Why is HubSpot such a robust landing page platform?

Landing pages play a key role in conversion. Whether your visitor comes from an organic route or paid advertising, they play a vital role in converting your visitor to a lead. If you're not using landing pages or you are but perhaps not via a dedicated system, then it's definitely worth considering an upgrade.

What is a landing page?

The specific purpose of a landing page is to focus on conversion. In B2B, you're looking for someone to connect with you, giving you their details, either to get in touch or in exchange for some collateral that might be useful for them, such as a guide or a whitepaper.

What are the key elements of a landing page?

A mistake a lot of people make when driving people to a page they want to convert on, is covering too many subjects and topics, overwhelming the visitor with choice, which can result in them doing nothing.

Landing pages should be a lot more contained than standard website pages, focussed on one offering, distraction free, an opportunity for the visitor to absorb the benefits of taking the action you want them to take.

We see a lot of adwords traffic directed to standard web pages, which often result in quite poor conversion rates. 

Landing page shouldn't include navigation. You can leave the home link on your logo, but everything else that might be in the header should be removed.

You can't convert people from visitors to leads without the use of a form. Most standard CMSs require a third party plugin to be able to achieve this. If you're using WordPress, something like Contact Form 7 or Ninja Forms will do the job of collection, but not necessarily processing the collections...

HubSpot history

When we first started using HubSpot over 6 years ago, it was pretty much exclusively an add-on for a main website. Using a subdomain, we'd connect it up to run the blog and landing pages away from the main site. It had the advantage of freeing up the marketing team to create and publish content, without being mired with the complications often presented from the development of new web pages.

HubSpot has moved on a lot now. The HubSpot CMS system is a fantastic tool for producing website pages so you can have your entire site on HubSpot now. The ethos of landing pages hasn't really changed, but the tool to produce them have become a lot friendlier to work with.

The templating system in HubSpot is drag and drop, coupled to responsive framework, it's very straightforward to add in new templates. For a finesse to the templates, you'll still need a website design and development team to produce the initial framework for you, but from there on in you should have not problem building pages for conversion.

The templating system in HubSpot allows genuine modular flexibility to your pages. The issue of removing navigation for a distraction free landing page is child's play in HubSpot. The setting up of multiple templates is very straightforward, and with a sensible naming convention deployed, it's easy to select the right tools for the job you're doing.

The form system in HubSpot intrinsically woven into the fabric of the entire system. From submissions can just be the start of something beautiful in HubSpot. You can setup multiple email addresses to receive notifications of a submission. You can also add people to a workflow to start nurturing them with other content to further strengthen your argument for selecting your services or products.

Because the forms are smart, if a visitor is already known by HubSpot, it'll populate the form fields with those values to shorten the required level of input to complete the form. Also in HubSpot, you can queue additional fields, so you can learn more about and profile your potential new customer, helping you make decisions as to whether you send them more relevant content to the issues they're looking to resolve, or even if it's now time to pick the phone for a consultative sell.

You can include inline thank you messages from form submissions, but where possible, we would always recommend you use HubSpot's built in switch to thank you page option. It gives you the opportunity to make it clear to the user that their submission was successful. If it was to download an asset, you can clear the decks to display a clear and apparent link to that download so the user doesn't get frustrated they can't find what they came to look at. You can also include a bottom of the funnel proposition on the thank you page so if they've read the asset and they feel that now is the time to talk, there's an easy method to do so. And of course it's not time to return the navigation to the page, giving the user the opportunity to move back through the  main site to learn more about your products, services and people.

You can also include tracking code on that thank you page so if you're using any third party software such as Google Analytics event tracking, you can use the thank you page to trigger events by dropping the code into the header or footer boxes. So straightforward. Of course HubSpot itself has plenty on analytics built in to help.

Each form has it's own view to submission rate, but through analysis of your individual landing pages, you'll see a picture of how well the landing page is performing and you can adjust the copy/form accordingly.

Beyond the standard

There is no one landing page design that will convert every time. Highlight the problem, emphasise and sympathise with the pain or pains that problem causes, and then explain why taking the action on the landing page would be beneficial to the user. Simple right?

The modular flexibility of the HubSpot system is really key, as it allows designers and developers like us, to fill a portal with easy to deploy custom modules to act as the building blocks for these pages.

We've produced really handy modules for including social endorsement through quotes, as well as custom slider systems to allow the previewing of the content from the whitepaper or asset the user is about to download, so they can start to see the value of the work inside before they commit their details.

We've worked with many different marketing platforms over the years, none of which started out with the right intent to deliver a usable platforms for marketers and continues to evolve into an ever more useful and connected setup day in day out as the HubSpot platform.

If you'd like to take advantage of this great system, why not get in touch today to see how we could help you do just that.