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How To Create A Laser Focused Landing Page
Building landing pages is a key component of any online marketing campaign.
At the Unbounce Conversion Road Trip in New York, an amazing roster of presenters lended their insights on how to build high quality landing pages from copywriting, web design, color theory to ppc, content marketing and donuts.
This is going to be a (very) high level run through of some key takeaways that I put together to give myself some tangible action items to look back on for reference, along with the much deeper knowledge that was melted into my brain during the incredible event.
I’m publishing these notes so that you’ll also receive some value if you’re a marketer looking to improve your online funnels.
1. Set Clear Goals
Like any marketing campaign, you need to have a clear goal in mind for what you want your campaign to accomplish, otherwise you’re just committing random acts of marketing, which can’t really be measured or tested.
Once you have your goal set, it’s time to get to work on building your campaign and conversion funnels.
2. Know Your Customer
The most important part, arguably, of developing a marketing campaign and creating a landing page is knowing your customer.
Buyer Personas are more than just a fictional representation of your target audience, and Mike King puts those notions to rest by explaining how Buyer Personas are the story tied to your customer segment data.
There’s no arguing that the more you know about your customers, the better you can speak to them about what they want to know, and in a way that resonates with them.
3. NSAMCWADLP: Build Your Landing Page
Don’t know about the marketing law of NSAMCWADLP yet? Let me clue you in on this lovely, unpronounceable “secret” from Oli Gardner:
“Never Start A Marketing Campaign Without A Dedicated Landing Page” – Click To Tweet
Once you have your goals and know your customers, it’s time for you to build your landing page. So what goes into a high quality landing page?
Mainly, you’ll need killer copy and delightful design.
When a visitor clicks to your landing page, they should be exactly where they thought they were going. You want to avoid cognitive dissonance at all costs!
Make sure that your hero shot and your headline are familiar to your audience so that they can immediately know what is of value to them. If you are running ads, make sure that they match your headlines as well.
Be very clear and use descriptive copy to guide your visitor. Tell them, kindly of course, what they need to do next.
A lot of people try to be a little more ambiguous so they don’t leave anyone out, but when you try to talk to everyone, you are talking to no one. Don’t be ambiguous.
Create a connection with who your perfect customer is and hook them in. It’s ok if that means some people won’t get it the same way, they aren’t as good a fit for you anyway and you’ll end up wasting more time than it’s worth trying to qualify borderline leads.
Michael Aagaard brings us our next marketing law, in a very majestic sounding acronym:
WYSIATI (wiz-ee-ott-ee)
“What You See Is All There Is”
Because people aren’t inclined to look for what we don’t see, we will take whatever information is readily available in front of us and then create a complete picture by filling in the blanks based on consistency.
It’s a fundamental element of the human decision making process. Don’t try to outsmart the law of WYSIATI. (That definitely sounds like something from the next Marvel movie, especially in Aagaard’s accent).
If you try to outsmart WYSIATI, you will lose customers! – Click To Tweet
When you’re dealing with online marketing, your focus is on getting people to take action.
Click to your page.
Read your copy.
Fill out a form.
In this action economy, effort is a cost. Your goal needs to be to create as frictionless of an experience as possible so that there is minimal effort needed on the part of your customer.
“Create a conversion experience that facilitates cognitive ease.” Click To Tweet
So how can you apply WYSIATI to create a successful landing page?
Insights from the brilliant Angie Schottmuller can help implement the WYSIATI principle. Use the 5 second test for your landing pages and see how memorable these key elements of your landing page are:
- Identity (your branding/company name)
- Offer (what you’re offering your customer)
- Credibility (prove that you’re legit)
- Call to Action (next step button for your visitor to click to take action)
Once you have all of these elements in place, you need to make sure that you’re using all of the right colors.
Your eyes can play some freaky tricks on you.
Watch the center of this image and you’ll see a green dot moving around the circle replacing the purple dots.
But guess what?
There is no green dot!
It’s an effect of relief in your eyes that is actually impressing that green color where it doesn’t actually exist (the purple is just disappearing).
Having an understanding of optical physiology will give you a little superpower for creating higher converting landing pages.
- Make sure that you use a complimentary color for your CTA button.
- Don’t use the same color from your CTA anywhere else on the page. If you use that same color somewhere else, it will dilute the power of the CTA button.
- Use “pure” colors for your CTA button
Ok, so now you have a laser focused landing page that speaks directly to your perfect customer and creates an effortless experience for them to make the decision to take the action you want them to take.
How do you actually get your ideal customers to your landing page?
4. Driving Traffic To Your Landing Page
Now to get people to your landing page, you can run ad campaigns with Adwords PPC or Facebook to target a more specific audience. But what if you don’t have the budget or resources to run paid advertising?
That’s where Anna Sawyer’s Content Marketing Donut comes into play. And if you’ve done your Persona homework, then you are already coming from a great place of insight into what your customers are looking for and will find valuable.
By following along the content marketing donut here, you can repurpose one idea into several different content assets along your customer’s journey.
5. Profit
Thank you to Nemo Chu for presenting through the scope of profitability. It’s easy to get lost in the technical implementation work and losing sight of the whole reason we’re running a campaign, to make profit.
Getting obsessed with increasing benchmark metrics (like search engine rankings or ad click through rates) that are supposed to lead to increased profitability, but not paying attention to if it is or not is unfortunately not uncommon.
If you run new ad copy and your click through rate doesn’t improve, but you lower your Cost Per Acquisition, then that’s a huge win.
In the same light as focusing on profitability is making sure you are putting your efforts in the right place.
Are You Asking The Right Questions Before Diving Into Your Marketing Efforts?
“Should we use Facebook Ads or Adwords?”
Maybe asking X vs. Y isn’t the right question for you. You’re better off knowing what your team is best suited to do, and making that work for you. Is your team amazing at getting quality website traffic from online forums? Then don’t worry about trying to figure out the Facebook Ad landscape right away.
Building Your Laser Focused Landing Page
To recap, here are the steps to building your laser focused landing page:
- Set clear goals
- Know your customer
- Build your landing page
- Copywriting
- Designing The Page
- Drive traffic to your landing page
- Measure, experiment, improve
- Profit
And remember: NSAMCWADLP
*Insights for this post came from the presentations of all of the speakers.
**Please don’t take this as an overview of every idea and insight from the full day event. These are some high level, key takeaways that I put together mixed with my own experience and knowledge.
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