Why Landing Pages Are Crucial for your Montessori Marketing

Every competent digital marketer "gets" that once you've done all that hard work to get visitors to your website, the next big step is to convert them into leads for your Montessori school.

And how do you do that? With landing pages!

Usually half of the clicks for schools are directed to their homepage, not a landing page. Also, many of the Montessori Schools that use landing pages have only one, even though they are driving traffic from multiple keyphrases.

Landing pages are the bread and butter of lead generation strategies, so why are they still so under-used?

The number one reason schools don't use landing pages is because their marketing department doesn't know how to set them up or they are too convoluted with detail.

Let’s stop the madness, right, marketers? Landing pages are much too paramount to the success of your lead generation efforts to go unnoticed, and here's why:

What Is a Landing Page?

First, let's start with a simple definition:

A landing page is a web page that allows you to capture people who are interested in Montessori’s information through a web form.

A good landing page will capture a particular audience, such as traffic from a PPC campaign, or visitors who click on a lead magnet from your webinar (we recommend stealthseminar.com. You can build landing pages that allow visitors to download your content, i.e. ebooks, whitepapers, and webinars), or redeem other offers such as free trials, demos, or case studies about your school.

Creating landing pages allows you to target your audience, offer them something of value, and convert a higher percentage of your visitors into leads, while also capturing information about who they are and what they are interested in.

How Landing Pages Work

To fully understand how landing pages convert, let's talk about a hypothetical scenario:

Let's say your location only specializes in K-6th grade, and you are offering a free tour.

Now let's say a mother was looking for a Montessori school for their son/daughter who is growing too old for pre-school and they believe Montessori is the best choice for their child.

She comes across your blog post entitled "Why Montessori is the clear winner over public schools" as a result of a Google search, and she clicks through to read it.

When she reaches the bottom of the article, she notices a call-to-action (CTA), asking her to schedule a free tour with your school representative. "That would be valuable," she thinks, clicking on the CTA and visiting the landing page where she can sign up for her free school tour.

The landing page provides some additional information and details about what she will get out of the tour, convincing her it's worth providing her contact information on the landing page's conversion form in order to take advantage of the offer.

She submits her information, and voila! She's now a viable lead for your school with whom you can easily follow up.

What's more, she wants you to follow up with her. How fantastic does that sound?

And this isn't the only pathway through which a visitor can travel to convert into a lead. In addition to search, visitors can find your site and its landing pages through a number of marketing channels including email, social media, PPC, direct traffic, or referral traffic. Also, they can find your landing pages through calls-to-action you place throughout your website, or directly as a result of you sharing the link to those landing pages in social marketing channels.

They key, as a marketer, is to create these landing pages in the first place, and make it easy for potential parents of students to find them in your various marketing efforts.

6 Reasons You Need Landing Pages

Still not convinced that landing pages can make your marketing and lead generation efforts more effective? Well, let me give you six more compelling reasons:

1) Easily Generate Leads:  If you could do one thing right now to drastically improve your lead generation efforts, it would be to use landing pages on your website.

As we mentioned earlier, too many schools send their email, social media, and search traffic to their homepages. This is the equivalent of throwing leads away. You could capture these leads at a much higher rate simply by sending them to targeted landing pages.

Landing pages provide a very easy way to generate leads for your school representatives that you can then easily segment, nurture, and distribute to your team.

2) Lead Magnets: Without being gated behind landing pages, your offers will do nothing to support your lead generation efforts. The idea is to require your website visitors to 'pay' you in contact information for something valuable like an offer, and your landing page is the collections tool.

3) Gather Demographics About Your Prospects: Every time a lead completes a form on your landing page, your front staff is collecting valuable information about your leads.

Your team can then use this information to understand what types of visitors or Avatars are converting, and your staff already has baseline information about a lead before they reach out.

4) Understand your audience: Landing pages not only enable you to generate new leads; they also allow you to track conversions of existing leads, which you can then use to identify which prospects are more engaged with your school.

This also enables you to collect better intelligence on your leads' behaviors and activities on your website, which your staff can use in the enrollment process.

5) Provide growth for other traffic sources: A successful marketing strategy relies on ongoing content creation.

Landing pages are a great addition to any marketer's content arsenal since they can be shared in social media, used as the focus of dedicated email blasts and in lead nurturing campaigns, be linked to in PPC ad copy, and get found in organic traffic.

6) Offer new lead magnets: Every time you create a landing page, you're creating another asset for your campaign.

By tracking and analyzing the metrics associated with your landing pages, you can collect a lot of insight into your marketing effectiveness, such as how your offers compare, how traffic and how leads are converting on your landing pages over time. This gives you information that you can optimize and improve your marketing campaign with.

Key Components of an Effective Landing Page

Okay, so now you understand what a landing page is, how they work for lead generation, and why you need them. Let's just quickly touch on a landing page's main components:

1. Headline: The headline is the first thing visitors will likely see when they 'land' on a landing page. A great landing page headline shows the info as clearly as possible. "What will traffic who convert on this page receive?"
2. Content: The text on a landing page should explain the value of the offer clearly, simply, and effectively. Bullet points should be to break up large amounts of text and keep it short.
3. Keywords: Like any other inbound marketing content, keywords should be used in the page title, headers, and text on a landing page to optimize it for search engines.
4. Social Sharing Buttons/Links: These links enable visitors to easily share a landing page with their connections on social networks.
5. No Navigation: A landing page should not have any navigation bars. This will help to maintain focus and decrease a landing page's bounce rate. It also increases the chance that users will stay on the page and convert.
6. Lead Form: The most critical piece of any landing page, the lead-capture form is where traffic submit their information in exchange for the offer, converting them into leads.
7. Image: Landing pages that include a relevant images will give traffic an idea of what they'll receive and make landing pages much more visually appealing.

Thank-You Pages and Email Responders

Landing pages should always be followed up by what's called a “thank-you page,” that confirms receipt of the lead's information and either provides the offer, or details the next steps for receiving the offer.

For example, if the landing page was offering an ebook, the thank-you page should explain that the eBook was sent to them via email. If the offer was for a free tour, it might show a message that someone would be in touch with them shortly to schedule the tour.

Thank-you pages can also trigger an automated email that sends next steps in an email. This is definitely helpful if the offer is a free tour, because it stops the “shopping process” and solidifies an appointment.

The more landing specific pages you have, the more opportunities you'll have to convert traffic into leads.