Why Your Landing Page Sucks (And How To Fix It)

Ok, so maybe your landing page doesn't suck. HOPEFULLY, it doesn't totally suck. But it's not making the kind of traction and sales that you want. If your problem is that you aren't getting enough traffic to the page, then you'll need to look to your marketing efforts. Even the greatest landing page in the world is going to fall flat if you don't market it effectively.

But if you do have a lot of traffic and few conversions, you've come to the right place.

There are any number of reasons why your landing page might not convert, ranging from people not liking your offer to targeting the wrong audience. However, in my experience, these are the top four reasons why landing pages fail to perform.

1. You Don't Target Your Customer's Pain Points

This is the number one problem I see with landing pages. You know who your target audience ism and so you just start writing directly to them. This is great for most of your landing page (or for most of your website copy, for that matter), but first, you need to make sure that your reader believes that she is your target customer.

You only have a few sentences to attract her. These sentences are crucial to the success of your sales page. Use them wisely. List out your reader's areas of stress and aggravation. Make sure to cover the reasons why they should want to read the rest of the page.

2. Your Branding Is Off

I recently saw a gorgeous landing page that sold a healthy living product to women in my demographic. I was the ideal customer. The product was free. But I didn't sign up. Why didn't I sign up?

The message was so incongruent with the branding that I couldn't imagine that the product would deliver what it claimed. When I think of healthy living, I think of green and white. I imagine smoothies and juice. Maybe some veggies and dumbbells. This landing page was covered in pink and purple. The images were ethereal and surreal. Gorgeous, but confusing. The font was whimsical. It would have been a perfect landing page for a manifesting guide or a "find your inner diva" checklist. I may even have signed up for those. But this one had such confusing branding that I got bored and clicked away.

Lesson: Make sure your font, color, background, and photos all line up with your product and business brand.

3. You Forgot The Basics

You know exactly what your offer or lead magnet is. You've worked with it for weeks, months, or years. You understand all the benefits, and it makes sense that you'd try to market those awesome benefits. But here's the problem. You spend so much energy focusing on the details that make your offer better than a different offer that you forget to cover the basics of what your offer is. It's shocking how often this happens. Let's say, for example, that you are a coach for photographers. You create a landing page to offer your lead magnet: a PDF of the top 50 shots to take at a wedding. Instead of appealing to the aspiring photographer's desire to gain clients with the contents of the PDF, you focus on all the different poses and how they can use their camera to capture each one.

SLOW DOWN. Back up. They don't really care what the poses are. They don't care which lens to use on their camera. (At least, they don't care yet. They will care once they have the PDF.) Right now, they care about having a valuable tool to help them book more weddings. Focus on the basics. You can get into all the details in your Thank You page or your welcome email.

4. Your Facebook Ad/Social Media Post/Other Advertisement is not aligned with your Landing Page

This is a biggie for pages that get a lot of clicks from an ad, but few conversions. If people are willing to click on the Facebook Ad, there's a decent chance that they are interested in your offer. This isn't only true of free offers, but also of expensive courses and membership sites. If none of the above reasons ring true for your landing page, then it's very likely that your ad and your landing page are out of sync (Nobody tell Justin Timberlake!).

Pull up your ad copy on one tab and your landing page on another. Compare the text. Since your ad copy is much shorter than your landing page, the content of your ad should fit nicely somewhere in your landing page. Make sure it is present somewhere (preferably at the beginning of the page).

Are you using the same language on both pages? Are you referencing the same pain points? If you put 50 ads and 50 landing pages side by side, could you match your ad to your landing page? If not, you have some work to do.

Your landing page is the lifeblood of your income. It has the power to be your most dedicated and persuasive marketing associate. So take a couple of hours to check for these mistakes. The effort will be worth it.

Cheers,

Nicole Hunt