How Good Are Your Landing Pages for Marketing Consulting Services?

Landing pages are like 24/7 employees. Once they’re set up properly for marketing consulting services, landing pages sit there day, night, weekends, even holidays -- and collect your leads.

Landing pages don’t take sick days. They don’t get caught up in office gossip or politics. And they don’t generate friction with co-workers.

Even for consulting firms that only do business in one local area in one time zone, it’s shocking how many leads come in after hours. Seriously check your marketing software on this.

Common Landing Pages That You Need

Create a new landing page for each and every premium content offer. Sometimes, you’ll want more than one landing page if you’re A/B testing or personalizing the landing page by the buyer persona.

Here some of the more common kinds  of landing pages that you’ll likely need for marketing consulting services:

Awareness Stage

• Newsletter subscription landing page
• White paper download landing page
• eBook download landing page

Consideration Stage

• Webinar registration landing page
• Buyer’s guide download landing page
• ROI calculator download landing page

Decision Making Stage

• Needs assessment sign-up landing page
• Demo request landing page

Those new to marketing consulting services on their websites may have one or two landing pages. However if you really need to engage in a way that advances the sales cycle with buyers who are at different stages of the sales cycle, you must have landing pages that address the various buyer’s journey lifecycle stages.

Landing Page Best Practices for Marketing Consulting Services

Here are a few of the key things to pay attention to for building effective landing pages that generate qualified leads at various stages of the buyer’s journey:

1. Use a clear, benefits-focused headline.
2. Introduce your value proposition. Keep the features locked away. Benefits only.
3. Format with bullet points. People can’t process full paragraphs. Everyone skims.
4. Add a form with four to eight fields. Think Goldilocks. You want your top of the sales funnel leads to be not too cold, not too hot. Just right. If you ask for too little information – the most common rookie mistake – you’ll have no idea about lead qualification. If you ask for too much, you’ll severely damage your conversion rate as most readers will see your form as too intrusive.
5. Maintain white space. It gives your message a little breathing room.
6. Keep your most important content above the fold. With mobile devices, this can be challenging, but think like the classic inverted pyramid from journalism classes. The most important content must be at the top of the page.
7. Remove all navigation and extraneous links. Keep the visitor’s attention focused on the single goal at hand on the landing page: transforming a qualified visitor into a qualified lead.
8. Make your lead generation offer more tangible by including a related image. Most of the time for premium content, this can be something like a cover page, Title slide, or an author’s photo.
9. Redirect to the confirmation page following successful form completion and submission.
10. Deliver the promised premium content offer by email.

Metrics to Stay On Top Of

So kind of like professional sports, everything with Inbound marketing – including lead generation and landing pages -- is 100% data driven. Metrics rule. How do you judge the performance of your landing pages?

Conversion rate percentage is kind of like the batting average in baseball: a very pervasive, easy to understand number. The conversion rate of a landing page is the number of website visitors that completed a form and became a lead, compared to the number of website visitors that saw that landing page.

For example, if 25 website visitors completed a form and became leads compared to 100 website visitors that saw the landing page, this landing page has a 25% conversion rate.

While conversion rates are not the be-all and end-all of Inbound marketing, conversion rates should be monitored regularly.

What’s a “good” conversion rate? It depends greatly on personas and the sales cycle stage. For SP Home Run’s most recent calendar year, landing page conversion rates were 20.8% across all landing pages, across all sales cycle stages.

• The top of funnel high performers had anywhere from 34.6% to 45.7% conversion rates (most are in the 15% to 30% range).
• The middle of funnel landing pages have about a 31% conversion rate.
• The bottom of funnel (only the most serious, sales-ready conversions) average a 6.2% to 11.7% conversion rate.

Deciding How Many Landing Pages You Need

How many landing pages are enough?

At the minimum, you need to cover your buyer personas and sales cycle stages.

Bear in mind that companies with 40 or more landing pages get 12 times more leads, compared to those with 1 to 5 landing pages (Source: HubSpot State of Inbound Marketing Report). Let that sink in for a moment.

If you currently for example have 2 landing pages and you’re averaging 10 leads per month, by increasing your landing pages from 2 to at least 40, your lead volume may go up as much as 12x to 120 leads per month.

What would that increase do to your annual revenue? You need to be aware of key lead gen tipping points like this.

For marketing consulting services, does your company have enough of the right kinds of landing pages? And which landing page best practices have you found most game-changing? Let us know your take in the Comments below.

And to learn how to use landing pages to fill up the top of your sales funnel with more highly-qualified leads, be sure to watch the "Inbound Revenue Acceleration Webinar for Managed Services & IT Consulting."