An effective landing page is a critical ingredient for any digital marketing campaign, but it plays a particularly crucial role in the complex B2B buying ecosystem—an ecosystem that has become increasingly digital and self-serve over the past year. According to recent data from McKinsey & Co., since the onset of the pandemic, more than 70% of B2B buyers and sellers say they prefer digital self-serve and virtual interactions over face-to-face meetings.
This puts the impetus on B2B sellers to tighten up their B2B inbound marketing strategy, ensuring that the content they produce for sellers across the entire sales ecosystem is relevant, targeted, and of the highest quality. A critical part of the strategy is creating an effective landing page. Understanding landing page best practices, preferences, and trends can help sellers create landing pages that compliment targeted inbound marketing approaches, ensuring that the content you create is supported by impactful (and compelling) landing pages that get high-quality leads into the sales funnel.
Best Practice #1: Use video.
Video is a powerful selling tool. Just over half of B2B decision makers use YouTube when researching a new product or solution, so it makes sense that video can boost your landing page performance in a big way. With B2B selling looking a lot more like B2C selling, it’s important to understand the impact video can have on your landing page. For example, providing explainer videos, or other kinds of product or service-related tutorials. A poll by video platform Wyzowl revealed that 96% of people had watched an explainer video to learn more about a product or service. Embedding a video into your landing page can increase conversion rate by 86%. Also consider that the video you use on your landing pages can be leveraged elsewhere such as social media and email. For example, including the word “video” in your email subject can increase open rates by 19% and click rates by 6%. It can also reduce unsubscribe rates.
Best Practice #2: Get to the point.
When Benjamin Franklin coined the phrase “time is money,” he obviously wasn’t thinking about website user experience, but these wise words are as relevant today as they were over 250 years ago. Roughly 55% of website visitors spend fewer than 15 seconds on a website. They form an opinion about whether (or not) they like your page much faster than that. How much faster? It takes the average website visitor about 50 milliseconds or, 1/10th of a second to assess the quality of a web page. Help these people out. Your landing page should feature a prominent headline that addresses the topic the user is interested in based on where they came from (an ad, social media post, email or offline source). You can do this by stating—in the headline—the specific problem that your visitors are there to solve. Keep the layout of the landing page simple, focused and devoid of distraction such as too many links or too much navigation. Use an image or video as the featured object. Keep forms brief. Make sure the page is mobile friendly and loads quickly.
Best Practice #3: Build trust.
There are many ways to establish trust for visitors who may be new to your company or service. First, ensure that the look and feel of your landing page matches your brand and your primary website. Include a link to your privacy policy in the page footer and make sure your page follows all relevant privacy compliance laws (e.g., GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA, etc.). Keep your messaging consistent and key page objects (e.g., headers and sub headers) relevant to users based on how they found the page. Instapage, a landing page platform, recommends using client logos and industry badges to help establish expertise and build trust. Client testimonials can also increase trust while helping to clarify how your specific solution or product solved a problem for a similar business.
Best Practice #4: Use layout as a guide.
Landing pages aren’t blog posts or service pages or home pages. They exist for only one purpose—to generate leads. A good landing page is designed for a singular call to action (CTA). Landing page layout plays a crucial role in getting visitors to complete an action such as signing up for an email, registering for a webinar, or submitting information in exchange for something like a whitepaper or eBook. Create a page that acts as a guide, directing visitors to complete the main objective of your page using images, text, and navigation elements that make the next move obvious. Templafy’s PPC landing page for the term “enterprise data management” presents a good example of a layout that provides clear direction with minimal distraction.
The Templafy page presents two buttons for users to click: “Try It Now” or “Request a demo” both of which lead to forms that users can fill out to book a demo. There’s no other navigation on this page, and the hero image is minimally distracting (though it might be better to feature an explainer video). The list of well-known logos just beneath the main image adds credibility to the company. There’s also a chatbot feature at the bottom-right of the page which provides an additional way for visitors to reach out to the company (again, with minimal distraction). The page is scrollable, with more information “below the fold” but the main point of this page is clear to visitors within the first few seconds of landing on the page.
Best Practice #5: Personalize it.
AI and personalization are two growing B2B marketing trends that can (and should) be applied to your B2B landing page strategy. Tools like Itellimize, Instapage and PathFactory customize landing pages in real-time using AI to analyze large datasets that predict the type of content that website visitors are most likely to engage with. B2B buyers have come to expect personalized messaging, offers and content from sellers, and the technology exists to help sellers meet this expectation. Personalization is an excellent investment that’s been shown to drive results. HubSpot reports that personalized CTAs perform an astounding 202% better than basic CTAs.
Putting it all together
The B2B buying landscape is an increasingly self-serve and digital environment. Buyers prefer to research, identify and compare solutions on their own, learning about vendors through multiple channels and touchpoints.
Landing pages play an important role in this complex B2B selling ecosystem. They can help B2B vendors establish trust, deliver information quickly and succinctly and generate high-value leads, but only if they leverage the most up-to-date technology and strategies.
By understanding the trends and best practices that drive high-performing landing pages, B2B sellers can better leverage both inbound and outbound marketing tactics. contact us today to learn more about our B2B lead generation marketing services.
