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Copywriting for Landing Pages

Planning out your user journey often involves landing pages, but how much effort should you put into the copywriting of this page?

Landing pages play a unique role in user journeys. They help bridge the gap between advertising and sales, capturing key information about customers that are ready to buy, sign up or otherwise take a favourable action. Landing pages need copy on them, that’s a no-brainer. But how much effort do you need to put into them? On the one hand, you need to say something to give your sign-up form context, or visitors will bounce. On the other hand, you don’t want to waste visitors’ time by presenting them an essay on why they should sign up since they’ve already taken a step towards doing so. That delicate balance is the difference between a horrible landing page and a great landing page, and we’ll be discussing the finer points that play into that. 

Headings

Search engine optimisation plays a significant part in your landing page being a success. Writing creatively and writing to optimise keywords use two different philosophies but need not necessarily mean that one writer cannot produce either. Simply by formatting your landing page in a specific way, you can set your page up for success without needing to thoroughly research the tenets of writing for optimisation. One of these practices is use heading correctly.

When your page gets crawled, using your headings correctly will help Google surmise what your page is about and thus display it in the relevant search results. Good practise would be to plan out the skeleton of your page, including its headings, to make sure you’re hitting the keywords that you want your page to be associated with.

Another quick point to touch on, regarding writing for SEO, is to remember to speak like a human. Keyword stuffing can be a problem, and ultimately negatively affect the ranking of your landing page. What that means is rather than repeating your keyword as many times as possible in the opening sentences of your landing page, experiment with ways to organically thread your copy together while still bringing in your keywords. 

Be. Concise.

It’s important to understand the philosophy of your landing page in the greater picture of your user’s journey to taking a conversion action. In essence, your landing page won’t be the first interaction between your potential customers and your brand – there would have likely been a social post or Google Search before they click through that provides a bit of context for them before landing on your page. Therefore, how much information you display is a very delicate balance.

Of course, you want to give enough detail to ‘sell’, but there is a very high chance of your visitors dropping off if the details feel repetitive and their next action feels buried underneath your piles of information. The most advisable approach to the amount of copy feature on your landing site is to be concise. Convey what you need to convey as quickly as possible, without distracting your visitors from what you want them to do next.

Every page looks different and serves a different purpose, so a ‘hard and fast’ rule cannot be made specifically about how many characters, sentences or paragraphs you should use, so getting a fresh set of eyes to look at your landing page in the context of your full user journey might help you identify what you can leave out or what still needs to be included. 

Often, copywriters get lost in talking about the product. It’s an easy trap to fall into, since that’s the end goal – sell the product. But, in being concise, it’s important to also remember to focus on the benefits that you offer as opposed to how great your product is. Readers tend to switch off when the text gets too ‘salesy’, so to counteract that, rather talk about the areas where the product can improve their lives. 

The Next Step in the Journey

As we touched on above, getting a visitor onto your landing page is a win for your SEO or social media marketing strategy, but these aren’t concrete leads that pay the bills. So, it’s important to figure out a next step that moves your visitors further down your sales funnel, given that they are interested in something that you offer. 

A common outcome for landing pages is signing up to a newsletter. This small but powerful action is valuable since it opens the door for further conversation about your products and services. Signing up could be incentivised – “sign up now and get 10% off your first order” – because the future conversation, such as information about a promotion you’re running or new products that have come in, is very valuable when you’re talking to people that have already expressed an interest in what you offer.

Email marketing is a vast, powerful tool that deserves its own article – take a look at other ways to grow your database here

Other outcomes might be to direct traffic to specific pages on your website. Navigating a site that has a whole myriad of products and services can be difficult, so a landing page can help bypass that and connect potential buyers with the product that they’d be interested in.

The page’s copy plays a pivotal role here once again, the product page would provide full details of the specifics, so the landing page can bridge the gap and touch on more sales-orientated details, like unique selling points, upgrades from prior products and the likes. 

Bullets For Impact

Hand in hand with presenting relevant information concisely is using bullet points. Always assume your visitor is in a hurry, thus forcing you to condense your copy to into digestible segments. 

Bullet points have gotten somewhat of a bad rap from their use in PowerPoints, but they remain a valuable mechanism for highlighting important factors. Need to touch on key product features? Summarise your offerings? Bullet points are for you. 

Don’t expect to get away with only a headline and some bullet points though, they’re a great mechanism for listing things, but don’t do a great job at ‘selling’ them, since they’re direct and normally matter-of-fact. 

So, in summary:  

  • Use bullet points to highlight key points  
  • Touch on key features of your products or services  
  • Use them to summarise at the end of your page.  

See what we did there? 

Don’t be intimidated, writing copy for landing pages is a skill that’s developed in iterations – while you observe what does and doesn’t work for your specific circumstances. If you ever have a landing page that you don’t want to experiment with, you know who to call! 

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