Using Landing Pages to Generate Leads for Manufacturing

Your website’s landing pages are the bread and butter of your digital marketing strategy. A great landing page intrigues, incentivizes, and eventually converts visitors into customers. When done well, your landing page can be one of the hardest working marketing tools you have, especially for manufacturers. Since manufacturing audiences are highly-specific and segmented, bringing the right people to the right content is essential to turn leads into sales.

What is a Landing Page?

In general, a landing page is built with the purpose of capturing a visitor’s contact information and turning them into a lead or, even better, converting them into a purchasing customer. Landing pages usually have one general focus and in the industrial/ manufacturing space they are most commonly used to speak to one core industry segment, like food processing or automotive. In the manufacturing industry, these landing pages are used to build an industry segmented contact list that continuously grows. It works by offering the visitor something of value in exchange for their basic contact information.

Some common examples of lead generation landing pages:

• Opt-in pages
• RFQ
• Content (eBook, white page, etc.)
• Contact pages

Creating a Great Landing Page for Your Manufacturing Company

Although each landing page will have a different look and feel, the typical landing page will consist of three main elements: A title, body content, and a call to action.

Title – At the top of the page you’ll still want to have an h1 title to let the user know they are on the right page. It’s generally a good idea to have the title be the name of your content.

Body Content – Usually short and sweet, the body content is where you explain exactly what they’ll be getting if they download the content, and how it will solve the problem that brought them there in the first place. Some landing pages even use bullet points to list main the main topics that the content piece will cover.

Call to Action – The CTA is the most valuable piece to you on your landing page. It should be clear to the user that they will receive the content after filling out your form. Keep the requirements to a minimum, such as name, email, company, and phone number. A lengthy form with too many requirements will deter visitors from completing the form. Remember, this is your lead generation tool, so only use fields that make sense for your business purposes. For example, some manufacturers define the strength of a lead by job title to ensure the prospect has the capability of making purchase decisions.

What is a Good Conversion Rate for a Landing Page?

Website tracking is one of the biggest benefits of having landing pages on your manufacturing site, but the truth is that conversion rates are subjective and industry benchmarks are a bad way to measure your performance. Average conversion rates are usually taken out of context, and without context you could be comparing apples to oranges.

To determine a good conversion rate for your business, you first need to decide what a conversion means to you. Is it a newsletter subscription, eBook download, or even a filled out contact form? Whichever you decide, the conversion should be a measurable action that you can distinguish on an individual level, like discerning if one person filled out the same form twice.

Next, establish the value of each conversion. A RFQ will be far more valuable to you than a newsletter subscription, as an example. What percentage of prospects become customers at that stage in the funnel, and what is that average lifetime customer value?

By tracking these numbers, you have the ability to understand the number of visitors that navigate to your landing page, the percentage of those visitors that convert, and ultimately the effectiveness of your campaign. With this data, you can adjust your campaign accordingly.

How Can I Improve My Landing Page Performance?

Defining your conversion goals is half the battle. A great landing page that isn’t converting is a call for optimizations. Revisit your page and look at it from a visitor’s perspective. Is it user-friendly? Is the CTA button clear and properly placed on the page? Are you requiring too many fields in your form? Is the content valuable? All of these can have an impact on your conversion rate, so try some A/B testing to mitigate risk in your decision and use it to figure out what works best for your B2B landing page.

Why Use a Landing Page for Manufacturing?

By simplifying the process, landing pages are a very effective way for manufacturers to convert visitors into leads. Rather than just routing a user to your homepage where you run the risk of the user navigating away, they are directed to a landing page with content that is relevant to them. For example if a purchaser at an OEM is looking for CNC machining services, you would want them to be taken directly to a page that talked about CNC machining within the OEM space. This will allow you to get your value-add for that industry across while promoting your services, giving you a better chance of that visitor converting. This is especially useful when it comes to targeting keywords in a pay-per-click ad. Different keyword campaigns allow for different landing pages with content and offers specific to those keywords. Users are more likely to fill out a form and convert when they are presented with a highly relevant offer.

If you are running any kind of B2B marketing campaigns but are only directing visitors to the homepage or contact page of your manufacturing website, you are wasting ad dollars and missing out on leads – and qualified ones at that. A simple industry or service landing page that provides your visitors with a valuable content offer will incentivize them to convert into a lead, and allow you to better calculate your marketing ROI.

Are you looking to incorporate landing pages in your B2B digital marketing strategy? Let’s talk. We know our way around manufacturing landing pages, and have firsthand experience using them to generate leads for our manufacturing clients.