5 best practice tips for effective Marketo landing pages

Using Marketo landing pages instead of standard web pages is a great way to create campaign-specific content and aid conversion. No matter the campaign, it’s critical to send your audience to a landing page with relevant content that drives them to take action.

However, the average landing page only converts between 2 – 5% of visitors, so it’s clearly not as straightforward as it seems!

In this article we look at five best practices to help you produce effective Marketo landing pages:

1. Use pre-built Marketo landing page templates

2. Optimise content

3. Collect the right data at the right time

4. Use dynamic content

5. Test, test and test again

Let’s take each one in turn:

1. Use pre-built Marketo landing page templates

Invest in designing and building landing page templates that you can use and re-use in multiple campaigns, to save time and ensure brand consistency.

A good landing page template will be modular, with drag and drop sections and include editable elements, such as call to action (CTA) buttons that can be switched on and off, or backgrounds where colours are interchangeable. This will ensure versatility and make it easy to adapt to your needs, without resorting to hacking at code.

Whilst Marketo landing page templates are not as difficult to build as email templates, they do require specialist knowledge of Marketo coding. Templates also need to be responsive for mobile and will need extensive testing across multiple devices and browsers, so it’s wise to get Marketo developers (such as us!) to help.

Let’s talk templates!

2. Optimise content

An effective Marketo landing page should contain content that is relevant to your campaign and easy for visitors to scan and understand.

Before creating your content, always consider what the objective of the page is. For example, is it to encourage a webinar sign up, to explain a new service, or to compare products?

Often landing pages are looking to drive an action, in particular a conversion. Therefore, choosing the right text and images – and putting them in the right order – can have a big impact.

Here are some top tips to get you started: 

• Keep headlines short and sharp and avoid blocks of long text – replace them with subheadings and bullets.

• Ensure CTAs are clear with easy-to-follow next steps. Just a simple change in CTA position, wording or colour can have a big impact on conversions.

• Include social proof elements, such as customer logos and testimonials. These do a great job of encouraging visitors to trust your brand and take action.

• Decide whether you want your landing page to rank on search engines. If you don’t, remember to add the relevant ‘no follow’ tags in Marketo. If search engine optimisation (SEO) is important, decide on your keywords and subtly weave them into headings and body copy.

• Consider adding a secondary CTA. This way if a visitor isn’t quite ready to purchase, but is still interested to know more, they can easily sign up to your emailing list or watch a demo etc.

3. Collect the right data at the right time

Landing pages are great for collecting valuable data about your prospects. But how much information should you ask for on a form in order to get meaningful info without putting people off? 

Here are some ideas to help you get the data you need without harming conversion rates:

• Aim for three or four form fields e.g name, company, work email and job title.

• Turn on form pre-fill in your form settings, so it is pre-populated with data already provided by the customer when they return to your site.

• Use the ‘If known visitor’ field and swap to custom HTML, so they can get a welcome back message and link straight to the download.

• Use progressive profiling, so when visitors return they get presented with different fields to complete. This is an ideal way to keep gathering intel on your prospects to make future communication as relevant as possible.

• Pair Marketo forms with an automatic lead routing software to get prospects to instantly book a call time with a sales representative, improving the chances of success.

4. Use Marketo’s  dynamic content feature

Landing pages can be tailored to unique audiences and their specific needs using dynamic content.

Dynamic landing pages use sections of HTML content that change based on a viewer’s criteria. In its simplest form this could be using tokens in an email greeting e.g  ‘Hello {{lead.first name}}’.

On landing pages, dynamic content could be used to serve up copy based on a prospect’s industry, language, or job title. But remember, for dynamic content to work, you first need to create dynamic segments in your Marketo database. These segments will only be as accurate as the data you hold. You’ll also need to set up default content on your landing page, which will be shown to anyone not in a segment.

5. Test, test and test again

There’s no easy way to find your optimum Marketo landing page design, other than to keep on testing.

Whilst initially you need to test your pages to ensure they look good across all devices and web browsers (see point 1), testing should never stop, as you should continually be seeking ways to make them work harder for you.

You can set up A/B tests in Marketo, let them run for a while then review the results and move forward with the winner.

Aspects to test include:

• CTAs – colour, position, text

• Copy – headlines, sub-headings, images

• General layout

• Form positioning and content

• Personalisation versus none

Optimised Marketo landing page templates from JTF Marketing

The JTF Marketing team can help you create optimised landing page templates for higher-converting campaigns, without any of the hassle. With every Marketo landing page template project you’ll receive: 

• A dedicated and responsive project lead that is committed to getting you the results you want.

• Thorough testing to ensure your landing pages are responsive and compliant with all major web browsers.

We can also support with:

• Migrating your live campaigns to the new template.

• Monitoring and optimising your campaigns.

• Campaign building and execution.

Create more lead conversion opportunities from your landing pages – get in touch.