Digital Marketing Blog | Struto

Social Media Ads: How to Use Landing Pages to Coax Conversions

Written by Lauren Inggs | 12 Oct 2015

How much time have you spent working on your social media ads landing pages? Do you even have landing pages for them? Perhaps you're wondering why you need them? Landing pages play a valuable role in the generation of leads during your inbound marketing campaigns, and the same is true for your Social Media ads.

Using landing pages helps you generate higher conversions from social media ads by zoning in on the real value of the offer. Often an ad on social media is extremely limited in terms of characters and image size when hosted on a platform, so having those ads redirect to a brilliant landing page highlights the attractiveness of your offer in a professional way, and even allows you to segment your value proposition into smaller components. They also help you separate your offer from the other distractions faced by your viewer while they're spending time on social media and help them to focus exclusively on your offer.

Many social media networks offer ad analytics to their advertisers, allowing them to determine their users gender, age and location - but when it comes to some of the finer details, it's up to your landing pages to sniff them out.

That said, we've out together a few handy pointers to help you get started.

9 Top Tips for Empowering Your Social Media Ads with Landing Pages

1. Keep Your Messaging Consistent

As with all your other marketing efforts, consistency is crucial when creating the content found on landing pages for your social media ads. Whatever your copy promised in your social media ad has got to be accurately represented in the copy on your landing page as well. So if you're offering a "free trial" in your ad, be sure to include the same wording in your landing page content, most especially in your page heading.

2. Stick Your Essentials Above the Fold

On any landing page, it's the call-to-action that is key - after all, your sole effort at this point is compelling your viewer to follow through with the action of filling in your form and downloading your offer. Naturally, your design and content has to work towards this goal as well - which is why you should take the time to create pages where your key elements are clearly and concisely presented to avoid any distractions.

A couple of ways to achieve are:

  • Ensuring your brand and logo are clearly displayed
  • Making certain your viewer can immediately determine the purpose of the page
  • Outline the exact requirements a user needs to meet to get your offer
  • Clearly define what you're offering the user
  • Keep your brand colours and fonts consistent

3. Tailor Your Landing Pages

Remember your buyer persona profiles? They're the ones you need to be tailoring your landing page content to - and you don't have much time to do so. Statistics shows that when a person is redirected to your landing page from a Facebook ad, tweet or pin, you have less than 10 seconds to grab their attention! Create copy that is short and sweet, and make sure it speaks to your persona's needs or pain points.

4. Highlight the Value

Your offer needs to be a glittering jewel that captures the attention of your viewers - and it's through the careful construction of effective landing pages that'll highlight the value of your offers. Making sure your offer takes center stage on your landing pages means having clean copy, skipping out on jargon, using possessive pronouns and perhaps a well-placed customer testimony or quote. Remember that your goal is to emphasise the way your offer will help them and soothe their specific pain points.

5. Don't Recycle Your Copy

It's tempting when dealing with the many activities that compromise an inbound marketing campaign, to reuse copy on your social media ad landing pages. Don't succumb, though - reusing copy across your landing pages can hurt your conversion rate and give viewers the impression that you're too lazy to bother creating unique content. Tailor your landing page content to your offers and the value added proposition your social media ads are touting.

6. Focus on Your Design

Design is an invaluable asset for any inbound marketer, and its importance when creating great landing pages is not to be underestimated. Utilise these assets to position your offer in the best light possible - use a simple brand-appropriate colour palette, avoid excessive image or video usage and ensure everything contributes to your landing page's purpose.

A wise element to consider including are trust badges, as close as possible to your CTA button. These function as reminders to your viewers that they're able to trust you as they prepare to disclose their personal information to you.

7. Keep Them Focused

Your goal is to ensure your landing pages are well-constructed and work towards steering your viewers down the conversion funnel, keeping them focused on a single goal (in this case, filling in your forms and downloading your offer). This means eliminating all clickable items from your landing pages other than your CTA and avoid navigational links that could draw viewers away from your page.

8. Never Cease Testing

Running A/B tests helps you to determine which elements of your landing pages are working best in the conversion of leads. And the more pages you test, the better your chances will be of seeing higher conversion rates at the end of the day.

9. Don't Skip Mobile-Responsiveness

It's a given, but your landing pages (along with the rest of your site) need to be mobile-friendly, so that your users can use them effectively from different devices, and are not inconvenienced by form fields and page designs that make accessing from a mobile device painful.

10. Build Your Form Fields Wisely

Your landing pages will naturally contain form fields that require your users to disclose their personal information in return for your offer - it's up to you to ensure you align your form fields with the value of your offer and what your users will be willing to offer up. According to QuickSprout, your conversion rates are negatively affected the more form fields you require, so exercise caution in deciding on your form fields.

If you're advertising on social media, why not boost your returns by creating landing pages? Maximise your conversions by taking the time to focus on this area, and you're bound to see plenty of positive results.