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Technology and Governance for B2B Landing Pages

Technology and Governance for B2B Landing Pages

In previous articles we’ve looked at why landing pages are so important for B2B lead gen, how to design a high-converting landing page, and the important roles of the CTA and the form in the conversion journey.  

It’s time now to cover some of the practicalities – what technology platform should you use to build and host B2B landing pages, and what processes do you need to have in place around them? 

Landing Page Platforms

A landing page platform needs to provide multiple functions, including: 

  • Allowing you and your team to design and build the visual and copy elements of the landing page – obvs in a way that incorporates all our recommended best practices! 
  • Hosting the finished landing page on a high performing live web environment for production use. 
  • Capturing the leads from form submissions in an appropriate way (which often means integration with some other technology platform, like your CRM system). 

Functionality and performance both matter here. If your chosen landing page platform lacks functionality, you’ll be forced to make design compromises that will harm your conversions. If the live environment doesn’t perform well enough, users will be frustrated by slow page loads and again your conversions (and Google Ads quality scores!) will suffer. 

And your landing page platform also needs to be robust: you’ll be sending a lot of expensive traffic to your B2B landing pages, and you don’t want to risk wasting that on a page that sometimes doesn’t load properly or have form submissions lost because an integration has broken. 

So there’s a lot at stake here. It’s worth giving careful thought to your choice of landing page platform. Let’s look at some of the different options. 

Option 1: Use your website’s CMS

A landing page is just a web page, right? And you already have a website. So why not use your existing CMS? That saves on cost and complexity. 

No doubt this approach CAN work. But don’t underestimate the potential pitfalls. 

Some common downsides: 

  • It’s unlikely that the templates in your CMS will have been designed with landing page conversion principles in mind. You’ll either have to spend time and effort fighting the template or accept design compromises that will reduce the landing page’s effectiveness. 
  • Website platforms often force your pages to use common elements like global navigation, headers and footers, and limit the visual layout options. This might badly compromise your landing page design. 
  • Your CMS probably makes assumptions about how to treat content for SEO purposes. But you most likely don’t want your lead gen landing pages to be appearing in search engines. You’ll have to figure out how to make them a special case within the CMS.
  • Websites are complicated and need to be maintained and updated over time for lots of different reasons. If your landing pages are a special case within a general-purpose CMS there’s a big risk that future changes and updates will have unintended consequences for your live landing pages. 
landing page common components

Our recommendation: this won’t be the right route for most B2B marketing teams. If you decide to take this approach, make sure your website CMS really is fit for this purpose and that considerations like SEO and future maintenance can be managed. 

Option 2: Use the landing page builder from a general-purpose marketing platform

Many marketing platforms contain their own landing page builders. For example, marketing automation systems like Hubspot and email marketing platforms like ActiveCampaign and Constant Contact include their own landing page builders. 

There are a lot of these tools, and we can’t claim to be experts in all of them! But we’ve worked with many. In general, our experience is that these landing page builders do a good job for basic, transactional pages – for example, if someone has clicked through from a promotional email to sign up for an event. But they lack the flexibility to design really top-notch B2B lead gen landing pages. In particular, the available mobile layouts are often quite restrictive. 

Our recommendation: if you already have a marketing platform that includes a landing page builder, by all means try it out and see if you like the results. But don’t forget that design compromises will harm your conversions. 

Option 3: Use a specialist landing page system

There are several products that are built specifically for landing page design and hosting. Examples include Unbounce, LeadPages and SwipePages. The best of these are great solutions for B2B lead gen landing pages. 

At Sharp Ahead we’ve worked with Unbounce for ten years and we find the design and layout options to be excellent – there’s huge flexibility. It’s a great way to achieve a beautifully branded landing page that follows all of our best practices. But Unbounce is becoming very expensive and isn’t seeing much active development, so the platform is starting to look dated and poor value for money. It’s hard to recommend Unbounce these days if you’re starting from scratch with a landing page system. 

We’re also working on a lot of landing page projects in SwipePages which is a more modern platform and offers much better value-for-money. That’s our platform of choice for future work. 

Our recommendation: a specialist landing page system is likely to be a good choice for most B2B marketing teams but it’s not easy to pick the right product. The different landing page platforms vary a lot in functionality, price and availability of customer support. Most offer a free trial. Make a short list and evaluate a few platforms before you commit. 

Landing Page Governance

If you take your B2B lead generation activities seriously then you will likely end up with a LOT of landing pages! For example, you might need: 

  • A different page for each different target customer segment 
  • A different page for each of your main products or services 
  • Page variants for different geographic markets 

Multiply those together and it’s easy to need dozens or hundreds of landing pages. 

It’s also likely that many different people from your team will work on your landing pages, so that brings in another layer of organisational complexity. 

Your landing pages are a crucial component of your lead generation efforts, so they serve a critical commercial function for your business, and they will also be the first experience of your brand for a lot of stakeholders. 

So, your library of landing pages will become both important and complex. You need to think seriously about the governance considerations that arise from that. 

This is a big subject and, to be honest, a bit dull for a blog – despite its importance. So just a few highlights: 

  • Do you need processes for review and signoff of new landing pages, and edits to existing pages, before they are put live? 
  • Can you identify landing pages that are no longer used so they can be archived or retired? If you don’t do this, your landing page library will get cluttered with obsolete pages with associated overhead and risk. 
  • Think about how to maintain shared design and copy components. For instance, if the contact phone number for your sales team changes, how are you going to update that in a few hundred landing pages? Some platforms allow pages to share template components for this sort of purpose. 
  • How do you test and monitor the performance of your live landing pages, for example whether they comply with core web vitals? You might need to add your landing page URLs to a page monitoring system. 
  • How are you going to make sure that landing pages are capturing leads correctly and sending them to the right destination? CRM integrations and notification email delivery are brittle and it’s easy for an integration to silently break or for notifications to start routing to a spam folder. In B2B your lead volumes are often low, so it may take a while for anyone to notice a broken lead capture form. You need a QA process. 
  • How are you going to measure the performance of your landing pages and make iterative improvements over time? You can design a good landing page based on best practices, but to make it truly great you need to test and optimise based on real world results. 

That last point is worth a deep dive. So, we’ll look in detail at B2B landing page measurement and optimisation in the next, and final, article in this series. 

Sign up to ensure you don’t miss our next article on high-converting B2B landing pages, and more useful B2B marketing tips. 

Have more questions about high-performing landing pages, or B2B marketing in general? Please get in touch, one of our consultants would be happy to chat!

Form Design for High-Converting B2B Landing Pages

Landing Pages for B2B: Form Design
Landing Pages for B2B Part 4: Forms header.

Form Design for High-Converting B2B Landing Pages

In previous articles we’ve looked at the overall information architecture of a B2B lead gen landing page and considerations around the call-to-action

Once those parts of your landing page have done their job there’s one crucial step remaining – you need the visitor to complete and submit a form.

In this article we’ll look at how to design your B2B landing page forms to get the best possible results.

The form’s place in the user journey

The user journey.

Remember that the form is a step in a user’s journey that started – probably just a few seconds ago – with a search engine.

Your enemy is – still! – the back button. If you present a visitor with a form that is too time-consuming, or too intrusive, or that undermines the impression of your brand, they will abandon your landing page and try somewhere else. You’ll lose conversions to your competitors.

Let’s look at some ways you can maximize the results from your lead gen forms.

Choosing form fields: keep it simple

Illustration of a complicated form that doesn't display properly.

User experience research has shown that adding more fields to a form reduces average conversion rates. This makes sense: each extra field increases the time and effort that your visitor must commit to fill in the form so increases the risk they’ll hit the back button instead. If you want more conversions from your forms, keep the number of fields to the absolute minimum.

As well as using as few fields as possible, some other tips that will help with conversion:

  • Don’t make a field compulsory unless it is really essential that you gather that data. An optional field still adds to the complexity of the form, but at least the visitor knows they can choose to skip it.
  • Make sure that field names and labels are easy to understand. With technical B2B subject matter you might have some jargon terms that don’t make immediate sense to every valid prospect. There’s almost certainly a clearer way to ask the question.
  • Make sure that your forms are coded so that the autocomplete functions in a web browser can operate correctly. (There’s no substitute for testing this on a real device!)
  • Consider using a single open-ended question (like: “Please tell us about your requirements”) rather than a whole list of specific questions.

Consider where to put the form

An important design choice is whether to embed the whole form in the landing page, or whether to keep the form off-page in a lightbox or pop-up (with just a button on the main page to trigger the pop-up).

Both approaches can work. But for most B2B lead gen pages we prefer the lightbox/pop-up approach, for several reasons:

  • It frees up space on the main page for other, more persuasive design and copy elements
  • The lightbox can be used to show other information (for example, to set expectations about how and when someone will receive their sales follow-up) that helps support the conversion action
  • A single lightbox can be reused across many different landing page layouts, whereas an embedded form has to be integrated with the other design elements.

However, if your form is VERY simple – say, just a single field with an email address for a newsletter signup – you might get more conversions by embedding it in the page so that it’s immediately apparent to the visitor just how simple you’ve made the conversion journey.

Wherever you choose to locate the form, give some thought as to visibility of the submit button. It’s easy to create a tall form where the input fields push the submit button below the fold. This has two bad consequences: it implies that there are more fields, perhaps MANY more fields, which is a deterrent to a person even starting to fill in the form; and it introduces confusion and doubt about how to actually submit the form. Both of those will harm conversions. Make sure your submit button is visible above the fold!

Remember your form is still part of the conversation

Marketing is a conversation and B2B buyers are, on the whole, pretty smart people. Technical choices you make about your form will communicate things to your intended audience. And they are likely to be things you didn’t really want to say to them. Here’s a real-world example (I won’t name the offending site):

Bad form example with list of countries

What does that say to a visitor from, say, the United Kingdom? “We’re a US company and, if you’re from the rest of the world, alphabetical order is all you deserve.” Great news for prospective buyers from Afghanistan and the Aland Islands. Not so helpful if you’re from Great Britain, England or the United Kingdom. You might as well have gone with this:You might as well have gone with this

List of countries

Another example from that same site – what does this say to the prospective software buyer?

Bad form example select number of licenses

“Our sales team have asked us to make it clear to you that they don’t even want to talk to you unless you need at least 50 licenses.”

Here’s how that looks to the visitor:

List of unrealistic questions to answer in a form.

Think how crazy this is – at this lead gen stage, a person enquiring probably
doesn’t even KNOW how many licenses they need! “THAT’S WHY I WANT TO
TALK TO SALES!!” There isn’t even a default “not sure yet” option here.

Your visitor is smart and they are going to make judgements about your
company based on the way you talk to them. Your website forms don’t get a
pass in this respect. Think about the questions and the implied messages they send.

Styling the form

The visual style of your form also communicates something to your visitor. Are the fonts, colours and spacing congruent of the form with the rest of your visual branding? Or do they look like throwbacks to the early days of HTML?

There are often technical trade-offs here. If your form is a connection to a back-end CRM system, it might be more technically convenient for you to directly embed a form that’s designed and styled within that CRM system. Those types of system often offer only limited control over fonts, styles and layout.

Alternatively if you design and build the form within the same CMS or page builder that you are using to build the landing page itself, you’ll get a lot more control over the visual appearance. But you’ll have a more complex technical integration task.

There’s no single right or wrong answer here. You might choose to accept a few visual compromises in return for a lower implementation cost. Or you might decide it’s worth the extra implementation effort to give the very best experience of your visual brand to the prospective customer. It’s worth actively evaluating the trade-offs when you’re planning your landing page design.

Testing and maintenance

It’s horribly easy to implement a form that looks good at design time but, erm, doesn’t actually work on the live site. Or to have a previously-working form break during a harmless-seeming site update. Perhaps a validation rule is wrong, or an API connection has gone adrift, or some privacy-related browser function is blocking the form submission.

B2B lead gen forms are particularly vulnerable to this type of failure because the frequency of form submission is low. It’s easy for a few days, or a few weeks, to pass without a form submission. No one notices that the form is broken and that conversions have been lost.

Some testing suggestions:

  • Test your form on the live site as soon as it is deployed – on both computer and phone
  • Repeat your live site tests at intervals and whenever there is a site update or a material tech stack change
  • Use a screen recording tool like MS Clarity to monitor form usage and look for submission failures

Form design tricks for B2B conversion superheroes

Here are some of our very best B2B conversion tricks that don’t fit naturally into the discussion above.

  • Multi-step forms: Ask a few questions and allow the form to be submitted. You have a lead! Now: have the form reload and use the same space to ask some more questions. Some people will be happy to give you additional information. And you’ve kept your form small and simple.
  • Web-to-phone is still an option: Show a phone number in the form lightbox with opening hours. A person might decide to call instead of going to the trouble of filling in the form. You still get a lead!
  • Don’t use a form at all! Chatbots are an emerging alternative to conventional forms and their conversation style can be easier for the user, especially on a mobile device. You can offer both, with a chatbot overlaid on a conventional form.

Our favourite form design

To wrap up – here’s an example of some of those best practices in action:

Great form example from Sharp Ahead.

We’ve put that form in a lightbox so it’s easy to integrate with any other digital content.

We only ask for a single input field. And that’s left us plenty of space to that the action button is visible and we can provide some supporting messages about the benefits of subscribing.

And we’ve styled everything with our visual branding for a coherent, branded look.

So that’s a great reminder that if you’ve found this blog useful, sign up for our newsletter!

The final part of this series on landing pages will look at landing page platforms and some of the governance considerations that arise in managing landing pages over time.

Have more questions about high-performing landing pages, or B2B marketing in general? Please get in touch, one of our consultants would be happy to chat!

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