How to design persuasive B2B landing pages

Introduction

Landing pages allow you to improve marketing campaign outcomes with higher conversion rates, more relevant leads, and a better return on investment. Effective b2b landing pages contain tailored content that is relevant to your campaign, address the pain points of your target audience, and showcase a high-value offer that they can’t resist.

In this post, we break down 4 fundamental performance levers that can be tweaked to make your B2B landing pages convert like crazy.

1. Relevancy

If you take anything away from this post – make it this – landing pages need to be relevant to your audience and campaign messaging. 

What does this mean in practice? One example – if you lead with an advertisement that speaks to a specific pain point, your landing page should contain copy that expands on this, and further shows how your product and service can solve that pain point with your unique value propositions.

Consider message match

For paid search, message match is crucial to deliver a good user experience, which results in higher conversion rates and lower cost per acquisition. Message match is simply how well your landing page copy matches the copy in the ad that brought the visitor there.

For PPC campaigns this means you should match up your keywords to your ad copy (with headlines being the most important ad element), and your ad copy to your landing pages. If I search for “dog sitters Brooklyn” on Google, and receive an ad with copy that mentions ‘Hire a Dog Sitter Today’ then I’m taken to a landing page that allows me to book a dog sitter, I’m highly likely to convert, given that the offer I’m presented with matches my search intent.

Don’t send traffic to your homepage

Ok in some cases this is acceptable. If you have a simple product/service and your homepage speaks to the use case then this can work. 

However, the beauty of a landing page is that it allows you to tailor messaging to a specific audience, product/service offering, or campaign. This again relates to message match, if you can segment your landing pages to better address their needs, your campaigns will perform far more effectively. 

2. Layout

While relevancy focuses more on words, effective design is just as important. The layout of your page can make or break your campaign, and small tweaks to design can lead to significant changes in performance.

Use common design patterns

You don’t have to reinvent the wheel when designing your landing page. In fact, we recommend that you don’t. If you want to convert users into leads, don’t make them think, this is the first law of usability according to Steve Krug. Landing pages should be as easy to understand and navigate as possible.

As a general rule, people scan web pages instead of reading them. By taking advantage of ubiquitous design patterns, landing pages should offer relevant information up-front so the visitor quickly grasps what you’re offering and whether it’s relevant to them.

Keep it simple

Pages should be broken down into well-defined areas so visitors can quickly find the information they need, without having to spend time on less relevant areas. Content should also be formatted to support easy scanning – headings, snappy paragraphs and use of bolding all support easy visitor scanning.

3. Messaging

Marketers can make a lot of mistakes when it comes to messaging. We’re not going to delve into all of those in this post. Instead, let’s look at the number one sin we’ve diagnosed in auditing B2B landing pages: a focus on features instead of benefits.

Segment and focus on benefits vs. features

Frankly, very few users care about the features of your product/service. Instead, they want to know one thing: how can it benefit them?

Here’s a simple breakdown of features vs. benefits:

• Features are things that your product/service does
• Benefits articulate how those features help your target audience

B2B marketers often get caught in the weeds speaking to why their product’s features are so exciting. However, if you want to boost conversions, your landing page should present your product/service benefits front-and-center instead.

The matrix below breaks down some examples of features vs. benefits.

Product/Service	Feature	Benefit
Hotel	Self-check-in	Arrive at any time
Smartphone	Waterproof	Safe for use anywhere
Air conditioner	Low power consumption	Save $ on electricity bills

Take a look at the messaging on your page. Can you re-word the copy to focus more on benefits? This is a relatively simple exercise that can improve conversion rates significantly.

Call-to-action

A call-to-action (or CTA) is a prompt for users to take a desired action on a web page. For a landing page, it consists of words or a phrase that encourages an action that converts a user to a lead for a service-based business or to complete a transaction for a product firm.

To create a compelling CTA, consider the following tips:

• Use an action verb (E.g. Download, Claim, Get, Schedule, Book).
• Give users a reason to click – what’s the benefit for them? (E.g. a free trial, special offer, or product demo)
• Run tests – the CTA is one of the most important elements on your landing page, and your aim is to use it to convert users. Consider testing how different copy, offers and design affect your CTA conversion rate.

4. Points of conversion

The point of conversion on a landing page is the step at which a visitor converts. This can be via completing a form, calling a phone number, or in the case of commerce, adding a product to a cart.

Generally, B2B landing pages use some kind of form fill to capture leads. We could write a whole article around how to design better lead capture forms, but that’s for another day. In the meantime consider these quick tips to design high-converting forms.

Make the form easy to fill out

The prevailing opinion in the marketing community for a long time was that shorter forms resulted in higher conversion rates. 

However, the latest data suggest that form length isn’t as important as quality. If a form needs to contain additional fields to be more relevant to your audience, then it’s worth including them.

Multi-step forms can be very powerful. These forms are broken down into a series of steps to collect additional information and can provide a more straightforward user experience than tackling a lengthy form in one step. If each step makes the visitor feel like they are making progress these forms also reduce psychological friction.

So how many form fields should you include? Generally, we recommend including enough fields to capture critical info to qualify the lead, then run tests to see if multi-step forms or additional fields impact conversion rate.

Reduce friction

The first step in reducing friction is to design forms that are easy to fill out. Make sure forms are responsive across different devices, clearly labeled, and easy for any user to interact with.

Another great way to reduce friction is to set expectations around what will happen after a form fill. Will the visitor get a callback, receive a quote, or get sent a piece of content? Letting them know exactly what to expect by submitting their information will build trust and ease concerns they may have around sharing their details.

Conclusion

Designing high-converting B2B landing pages is an ongoing process. It takes time to figure out what works and why. We recommend continually testing the elements we’ve outlined in this article.

Don’t be afraid to iterate, and remember that getting real data on what works is far more important than generating assumptions before launching the ‘perfect’ page.