HubSpot

While Google Analytics classifies a landing page as the first page a user lands on when entering your website, a true landing page is a standalone online destination designed specifically for conversion. In HubSpot, landing pages and website pages are both found in the Marketing Hub under the “Marketing” dropdown menu, but are housed separately to reinforce their distinct differences.

HubSpot Landing Page vs. Website Page: What’s the Difference?

A HubSpot landing page is meant to be customized for a specific campaign or offer: its purpose is to guide users towards a single call to action. A HubSpot website page is one of the core building blocks of a site. Typically pages such as your homepage, about us, contact us, and product/service pages belong in this category.

Creating a page exclusively to promote a single call to action may seem extreme, but there’s plenty of psychology (and data) to support the effectiveness of a landing page approach. 

Regardless of whether a user arrives on a landing page through organic search or after clicking on a call-to-action (CTA) link in an email, paid ad, or organic social media post, the goal of a landing page remains the same: to entice a web visitor to take a conversion action. 

HubSpot landing page examples

The most popular types of HubSpot landing pages showcase offers for:

• eBooks, guides, and whitepapers
• Email newsletter subscription
• Online course enrollment
• Event registration
• Free trial
• Community membership
• App download

Depending on the landing page’s dedicated offer, a conversion could be the collection of a user’s contact information or the sale of a product/service.

HubSpot Landing Page Best Practices

1. Apply these HubSpot landing page design tips

Landing pages have been tested and perfected by marketers for decades. Using proven Hubspot landing page design tips as a foundation for your company’s landing pages can ensure optimal results: 

• Provide a benefits-focused headline: Positioned just under blog articles for earning the highest on-page bounce rate, 70 to 90% of landing page visitors will bounce from your page. Create landing page headlines that are clear, concise, and focused on your offer’s primary benefit to help decrease your bounce rate and boost conversions. Regardless of how someone arrives to your landing page, take the time to ensure the headline is consistent with the offer they’re expecting to receive.
• Include a visualization of the offer: Imagery should also be part of your landing page strategy. Strive to find an image or create graphics or illustrations that will resonate with your target audience and convey the offer visually. Design is an area where A/B testing can help you hone in on the most effective visuals for your offer while also gaining deeper insight into audience preferences (more about this later).
• Don’t forget the form: The use of a user-friendly form to capture user data cannot be overstated. Forms are often the single most important element on a landing page. Don’t be shy about adding a form and asking for basic contact information from page visitors. When a user visits a landing page, the expectation to share contact or payment information already exists in their mind. Make it easy for them by including the form above the fold of your landing page. HubSpot’s landing page builder enables special form functionalities, including a form scroll feature that allows the form to move down the page as the user navigates down the page.
• Ensure the copy is clear and concise: The text on your landing page should be easy to read and get to a specific point quickly. As Neil Patel advises, every single sentence and word on your landing page should serve a purpose, and that purpose should be to support your CTA. If it doesn’t do that, cut it.
• Keep it simple: The highest-converting landing pages focus on one offer and one action. Including more than one offer on a landing page can decrease conversion rates by as much as 266%. When a user ends up on a landing page, it should be immediately and abundantly clear what action they should take next. Presenting multiple conflicting offers creates unnecessary complication and can negatively impact conversions. 

Have more than one offer to promote? Great news. According to HubSpot’s Marketing Benchmarks from 7,000 Businesses report, companies that increased the number of landing pages they publish from 10 to 15 saw a 55% increase in leads. The more landing pages a company has, the more leads it stands to acquire (providing those landing pages are created and maintained according to best practices)!

2. Be thoughtful about color

Creating a consistent experience across your online and offline marketing elements conveys a professional appeal to your brand. One way to create this consistency is by using the colors associated with your logo. In addition, always make sure that your choice of background and text color are contrasted well so visitors can easily read the copy (e.g., dark text on a light background or vice versa). 

On a similar note, double check that your font choice isn’t overly fancy or difficult to read at a quick glance. It doesn’t matter how amazing your offer is if people cannot see it or read it clearly.

Keeping visitors' attention is not easy. Adding unnecessary obstacles to their viewing experience is only going to negatively impact your landing page’s performance. 

3. Choose images wisely

The days of text-only landing pages are long gone. Pages with creative elements such as images, infographics, and videos consistently convert at a higher rate. But how do you know which images are the best to use on your landing page? One way is to evaluate whether your image contributes to the story you’re trying to tell. 

Generic stock images are easy to spot and often fail to contribute a meaningful marketing message. Try to find ways to showcase your product or service in action. Highlight how happy or excited people are when they use it. Images are far more effective than words at conveying feelings in an instant. The right images add another persuasive layer to a landing page’s overall message.

4. Master the art of the CTA

The CTA on your landing page should provide users with exact instructions on what to do next. Whether it’s to view a piece of content further down the funnel or fill out a form to schedule a demo — the CTA is the most critical element to any landing page.

As the CTA is the next step you want your visitors to take, it should be short and sweet. If visitors haven’t been convinced by the time they reach the end of your landing page copy, then your marketing has already failed. But if it was successful, they should be ready to make a move. 

Sounds simple, right? Sort of. 

Here are a few things to keep in mind to get the most out of your landing page calls to action:

• Stay laser focused: At the most basic level, landing pages live separately from a website’s main navigation, and are void of common elements that might distract a user from taking the next intended action. Remove website menus, breadcrumbs, other links from your landing pages, and anything that could distract from the singular action you want your visitors to take.
• Drive action: Introduce urgency so that the positive momentum of the landing page is not wasted.
• Showcase benefits: Phrase your CTA in a positive way that reaffirms the core benefit of the offer.
  
  

5. Don’t neglect the mobile experience

According to Statista’s 2022 Global Mobile Traffic survey, 58.99% of web traffic comes from mobile devices. If the mobile experience doesn’t match the quality of the desktop, visitors will notice. With a responsive HubSpot landing page, visitors will have the same high-quality experience no matter what device they are using. That means more conversion opportunities and new leads in the pipeline.

6. Track performance

Tracking landing page metrics is key to understanding current performance. Doing so also helps inform any changes that can be made to optimize performance. Here are some of the most common landing page metrics:

• Page visits: Traffic is the lifeblood of any offer. If you’re not getting the sessions or views you’d like, try adjusting your paid and/or organic strategies to bolster it.
• Traffic sources: Not all traffic is created equal. Tracking sources allows you to see what traffic channels are bringing in the most qualified leads. With that information, you can put more time and budget into the channels you already know are working.
• Submission rate: Also referred to as conversion rate, this is the percent of visitors who complete your form. If your pageview-to-submission rate is low, you can tweak the copy on the landing page to try to improve it.
• Bounce rate: The percent of visitors who leave your landing page without performing an action (i.e. click a link, fill out a form, etc.). If the bounce rate is high, there may be a disconnect in your message. A high bounce rate may  also be caused by issues with page speed, pop-ups, plug-ins, and usability.
• Form abandonment: Measures how many visitors started to fill out the form but did not complete it. This can be caused by the form having too many fields, unclear instructions, or friction in the submission process.

7. Optimize through A/B testing 

It’s no secret that knowing your audience is key. There’s a reason why a recent Cintell study found that companies with documented buyer personas exceed revenue and lead generation goals by 71%: they’ve invested the time and resources to better understand who their customers are.

While personas detail who a person is and what type of buyer they are, personas can’t predict actual user behavior. Ultimately, audiences are unique and how they might respond to marketing efforts is not 100% predictable: that’s where A/B testing comes in. 

HubSpot’s landing page builder can help businesses understand what resonates with audiences through robust A/B testing capabilities. By tracking user behavior on a landing page, you can gauge which areas are causing the greatest impact on performance. Creating alternative versions to split your traffic will provide important insights. You can uncover what messages are most effective at producing meaningful conversions, and use that information to improve future marketing.

Like a science experiment, changing too many variables at once can cause confusion and unreliable results. Rather than change both at the same time, test changes in copy in one instance, and design in the next.

After a trial period, the version that performs better becomes the winner. This exercise can be performed in various ways until the desired conversion rate is achieved. 

Average landing page conversion rates

A recent study by Unbounce reports the average landing page conversion rate, across all industries, is 4.02%, with top landing pages converting at 24.7%. The highest performing pages in the conversion-rate department deploy a “squeeze” technique, which prioritizes obtaining the user’s email address. 

Looking for ways to increase conversion rates on your landing pages? Along with applying the HubSpot landing page best practices outlined above, the following statistics can help guide your efforts:

• Consider videos: Landing pages with videos convert up to 86% higher
• Test, test, test: Strategic targeting and testing can boost conversions more than 300%
• Keep things moving fast: As little as a one second delay in page loading time can reduce conversions by 7%.
• Know what to offer: 55% of top landing page submissions on the HubSpot blog came from eBook offers

Building a Landing Page in HubSpot in 5 Easy Steps

Relying on these best practices can help you put your best foot forward when building a landing page for conversion. These next steps detail the step-by-step process of building a new landing page using a template in HubSpot:

1. Open the HubSpot landing pages editor

Log into Marketing Hub, and select “Marketing” from the top navigation to expand the submenu. Click on “Landing Pages” within the Marketing submenu to open the editor.

2. Click on the “Create” button

After clicking on the orange “Create” button, choose “Landing Pages” from the submenu. This will open a popup window labeled “Create a page”.

In the “Create a page” popup window, you will be prompted to provide a “Page name”. Be sure to designate a “Page name” that makes your new landing page easy to find and distinguishable from your other landing pages (this is for internal purposes only and will not be seen publicly).

 If you have more than one domain connected to your HubSpot account, you will need to select the “Website” where your landing page will publish.

Once you are satisfied with your “Page name” and “Website” designation, click on the orange “Create page” button located within the popup window.

3. Choose your template

Depending on your HubSpot account level, you will have different prepackaged templates available for use. If you have the capability to design and build your own, this is also an option in HubSpot.

Whatever path you choose (i.e., prepackaged or custom), select the template that best aligns with the goal of your landing page offer.

4. Use the drag-and-drop and sidebar editors to make tweaks

HubSpot landing page templates contain blocks of content called modules. You can arrange these modules into horizontal rows or vertical columns, group rows and columns into sections of elements, and drag and drop these elements to rearrange the layout of the page. 

At this point, you may choose to:

• Select the Theme tab in the sidebar editor to edit the default styles for your template. You also might opt to edit the background color or image for a specific row, column, or section of your landing page.
• Click the mobile phone icon in the sidebar editor to adjust the appearance of the landing page on mobile devices.
• Utilize the drag-and-drop editor functionality to customize the content of your landing page.

5. Finalize your settings and publish

Once you are happy with the look, feel, and content of your landing page, click “Settings” at the top and middle of the screen. 

The “Settings” tab is where you implement the meta data for Google Search indexing. “Page title” is where you input the meta title for your HubSpot landing page, the “Meta description” field is where you enter the page’s description (be sure to include target keywords), and the “Content slug” field is where you edit the characters in the landing page URL that follow the forward slash (/) of your chosen domain.

When you have your “Settings” tab configured properly, click the orange “Publish” button located in the top right corner of the editor to push your landing page live.

Conclusion: Landing pages are critical components of your website

Thankfully, you don’t have to start from scratch to discover what works and what won’t work for HubSpot landing pages. By using the best practices discussed above, you’ll have a conversion-optimized page ready to help you reach your marketing goals.