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B2B Lead Gen Landing Pages part 5
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.
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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.
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.
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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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