It’s time to change how you think about your landing page. Do you use it as a place to show off your company history and how proud you are to have made it to this point? What about stacking it with reviews of happy customers so that visitors know that you're a good company? Or maybe you load it with tons of photos of your fantastic facility?
All of those are great ideas and useful information to provide... but not on your landing page. If you shouldn’t have any of that, what should you have? Here are the basics that you should keep in mind when creating your landing page:
You may want to give your visitors a ton of information about you, your company, your facility, and your happy customers, but chances are they do not care. Sorry! What do they care about? As a storage facility, it will likely be one of three things:
If that's what they're most likely to want, make sure all of that is available on your landing page above the fold. Pretty simple! Keeping your visitor in mind, they are going to want to get the information they want as quickly as they can, and not be bombarded with other distracting information. In addition to that, overloading with information can make the page cluttered and confusing, so even if the knowledge that they want is there, they won't be able to find it.
Instead, simplify the design and the information on your landing page to just those three things. If they need additional information, they should be able to navigate easily around your site to find it! If they are interested in scrolling through photos, you can have a rental unit display page with a gallery (or even a walkthrough video). If they want to know about your history as a company, that’s easy to find on an About Us page. Finally, throw up a Reviews page so they can see how many customers you’ve happily serviced, and they can read through that if they’re interested.
If the information is hard to find, they may give up in frustration, or leave halfway through the process. On the other hand, consider the impression you’re making if you have a modern, customer-friendly site that’s well-designed and easy to use (and maybe even optimized for search engines).
You may have heard “call-to-action” (or CTA for short) thrown around as a buzzword, but all it means is a clear invitation for your visitor to do something; in other words, rent a unit, pay their bill, or get contact information. So why distract them from what they’re looking for?
It's not good enough to list some information about how they can rent a unit in person, or mail in a check to pay their bill. Your visitors, future customers, and current customers expect to have the option to do all of these things online.
For renting a unit, there should be a clear call-to-action where the viewer can click and begin the rental process immediately – they may want to see information about pricing, view photos of the space, or read through the rules, but ultimately, they need to have a place to click “Rent Now.” Imagine them scrolling through all that information and then being told they have to wait and come into the facility in person to rent? You could be losing out on someone who wants to get the rental process over with and is ready to click rent – and may go to another company who will let them.
Something your current customers likely want, and potential renters probably expect, is to be able to pay their bill online. Gone are the days of mailing in rent checks, and automated online payments are here to stay. If you don't offer this, potential renters may not want to deal with the hassle. Either way, online payments should be something you provide, and it should be easy to find on your landing page.
Finally, your contact information. The easiest call to action is to put your phone number up so that your visitors can click it and call, and put your address up so that they can open up whatever map application they use and drive straight to you if they want to.
The bottom line is to make all these things easy and simple for your visitors to find and do and leave the extra information for the other pages of your website.
You may have heard that you should make your desktop landing page “responsive,” which means that it detects what device a user is viewing the page and alters the design of the site so that it looks good no matter what. Sounds reasonable, right? Well, it was. In 2015.
So whether you have a responsive mobile landing page or haven't thought about your mobile landing page at all, it's time to invest in treating your mobile users, as well as you, treat your desktop ones.
Your landing page is a big deal, but you may need to reframe how you think about it. Instead of trying to give your visitors all the information you have at once, think about what they’re most likely to want from you. Take that information (and only that information) and make it easy for them to find, and make anything they may want to do (like rent a unit or pay their bill) easy to do.
