STAGES OF CREATING A LANDING PAGE

STAGES OF CREATING A LANDING PAGE. A few years ago, selling something over the Internet was difficult. Today, marketers have at their disposal a tremendous arsenal of technology and technology tools. Landing is one of them. This is an effective and therefore common way to distribute your goods and services with a small initial investment. This is a landing or landing page, the purpose of which is to encourage the visitor to take the next step in the sales funnel.

 

The development of the landing page is that every little thing is important in this matter. Even improperly selected button color, too small or too large font, incorrectly formulated call to action and so on can reduce page efficiency.

 

To take into account all the nuances and provide the customer with a page that will convert visitors into buyers or subscribers, the coordinated work of a team of copywriters, designers, layout designers, and marketers is required. This requirement can be ensured only by formalizing the process, dividing it into stages. About how to create effective landing pages and will be discussed in this material.

 

Prototyping a landing page

 

You need to understand what a landing page is primarily a selling page. Its effectiveness can always be calculated in monetary terms. Its goal is to sell or attract potential customers for a future transaction. That is why, at the prototyping stage, a thorough analysis is carried out:

1.company product;

2.target audience;

3.level of competition;

4.seasonality of the market and not only.

For this, customer participation is required. Only he can provide information that will help to draw the right conclusions in a short time and without unnecessarily increasing the project budget. The customer also provides the company logo, basic information about its activities.

 

Writing a selling text

 

Let’s draw an analogy with a restaurant. There is a chef in any decent catering establishment. He practically does not cook, but he is the bearer and author of ideas about what a dish should be like to taste, serve, cost and time of cooking.

 

When developing a landing page, the role of the chef is tried on by a copywriter – the author of the text that will be placed on the page. This is the most important element of the landing page because it conveys to the reader the bulk of commercial information that is important for making the desired decision.

 

Copywriter:

writes the text;

Designs an arrangement of auxiliary graphic elements;

forms the general logic of the page.

The result of his work should be a prototype – a schematic representation of the future site, which gives a clear idea of ​​how it will look, work and sell. The optimal design for familiarization with all the information gave is chosen by the designer.

 

However, before transferring the prototype to it, the result of the copywriter’s work must be agreed with the client. This is important because, at this stage, the time and financial cost of making corrections are minimal.

 

Design and layout

 

Continuing the analogy with the restaurant, we can say that the landing page design is the decoration of the hall, which should create a favorable atmosphere for eating. And in the case of a catering place, and in the case of developing a landing page, it is necessary to build on the characteristics of the target audience.

 

The designer must understand the preferences of the customers of the customer’s company, their lifestyle, related interests, behavior patterns and more. All this will help to choose a suitable color palette, illustrations, highlight the most important blocks and shade additional information.

 

After completing the design, another round of approvals is held with the customer. However, usually, there are no global edits here: most often they ask to change or edit illustrations, swap blocks, etc.

 

Further, depending on the complexity of the landing page, a frontend developer or layout designer is included in the work. These experts have one and the same task: to turn the layout provided by the designer into HTML, CSS and JavaScript code. There are three criteria for the quality of their work:

code compliance with standards;

site loading speed;

same page display in different browsers and on different devices.

After the layout stage is completed, the site is uploaded to test or real hosting to continue working on it.

 

Connecting analytics counters

 

The main criterion for the quality of a landing is the conversion rate of visitors to customers or subscribers. In order for the customer to be able to quickly track this indicator, analyze it and optimize, analytics counters are connected to the site. It’s good practice to use Yandex and Google services for this.

 

Google Analytics is a powerful analytical tool by which you can thoroughly study site visitors and their behavior on it. However, it is not perfect. For example, if the task is to understand at what stage of familiarization with a page user most often leave it, Google Analytics will not help

 

Testing the work

 

When the landing page is already uploaded to the customer’s hosting, analytics services are connected to it and all the necessary settings are made, it remains only to test its operation in real conditions. The volume of this step depends on the functionality of the page. There are three main factors that must be checked.

The correctness of display. The site should look the same in all popular browsers on monitors with different resolutions. If it is adaptive and should correctly display on mobile devices, then its display and functionality are checked from smartphones and tablets with different screen sizes.

Contact Form Performance. Data entry fields accessible to the user should work correctly and safely. In this case, the sent applications must reach the customer quickly.

Correct work of uploading data to CRM. If the landing page is integrated with the one used by CRM, several test orders with different parameters are executed to see if the data exchange works correctly.

Customer involvement at this stage is extremely useful. First, it can detect bugs and inconsistencies that have eluded developers. Secondly, he can look at the site through the eyes of his customers and suggest possible test scenarios.

 

What to do next

 

Landing development is only the first phase of its life cycle. After that, it is necessary to advertise the landing page, attract potential customers to it and process applications received from it. It is equally important to monitor the dynamics of the conversion and, if it is reduced, make adjustments to the structure and content of the page.