What makes a landing page different from a typical webpage?
Webpages are meant to be fairly evergreen content that entail fewer updates, such as an About Us page or an overview of the services that your brand offers. Landing pages however have a deeper context that requires far more communication with your writer. Here’s what you need to do about succeeding with landing pages and how you need to instruct your writer.
Provide Context of the Customer Journey
Writers need more than a simple description of what should be on the landing page, which is a highly visual webpage expressly designed to make the visitors do something.
Mostly, where are visitors coming from? Are you running PPC ads through Google or Facebook? Advertising through a third party webinar or sponsorship? If not advertising, are these leads coming from other content or your social media? Visitors are coming from somewhere and these sources have different context leading them to the landing page.
This is extremely important because the writer needs to know if this landing page should be tailored to interest or to intent. A visitor who’s looking for your solution by entering an exact or broad match in Google is going to require different landing page copy than someone who discovered your product through Facebook, where your ad became visible because it’s relevant to their interests.
Tell the writer where visitors are coming from and how many steps they are into the customer journey. Show them your ads or the places leads are coming from.
Landing Page Copy MUST Prove That the Visitor is in the Right Place
Showing the writer your existing ad copy and/or display ads is crucial for them to help you flesh out a cohesive, effective landing page. Visitors must have confirmation that they’re in the right place. Your ad had to stand out on Google, Facebook, or third-party sites but now you have the visitors’ attention on the landing page, so what keyword were you targeting? Tell the writer to make it prominent.
Have the Writer Create Multiple Versions of the Same Landing Page
Every marketer has different needs in this regard, but it doesn’t hurt to have two separate landing pages for visitors coming in from search ads and one for interest-based ads. Additional variations for location or other parameters could prove to be crucial, such as if your target audience has different needs from one territory to another.
At least two versions of the landing page are also prudent to have for A/B testing purposes. Keyword placement and exact or broad matches specifically need to be experimented with in these variations.
Pay Your Writer Commensurately
This is a good rule of thumb to adhere by as it is, but especially if you want a landing page that continually gets conversions.
We all want to hire a motivated self-starter and as writers, we also don’t want to be micromanaged. But when it comes to landing pages, we need more direction from the client than a wall of text. Because landing pages inherently require the writer to spend more time crafting copy that fits both the page’s goal and the overall customer journey, in addition to any direct communication and materials review with you, the default mode of pay-per-word isn’t fair to them and likely merits a higher flat rate. This is because “less is more” is often a best practice for landing page copy and it’s a matter of determining which smaller amounts of words will pack the most punch as far as conversion rates go.
And if the writer is writing multiple versions of the same landing page and must pay really close attention to keyword placement, payment needs to account for these factors.
Landing page copy requires a more scientific approach in comparison to other forms of web content. Writers need more context and direction as well, because the landing page needs to be designed for a specific step of the customer journey. Writing for intent requires different nuance the writing for interest, but in either case the visitor needs to be aware that they’re in the right place. Writers need to know which keywords to focus on and where to put them to work their magic.
Rachel P is an indie game developer, writer, and consultant. She is also a content strategist here at Writer Access and would be happy to help you with keyword maps, customer journey maps, and buyer personas in addition to writing for you. If you would to like to hire Rachel to devise a content strategy for you, please contact your account manager or send a direct message.
