You might have developed an amazing website, put together a solid content strategy and grown your followers on social media – but these alone won’t ensure that you’re getting direct bookings.
One area that you might have missed is landing pages. A landing page is a page on your website that is built for one sole purpose. Whether this is to sign them up to your newsletter, to make a booking or to take advantage of an offer you have, it will be made with one aim in mind. These are developed so that the links can be included in blogs, press releases and on social media. Why is it that they’re so effective though?
Well, in contrast to your website, which is designed to offer a wide range of information for any potential guests, a landing page is speaking to one specific target group about one particular thing. If you’re using them correctly, landing pages can be a big part of the strategy that can drive direct bookings.
Targeted leads
Instead of directing traffic from email campaigns, social media and paid ads to your homepage, directing users to a page that will give them an offer and prompt them to book will be much more successful. This is because you are immediately catching the interest of someone who is already considering a booking, but offering them the chance to quickly and easily finalise this.
Target business goals
As well as increasing bookings, you might have other business goals in mind when you develop a landing page. This could be anything from subscribing to a newsletter or following your blog to booking for an event or special offer. Whatever it is, you’re directing them to a page that is focused solely on the one specific action that you’re looking to achieve.
Makes ROI transparent
When it comes to working out the return on investment (ROI) for a landing page, there’s not really much that needs to be investigated. You’ll be able to see exactly how many people have made a booking directly from this landing page. So, you now know the benefits of having landing pages – but how do you go about creating them in the right way?
Keep it simple
As your landing page will only have one aim, you don’t want to make it too complex and confuse people. You want it to have a strong headline and call to action (CTA), highlight the key benefits of what it is you’re offering and then not much else. If you try to add lots more details, this will detract from the actual aim of the page and make it seem like every other general page on your website. In addition, you don’t want to give people the opportunity to browse too much further, as this page is designed to get them to make the booking there and then.
Create a strong headline
The headline is what the reader will use to determine whether they click through to your landing page or just continue with their internet browsing. You want it to quickly grab their attention and convince them to read the rest of the page. According to advertising legend David Ogilvy: “Unless your headline sells your product, you have wasted 90 per cent of your money.” This has been proven even further by a study conducted by Content Verve, which revealed a huge 38.46 per cent increase in conversions by simply tweaking a weak headline into a strong one. There’s two key things that you want to do when it comes to creating a good headline. You want to make sure that you address your ideal guest, and you need to promise a benefit.
Don’t use a boring CTA
The CTA is the most important part of the landing page after the headline, as this is where you want to direct your guests. With this in mind, you want to make sure that the CTA stands out. Try to keep it central, so that people don’t have to search for it on the page. You want it to be in a colour that can be seen and big enough to stand out from the rest of the text on the page. Finally, you want to try a range of text to see what performs best with your target audience. You can either test a few different options with A/B testing, or make changes as you see fit throughout the campaign.
If you follow these rules, then you should be confident that you’re creating a good landing page that can really boost the number of direct bookings and see your customer base grow.
