How to Make Your Landing Pages Work for You
Every recruiter or corporate hiring team realises the importance of landing pages and onsite applications, but not all get it right. Perfecting your job application landing pages will reduce your reliance on job boards and aggregators, while keeping visitors on your site.
Candidates funnel toward landing pages that are clear with easy job application steps. The aim is not grandiose – build it to make them come, keep them long enough and convert to another successful application.
Sites that confuse potential applicants with incoherent content, annoying drop-downs, confusing navigation or an unclear value proposition are a waste of time and money. Remember, first impressions count. For example, if you are investing your recruitment advertising budget into finding Sales and Marketing candidates, then you need to give potential BDMs, executives, and marketers a great first impression, immediately connecting with them as soon as they land on your page.
You may already be sending traffic to your landing pages with great SEO, social media, email marketing and job advertisements, however bear in mind that if your landing pages are substandard, you run the risk of killing your lead generation efforts.
1. KEEPING IT SIMPLE
If your landing page is overcrowded with information, your visitors will jump. A human’s average attention span is seven seconds. A clean and attractive web or application page makes it easier for candidates to find the most important information quickly.
As a guide, your landing page should be answering following questions for each visitor:
- What is the purpose of this site?
- Does it capture my interest?
- What am I supposed to do?
- Do I want to share this experience?
The key is to answer the above questions in a succinct way, ensuring it is easy for the reader to digest.
2. POWERFUL CALL TO ACTIONS
Visitors need to be compelled to stay on your landing page and take a specific action. It is a balancing act as too many prompts could also confuse your visitors, resulting in fewer conversations.
Stick with one or two interesting, significant call to actions. Most of these steps require small changes but could result in a big impact on your conversion, positively or negatively. So my suggestion is to make one change at a time, closely monitoring the results as you go.
3. KEEP IT SHORT AND SWEET
When sharing relevant content with your audience, avoid disrupting their attention with long blocks of text. Try to vary the layout with bullet points, and appropriate videos or images.
This small step helps you to share your message up front with your prospects, ultimately resulting in more applications.
4. THINK HEADLINES
If you see these two headlines:
- “Don’t let inferior leads cost you money.”
- “80% of marketers believe leads are valuable.”
Chances are, you will gravitate towards the first one. Your headline does not need to cover all of your landing page’s elements, but it needs to lure your audience to continue the content journey, and ultimately follow through with your call to action.
The great David Ogilvy said “On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar” – that is a hefty 80% of your committed resources to an initiative.
Give these recommendations a try, run a quick audit on your landing pages to get an idea of where the gaps are. It is relatively simple to secure your audience’s attention with a fantastic first impression.
About the author
Rick Maré is the founder and CEO of JXT, the number one provider of cloud-based digital marketing solutions for recruiters and corporate recruiters. Rick has coached thousands of recruiters, empowering them to take their businesses and careers to the next level. Connect with Rick on LinkedIn.
