The future of landing pages looks bright because they make exceptionally useful marketing tools. And if they aren’t working for you it’s because you aren’t using them right, says a renowned marketing guru Neil Patel. These pages are invaluable both for lead generation and for conversions. The landing page design is an important part of your customer experience, hence you need to follow design trends and adjust your pages accordingly.
Overall, to make the optimum landing page you need to map out the customer journey. When you do this, you will obtain a deeper understanding of your website visitors and will be able to adapt the page design to make a greater impact upon your targeted audience.
A Glimpse of the Future of Landing Pages: 5 Latest Design Trends
1. Make your page ‘real’
The consumers of today seem tired of the infinite power of CGI which can create any artificial image you can think of. Instead, they want the businesses they buy from or work with to be ‘human’ and relatable. The easiest way to achieve this is to post pictures of real people onto the landing page.
A recent study by MarketingExperiements shows that landing pages which include a picture of the company founder (not photoshopped beyond any human likeness) generate 35% more CTA form fills than pages which feature stock photos of professional models (which are usually photoshopped quite heavily). The future of landing pages clearly lies in the ‘slice of life’ type of visuals, instead of obviously staged ‘artificial’ scenes.
2. Tell a story with your visuals
Visuals used on your landing page are extremely powerful tools for creating the impact that you desire. However, to realize their full potential you should connect all the visuals in such a way that they tell a story. Note that even buttons and on-page animations should be involved in your visual storytelling. Overall, your goal is to create a landing page that is a micro-story, much like children’s books which have a lot of pictures that basically tell the story and only a few words that connect the visuals together and explain some points.
Of course, a landing page must be cohesive, which means that you cannot rely only on visuals. Instead you need to come up with an effective headline and no less effective copy. For a landing page, this means that you require both a copy that teaches something and a copy that boosts conversions at the same time. The copy must be a story in itself and visuals are aids which bring it to life. Intercom’s landing page is a good example of how you can use visual style to connect informative elements of the copy and enhance it with subtle messages, such as the ‘like’ sign or arrows.
3. Split the screen
In one way the future of landing pages is the same as their past, meaning one requirement these pages have to meet remains unchangeable. That requirement is 100% readability and split screens help to achieve it. The most effective ‘split’ is dividing the page into two columns. This way of presenting information makes it easier to process, especially when one of the two columns is informative.
Split screens allow for better categorization, which make it easier for the website’s visitors to memorize information. But remember that to make the most out of this particular design, you need to make sure that both columns are directly connected. This is another reason why pairing up a visual and readable content is best. Adding a relevant image to the text enhances memorization.
4. Do away with the navigation bar
If you still have a navigation bar on your website, now is the time to get rid of it. In the event that you run some kind of huge information hub and a navigation aid is necessary, make it semi-hidden. You may either use a widget to create a collapsible menu at the top of the page or simply move the list of categories down to the very bottom.
It is essential to remove navigation from landing pages or at least to place the links beyond the first fold. These pages are there to keep people focused upon a single goal. Thus any additional link beyond the CTA button is a distraction which reduces your bottom line.
5. Provide a dedicated mobile experience
More people today use mobile devices to browse the Web than they do regular PCs, which changes marketing in many ways. The future of landing pages lies in recognizing that mobile devices are on top now. This means that having responsive landing pages isn’t enough. You have to provide the highest quality UX possible on any mobile gadget, therefore you need to develop dedicated landing pages for this specific purpose.
Never forget that whilst customer experience trends change, the fact that you should always strive to provide the best experience possible does not. This means that you should draw inspiration from the best landing page examples and watch how design trends change for them as well. No matter how good your current design is, you will need to adjust it regularly to fit with the times.
