If you’re a B2B SaaS company investing heavily in PPC, content or lead generation, you probably already know that custom-built landing pages are a key component to your overall customer acquisition strategy.
This article will show how to construct a winning page from scratch.
The first place to start, before even creating a single wireframe, is to think long and hard about your user journey:
- Who is your audience?
- What is the problem or need state that you’re looking to address?
- How is your value proposition unique vs. the competition?
- What part of the product or service are you going to visually communicate? If it’s a SaaS app or a tool, what’s the most important part of the product to showcase?
- Are there reviews and testimonials that you can leverage?
- What are the key frictions that usually exist for the average visitor? For example, think about all of the reasons that a user might not convert
The more detailed your understanding around these points, the more effective your page will be in persuading your visitors to take the desired action, whether that’s to buy there and then, schedule a demo, or hand over their precious contact details for a custom quote. Ready to build a landing page that converts?
Mapping questions to your landing page layout
If your SaaS landing page is to successfully become a persuasion page, you’ll need to break it down into specific sections, which focus on reducing ‘friction’ to convert. Within a B2B SaaS context, these frictions may include:
- Am I in the right place? Is this website relevant to my problem?
- How does the company compare against others in this space?
- What are other people saying about this product or service? Is the company trustworthy?
- Does the value offered outweigh the cost of the product?
- Do I know enough about the product to take action?
Your next step is to marry each question or ‘friction’ to a particular section of the landing page layout. At Conversion Stars, our formula for this is as follows:
- The Hero section: Should convincingly address the ‘Am I in the right place?’ and ‘Is this website relevant?’ questions. Should highlight your overall value proposition, in short-form format. We’d also suggest that you put your main call-to-action (i.e. form) here, to maximize – conversions.
- The Feature section: Should elaborate on the Hero section, and outline your top features in visual format.
- The Social Proof section: As the name suggests, address the ‘What are other people saying about this product or service?’ and ‘Is the company trustworthy?’ frictions. This means using ‘social proof’ signals such as client lists, reviews, or customer testimonials.
- Why us section: Address the ‘How does the company compare against others in this space?’ friction. Elaborate on some of the key features vs. the competition.
- FAQ section: Unlike other sections which are focused on addressing specific frictions, the FAQ should be a catch-all in addressing any lingering questions. Feel free to elaborate on any of the above points here.
You won’t necessarily need all of these sections, but this structure usually works well for SaaS clients who operate within particularly competitive industries, such as market insights and CRM.
The full article (link at the bottom) breaks down each part of the page, and highlights some of the best SaaS landing page examples of B2B companies who are achieving excellence. It also goes into specifics around things you should look to test, as this will be crucial to improving landing page performance over time.
The article shows landing page examples from a variety of SaaS companies, including MarketLogic Software, Zoom, Basecamp, TopTal, Intercom and more.
Conclusion
Here are the main points to remember:
- Before designing your landing page, you really need to zero in on your audience and understand their problem or need. Only by having true empathy with them, can you craft a page that drives results.
- Think of your landing page as a persuasion page. In order to persuade your target audience to take action, you need to be relevant to their needs, and use every section to remove friction across the decision-making journey.
- Key components of the Hero section include image or background, headline, and form.
- The features section highlights the core features of your product that support the value proposition highlighted with the Hero section.
- Social proof comes in different shapes and sizes and social proof signals should be peppered throughout your landing page. The social proof section is a good place to anchor the bulk of these signals in one digestible grouping.
- Testimonials should be used where possible to hammer home the value of your product. More elaborate testimonials such as case studies and video testimonials can add an air of authenticity, and instill a higher degree of trust than simple ‘quote’ testimonials.
- The ‘Why us’ section is where we recommend comparison vs. other players in the space. Here you can choose to be a bit more direct in your messaging, as you really want to hammer home why your product is the ideal solution to your visitors’ needs.
- Choose six to eight concise FAQ’s, in order to help remove any lingering friction to conversion.
- Above all, always be testing across each of your sections. Ongoing landing page optimization is key!
The Ultimate SaaS Landing Page Guide: A Formula for Landing Pages that Convert
PS. Whatever you do, I hope you’re not sending your paid traffic to your homepage. That would be a huge waste of money.