Last week I spent a little bit of time talking to you about how a landing page can help you market your business. As promised, this week I’m going to spend a little bit of time talking to you about what you can do to make your landing page as excellent as possible so that it will serve as an effective gateway to the “meat” of your website.
There are 4 items that you’ll need to pay attention to.
1. Great design.
I know you may not want to hear this. Becoming a personal trainer does not necessarily teach you how to be a graphic designer or a web designer.
And frankly DIY design may hurt you in the long run, whether we’re talking about a single landing page or whether we’re talking about developing your entire website. At some point you might just have to buckle down and invest in some professional help.
Fortunately, there’s a wide range of “professional help” out there. We’ve discussed WordPress templates for personal trainers. There are also professionally designed landing page templates. You can use one of those to create something that looks clean and attractive.
2. A great headline.
Your landing page needs an attention-grabbing headline. Ideally it would match your ad in some way, so that people know they’ve come to the right place.
If your ad was, “Free fitness evaluation” your headline might read, “Get your free fitness evaluation right now and finally create the body that you deserve!”
Great headlines use the word “you” whenever they can. They make it all about the reader or the customer. They speak directly to the reader and they instantly convey the benefits of taking the next step.
There’s an art and a science to writing great headlines. Check out 5 Landing Page Headline Formulas You Can Test Today for a little more guidance on landing page headlines.
Note that you may not get it right the first time. That’s okay. You can make different versions of the same page. Create 2 PPC ads that say the same thing, and see which performs better. That’s called an A/B test, and marketers use it all the time to really refine what they’re saying and doing. That’s because one little tweak of a word on a headline can make a big difference, and nobody really always knows what the difference will be until someone tests both versions.
3. Something to do.
When you create a landing page you do so because you want a potential client to do something.
It has to be one thing, and it can’t be too complicated.
You might want them to give you an e-mail address so you can contact them later. This is pretty common.
Or you might want them to share some information about their current fitness goals and plans so that you can write them with some short, personal recommendations before inviting them to call you back for an even more effective plan.
If you don’t know what you want the visitor to do they won’t know it either, so make sure you’ve got a clear idea before you launch your landing page. Anything that you write or place on your landing page will be in aid of getting them to do that one thing.
Don’t add too many words. You want to keep the page short, sweet, and to the point. People need to be able to glance at your page
4. A call to action.
You know what you want your visitor to do. Be sure that you tell your visitor, too.
Don’t assume that your visitor will just know. It’s purely psychological, but they won’t. The call to action could be as simple as a button which says, “Sign up now,” but it has to be there.
You can present all of the reasons in the world why doing “that one thing” will benefit your visitor. But if you don’t deliver a strong call to action at the end of it most people will not end up doing anything at all.
That would be a shame, because you’ve alraedy put so much work into your landing page!
Need more help?
Check out this critique of several personal trainer landing pages. You’ll start to get a very good sense of what is effective and what is ineffective. You will also get a sense of what other personal trainers are using.
The main thing, though, is just to do it.