Build Stellar Landing Pages That Convert

Imagine this scenario:

Your heart and vascular center just got an incredible makeover, bringing your organization into the upper echelon of heart care providers in the area. With the renovation, you’re also planning new events for heart patients and families, and you’re excited to help your community with screenings on the new equipment.

But now it’s time to turn your attention toward the web. And that’s where landing pages come in.

What is a landing page?

Landing pages are generally standalone webpages with a single focus, intended for a specific audience and often tied to a marketing or advertising campaign. In a healthcare organization, this might be a campaign for heart screenings in Heart Health Awareness Month, or maybe it’s your mobile mammogram unit.

Landing pages should funnel your users to a single action, such as scheduling an appointment, finding a doctor, or attending an event. Sharing your landing page with vanity URLs can be a helpful way to attract traffic from social, referrals, traditional advertising, and more.

Why do landing pages matter?

Landing pages help consumers move along in their journey, which usually appears in four stages of a specific funnel:

• Attract – Connecting the user or patient with content they need based on their search or interest
• Engage – Delivering value through content and helping your user or patient answer important questions
• Convert – The user or patient moving to the next logical step: Scheduling an appointment, attending a class, etc.
• Retain – The patient returns for future visits, and shares their positive experience with family and friends

Considering nearly 80% of internet users – around 93 million Americans – search for health-related topics online, it’s a valuable opportunity you don’t want to miss. And a well-designed landing page can help organizations like yours get in front of them and answer their queries and needs and put them on a path to conversion.

Before you start: Set a goal

Before you launch a new landing page, meet with stakeholders and your team to determine a goal you want to set.

By setting a goal, you’ll build a stronger strategy for the landing page copy and design. And SMART goals are a great place to start.

What are SMART goals? This stand for:

• Specific – Tie your goal to actual numbers.
• Measurable – Something you can monitor with tools, like Google Analytics.
• Attainable – An achievable goal that’s not too big to chew.
• Relevant – Aligns with your overhead organizational goals.
• Timely – Has a specific time period to measure, such as month-to-month, quarter-to-quarter, etc.

SMART goals can find their way into many pieces of your marketing strategy, including content marketing and editorial calendar planning.

For purposes of this exercise, let’s set the following goal for your heart and vascular center:

With the heart and vascular center campaign page, our goal is to get 200 event registrations in the next three months for our heart classes and schedule at least 50 heart screenings. We’ll do this by tracking form submissions for the event registration and the “schedule a screening” call-to-action. We’ll monitor our progress in Google Analytics, using conversion tracking through Google Goals.

Once you’ve shared your goal and agreed on it internally, it’s time to start strategizing the landing page itself.

Five tips for building a landing page that converts

Ready, set, go! It’s time to build a landing page. But where do you start? And what elements make a successful campaign landing page?

1. Put calls-to-action high up on the page

You should have a clear goal in mind for your landing page and that goal should be attached to a clickable call-to-action. Instead of burying the call-to-action in body copy, or at the bottom of the page, keep it high on the page and eye-catching. When you build a call-to-action, don’t forget to:

• Use text that speaks to the user
• Use short, action-oriented button text (i.e. reserve your spot)
• Use brand-friendly, contrasting colors that attract attention and stand out
• Keep the CTA fairly large, so it attracts attention on all screen sizes

2. Add videos and media to keep people engaged, especially on mobile

Video can be a great way to track conversion and interest of your users. Unsure if that’s true? Check out these impressive stats about video play:

• Over half of video content is viewed on mobile
• YouTube boasts over a billion users – nearly a third of total internet users
• 87% of online marketers rely on video content

They’re also highly shareable, and make great assets to keep available on your social media profiles, where you should also be sharing your landing page when it’s ready to launch. In fact, 92% of mobile video viewers share videos with others.

Whether it’s a tour of your new heart and vascular facility or an interview with a leading cardiologist and recent patient, videos are a great way to engage your audience.

3. Enable clickable phone numbers and e-mail addresses

The last thing a user wants to do on a mobile phone is to remember a phone number or email. Instead, make sure your phone numbers or emails on your landing page are clickable and open either the mobile phone’s native phone dialer or the user’s preferred email provider.

4. Make your content about the patient experience

Your doctors’ expertise, your incredible new technology, and your beautiful new waiting room and surgical suites are impressive, of course. But how do those things impact the experience and health outcomes of your future patients? That’s the story you want to share, and it’s the story they want to read.

Landing pages are no place to write a term paper about how great you are. Instead, focus on what information the consumer or patient really needs to know. In the case of your heart and vascular center, they want to know “Why should I choose you?”

Subheads, bullets, and short, easy-to-digest paragraphs are still the name of the game when it comes to landing page content, so don’t leave your writing for the web best practices at home.

5. Weave your keywords in the right places

Of course, as you’re writing content for your landing page, be sure that you’re using keywords your audience relies on to find you (and your competitors).

“Cardiovascular surgeons” may be the language you use, but if your target audience uses “heart doctor” in search, you’ll want to answer that call.

Keywords find nice homes woven contextually into your body copy, but also:

• Page titles
• Meta descriptions
• Headings and subheadings
• Calls-to-action
• Alt text on images or videos

Before you start writing, conduct keyword research to determine what high-value keywords to incorporate into your landing page content.

Launch, monitor, iterate

As your campaign page leaves the proverbial nest, keep an eye on how it’s doing. Track not only the analytics you established for your SMART goals, but consider adding heat-map or click tracking to see how users are engaging with it on different devices.

If you’re noticing features of your landing page aren’t being used, consider a quick A/B test to send users to different versions of the landing page. Does the CTA perform better on one version than the other? Maybe the video belongs lower on the page, rather than the top? A/B testing divides the traffic in half, allowing you to track the success (and challenges) of each, which can inform future iterations and improvements.

If you’re ready to take some new organizational initiatives to the web with a landing page, but you can’t or don’t want to do it alone, Geonetric can help. Contact us today to get in touch with our friendly experts who’ll help you research keywords, strategize conversion opportunities, write groundbreaking copy, track your goals, and design stellar landing pages that convert.