B2B Landing Page Strategy: Boost Conversions, Not Just Traffic

EP004 – Getting Started WIth Landing Pages 

Louis HD: [00:00:00] I’ve been working in digital marketing for the best part of 15 years now, and it still amazes me how much impact the content of a page has on its conversion rate, which is the percentage of visitors that turn into a lead. This is the B2B Performance Marketing podcast by web marketer here to help you make the right moves with your B2B advertising. 

No spin, no smoke and mirrors, just honest insights from the advertising frontline. 

Maelien H: Welcome back to the podcast. I’m Maelien. 

Louis HD: And I’m Louis. Apologies in advance for my voice. Uh, my son’s rugby team got through to the cup final a couple of days ago and uh, my voice hasn’t really recovered from all the supporting, but we’ll power through. 

Maelien H: If you are new to the world of landing pages, then this episode is definitely for you. Today we’re going to be focusing on how to create landing pages for your ads. From experience, i’d say that most marketers know that landing pages play a really crucial role in performance marketing, but we see so many ads going through to pages that just aren’t gonna do your [00:01:00] bottom line any favours. 

And that’s what we’re gonna be talking about today. This episode is gonna be focused on getting started with landing pages, so we’re gonna stay quite strategic and top line. We’ve also got a couple of episodes brewing where we’ll be diving in deeper, so going into things like landing page optimization, split testing, and getting buy-in from the board. 

Anyway, let’s get things kicked off with a bit of positioning. Technically a landing page is the first page in a browser session on your website, so essentially the first place that someone lands. In this episode, when we talk about landing pages, we’re talking about a very specific type of page that’s been designed to get you inquiries. 

Louis HD: Yeah, exactly. It’s not the homepage and it’s not any internal page with a few extra buttons to the contact form. It’s its own thing altogether

because paid traffic actually behaves really different to organic traffic and it needs its own journey. 

Like, if you look at your Google Analytics, you’ll notice that organic traffic typically [00:02:00] stays around for longer and views more pages, whereas paid traffic is actually quite a bit more fickle. It’ll stay for much less time and typically have a much lower engagement rate. It’s almost like when someone clicks an ad, they’re viewing your content in this default state where they’re actively looking for a reason to abandon. 

So you’ve gotta work extra hard to make them stick around, and you’ve gotta work even harder to make them take action and inquire. Based on this. It’s really important to remember that with ads we’re actually playing in the minorities. If let’s say 10% of people who see an ad click it, and then 5% of those people who clicked go on to convert, we’re only actually playing with 0.5% of people who see an ad and then go on and make an inquiry. 

Like I’m super conscious that there’s. Almost this preconception before a business starts running ads, that there’s almost a queue of people online waiting to buy, and all you have to do is launch ads and the [00:03:00] inquiries start flooding in. And to be honest, that’s probably our fault as an industry for over egging it, but it’s definitely not true. 

Now, I’m not trying to go the other way and do ads a disservice here, but what I am trying to do is illustrate the fact that we’ve got this challenge where we’ve got a marketing channel that’s really, really scalable, but actually it takes work to make it commercially viable. So the same as you, don’t just turn ads on and start seeing inquiries flooding in. 

That doesn’t happen when you put a landing page live either. Now just the action of putting a landing page in place isn’t the bit that works. The landing page is actually the enabler, and really it’s about getting all of the ingredients in place to set it up for success. And with that, there’s this big mindset shift that has to happen. 

We have to go from thinking of a landing page as a piece of web design to almost thinking about it as a piece of communication engineering. So it’s not this static thing like a [00:04:00] poster or a brochure. Actually, it’s more like this visual conversation that moves towards a specific point, which is an anonymous click becoming an identifiable person.

Maelien H: I think a good way to position this is you probably know someone that is just amazing at explaining things. It doesn’t matter how complicated it is, they’ve just got this way of making it really clear and compelling. Now this is what your landing page needs to do for your ideal customer, your ICP. Trying to take a journey that might take weeks or months engaging with your brand online and trying to distill it into one single session on one single page. 

Now, I know that’s not always possible, especially in B2B, but this is definitely the North Star that we are aiming for. 

Louis HD: I’ve been working in digital marketing for the best part of 15 years now, and it still amazes me how much impact the content of a page has on its conversion rate, which is the percentage of visitors that turn into a lead, and what naturally seems like the small stuff is actually the big stuff in the world of landing [00:05:00] pages. 

Like you can’t just say the product service name, plonk a few bullet points on, add a form, and then expect that to work. How you say things and how you visualise them is often just as important, if not more important than what you say. Now there’s this principle in sports coaching called “show don’t tell”, and that principle really applies to landing pages. 

For example, a line of text that says, great customer service is never gonna be as effective as a review badge and actual customer testimonials. This is exactly the same principle as showing an image of the product or service actually working or in situ. That’s always gonna work far better than a stock image of happy people or a dense wall of text explaining it. 

Now, this actually plays into two things that I find myself saying a lot, which is that a ads are for traffic, and landing pages are for conversions, and B, you’ve either got a traffic problem or a conversion problem. Let’s take the scenario. Let’s [00:06:00] say you’re not getting the number of inquiries that you want from your ads. 

It’s almost the default to think ‘if we’re not getting the leads, then we need more traffic. And so to get more traffic’, if you’re not gonna increase your budget, the first thing you’re gonna do is to focus on trying to get those cost per clicks or CPCs down. But when you’re so focused on buying cheaper traffic. 

That often means that you’re actually buying worse quality traffic too.

Maelien H: I think that’s so true in terms of the quality there. When you see that quality drop, often you see on the front end that you’d get a cheaper cost per lead, which looks great, but on the back end you’re gonna see a completely different story. 

You’re probably going to find here that more time is spent on qualifying and call setting those leads and less of them are gonna end up becoming an opportunity. You’re also probably gonna be getting way more complaints from sales, and all of this is gonna mean that you’re gonna get a lower return on investment. 

So if you’re getting a really good level of traffic here and it’s not turning into leads, more of that traffic just isn’t the answer. This means it’s less [00:07:00] about the traffic here. And more about why that traffic isn’t converting into leads. So you haven’t got a traffic problem, you’ve got a conversion problem. 

An easy thing to check here is if your landing page conversion rate is below 2%. Then you’ve almost certainly got conversion problem. Tying back in with what Louis said earlier about ads being for traffic and landing pages being for conversions. This is solved by pushing the conversion rate on your landing page up. 

If a higher percentage of your traffic is becoming a lead, this means you’re decreasing your cost per lead without increasing your ad spend, without decreasing your CPCs, and without compromising on your quality of the lead. This isn’t a cost cutting exercise. This is actually a profitability exercise. 

Same budget, same traffic quality, but more leads. This ultimately all goes into your bottom line. 

Louis HD: Now, one of the biggest conversion rate killers that we see is sending traffic to the homepage. Now I get why the homepage seems like a good choice. It’s the page [00:08:00] that gets the most design attention. It also gets the most traffic. 

It probably has a really good engagement rate, and it also assists conversions a lot of the time. So when you look at converting sessions, the homepage will often be part of that journey. And so it feels like all of the data is pointing to the homepage as a really good option to send traffic to. But actually the data is being a little bit misleading here. 

Because think about this. The homepage is designed for everyone at every stage of their decision making journey. It’s trying to be helpful to new visitors,

returning visitors, people right at the top of the funnel and people already in the pipeline. Its sole purpose is to get people to click one step deeper into the website. 

Actually on a landing page, we don’t want that extra click, and when we look at a B2B website as a whole, nine times outta 10, it’s gonna take a ton of work to optimize that journey for conversions. And rather than optimizing a whole journey, [00:09:00] it’s so much easier to build a single page. And according to InstaPage, companies who switch from sending traffic from the homepage to a dedicated landing page without external links and without a nav bar. They typically see a 100% uplift in the number of inquiries they generate. 

Maelien H: That’s such an important point there on the fact that a landing page has no nav bar and no external links, and this is why landing pages will perform better than internal pages if compared on a like for like basis. The journey is just 

so much more streamlined towards action, and everything happens on one single page rather than multiple clicks across multiple pages. 

I’ve seen so many businesses sending traffic to their internal pages, like their product or service pages, and yet these pages have some really good information, and they’re generally better than sending people to a homepage. But a lot of the time these pages can send people on different journeys with only a few of those journeys going to the actual contact page. 

And sending [00:10:00] people to a contact page isn’t necessarily ideal either. They came in searching for this thing over here and then find their way, funneled to a contact page, asking generic questions rather than solving the specific need that they were looking for. And that’s kind of like when you call a company and keep being redirected to multiple different departments, having to explain yourself every single time. 

It’s so much better to have a dedicated form on the page it relates to, so you can pick up with the customer where they left off and avoid that frustration entirely. 

Louis HD: So I took a quick look at our notes when Maelie was speaking, and there’s just a couple of things that I wanna cover before we wrap up the episode. 

Here are a few key principles that you want to keep in mind as you get started. Now, the first critical principle is ‘if it’s not an action, it’s a distraction’. On an internal page, there are so many clicks away from the action that you want someone to take. Now, this could be the nav bar, it could be social links, it could be internal links, and it could be external links to other websites as well.

The key [00:11:00] thing to remember is that on a landing page, a hundred percent of the links are pointing towards the action that you want someone to take. The second principle, and this isn’t a comprehensive list, this is just a few tips, but the second principle is that you lose 80% of leads with every extra click. 

Now, a rule of thumb that we use internally is that every extra click that someone has to make before converting, you’re gonna lose 80% of your potential leads from that. So if someone visits a page and then has to click through to another page before making an inquiry, then we would say that you would lose 80% of your leads just by that happening. 

Now, that’s not a hard and fast rule is just a guideline that we like to run by, by default. And then finally, the third principle that I’d like to share is ‘if you don’t ask, you don’t get’. And what I’m talking about here is that call to actions and specifically buttons are really, really important. Now, while buttons aren’t the most visually attractive thing in the world, especially not to web designers, [00:12:00] nothing says Click me more than a button. 

So having more buttons on a page. Can actually have a surprising impact on the number of conversions that page generates. 

Maelien H: That point in terms of the buttons is such a good one. I can think of two instances where we improve conversion rates by up to 50% just by adding more buttons. Personally, I like to have a call to action button within at least every two full screen page scrolls. 

So before we finish up, let’s do a quick recap. We talked about how a landing page isn’t just a page that paid traffic lands on. It’s actually a purpose built page designed to increase your conversions. We covered how it’s less about design and more about communication engineering, so it’s less about the way it looks and more about what you say and how you say it. 

We’ve run through how you can’t fix conversion problem with more traffic and how landing page optimization is a big part of turning more traffic. Into inquiries. And finally, we explored why landing pages are such a better fit for paid traffic than homepage [00:13:00] or internal pages. 

Louis HD: And I think that just about wraps it up. 

If you are working on your first proper landing page, we’d love to know how you get on. And if you took something useful from this episode, please leave us

a review. Let us know your biggest takeaway. It helps us so much with spreading the word. 

Maelien H: Also, if there’s a specific topic or challenge you want us to cover, let us know@webmarketeruk.com forward slash topic. 

We read every single message. Thanks for listening and catch you next time.