Best Practices for Designing Marketo Landing Pages

The art of creating the perfect landing page is, in effect, the science of creating high-converting engaging campaigns.

Landing pages play a pivotal role in any digital marketing campaign. They provide a first touchpoint for customers to interact with your brand, and are typically the main lead generation mechanism for a campaign. The customer journey starts with a landing page; getting the design down to a science isn't just about conversion – it's about user experience and brand reputation.

Designing effective landing pages in Marketo is a linchpin of your campaign creation process. Let's take a closer look at tips and best practices for designing Marketo landing pages.

Marketo Landing Pages and Form Design

Forms serve as the gateway between visitor interest and lead conversion on your landing pages. When designed thoughtfully, they reduce friction while maximizing data collection and seamlessly feeding your Marketo campaign workflows. The difference between a well-crafted form and a mediocre one can significantly impact your conversion rates.

The foundation of effective form design lies in simplicity. Each additional field creates friction that can drive potential leads away. Marketo's hidden fields feature lets you capture valuable data without overwhelming visitors—pulling information from cookies or scripts running behind the scenes.

Progressive profiling takes this concept further. Rather than confronting visitors with lengthy forms, you can collect basic information initially and gather additional details over subsequent interactions. This approach respects the user's time while building comprehensive lead profiles.

Dynamic content transforms static forms into personalized experiences. When forms adapt to visitor behavior or characteristics, conversion rates improve measurably. This personalization extends beyond the form itself to surrounding messaging and calls-to-action.

While creating program-specific forms might seem logical, this approach quickly becomes a maintenance nightmare. Global forms offer a cleaner solution. Design one versatile form, then use smart campaigns to filter submissions based on the originating page or campaign. This strategy maintains consistency while allowing for program-specific lead routing.

The result? Streamlined form management that scales with your marketing operations without sacrificing functionality or performance.

Marketo Landing Page Content

The best landing page examples masterfully connect with customers through clear, direct content. The art of copywriting is very much alive and well. Having compelling content on your landing page can help increase conversion rates, improve your brand's reputation, and enhance the user experience.

To do this, follow tips like writing clear and concise headlines, keeping supporting text short and direct. Unlike a blog post that's a little bit more long-form, landing pages have a straight line towards conversion. So make sure that you're building that story effectively, precisely, and purposefully.

Call to action placement is really important. We recommend placing your CTA above the fold. Oftentimes it makes sense to put it in the hero section at the top of the page and then have a CTA at the bottom of the page as well. When it comes to organizing important information, consider using bulleted lists or numbered lists to help organize key messages.

Marketo Template Design

For those of us in marketing operations and campaign creation, one of the most important tenets of what we do is making sure that our work is scalable. Designing effective landing page templates for Marketo can boost efficiency, cut down time to execution, and improve outcomes across the board.

When creating templates for your Marketo instance, there are a few things to think of. First of all, making sure that you name all the elements in the template clearly. Users will use the template to create landing pages, so they'll need to understand what's expected in each module on the page. A clear naming convention backed up by internal documentation can go a long way to helping your marketing team create beautiful landing pages.

It can be a pesky little detail, but Marketo sometimes adds extra tags into the Marketo editor. For instance, if you're copying and pasting from a word processing doc, it sometimes will add spans and so on. You want to make sure to avoid this at the template level so you're not reproducing these errors or just adding extra code for browsers to render.

Defining custom CSS helps to ensure all your landing page templates follow the same brand alignment. This custom CSS can be loaded up in a style sheet file and applied to all your landing page templates. Making sure that your design team has this in place can help ensure that your brand looks great no matter who creates the landing page.

Having the right balance of editable modules is important. Some areas should be fixed and uneditable by users. For instance, the footer or the header of the landing page. Other areas, however, are valuable to ensure that they are editable. For instance, being able to swap out forms, being able to swap out images, or add in new content.

When creating landing page templates, you also want to limit the number of content blocks. 25 to 30 is the maximum we recommend to keep the editor manageable and efficient for users. It can seem like a high number, but with the various different modules for personalization and so on, you may find yourself creeping up to this number relatively easily. The key is to keep your pages simple and effective.

Marketo SEO and Technical Performance

While we often think of landing pages sent out via campaigns as primarily being lead generation or demand generation and not so much for SEO, this is still important for us to consider. It's important to remember that as long as the page itself is discoverable by Google and search engines, the content could be crawled and displayed to customers. Increasingly as well, LLMs like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude are referencing content—often landing pages—for people who are interested in your product or services. So making sure that your details here are taken care of is important.

The SEO basics are key. Setting meta titles and descriptions helps to ensure that search engines and other crawlers are able to quickly parse the information on your page. Having good heading hierarchy and structure allows the crawlers to get a sense of the content architecture on the page itself. Making sure your page is free of SEO errors is also important. Simple things like broken links and poor page performance can impact user experience as well as SEO appearance. Having an SEO-friendly URL ensures that the URL is easy for users to navigate back to and communicates some information about what's on the page.

From a technical performance perspective, we want to make sure that our page speed scores are acceptable. You can use a tool like PageSpeed Insights to check to see if there are any performance issues with your page. It's important that your landing page is rendered quickly and effectively for visitors in order to ensure a strong conversion rate.

Marketo Landing Page Visuals

The visuals you use on your landing pages can have a big impact on conversion rates. It's cliche, but a picture is worth 1000 words. It can clearly communicate your value proposition, entice users into completing the form, and communicate something of substance about your brand. It's important to use high quality, relevant images and graphics on your page. Focus on grabbing attention while staying on brand.

From a Marketo perspective, you can use the Design Studio to reuse images in multiple landing pages. It's a best practice to develop a gallery of pre-approved assets that can be used in a number of different instances. The benefit of using Marketo Design Studio is that when you update the image in Design Studio, it updates everywhere it's being currently used.

Marketo Landing Page Personalization

In your campaign lifecycle, landing pages represent one of the earliest, and most significant opportunities to apply personalization. Personalization allows you to improve the user experience and conversion rate outcomes. Using Marketo's tool set, we can go far beyond first name personalization.

When you're developing your landing pages, consider dynamic content blocks to change based on user segmentation. So if a user belongs to a segmentation like job function or job seniority, you can update the page content based on whether they're an executive or a manager level. For example, executives might see ROI-focused messaging and case studies about enterprise implementations, while managers might see operational benefits and workflow improvements.

Marketo provides the ability to generate personalized landing pages, which can be an awesome way for you to engage with known leads and to provide them with a highly personalized experience. This goes beyond simple text swaps—you can change entire sections, swap out relevant case studies, or display industry-specific offers based on what you know about the visitor.

Marketo snippets for dynamic content are effective. They allow you to easily deploy content and update that content across all the assets. So snippets work the same as images in the Design Studio. When you update a snippet, it populates everywhere it's being used. This makes maintaining personalized content at scale much more manageable.

Marketo tokens are a fantastic way to apply personalization and are Marketo's built-in variables. Beyond basic contact information, you can use tokens to pull in company data, recent activity, or even custom fields that reflect their stage in the buyer's journey. This level of personalization can significantly increase engagement and conversion rates by making each visitor feel like the page was created specifically for them.

Marketo Landing Page Analytics and Reporting

All this work put into designing the perfect landing page, and it's essential that you have the analytics and reporting in order to validate its effectiveness. Marketo's built-in analytics tools and reports can provide you with some initial insights on how your pages are performing. Although you may want to use a web analytics tool like Google Analytics installed on your page to get more information.

You can install tools like Google Tag Manager to allow you to use other software, such as heat map software, to get more information on the page. Heat mapping tools like Hotjar or Crazy Egg can reveal where visitors are clicking, how far they're scrolling, and where they might be getting stuck in the conversion process. This behavioral data complements Marketo's conversion metrics and helps you understand not just what's happening, but why.

It's critical that you implement A/B testing as well. Marketo's landing page A/B testing tools are a great starting point, and so are the various premium solutions available. Test elements like headlines, form fields, CTA placement, and images to see what resonates best with your audience. Start with high-impact elements that could significantly affect conversion rates before moving to smaller details.

The key is to continuously iterate over time, finding improvements and then measuring those results. Set up regular reporting cadences to review performance metrics like conversion rates, bounce rates, and time on page. Use this data to inform your next round of optimizations and create a culture of continuous improvement around your landing page performance.

Marketo Landing Page Productivity

One of the benefits of the Marketo system is that it allows you to scale up your landing pages within your campaigns quite rapidly. Simple tips like cloning landing pages from a master template rather than duplicating old landing pages can save you headaches down the line. Maintaining that master template, ensuring that you're using the latest brand styling, imagery, and design layout based on A/B testing, ensures that you benefit from the compounding benefits of having a center of excellence for your landing pages.

From a marketing operations perspective, it's important to minimize template proliferation. It's easy to create templates, but hard to keep control of them across the organization. Within your Design Studio or your template management tool, organizing assets by asset type makes it easy for users to know what asset template to use in which case.

Using a centralized template management approach, whether it's Marketo Design Studio or a no-code landing page builder like Knak, can help you create an internal repository for landing pages, so that anytime somebody uses or needs a landing page for a campaign, they have something at their fingertips ready to develop. If you're looking to future-proof your landing page design and development in Marketo, check out Knak.