Creating a Virtual Summit Landing Page

Landing page is one of the most important parts of your summit. It’s your first interaction people will have with your online summit. This is where your prospects can sign up for the summit, learn more about it, see who’s speaking, and ultimately decide if they’re interested in it or not. If you’re driving traffic to this page, you want to ensure that it converts at the highest possible rate. And for that, you have to make sure this page is the best it can be. Some of the critical elements of this page are:

1. Headline – This should be above the fold (that’s the top part of the page)and should have a strong focus on the benefits of attending the online conference. It needs to be concise, it needs to stand out, and tell people what they will get by attending.
2. Feature Image – It should have a sharp image that invokes the emotions of familiarity, and trust. We use an image featuring headshots of the most well-known speakers. You want a cold website visitor to recognize the speakers immediately and keep reading. Next to this hero image, you can add a short paragraph reiterating what the summit is about and the benefits of attending. The goal of this text is to give more credibility to the event.
3. Call to Action (CTA) – CTA should be above the fold, you want a clear call to action (CTA) that lets visitors sign up for the summit online. This should be connected to your email autoresponder so that they can receive a sequence of automated messages. This CTA must be above the fold, and easily visible.
4. The Speakers List – Online conference would ideally be associated with the top people in your industry, so it makes sense to get as much mileage out of this as possible. People will attend the virtual summit based on who’s speaking. Creating an extensive section on your virtual summit landing page that lists each speaker, and why they’re so amazing that people should listen to them should achieve this for you.
5. Brand Recognition – Create a ‘Featured In’ block just below the call to action. The purpose of this is to create brand familiarity and build trust. This is a section where you showcase as many well-known brand logos as possible. You should include at least 5 logos here. The more you have, the more credible, and larger the online summit will appear.
6. Social Proof & Testimonials – You should add some social proof & testimonials; these should be included next to the CTA. When choosing which testimonials to place here, find the ones that address various pain points, and how your offering has solved them. Testimonials can act as a replacement for an online referral and can have a significant effect on the sign-up rates.
7. Detailed Features and Benefits List – You’ve worked hard to get people to your virtual summit landing page, and some of them may be hesitant to hand over their email address. It’s easy to list topics and features but, from our testing, we’ve found that listing features in the form of benefits convert better. They’re busy people and want to know precisely what’s in it for them. To help these people over the line, create a list of 20 benefits of attending your summit, and list them. Go into as much detail as you can.
8. Content Demo – Create a content demo. You want to literally ‘show’ people what they get access to when they sign up. You want people to ‘see’ the product and have a visual representation of the content available. There are a few ways of achieving this. You can create a quick 60-second video demo from an interview that they can play, or you can create a mockup image using Photoshop.
9. A Final Call to Action – If someone has read all the way to the bottom of the page, they’re ready to decide to sign up or not. Make it as easy as possible for them by including a call to action at the end of the page

This article was originally written by Liam Austin and published on entrepreneursHQ.