If You're Not Converting Visitors to Customers, Blame These Common Landing Page Copywriting Mistakes. The time and effort you spend on site design and marketing is mostly wasted if you don't get your landing page right.
By Nathan Chan Edited by Dan Bova
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Most marketers approach landing page strategies with the wrong mindset. After they've spent all their time and money on paid search ads, social media marketing and acquiring incoming traffic, they assume that designing the perfect landing page will be as simple as throwing together a few words and pictures.
Unfortunately, just like every aspect of your marketing strategy, a good landing page design is all about establishing the correct combination of crucial elements -- like the recipe of a cake. You need to consider everything from the layout of the page and placement of your CTAs, to the color pallet that you want to use to make an emotional impression.
Related: 4 Things Your Website Needs to Convert Visitors Into Customers
Kissmetrics describes the landing page layout like this:
C: Call to Action
O: Offer (the thing that convinces your traffic to convert)
N: Narrow focus (be concise)
V: Very Important Attributes
E: Engaging headline
R: Resolution-rich design
T: Tidy Visuals
S: Social Proof
All of that seems simple enough, but before you can begin designing the ideal landing page, you need to eliminate some of the negative habits that can weasel their way into your creative process. Many of us convince ourselves that we're on the right track with marketing, but we make the same mistakes time and time again, like rats in a maze.
Below, I'll show you the landing page copywriting mistakes you want to avoid so you can design a page that actually C.O.N.V.E.R.T.S.
Mistake 1: No goals.
The "goal" of your landing page marketing strategy relates to the "C" and "O" of our conversion list above (call to action and offer).
Copy without any real objective sets your landing page up for failure. If your visitors don't know what they're expected to do when they approach your page, they may consider it a waste of their time and go elsewhere.
A good way to get your goal across to visitors is with an engaging headline and persuasive subhead. Your headline should outline the pain point of your goal, but in a way that is short, exciting and valuable enough to grab the reader's attention. Once your headline has made your user look, your subhead can make them stay by leading into your "Very Important Attributes."
Mistake 2: Misunderstanding your audience.
To better understand your audience, and therefore simplify the process of crafting your offer and showing off your very important attributes, ask yourself the following questions:
- What stage of the sales funnel are your visitors probably in?
- Are they likely to have heard of your product before?
- What are the chances of them making a purchase?
- Do they have all the information they need to decide?
- Could something be holding them back from a conversion?
Once you know the answer to these questions, you will be able to narrow the focus of your landing page, and address the needs and pain points of the people who visit.
Related: Three Problems With Your Landing Pages That Are Costing You Sales
Mistake 3: Problems with legibility.
Writing copy is easy. Making sure that people read your copy is much harder.
Internet users don't have time to lament over long words and jargon that has no place in their everyday lives. We all go to websites and quickly scan the information before deciding whether something is eye-catching enough to deserve our attention.
Landing pages aren't the place for poets and literary masterminds. Though you want your copy to sound good, the most important thing is to ensure it gets read, and that's all about scanability. Make sure that you use the five-second test to check whether your copy is easy to scan. Focusing on the legibility of your copy with scannable words, tidy visuals and a resolution rich design is also a great way to boost your chances that whatever you write actually gets read.
When you're choosing the font, the bullet points, and even the way that your words appear on the page, ask yourself whether the combination of all these elements will give your visitors an easy reading experience. Does the color stand out well against the background of your landing page, or are the letters too close together? Once you've got that figured out, you'll be able to focus on other details, like how many lines each paragraph should have.
Mistake 4: Failing to pinpoint benefits.
Listing the important features of your product is a good way to make sure that your audience understands the value of whatever you're offering. At the same time, however, it's a good idea not just to focus on a list of features, but also establish the benefits of your product in your marketing strategy too. Consider the problem that your product or service addresses from the perspective of your target customer, and show them what you can do to make their lives better.
People often buy items in an attempt to avoid pain and discomfort. While we frequently make purchasing decisions according to how we feel at the time, or what we crave, we also buy things that we believe we need. For example, we buy food because we want to avoid the pain of being hungry, and we buy soap because we want to avoid the discomfort of being dirty.
Related: 7 Ways to Get More People to Trust Your Content
If you make your copy about your customers and what they can get out of your product, then you're far more likely to make a positive and lasting impression. A good first step might be to interview your current clients, and find out what they think is the biggest benefit of your product. Use the answers you get to guide your writing, and your chances of creating convincing copy are sure to skyrocket.
Creating the right landing page.
Sometimes, creating the right landing page for your marketing strategy isn't just about knowing which elements you need to implement, but also knowing which mistakes you should avoid. Be careful, and stay away from the problems outlined above, and you should find that you deliver copy that only boosts the performance of your marketing efforts.
