How To Launch Your Startup Landing Page
How to Launch Your
Startup Landing Page
“For many businesses, a website is the first way that your clientele will look at you. The quality of your site is often a measure of the quality of your business."
- Rand Fishkin, founder of Moz
1. Header - Sell Them Now, or Never
Your site header is the first section of your website, that people will see as soon as they land. Our attention spans online are brutally short, and the quality of your header design determines whether your site visitors will stay to learn more, or leave immediately.
A good header will need to include these three to five elements:
- Headline - The instant pitch. Short, crystal clear, and captivating.
- Custom Logo - If you don't have one yet, here are some free resources to design your business logo.
- Background photo/video - Use your own, rather than a free stock resource, to reflect your startup's uniqueness.
- Value proposition - The quick pitch. Either in or just after the header.
- CTA (maybe*) - You might choose to include a call-to-action here.
That's all - what's important is to get each element, as well as the overall balance, right. Make sure everything is sharp. No scrappy images or rambling headlines. Remove clutter - clutter is confusion, and confused visitors aren't staying or signing up for anything. Either focus people's attention on a CTA, or have your header be simple and attractive enough to make them scroll down to discover more.
Writing A Good Headline
As Brian Clark of Copyblogger made it known: “8 out of 10 people will read headline copy, but only 2 out of 10 will read the rest.”
Daunting statistic - but even more reason why your headline needs to deliver high impact in the tiny window you have to snag your site visitors' initial attention. The best landing page headlines are short and easy phrases - direct, simple, memorable. Avoid jargon and long words altogether.
Locations. Analysis. Simplified.
In three words, Elenytics indicates what problem they are aimed at ("locations"), what solution they offer ("analysis"), and what value they ultimately deliver ("simplified").
Focus on quality users.
Datable's headline pops off the page instantly. It's a simply worded and crystal clear message, written in active voice, and leading into the rest of the value proposition.
Good Landing Page Headers
Take a look at how these three different examples each work well.
Virtual Reality
No value proposition, no CTA, hardly even a headline - here's a header that succeeds purely on design. Text is bolded and centered, a custom image is used, and the mix of black, red and white feels intense and intriguing. Even if you have no idea what Fire Panda is - which you probably don't - you would scroll down to see more, based purely on the visceral appeal.
Your education. Funded.
With a playful custom logo and blurred background that creates a cheery feel, Scholarflip cuts right to the big idea - "We're changing the way students pay for college". There's no CTA here, but a powerful headline like that leads you right on to the rest of their value proposition below.
Where Muslims match and meet.
The header for Salaam Swipe is all about about emphasizing the CTA. In order to make it work, a simple headline is used - read it once, and you know whether you're in or out - then you have the value proposition, and the signup button in contrasting green.
2. Churn Out CONTENT
Your startup landing page needs more than just a great header – it needs great content. From pre-launch until happily ever after, producing great content lets you converse with your audiences, develop branding and thought leadership in your field, and also strengthen your search engine visibility to attract new customers and partners.
A lot of content can be created for free, using your existing assets and knowledge. Your content strategy should include some of the following:
- Blog
- Media gallery
- Social feed
- Launch video or product demo
- Background info - team, story, mission
- 'Premium' content - guides, reports, tutorials etc.
Even if you have yet to launch, you need to prove and indicate that great things are coming - otherwise, why would people bother to follow and be part of your story? Aim to publish unique and valuable content regularly, and feed it to your subscribers through email notification.
Content Types
Let's think about content in three main types - static, interactive, and ongoing - and then look at examples.
Static Content
Static content - such as header sections about your story, team, and mission - is timeless and reliable. It also helps balance out busier content like rich media. Too many moving parts will overwhelm visitors, and slow page loading speed too.
Interactive Content
Curated photo and video galleries will always be one of the best ways to not only visually showcase your startup, but also forge an emotional connection with your site visitors. Bonus points for a launch or demo video!
Ongoing Content
'Ongoing' content sections - like a blog or social feed - are ones you update regularly. These are powerful ways to keep your audiences in the loop. Feed them fresh, valuable updates that will retain their interest and loyalty.
Meet the Team
Introducing your team and cofounders is another great choice for static content. It also functions as a form of social proof.
Be sure to pair each member's description with a pleasant, professional profile photo. Regardless of your business or branding, the tone should be cheery and expressive. Nobody wants to see a team of motionless stormtroopers.
Mengting Gao
Co-Founder
Mengting is the mind behind Kitchen Stories. She is responsible for product development and marketing, ensuring that Kitchen Stories brings the fun back to cooking.
Christian Lohse
Double-starred Chef
"Berlin’s Master Chef 2009" serves his guests modern French cuisine with his signature take at Fischers Fritz. For the seventh time in a row he has been awarded two Michelin stars.
Verena Hubertz
Co-Founder
Verena is the backbone of the team, always ensuring that things run smoothly. She looks after our partnerships, manages the finances, and coordinates all PR activities.
Add a Media Gallery
Media galleries let us tell powerful visual stories of our lives and work, because photos and videos transcend barriers. Whatever your startup is trying to do, adding a gallery is universally one of the best ways to engage your site visitors deeply and instantly.
Anything to do with your business or product is fair game - it's up to you how to curate and share your media assets with your audiences. If you're pre-launch, build some hype and suspense with product previews, mockups, and teaser trailers.
Offer 'Premium' Content
'Premium', 'advanced', or 'gated' content is an unofficial category including high-value content that takes more time and expertise to produce. You could justifiably sell premium content - but as a startup making a name for yourself, you're probably better off giving it away or at most, using it to incentivize signups.
Offering premium content is a great way to express your initiative, authority, and commitment to helping your audiences beyond your pure product offering. Premium content gives that extra "wow" factor that potential customers and collaborators are always looking out for.
Written Guides
E-books, whitepapers, how-to's, case studies and so on - hand-crafted educational resources related to your business can be marketed to help draw in your target audiences.
Tutorial Videos
Kitchen Stories provides crisp and active video guides walking you through various recipes. A natural and effective content choice that their customers undoubtedly love.
Podcasts & Webinars
Packpoint lets you listen to their podcast - "Travel Smart" - for free. That's a great free offer, and audio is a smart choice of channel given their travel-inclined target audience.
Write a Blog
"We had a blog in place, even before product development. By talking about the problems we aimed to solve, we began drumming up interest with so much advance notice, we had more than 14,000 interested buyers when the product came to market." - Phil Fernandez, founder of Marketo
We're not saying you need to have 14,000 readers pre-launch. But the principle holds here - blogging is one of the best ways to build lasting, loyal audiences, even if your actual product or service is not live yet. Aim at a regular posting schedule, and encourage feedback and interaction. Engage your audience in a direct and meaningful way, addressing their hopes and needs. Grow and lead your readership.
Here are some free tools, design tips, and ways to drive traffic. Don't forget to pair an email list with your blog. And whenever you publish a new post, share it across all your social platforms.
Blog Post Ideas
Expertise and experience sharing
Thoughts on industry movements
Personal and team reflections
Tips, tutorials, how-to lists
Stories and 'behind the scenes'
Guest posts and interviews
3. Present Social Proof
When everyone suddenly looks left, do you do the same?
If no one is wearing a certain color, do you avoid it too?
That’s “social proof” in action - the influence created when someone finds out others are doing something.
One of the greater goals of your landing page is to establish credibility to your startup name. And one of the best ways to do this, is to offer up “social proof”. Social proof statements can be numerical (such as number of customers or downloads), or qualitative (like recommendations). Some of the most common and effective types include -
- Testimonials
- Press kit
- Affiliated parties' logos & links
Social proof can be leveraged to great benefit in all aspects of your branding and marketing. If you’re not yet at the stage where you have much social proof for your startup, it’s probably worth beginning efforts to gather some. In the meantime, even pictures of happy users or team members will do.
Display Testimonials
Testimonials connect with people emotionally. We can all relate to simple words and feelings from other people, better than almost anything else.
Display your testimonials in a paragraph, slider, or listing as shown in the three examples below. Keep them short and sweet!
Kitchen Stories
In their "Opinions" section, Kitchen Stories features a glowing paragraph each from four reputable figures.
Strikingly
Strikingly present a few user recommendations in a slider, along with a quote and call-to-action.
Embr Labs
Embr Labs presents their Wristify testimonials in a short and fun video collage.
Show Off Your Affiliations
If you have partners, clients, and sponsors that you're proud of working with - or if your startup has been featured in any publications, blogs, or other media channels - then by all means, show that off on your landing page.
Like the "resume" section of a personal website, this kind of social proof brings an air of trust and familiarity that is difficult to earn in any other way.
Press Feature Listing
Embr Labs plainly lists where and how they've been featured, across various news publications and other channels.
Press Feature Links
In their header, Packpoint slips in direct links to all the renowned publications they've been featured in, establishing context and credibility right off the bat.
Partnerships
Compiling and showing off icons of your business partners and sponsors, as Kitchen Stories does, conveys instant legitimacy.
4. CTAs -
Let People Take Action!
You’ve got a sharp header, quality content, and some glowing social proof. Now for the final ingredient of your landing page - the CTA (call-to-action). CTAs are what earn you direct conversions from your site visitors, whether it be signups, pre-orders, donations or something else. They are a key element of your landing pages that cannot be overlooked.
CTAs should have simple phrases, be free of surrounding clutter, and be highlighted in color contrast with the rest of the page. Depending on how early and how effectively you've "sold" your site visitors, you can place your CTA in your header, further down your page, or have it repeated two or three times. Whatever you do, make it dead easy and visually compelling for site visitors to take your desired action.
Here are some likely candidates for your landing page CTAs -
- Email signup form
- Social media buttons
- Contact and feedback form
- Donation link
Let's examine these examples in more detail.
Add Email and Social Buttons
Place big, juicy buttons to let people contact you via email, social media and other platforms like LinkedIn or Youtube. Make sure to embed links into the icons, so visitors can reach you in one click.
Adding a social feed helps as a form of contact CTA, but you'll still want social buttons at the bottom of your site because they're more focused and obvious, leading your site visitors to clearer actions.
Email
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram
LinkedIn
5. Promotion - All Out Launch!
Well done making it so far - by this point your landing page should be more or less completed, and it's almost time to share it with the world.
Before we go further, you'll first need to invest in a custom domain, and then perform a few SEO (search engine optimization) tweaks. We'll take you through a final checklist too, to make sure you have all the most important elements of your site in order.
When everything is ready you'll share your site across social media, and also reach out for some promotion and PR to give you extra exposure, on your way to launch day and beyond.
SEO Quick Fixes
Search engine optimization makes your site more highly ranked and visible on Google, Bing, Yahoo and so on. This is hugely important if you are trying to gain authority in your niche, build a focused content strategy around certain keywords, and also be found by the seas of digital writers, investors, and potential customers who live online, looking for emerging startups and businesses like yours.
Take a look at Quicksprout's chapter or Moz's beginner guide to learn more about SEO. Otherwise, here are some easy but effective SEO tweaks -
Submit your site to Google
Letting Google index your site is quick and easy. Just type in your domain URL, and the search keywords you want to your landing page to be associated with.
Page description and meta tags
Fill in as much info as you can for your page description and meta tags. Your description should be several sentences long, with several meta tags.
Put keywords in headings
Search engines give additional weight to headings, so you should add descriptive keywords into them. For instance, “About Johnny’s Bakery” is better than “About” .
Add image descriptions
Since search engines don’t understand images, image descriptions help them index your images and by extension your site. Also known as adding HTML “alt” tags.
Social & Email Sharing
Now that your landing page is ready for the world, it's time to promote it! Start by shouting out on social media, and sending an email out to everyone in your and your team's contact lists.
Shout out on social media!
Social media has become so prevalent and powerful that every startup should be leveraging it to reach audiences. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Youtube, Instagram, and Pinterest are some of the best choices. Go after the two or three where your main audiences are.
When your landing page is live, shout out across your platforms, using hashtags, mentions, and brief and catchy copy to help increase reach. Encourage people to follow your page, and sign up to your early access list.
Send out an email -
Send an email out to your contacts, providing the link to your landing page and inviting them to check it out and then take some action (email signup, product feedback and so on). Make the message exciting and sincere - your earliest fans will be some of your most important ones all the way.
Outreach & Exposure
There are countless ways to go about this, so you need to prioritize which few channels would work best given your startup and audience. If you're setting up a physical business, focus on local press and word of mouth. If you're testing a tech product, go after ProductHunt, BetaList, and other relevant news & listing sites. Choose the promotion strategies that will let you most effectively find and engage with your best potential users.
You'll need to find a balance between reach and relevance. Since you (should) already know who your target audience is, it's best to start with them - stay smaller and highly targeted, and build some success in a niche market before expanding your reach and taking over the world.
Connect with influencers
Use a tool like Buzzsumo to find influential figures, journalists, and bloggers in your niche. They're always on the lookout for promising stories, so pitch them and see if they're interested in sharing or writing about your startup.
Submit your page to directories
Getting listed in business directories like Yahoo Directory, Google's Local Business Center, and Insiderpages will earn you backlinks to boost your search ranking, and help raise your local visibility.
Engage with niche communities
Your best potential users might not all be on Facebook. Find them on boards and forums, through local meetups, and other less obvious places. Usually, hitting just one niche ends up kickstarting your startup growth.
