9 Startup Landing Page Strategies & Tips

Creating an effective lead-generation landing page is crucial for any MVP in business. 

Let me explain why in 50 words or less:

Your landing page allows you to validate your business idea and find early adopters without coding a site. It’s also a reliable, no-cost marketing tool to collect customer data in exchange for free materials like eBooks, whitepapers, and templates.

In short, a lead gen landing page is your startup’s digital business card. 

Its main goal is to collect contact info from potential customers so you can nurture their interest and eventually convert them into paying customers. Without leads, there are no sales!

But how do you create a landing page that drives results? Not to worry – the process is easier than you think.

First, let’s review what we’ll cover:

• What are landing pages, and how do they work
• Why you need landing pages for your startup
• Examples of effective lead gen landing pages
• Tips for creating a high-converting landing page

Let’s dive in!

If you are just looking for a great idea for your new venture, see how to find an idea for a unicorn startup with market potential and scalability.

What Are Lead Generation Landing Pages?

The landing page is a single page or one of the pages of your website where users “land” after clicking on an ad or a social media post. The landing page could be a product itself and significantly cut the cost of an MVP.

This page is all about making users do their first action: subscribe, sign up, leave an email address, or make a purchase.

You see that page while scrolling through Amazon Prime. Or when you consider signing up as an Uber driver. Or while visiting the Snapchat website.

These landing pages show us how companies (frankly speaking, it could be any type of business) engage users in their products.

So, if you ask yourself “I bought a domain now what?”, let’s find out what is the goal of such kind of a website.

A landing page provides the customer with compressed, focused data to create a clear meaning of what a company or product does. And how to become a customer too.

These lead magnet landing pages aim to attract the attention of not-a-customer, build trust moment, and convert this person into a potential customer.

Landings are an essential part of a marketing flywheel (modern marketing specialists do not use “funnel” anymore). People you aim to attract are just at the awareness stage of your service or product.

And the landing page should catch this aha moment to involve people in your marketing.

Collecting data is the easiest way to start a leads warming-up campaign. Simply because with any sort of data, you could begin to build trust with your brand, provide value, and qualify leads to close a sale.

Usually, to qualify a lead, it is required to offer to fill out the conversion form. It’s a free form available to any visitor on the website. But to make form truly convertible, founders (or marketers) use the following:

• Free webinars or courses
• Detailed white papers or guides
• Free ebooks and reports
• Overview of case studies
• Step-by-step checklist
• An online business card
• A free product demo, and so on

So, if to sum up, what is a landing page at all?

It’s a potent marketing tool with no complex features and a single primary action. It helps to drive traffic on your website.

The well-made lead generation landing page is a must-have for an early-stage startup founder. It’s a crucial tool to validate an idea for an app and identify the customer’s willingness to pay without spending a penny.

However, let’s take a closer look at reasons to start with building a landing page.

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Why Your Startup Needs Lead Generation Landing Pages

There are many benefits of using a landing page as a driver of your project’s marketing and sales. Thus, there are many reasons to spend resources on well-made landings. But I consider these 3 to be the most important:

• Landing pages test the value level of your offer.

The trick of landing pages is simple – there is the only “shine thing” to catch up visitor attention. In terms of startup building, that means that the landing page is a test polygon for your business hypotheses.

Did you identify the real problem on the market? Did you wrap it attractively enough? Did you offer enough value to give a shot for your product? Did you address the relevant audience?

All these things are much easier to test in the controlled, almost laboratory conditions that the landing page provides. For example, you decide to build own uber like app. How to make sure it would be interesting for your specific target audience? Start with a landing. If you want to learn more about the cost to build an app like uber, check out our guide.

To make sure, you get this point right, you can check the overview of the landing page builder.

• Landings boost up your conversions.

Take a look at your homepage. If you still don’t have it, just recall a few of your favorite homepages.

What do you see? I’ll tell you ⁠— many blocks with a different context. For sure, all these content blocks are required. In the complex, they build trust and brand awareness. But such design doesn’t push a customer to become a lead.

In contrast to a generic homepage design, a lead generation landing page is designed to let the user do a single & specific action. And this kind of strategy is much more effective.

Of course, many different factors influence customers’ behavior like industry, product or service, design. The truth is that landings are subjective. If you did it right, it would boost up conversions.

• Lead generation pages lower acquisition costs.

Let me clarify the meaning of this statement.

The mere fact that you make a landing page for your site does not mean anything. But the way you would use it defines the final acquisition costs.

I mean, things like A/B testing, a complex configuration of ad campaigns, retargeting, and other promotional tips define the unit economics of your startup.

To make acquisition cheaper, execute a long-term strategy. Your ad campaign expenditures will be the same but conversions will be higher.

The key to this is optimizing the design and content of your video so that it is clear and engaging. With royalty-free background videos from Videvo, you can create an interesting, engaging and professional video.

You can also use the same technique for your landing page: add a background video to it, make sure it fits with your brand and message and improve the user experience.

How Do Landing Pages Work?

The basic principle of landing page functionality is an exchange.

See, as a founder, your goal is to share as much value as possible using your product. Marketers face the same challenge. And the landing page is the most common channel to build such kind of communication.

It’s a win-win situation: you share valuable information, while visitors share personal data.

It comprises simple mechanics:

1. A site visitor is caught by a call-to-action: button, form, or pop-up form.
2. A site visitor does the target action: clicks the button or fills out a form.
3. A data of that particular visitor goes to your CRM system, even if it is a Google Spreadsheet.
4. You start warming the company to push lead through all marketing stages.

As a result of that flow, the nurtured lead becomes an MQL – Marketing Qualified Lead. At this point, it becomes available to track the lead status through all marketing stages and cooperate with the sales team to close deals.

Meanwhile, it’s worth knowing that a sales page is dedicated to converting visitors into customers, whereas a landing page is focused on generating leads. Building a high-converting landing page in a quick and simple manner is possible by using sales page templates.

4 Top Lead Generation Landing Page Examples

At this point, it’s clear that the lead gen landing page is an action-focused page of your website. These pages can be used at different stages of marketing & sales activities.

Hence, let’s take a look at good lead generation website examples and analyze their pros and cons and find out what you can use for your own startup.

HubSpot and Canva’s eBook Promo Landing Page

What company did right:

• A clear context and message in “How To” headline
• A good page structure – a content and an action area are separated
• Visualization of the final result in an image

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What they could test:

• Make a form shorter, because too many fields look boring
• Change background visual. It’s about zen, but less about graphics
• Try to make a clean design with much empty space around key zones

PayPal’s eBook Promotion Landing Page

What company did right:

• “Download the free eBook” is clear enough to understand the no-cost offer
• CTA is contrasting and catching the attention
• A good text structure that uses a bulleted list
• The image makes offer stronger, as “after reading” results show

What they could test:

• Try to customize the CTA, because “Download Now” is too generic
• Make text on image readable
• Cut off the PayPal logo, since by clicking the logo you open the homepage

Hired’s Registration Landing Page

What company did right:

• The texts are neat. The headline shows the solution to the primary problem, while subheading emphasizes the additional values
• The CTA is set against the background
• Bullet list makes the text easy to understand
• The form is short

What they could test:

• Cut off header and logo, as these elements make urge the user to leave the page without action

Shopify’s Registration Landing Page

What company did right:

• An attractive and catchy CTA button set against page colors
• An ideal single-CTA approach
• An excellent example of UX-focused writing on the button, as “Start today” emphasizes benefits

What they could test:

• Hide the logo to make sure visitors won’t go to the homepage before doing target action

9 Tips for Building High-Converting Landing Pages

At the heart of any landing page lies in-depth research on what to offer and how to make it attractive.

The approach may vary depending on the specifics of your industry, target audience, and product.

However, there are universal tips on how to make your landing page a real lead-magnet.

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So, what should a landing page include?

1. A catchy-as-hell headline. It isn’t an easy task. However, there is a clear and straightforward acceptance criterion. Create a headline that would converge your own attention quickly enough. It should be both clear and concise.
   1. The bad example of a headline is “SaaS Solution To Automatically Respond All Your Leads.”
   2. A catchy example of a headline is “Close up to x2 more deals with simple two-clicks integration.”

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1. A definite page structure (which is one more uneasy task). If you have ever heard about the blink test, you’ll get what I mean. The goal is to build the page that would highlight the most important info in a single eye blink. The user behavior patterns and landing page templates help you to deal with it successfully.
2. Bullet Points. The reason to put such kind of list in your page is as easy as pie. It signals our brains to read faster. This form of text engages visitors and make them interested in what you have to say. Also, the short text is more mobile-friendly than long texts.
3. Different conversion forms. When I say “different” here, I mean “according to the particular marketing stage of the lead.” Just put yourself in a visitor’s place. Would you like to fill out long forms with many inputs for some unknown content? I think you wouldn’t. But the further you push the lead, the more data to work with you get. Sometimes you have to be creative to trick a visitor into giving you more information. For instance, Classy Essay made a short order form on top of their landing page. However, as you start filling in the fields, the form will expand into three pages of blanks to check, choose or type in. So keep in mind that you should collect data wisely. More value = more trust = more personal data. Exactly this order.
4. Delete navigation. Lead generation page with navigation unfocus user and enable him or her to avoid target action. It is obvious. However, many companies forget that point.
5. Use high-quality visuals. There are no guarantees that people would spend their time reading whatever you wrote. Images are much easier to understand. Basically, images are more captivating. So invest your resources in designing and try to use relevant and well-made graphics. Let’s say your landing page promotes sustainability. You can use a background design resource like grass brushes for Procreate to create a consistent experience. Don’t have a big budget? Use an AI upscale image tool to increase image size without losing quality. By the way, AI’s impact is growing rapidly, and these AI statistics highlight the trends you need to know.
6. Social sharing. Yeah, I have already told that this element is not the right decision. It might be if you make social media to open in a new tab or window. Thus people will promote you without losing focus.
7. Social proof. Put customer testimonials and case studies with an interview of your real customers. There is no better signal to a visitor than honest feedback on the user experience and values of your product. However, you need to make sure that testimonials correlate with what you are going to promote. Legacy Healing does exactly this on their landing page. They add both quote-style and video testimonials.
8. Well-made user experience. It isn’t precise advice. What I mean here is that you need to ensure that each next step is described clearly and in a friendly tone. Do not use the standard “Download now.” Better say “Start converts” or “Get free eBook”.

Want to Design an Effective Landing Page?

Creating a high-converting landing page takes strategic testing and refinement. While there’s no universal formula, following our outlined tips will set you up for success.

Work with our design experts to create visually compelling, on-brand landing pages and graphics that convert visitors into subscriber leads.

Let’s talk about giving your startup’s landing page a makeover that takes leads and sales to the next level!

Wondering how long it will take to launch? Check out the average time to create a website for a realistic timeline.