8 Tips for writing copy for an effective landing page

Why do you write on your websites? What is the purpose of all this online writing ? Well, often it is communicating and expressing oneself , without ulterior motives. Or even inform and disseminate . In many other cases, however, the goal is to sell something. A service, a product, a professionalism.

Today I try to focus on the latter goal. Central to commercial objectives is the ability to know how to structure and fill the so-called "landing pages" with effective content.

But before figuring out how to write a landing page… What is it? It is none other than one of the pages of your site to which readers / users / potential customers arrive in the first instance, for example by clicking a link on Facebook, clicking an advertisement, clicking a result reported by search engines, etc.

Potentially, each of your pages can be a "landing page" , both in terms of visibility (a page that "positions" well on Google for example), and in terms of commercial potential (on each page you can indirectly communicate how reliable the your products-services or how productive a certain action can be for the customer).

Let's see, therefore, which criteria should be followed in order to write the most effective text possible for a landing page.

8 ingredients to convince the potential customer

1 - A Concept.

When one writes on the web, one often thinks: “ I have to put this information, then say this other thing and then what about that concept… ”. Different results that are obtained with this way of acting: sometimes it is possible to cover a topic well, integrating the main information and making appropriate connections, more often instead one ends up in a cauldron of too many related but not sufficiently detailed concepts .

In the excess of information to which the reader is subjected, today more than ever, the vast majority of times it is more useful to make a choice that aims at a single topic, at a very precise path: this approach must be the law when it comes to write the text of a landing page .

Less is More

– Ludwig Mies van der Rohe –

2 - A keyword.

A wink to SEO Copywriting should be done: however precious and decisive it is to write in a natural and fluid way, for readers, it is good to try to direct their writing towards the adoption of a single keyword, suitably dosed also in page title and various meta tags.

3 - Know the target.

Perhaps this point should be the premise of any text to be written. Who is and what does the target audience on your landing page want? How do you conduct your information searches? What words and phrases does it want to read?

4 - Write for the reader.

This point is linked to what was expressed in point 2. The priority in writing a text for the web, in general, must always be aimed at the reader : a fluid, simple, non-repetitive writing, not expressly designed for search engines. Moreover, (simplifying a lot) Google really wants to move in a direction of interpretation of a web text and the value of the relative page that is increasingly based on an analysis as semantic as possible (and less on incoming links, for example).

5 - Pay attention to the title.

One thing that unites many web readers, if not all, is that of the limited time available. Among the thousands of information stimuli of every day, one must be able to bring out one's own. The first test to pass to win the reader's attention goes through the title, which must be:

• informative;
• capable of triggering the reader's curiosity;
• quickly show the main advantage for the reader-customer of a certain product-service;
• possibly short, so that it can also be used effectively in Facebook and Google ads.

6 - Focus on benefits.

Not only in the title, on the contrary: the whole landing page must clearly show all the benefits that the product-service brings to the customer and which problems it solves. In fact, the potential customer will implicitly ask himself what advantages he will derive from it. The concept "problem-solution" must therefore have a main role.

7 - Call to action and urgency.

The user will hardly return to your page, so it is good to bring him "to action" immediately. The use of calls to action (= “calls to action”) is essential; if then the call to action is associated with immediate benefits ("only for today"; "in promotion this week"; etc).

8 - The foot in the door .

Psychology teaches us that it is not productive to ask too much and immediately: the initial conversion goal must be simple, given that - especially in b2b - the commercial negotiation is often long and full of information exchanges. Basically: it's better to aim to get even a simple contact like email rather than trying to obtain entire sets of demographic data or trying to sell immediately.

Besides text, there is also a “shape” that a landing page should have. But we will see this in one of the next articles (promise!)