The person is using a search engine and they’ve entered a query that reflects their needs – in my example, they searched for “flexible office space oxford”.  

The search engine has done its job and brought back a long list of web pages that might be a fit for the searcher’s requirements. There’s an interesting mix of websites in this particular case – a paid ad for one particular office space provider, a blog article with a review of multiple coworking spaces, some listing sites that offer multiple locations, and some individual office locations. All quite intriguing and likely to help with the research process in different ways. 

If you’ve been skilful with the design and implementation of a PPC campaign, your search ad might be one of the links that appears on that page. And if your ad is carefully written, there’s a good chance that it will appeal to the person who is searching. If the stars align, they’ll click on your ad. And they’ll see your landing page! 

At this moment the landing page has a HUGE job to do. Because at this point in the user journey, your landing page is in competition for the user’s attention with the search engine and with every other link on the search results page. If your landing page can’t immediately engage the searcher, the search engine (with its familiar, trusted user experience) and all of those tantalising competitor links (with their novelty and promises of relevance) are just one tap of the back button away. One click and that person is lost to you, perhaps forever. 

You have to convince the searcher to stay on your landing page, and you have to do it FAST. (Within 10 seconds, UX guru Jakob Nielsen wrote in 2011. In 2024 even 10 seconds seems too long!) 

You need to reflect the reality of this type of user experience in the design of your landing page. 

User experience challenges for a successful B2B lead gen landing page 

Grabbing the searcher’s attention is essential. But by itself it’s not enough to guarantee success. You need the person to remain engaged with your landing page and to be willing and able to take action. 

So your B2B lead gen landing page needs to deliver on three different user experience challenges: 

• It must convince the user VERY quickly that they’ve come to a place which offers a valid and accessible solution to their needs. You have less than 10 seconds of the user’s attention to do this. You can’t assume that they will scroll down your page or otherwise interact. This is a brutal design challenge that requires an extremely focussed approach to the page’s information architecture. 
• If the user does engage and starts to scroll through your page or otherwise interact, it must continue to offer a flow of easily-accessible information about your product or service in a way that offers the user a better return on time spent than a press of your ever-present competitor, the back button. 
• Once a user has been persuaded that they should take the next step and get in touch with you, the page must make it effortlessly easy for them to do so. 

A general-purpose web page isn’t going to do any of those jobs very well. Websites are designed to fulfil multiple purposes for a wide range of different user journeys, and so web pages within those sites have to feature complex navigation and multi-purpose information architecture. They rely on a visitor being at least somewhat engaged and willing to spend some time processing information and navigating around the site. 

You don’t have the luxury of an engaged, committed visitor for a B2B lead gen landing page. You need to bring specialist design principles to bear if you want to keep your visitor out of the clutches of the competition and give yourself a good chance to turn them into a lead. 

We’ll dive into the details of landing page design principles in the next article in this series.