Make your lead-gen landing page less lame

Make your lead-gen landing page less lame

2020-03-24T08:11:21-06:00

Six things you can do right now to get more qualified leads from your landing pages

Qualified leads are gold for any industry. For hyper-specialized B2B 3DP brands, keeping your pipeline full of prospects can mean the difference between crushing your sales goals and scrambling to make your numbers. You can generate qualified leads in a number of ways: referral marketing, tradeshows, direct mail and digital marketing. There are no magic bullets in lead generation, and what works well for one 3D printing company might not work for another. Best not to put all your eggs in one lead gen basket — instead, find the right mix for your brand, then test and measure over time.

In this article, we’ll focus specifically on your lead generation landing pages. These are highly-targeted pages your prospects will land on after taking one specific action. They could be clicking a remarketing or pay-per-click ad via Google, Facebook or LinkedIn. They could be clicking a link from your email or direct mail outreach, or a link in one of the thought leadership articles on your website.

The goal of a lead generation landing page is to either gather contact information from previously unknown prospects or to move known prospects through the Evaluation stage of the buyer journey toward a sale.

Lead gen landing pages pay the best dividends when you have strong, specific positioning and know who in your prospective customers’ companies make the purchasing decisions, their emotional triggers and the path they take to purchase. If you’re not quite there, then start by defining who your best prospects are.

Following are six things you can do right now to improve the performance of your lead gen landing pages.

1. Plot your prospect’s path

To accurately measure the effectiveness of your lead generation landing pages, you’ll need to plot out the precise route visitors will follow to get there. There should only be one way to get to any particular landing page. For example, if you run a remarketing ad inviting visitors to request a free printed sample, their path would be: see your remarketing ad, click on it to land on your landing page and request a free sample.

Lead gen landing pages are not part of your website’s public face. They should not be in your navigation or clickable from any other page. Blocking search engines from indexing your lead gen landing pages will ensure people can’t randomly end up on your page via search.

There should be no mystery as to how a prospect landed on your page. It’s better to build multiple landing pages, even if the content is almost identical, than to be unclear how prospects arrived. Your overall website analytics will be skewed by visitors that don’t matter — bots, bad searches and unqualified tire-kickers. Not so with your landing pages; your visitors will be far fewer and far more qualified.

Leave no mystery as to how a prospect landed on your page.

2. Limit your landing page avenues

Lead generation landing pages differ from other pages on your site in a number of important ways. While the rest of your website should be designed to encourage users to stick around and browse to other pages, your landing page should not. Visitors’ only option should be to click your call-to-action. This is the one time it’s okay NOT to give them your phone number. And don’t let them be sneaky and click your logo and go to your homepage. Think of your landing page as a restaurant with one item on the menu. You either order the steak or you leave.

Think of your landing page as a restaurant with one item on the menu. You either order the steak or you leave.

3. Magnets need to pull, not suck

In most cases, you’ll want a lead generation magnet to draw folks to your landing page. Lead gen magnets are something of value you provide in exchange for a prospect providing their contact information. For 3DP customers in the Awareness stage of the buyer journey, effective lead gen magnets can be white papers or demo videos. For customers in the Evaluation phase, an ROI calculator or a free printed sample can draw them in.

Selecting lead generation magnets is no time to be penny wise and pound foolish. If you think it will be cost-prohibitive to print and send sample parts, run the numbers. What’s a lead worth? What’s a sale worth? If your campaign is well-targeted, the sample requests shouldn’t be overwhelming.

Test the waters. Your sales team can always qualify the lead further, and you can always revise your magnet. It’s better to aim high and tamp it down than aim low and miss the mark.

4. Is your CTA DOA?

A call to action (CTA) is the message on the button featured on your landing page. The one thing you want people to do on your landing page is to click this button. Your CTA needs to be bold, prominent and enticing. A high-contrast, clearly clickable button on first glance will grab their attention. A call to action is just that, an invitation to do something interesting. “Submit” and “More Info” are not calls to action.

If you can do so in an authentic voice, your CTA should be in the first person from the visitor’s perspective: I want a free sample or Calculate my ROI.

“Submit” is not a call to action.

5. Make your form function

When it comes to contact forms, lead with the lead and less is more. The whole point of a lead gen landing page is to capture information, so integrate the form above the fold (no scrolling required). Your prospects will be able to take action with one click. And the less you ask of them in the form, the better. As a rule, the more information you require prospects to provide, the higher the drop-out rate. If all you need for your sales team to follow up is a name, email and phone number, then don’t also ask for a company name and mailing address. If you can get by with just an email, even better. The goal is to move from digital interaction to personal interaction as quickly and painlessly as possible. The increased number of leads will more than justify the time it takes to manually enter the additional data into your CRM.

The goal is to move from digital interaction to personal interaction as quickly as possible.

6. When in doubt (or not), test

Some marketing efforts are quantifiable and some are not. That’s the nature of the beast. Lead generation landing pages, on the other hand, are 100% quantifiable and provide a great opportunity to nerd out on the science of marketing.

If your sales department thinks there should be a picture of the printer on the landing page and your marketing department thinks there should be a picture of a printed part, test them both. When A/B testing, it’s important to utilize only one variable. If you test multiple calls to action, that should be the only difference between your A and B pages. Make sure your tests are served up evenly and randomly and that you get enough traffic to provide an accurate sample. And give it time; it might take a few months to generate meaningful data.

Generate some interest

Implementing these six tips will help ensure your lead gen landing pages are set up to succeed. If everything is clicking, you should start getting more qualified leads in short order. If leads are slow to materialize, you might need to revisit your positioning, digital marketing plan or content marketing strategy. If the leads are plentiful but not closing, it may be time to revisit your sale
s processes and pricing structures.

Any way you slice it, supercharged lead generation landing pages will be valuable tools in your sales and marketing toolbox.


About Toolbox Creative:

Toolbox Creative is a B2B Marketing and Design firm, helping the 3D Printing industry change the world. We distill complex technologies into powerful identity systems, websites and marketing tactics that align sales and marketing efforts, create lasting impact and build brand love.