The early days of your startup will set the stage for your brand authority and awareness. It’s time to make your first impressions, and they must count.

But, don’t sweat it! We’ll help you tackle one piece of the branding puzzle with advice on building a startup landing page. These pages can be a key part of your online brand and digital strategy if you build them with meaning.

Let’s cover the main goals of a startup landing page and must-have elements to include.

What Should Your Startup Landing Page Accomplish?

Before you create your landing page, you need to set clear goals for it. It’ll become much easier to optimize your page for conversions when you know what those conversions are and why you need ‘em.

As a new business, you’ll need to include objectives related to building customer trust. Answer these customer questions on your landing page to meet common startup challenges:

• What is this company and what do they do? Your visitors must understand what your brand does before they can get interested in it.
• Why should I trust this business with my money? Since you’re new to the game, you’ll have to build credibility ASAP.
• Will I get what this company says they’ll give me? Quality and consistency are key to bringing customers through to conversion.

According to the 2021 Conversion Benchmark Report, the median conversion rates for landing pages range from 2.4% to 9.8%, depending on your industry. You’ll have to do whatever you can to establish trust to achieve those rates.

What Should You Include on Your Landing Pages?

Just about every startup landing page should include the five elements of a winning landing page for the best chance of success:

1. Clearly articulated benefits (vs. just features)

When you describe your product or service, you wanna push benefits over features wherever you can. Features describe what your offering does, while benefits convince your visitors why they should buy it.

An easy way to keep your benefits consistent is to start with a value proposition. Value propositions are messages that express your primary value. Follow the Unbounce guide to building one, then branch it off into more specific benefits.

Once you have a solid list of benefits, try going a step further by tailoring those benefits to your audiences. For example, the software as a service (SaaS) startup Procurify made hyper-personalized landing pages customized for each lead.

You don’t have to go as buck-wild as Procurify did, but you get the point. If you peek at the “Spend Controls” section of the page, you’ll see that the landing page presents features as benefits first.

3. Top-notch imagery

Images keep landing pages visually interesting and encourage visitors to stick around. For the most professional results, use high-quality images. Shoot for high resolutions (with good loading times) and clear imagery.

A landing page builder like Unbounce will help with the process by supplying high-quality images directly in the builder. Unbounce’s Unsplash integration, for example, gives you access to over 850,000 professional-looking images you can add to your page.

Unbounce also has eye-catching templates that layout your images for you. All you do is choose your media and admire the results.

Check out the Multor template’s eye-catching imagery. It showcases a hero image (part two of a landing page’s anatomy) that puts you in a user’s shoes. The benefits list’s icons add a hint of visual appeal to each item.

4. Social proof/reviews

Today’s customers base their purchasing decisions on what other customers have to say. They need social proof—the influence created by “everybody doing it”— to take your brand seriously. Social proof comes in many forms, including brand associations, reviews, and media features.

As a startup, your best bet is probably reviews or testimonials, unless you’ve lucked out and already worked with well-known clients. Try collecting reviews with a platform like Google Reviews or reach out to happy customers for quotes.

Here’s an example of this kind of social proof from Applause, as highlighted by IMPACT:

In this case, Applause shared tweets from real users as a form of testimonial. Leave no stone unturned when looking for social proof from your budding customer base.

5. Superb CTAs

Now, for the grand finale: your call to action (CTA). The CTA is what closes the sale (or gets the signup, or collects a contact, or whatever else). Keep it short, keep it sweet, and make it count.

Look at this CTA from Waldo for inspiration:

Peep that headline: “Get ready to see happiness.” It’s so good that it made our roundup of irresistible CTAs because the headline sets up a positive tone for the CTA “start your free trial.”

Not sure what kind of CTA will knock your visitors’ socks off? Personalized calls to action perform 202% better than generic ones. Try using Smart Traffic to direct customers to the CTAs that will convert them the most.

Two Tricks for an Effective Startup Landing Page

Now that you have all the necessary parts on your landing page, keep these two tricks in mind to stick the landing (see what we did there?).

Trick #1: Establish clear and consistent branding

As a startup, you don’t have the advantage of being known the way that “household names” are. You have to establish a solid brand with your landing page visitors so they’ll remember you. Your branding’s gotta stay consistent throughout your copy and visuals.

Take a peek at this Typeform landing page’s visual branding:

Typeform paired bold, abstract patterns with striking user headshots in this testimonial-based landing page. Each pattern/photo combo is different, but they all have the same visual style and a consistent layout. They sell Typeform as a bold and exciting alternative to other form software.

Keep your design elements consistent and follow a visual hierarchy. Once you have your visuals nailed down, use words and tone that match those visuals and your brand goals. It’s easier said than done, but you’ll get better at it as you practice.

Trick #2: Talk to the right audience

Speaking of copy, your landing page should have messaging that feels relevant to your audience.

In an exaggerated example, seniors won’t respond well to “I can haz cheezburger” speak. (Unfortunately, most folks don’t nowadays.) They respond better to simple and elegant language.

As you build your brand and marketing assets, you should research your audience and customize your marketing to their preferences. Try techniques like demographic segmentation and psychographic segmentation that give you an overview of your typical customer.

Once you understand the groups that dig your product, think about the language that will fit their personalities and purchase goals. If you have more than one audience segment, give Smart Traffic a spin to direct customers to the copy that they’ll like best.

In the future, you’ll also be able to use AI technology to automatically generate copy that fits the audience you specify. Then, you can tweak it as needed to resonate with them even further.

Set Up Your Startup for Landing Page Success

When you optimize your landing pages to highlight your startup at its best, you’ll give yourself and your new business a better shot at success. As a busy startup founder, you need all the tools you can get to lighten the load.

Unbounce can help you simplify your landing page optimization and succeed in the digital landscape.

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