message us” CTAs can work well on any social network.

Think of this approach as a landing page-less lead. During the back and forth in the private chat, you can gather their phone number and email address if they seem to be serious. Typically, they are, or they would not have been willing to go back and forth with you in the first place.

Start by cleaning up your online home (website and landing pages) before inviting over company (traffic and leads). Doing so will make every other thing I teach you in this book more effective. When you get the hub right, the spokes (social media, search engines, email marketing) all work better, too.

With a website design that converts and landing pages that capture, we can start creating content (such as blog posts, lead magnets, and videos) optimized for search engines, social media, and lead generation.

NOTES

1 1. Wikipedia. “Landing page.” 2022. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landing_page

2 2. Gillespie, Chris. “How Long a Video Should Be.” Vidyard. February 19, 2021. https://www.vidyard.com/blog/video-length/.

3 3. Formstack. “Anatomy of a Perfect Landing Page Design.” 2020. https://www.formstack.com/resources/guide-the-anatomy-of-a-perfect-landing-page.Taylor, Floss.

4 4. Gardner, Oli. “How to Optimize Contact Forms for Conversions.” Unbounce. April 12, 2013. https://unbounce.com/conversion-rate-optimization/how-to-optimize-contact-forms/.

5 5. Kovash, Ken. “Changing the Firefox Download Button.” Mozilla. November 21, 2008. https://blog.mozilla.org/metrics/2008/11/21/changing-the-firefox-download-button/.

6 6. Formstack. “Anatomy of a Perfect Landing Page Design.”

7 7. Floss, Taylor. “Video on Landing Pages Means More Conversions, Right? Wrong—Here's Why.” Unbounce. August 26, 2021.