The importance of landing pages for industrial lead generation cannot be overstated. Why? That’s where conversions happen—visitors turn into leads. Landing pages are where your visitors first land from a marketing campaign or a social media channel.
Note, this is not the same as promoting your blog posts via social media channels for site traffic.
Landing pages have one job to do—Convert site visitors into leads.
I remember reading an excellent description of a landing page using a golf analogy. “A landing page is the putting green that you drive the ball (prospect) to. Once on the green, the goal is to get the ball into the hole. Likewise, the goal of the copy and design of a landing page is to get the prospect to take your desired action.” (Source: Coppyblogger).
Your Contact Us page with a simple form may not be the best example of a landing page. Most site visitors are hesitant to contact you right away. In contrast, a landing page provides a specific offer that is of interest to your audience. It should persuade the visitor to take the desired action. Of course, it is not just a matter of aesthetics; read on for ways to avoid common pitfalls that can sabotage your lead generation efforts.
This singular focus of landing pages for industrial lead generation makes them different from web pages that may have different goals to achieve. The visitor provides their name and email address in exchange for something valuable. Downloading white papers and how-to guides, signing up for your newsletter, or registering for a webinar are typical applications in industrial marketing.
Refer to these two online resources to learn more about landing pages.
In this post, I’ll focus on talking about some of the common mistakes I have seen made by manufacturing and engineering companies. With a little bit of planning, you can easily avoid these pitfalls.
According to research published by Instapage, “9 out of 10 visitors bounce from the average post-click landing page.”
Their definition of a post-click landing page is “…a standalone web page, disconnected from a website’s navigation, created for the sole purpose of convincing a visitor to act (to sign up, buy, download, etc.).”
Ouch, that isn’t very encouraging, so you need to optimize your landing pages for the best conversion rate possible. Ask yourself these questions:
Answering those questions will not only help you design more effective landing pages for industrial lead generation, it will also help you craft more compelling offers. Offers that your target audience will find valuable enough, to part with their essential contact information.
How often do you resist filling out online forms that have half a dozen or more fields? There’s a natural resistance to giving out too much information. Why would a phone number be required to download something?
The more fields you have, the greater the resistance to filling out the form. In the worst-case scenario, people provide junk information. What information are engineers and technical professionals willing to provide?
This chart is from the survey published by GlobalSpec, and it shows a significant dropoff after Job Title. The resistance is higher if you make more fields mandatory.
Crafting a valuable piece of content is not an easy task, especially when targeting a technical audience. Use this chart from the 2021 State of Marketing to Engineers report, also published by GlobalSpec.
Notice that engineers are willing to fill out a registration form for technical content relevant to their work. White papers and CAD drawings are the top two most popular, with case studies, video tutorials, and webinars filling the top five.
I call downloadable CAD files sales enablers because they help manufacturers of parts and components get “designed in.” This is critical if your audience is Design Engineers. You are not likely to get to the RFQ stage unless your part is specified and/or included in the BOM. (See my post, Using CAD and BIM Files in Manufacturing Content Marketing).
Don’t underestimate the value of the tried and tested e-newsletters. Engineers have consistently considered this a valuable channel of information. The key is to win their trust with good content (Not overly salesy), to get past the spam filters and into their inboxes.
“92% of engineers subscribe to at least one newsletter. 43% of engineers subscribe to 3-5, and nearly one-fifth subscribe to 6 or more.”
It should be abundantly clear by now that landing pages can make or break your industrial lead generation campaigns.
Let’s chat to determine if this will be a good fit for both of us. It will be a friendly conversation to get to know each other better, not a high-pressure sales pitch.
Rolf Preuß says:
Thanks for sharing these insights. Interesting to learn that Engineers read a lot of newsletters to become informed. I guess it’s because scanning a newsletter doesn’t take more than a minute. Valuable content can be selected easily to learn more about the subject of interest.
Lahn Hua says:
Interesting post!
This is really helpful for me to design the landing pages for industrial lead generation.