Top landing pages – essential digital marketing for finance businesses! If you have a website offering consumer financial services such as loans, you have a potential problem. There are so many others out there. How can you make yours stand out from the crowd? How can you ensure top UX for all who do visit your page? The key lies in your landing page. For many visitors this will be the first impression of your business. It’s estimated that this first impression will be formed in no more than two tenths of a second! So you need to make sure that you optimise every aspect of your landing page to wow them. It is important to establish the purpose of each and every landing page. A landing page usually differs from the main home page of your website. It will usually have one goal and one call to action. It may be a campaign-specific page, a lead generation page or a click-through page for ecommerce. Therefore the first thing that you need to prioritise is to make sure that the headline on the landing page is the same as whatever the user clicked on to get there. If not, it will be confusing and the user is likely to wander off. There are then five things that you need to include on your landing page to ensure its success. The image below (courtesy of unbounce.com) gives an overview of these and we will then look at them in further detail below. Your Unique Selling Proposition (USP) Who are you and what makes you different? Why should they come to you and not someone else? Give a few benefits of your product or service just to whet their appetite. There needs to be a main headline on your page to grab attention, with a supporting headline underneath to flesh it out a little more. Elsewhere on the page have a statement that reinforces the main message, and at the very end of the page a “closing argument” that convinces them to come to you. Show them what you’ve got We live in a very visual world so it makes sense to capitalise on this in your landing page. Try and include either a brief video or engaging image that showcases your product or service and will retain the interest of the visitor. State your benefits clearly People don’t like waffle! If they are researching different websites to compare products you need to ensure that you give them the key information in a simple form. What are the benefits of your product or service? What exactly are they going to get? Check out the competition to see how they are formatting their information: visitors will want to compare like with like. Then create a bullet point list summary of benefits for easy reading. If necessary you can supplement this with a more detailed list elsewhere. But to keep the visitor interested, use the “less is more” rule. Social endorsement With the continual growth in the influence of social media, it matters what other people think. Visitors will be drawn to reviews and testimonials. They can make the final difference in their decision to convert. So make sure you include reviews and testimonials from happy clients that will make others want to join them. A clear call to action What do you want your visitor to do once they’ve read your landing page? This is key. You need a clear call to action. This may involve clicking a button, navigating onto another page or submitting a form. But it is wise to limit the number of choices a visitor has to make in order to reduce the amount of mental effort they need to make and to guide them the way that you would like them to go. Also make sure that your call to action stands out very clearly from the rest of the page. Whether this is by use of colour, imagery or surrounding white space is up to you: but make sure they can’t miss it! In our next few articles we will return to these key topics of landing page design and UX. They are key to successful digital marketing for finance businesses so make sure you check back soon!