When it comes to winning new customers via your own website, landing pages are very popular. But they also help in email marketing to generate new leads, qualify existing leads, strengthen customer loyalty and build a positive reputation. But what is the ideal way to pick up prospects and what should you consider before creating a landing page?
In this article, we will focus on the four essential steps that you should take before you create your landing page. After all, this should also bring the hoped-for success, right?
Landing pages: 4 things you should do before you create them
Even before you start creating your landing page, there are already some stumbling blocks. It’s not uncommon for important steps to be forgotten, resulting in landing pages that convert poorly or communicate completely past the target audience. So that this does not happen to you, you will find below the 4 most important steps that form a solid basis for a successful landing page. Because only when you are clear about who exactly your offer is aimed at, can you work towards ensuring that your prospect really feels picked up.
Step 1: Research for all you’re worth.
Knowledge is power this also applies when preparing for landing pages. So the more you know in advance about the needs of your potential customers, their pain points, and desires in relation to your offer, the easier it will be for you to cat your prospects with the right arguments.
However, it is important to note that a landing page should only ever address one target group. So, if you want to address multiple target groups with your offer, each target group needs a landing page created specifically for them.
Possible methods to get a comprehensive overview of the market and your potential buyers are for example:
- Surveys of your current newsletter subscribers and community
- Conversations with prospects and existing customers
- If necessary, reading reviews of similar products and services on the appropriate platforms such as Amazon, Google, or iTunes
- and, of course, looking at the competition.
Step 2: Define your target group right down to the smallest detail.
The next step is to define your target group or review the existing target group analysis once again. Because even if you know the target group for your company, individual offers that you advertise on a landing page may only appeal to smaller subgroups. So the more precisely you know your target group, the more precisely you can address them and the more successful your landing page will be.
But that’s not all: In order to create a real target group-oriented and good landing page that sells successfully, you need more than a simple target group analysis. Because even if you already know basic demographic data, professional situation and fields of interest of your potential customers at this point, it is important in the course of the second step to really get to know your target group in other words, to also explore the language, precise interests and areas of tension of potential customers.
Step 3: Create realistic buyer personas.
Based on your previous research and analyses, you can now derive corresponding buyer personas, also known as target customers.
Buyer personas show a so-called “archetype” i.e. an exemplary, invented person whose characteristics represent your target group. At this point, however, it is no longer a question of superficial data, but above all of the soft factors. These can be, for example, life situations, problems, wishes, motivations, and fears.
Also feel free to give your buyer personas a picture and a name, just as you imagine your potential buyers based on your analysis. And even if this seems quite unnecessary at first, an image can help you write landing page content exactly for this person. After all, you are no longer writing for an abstract group of prospects. But your potential customers.
Step 4: Write a product sheet for your landing page.
The last step in preparing your landing page is to create a product sheet for your respective offer. This should sometimes serve as the content basis for your landing page and builds on all the knowledge gained so far from research, target group analysis, and visualization of the buyer persona.
These are the contents your product sheet should contain:
Features
What features does your product or service have? Collect a list of all components and features here.
Uniqueness.
What features set your product and service apart from the competition?
Pain points.
This is where your preparation is especially important: what specific pain points of the target audience does your product solve?
Benefits
List the benefits of your product or service and assign them to each feature, if applicable.
It is then advisable to prioritize all features and benefits according to their importance. Above all, don’t hold back your strongest arguments. There is no tension on a landing page. The strongest features and benefits come first here!
More leads through the right preparation of your landing page
Landing pages are the nonplus ultra when it comes to encouraging your newsletter subscribers to take a specific action from within the email. Compared to your website, this gives you the opportunity to formulate offers in a targeted manner. The result: your prospect gets the feeling of being addressed almost personally, which makes him feel picked up in the best possible way, which of course also positively influences your conversion rate. At least to the extent that you know who exactly you are writing for and what the goal of your landing page is. But luckily you now know the most important steps.