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Create the Best Pay-Per-Click Landing Page in 7 Easy Steps

Posted By Guest Blogger 25th of July 2014 General 0 Comments
Image via Flickr user Andrew Pescod

Image via Flickr user Andrew Pescod

This is a guest contribution from Poulami Ghosh of PPC Ads Management.

If conversion rates really matter to you, you should be aware that every marketing campaign has to have a dedicated landing page. This is particularly true with regard to PPC where you have to pay for every single click. Ask any PPC company and it will tell you the same thing. However, it is not enough to know that you should use a landing page. You also have to know how to craft one, so that your marketing efforts rise above the average and become exceptional.

There are seven steps to creating an effective landing page. In order to explain them better, let me create a fictitious organization first. Let’s name it SaaSProject. It is an online solution for project management, specifically created for SaaS (Software as a Service) businesses. The message they want to convey is that their platform has been specifically designed for the online software industry and comprises features closely associated with how SaaS businesses function. 

Setting Your Campaign Goal or Objective

The main aim of this campaign will be to accumulate leads, by offering informative content about handling SaaS projects. 

Majority of the marketing done by SaaSProject is content marketing. Thus, a PDF guide on the subject will be written so that it can be given away in exchange of data gathered from people. 

Another objective is to get the maximum number of leads possible for opting in to watch a demo of the product. This goal can be achieved in two ways, both of which will be explained by me when I come to the page design. 

Explain the Pain of the Customer As Well As Its Relief

Penning down a pain statement enables you to concentrate on the needs of your customer, and also express better how that pain is addressed by your solution. Let us try to understand it better with our example.

The Pain

Software for project management is either very complex so that no team member wants to use it, or too simplistic so that it is not configurable enough to do what it is required to. 

The Pain Relief

SaaSProject was particularly designed, keeping in mind a SaaS business model. Its functionality is role-specific so that it directly speaks to designers, developers and advertisers. There are comprehensive to-do lists for developers with complete Github integration. A PSD can be uploaded by designers, which changes into a sequence of layer previews intended for stakeholders. Again, writers have versioning, copy commenting as well as approval modes. What is more, there is a 10,000 feet-view mode for the project manager for easily managing the project with one view.

You are really enthusiastic about starting this organization with me now, right?

A balanced approach is given by these two accounts for narrating your story. Your prospects have to be addressed in a way that is understood by them, based on consideration of their most important concerns. 

Write an Engaging Campaign Story

Next, you have to create a compelling campaign story that weaves the pain as well as the pain relief descriptions together into a narrative which you can use as a parameter first for the ebook and then for your landing page. 

How to Write an Effective Campaign Story?

Make use of a story skeleton to simplify the writing process. The Freytag Pyramid defines a common plot structure, which involves breaking a narrative down into five stages, namely: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action and conclusion. This structure can be used to craft your base story, after which it has to be translated into the functional parts of a landing page. 

Create Your Form

A form is not just a collection of data requests. An entire landing page can be created only with a form. Any PPC company will vouch for that.

Since we have the story with us now, we have to begin the process of its translation to a landing page. In this case, it is always advisable to use the inside-out approach instead of the more traditional top-down one.

Your form comprises the following components:

  • A headline for introducing the purpose of the form.
  • A description involving bullets for highlighting the advantage and contents of what is being given away by you upon completion.
  • A call-to-action.
  • The form with vivid form fields (attention can be captured by original questions and label names).
  • Trust links or statements.
  • A context-enhancement or closing urgency statement.

I mentioned in Step one that there were two ways in which people could be asked to register for the demo. They are:

Reward

Offer the demo in return for something. For instance, a check-box could be added to the form, where people are asked if they would like to see a demo, before the submission of the form.

Reciprocity

It works on the philosophy that people will be keener to do something for you only after you do something for them. For instance, in our case, you have just given a guide free of cost to the visitor, and so you can politely ask whether they would like to engage in something else. 

Make The Page Design Around Your Form

The campaign story has to be broken down into the structural elements of your landing page. The main components that will feature on your landing page are as follows:

  • Headline
  • Subheading
  • Intro – pain
  • Pain relief or benefits offered by the solution
  • A hero shot showing your offer
  • Social proof
  • Your form as crafted from the previous part
  • A concluding statement that rounds off the story and takes them back to the form for conversion

Perform The Test of Congruence

Congruence refers to the principle of bringing every component on your page into line, with the intention of conveying one combined message. The presence of something incongruent means it is fighting against the goal or objective of your page. 

Go Through The CCD (Conversion Centered Design) Checklist Thoroughly

Once your landing page is ready, assess it once from the point of view of a Conversion Centered Designer. The main idea here is to be realistic and understand that some work is still left to be done. A set of design guidelines and principles has to be applied to your page to ensure it appears the best when your PPC traffic is unleashed on it. 

In this era of branding, storytelling is a crucial part of effective and successful marketing. Any PPC company will second that. So, apply the steps outlined by me and success could be yours. 

Poulami Ghosh loves to share knowledge about effective PPC practices and online marketing.

About Guest Blogger
This post was written by a guest contributor. Please see their details in the post above.
Comments
  1. This will help immeasurably with our marketing efforts, as our conversion rates have been stagnating of late. Thanks for the wonderful guest post!

  2. I think that writing an engaging campaign story can be very powerful to get more conversions. When you recognize yourself in someone else story you want to know more of how to get the same résults.
    Thank you very much for this awesome guest post :)

  3. Thanks for the great rundown on how to do this.
    I have had some ideas about landing pages and design before, but have never seen this particular model applied. I will have to do a bit more research, but your tips have certainly given me food for thought for the next campaign!
    thanks
    ashley

  4. Well, creating the best pay-per-click landing page is not really a rocket science as many would have to believe. This post has demystified the process by the detailed explanation of the processes involved.

    For any landing page to convert well, the needs of the potential customers must be addressed. This should be in both content and context. More so, value creation should be explored and every landing page should have improved user experience!

    I upvoted this post in kingged where it was shared for online marketers and bloggers.
    http://kingged.com/create-payperclick-landing-page-7-easy-steps/

  5. I’ve been struggling with finding a way to adapt PPC campaigns to the current internet success strategy that is dependent on branding. You’ve given me something to work with! Thank you. :-)

  6. Exactly! Most of the time that every company campaign has to have a dedicated landing page so that the marketing efforts rise above the average and become exceptional.

  7. Creating a great landing page to either be advertised via PPC or just created to attract traffic and sales naturally has always been an uphill battle for Drewry to achieve. Is there a free e-book you currently offer for stuck on stupid people like DNN’s CEO that explains things like this for “how to create a landing page for dummies 101?” Don;t laugh too hard at that one! LOL :-)

  8. Hello !

    This is a very interesting post about the subject matter, It was well explained for vivid understanding, This would help in going a long way as a prepare for my new landing page, Thanks for the share !!

    Regards,
    DOK Simon

  9. Awesome posts – thanks for sharing.

    I run PPC campaigns for clients and by far the most successful of those is the client who has awesome landing pages with a HUGE sign up form on the RIGHT with an arrow design drawing the eye down to fields to fill in and onto a gorgeous button that begs to be clicked.

    Sure, there’s copy there and there’s a pain and relief angle too, but this client needs contact details so they can convert in person. The form is the deal so the form is the main focus of the page. It works really well and it helps my job of conversion immensely.

    • That’s cool Todd! I always wonder how come those landing pages with same format converts, and you just confirm that it does work. Need to redo my landing page for one of my sites.

      That post is superb! Learned a lot, thanks!

  10. Hi,

    It’d be great if you could share some links to PPC landing pages which you consider to be really well constructed.

    Thanks in advance =]

  11. Great info on great subject.This was a great n simple verification of the subject that helped me alot to learn.
    Thanks for sharing.

  12. Basically, find the pain and give the one with the pain, a pain-killer. You have 3 steps: Find a pain you can solve. Find the one going through that pain. Have that pain killer in hand. The story you tell must be convincing, that in fact your pain killer will kill his pain. So in order to make the sale, you must focus on his pain and your solution. Good points here.

  13. Hi Poulami,

    Thanks for the great tips. I just started doing some mobile marketing. It would be interesting to know what your thoughts/tips are for a mobile landing page in your next post.

  14. Hey Poulami,

    Thanks for sharing such an awesome tutorial on creating a ppc landing page. All the steps were easy and sufficiently basic — find the problem, solve it and see the results! Really great..

  15. Hi
    Thanks for sharing this information that I was looking for. I’m a newbie in ppc campaign and I understood the tutorial for ppc landing page creation.

  16. Hey Poulami,

    Thanks for sharing informative tutorial. Very easy to follow and very helpful.

  17. Hey Poulami,

    This is really an amazing post and wonderful steps to Create the Best Pay-Per-Click Landing Page.

    Great stuff you provided. I like this post and gonna bookmark it. I’m sure that this tactic of creating landing page helps in increasing conversion rate.

    Thanks for sharing!

  18. Nice photo and a good article

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