Sticking the Landing...Page

Jennie Wright [00:00:05]: Welcome to the Acquire podcast from the Odd Phonic Podcast podcast network. I’m your host, Jenny Wright, and this is episode 11, sticking the landing page. This is the podcast that delves deep into the world of list building and online events, and it’s designed to empower repreneurs and marketers with the knowledge and strategies to master these essential business growth tactics. And you heard me in the intro say sticking, but you know I really meant perfecting in this case. And you should because landing pages don’t give 2nd chances. It’s a single page you are showing to people that has a very specific offer and purpose. There is no other way. This 1 page should always be done the right way. Jennie Wright [00:00:56]: There’s a ton of things that contribute to a really successful landing page, and you shouldn’t overlook any of them. I can tell you from experience, when you cut corners, you cut the potential of your landing page and what it has for helping you to get more opt ins, more sign ups, more leads, or sales. Luckily, I have learned some great techniques to optimize these pages for success over the years. I’ve gone from landing pages converting at 25% in the beginning of my career to over 58% or more on average. We all know the value of getting eyes on our offerings. So when people do endeavor to hit the link on our landing pages, We want as many of them as possible to see the value in our offer and compel them to take the next step, the call to action. But the eyes on your landing pages need to be the right ones. Making sure you’re either attracting or sending the right people to your landing page is all about your niche. Jennie Wright [00:01:54]: Marketing your business will always challenge your knowledge about your niche and your ideal clients and customers within it. Your landing page is offering something, and that’s something in most cases solves a problem or helps people in some way. So it must do so specifically for your niche or else this page isn’t going to be as effective for you or your business. What is your page gonna say that resonates with your ideal customers and clients? Will it feel like you’re talking specifically to them as though you know exactly what their needs are? Will it offer a solution that will meet or exceed their needs? Will it build trust and create awareness of what it is you do and how you help people? That’s the thing about knowing your niche thoroughly. It helps you find the words and the statements that are focused specifically on your ideal clients. This is what makes your landing page more compelling and by extension, how you’re converting. The truth is most entrepreneurs silently struggle with this because it’s a problem that seems to linger in people’s blind spots. And although we believe we have clarity about our niches, there’s a lot more that we don’t know, and that’s where a niche specialist can help us discover. Jennie Wright [00:03:04]: And if you don’t know 1, I can connect you with an excellent one. And if you wanna hear more about your niche, I would suggest you listen to episode 2, the key to researching the right audience and growing your business with Jason Wheeler. Your landing page is a beacon to your niche for the sole purpose of lead generation. You wanna connect with the people who will want or need your products and services the most. That page can help you acquire leads that can help you generate a lot more sales for your business, which means your landing page needs to have a value proposition that is extremely difficult to pass up. It’s like offering $5 of value for the price of $1. It’s just too good to say no to. And here’s how this works. Jennie Wright [00:03:49]: Step 1, you’ve taken the time to attract the right person to your offer. Step 2, You’ve connected with them on a very accurate yet personal level. And then step 3, you’ve offered them something at a price which is much lower than they would be willing to pay. When you stack these 3 tactics on top of each other, you have a very compelling offer. These are very important strategic pieces that you should include as part of your landing page. However, it doesn’t end there. There are other things that can help optimize your landing page even more. The look and the layout of your landing page also plays a big part in how people are going to respond to it. Jennie Wright [00:04:29]: There are very few, if any, pages that gain any traction by looking cluttered and disorganized. It’s like walking into a room and the furniture is set up in the most uncomfortable manner, and you’re bumping into the furniture when you’re trying to move within the room. It makes for an incredibly unpleasant experience. The amount of text and even the font type can have a significant impact. So can the color choices and the images on the page. It’s that same room again, but now the walls are painted with a weird color, funky drapes, and pictures that don’t really belong. It’s not that a landing page has to be a perfect piece of art, but it must be sharp. And by sharp, I mean, it matches the wants and of your ideal clients that exceeds their expectations visually. Jennie Wright [00:05:15]: It has to feel like a natural extension of your own brand and who you are. If the landing page looks totally different from your website or the ad or graphic that saw them to click on it and then go to that page, it’s going to cause confusion. And as somebody who is very smart once said, a confused mind does nothing. In order for your page to look as sharp as it needs to be, You’ll need to have the right page builder, and not all page builders are equal. Some are easier to use than others and some have more visual capabilities and have better templates. And most importantly, some are generalists while others are specialists for conversion. There are many landing page builders to choose from, but you have a few things to consider before you choose 1. What is the main objective of your landing page? If you’re looking to make sales or get opt ins, you probably wanna look at something like go high level or click funnels. Jennie Wright [00:06:14]: If you’re a novice at page building and you want something that’s easy enough for you to create with, you might wanna look at Kajabi or Leadpages or even Elementor inside your WordPress site. But you also might be sacrificing some special talents that the 2 previous page builders have. In a lot of cases, people choose to contract somebody to build those pages for them, giving them the best chance for a page that’ll do everything they needed to do and to reach their goals. Overall, I think this is the smarter strategy. Building a landing page takes some real artistic and technical skills. There are a few key elements that they need to be brought to life on the page. Putting them in the right place in the right order is also really important. Not all landing pages need all the same elements, but there are some key ones that do a lot of the heavy lifting and can add to your conversion percentages. Jennie Wright [00:07:05]: Think about the hero image on your page, the very first image people see when they come to your landing page. It’s the main banner across the top. What will it show them? Will it seem in or out of alignment with what they were expecting? Will it delight or entice them to look further? This one element can capture the attention or bounce people back out of the page with no results. And then what about video? Video is a great way to get a little extra time to prove to the audience that they are in the right place and you have something that they want or need, but it all depends on the content of your video. Will you take the opportunity to speak their language and say all the right things to make a connection, and will the production quality be there too? Even having your bio on the page in certain instances can help improve performance of your landing page. By sharing more about yourself, you can build credibility and trust, something that is necessary to get people to engage and participate in such a short window of time. I have witnessed better results when I create a page for a client that has infused more of themselves and their company’s identity into the page with copy, graphics, and so on, and the reason is really simple. When you or I decide to buy something or share our information with someone or a business, We naturally want to be sure that we’re buying from a trusted source, that we’re sharing information with a trusted person or business. Jennie Wright [00:08:36]: That trust can only be created when an identity is built into the page. If it’s not there, how’s it gonna happen? Who are they giving their email address to? Who are they buying from? They need to get some sort of feeling from that page that you are a trusted source, and this is the way to build that trust. Finally, there’s the call to action on a page or should I say calls to actions. This one element is the button, the link, and it’s the yes. It’s the one thing people overlook as an opportunity to place more than 1 call to action on a landing page. Throughout the whole page, you should be prompting and asking in a variety of ways if the person would like to take a next step As long as you’re not being repetitive and presenting the call to action in different and creative ways, it can really increase your chances that it’s gonna work. For instance, One call to action might be a convenience offer, like you’re one click away from the free greatest thing ever. Another might be a question. Jennie Wright [00:09:35]: For example, what’s better than getting this information for free? Or it could be a statement. It will finally be good to have this skill under your belt the next time you do x. And if they’re well placed and they’ve been well timed with certain pieces of content within your page, It’s gonna make a difference. Now here’s the punchline. After everything I’ve shared about the look of your landing page, keep it simple. It’s very easy to cleverly build in a lot of elements that to me seem useful or even up leveled. The last thing you wanna do is create a circus. It’s good enough to have the big tent, the lions, the elephants, and the jugglers, but adding in a bearded lady, a trapeze act, and clowns might be a little too much. Jennie Wright [00:10:21]: So clean and simple. Informative, but still to the point. Remember, landing pages do not reserve a lot of time in people’s pursuits. You must be careful how to utilize that attention that you’ve been given, and you must make sure people see the value in what you’re offering and do it in a way that’s easy to consume and absorb, sharing the right information and the right amount of it and using the elements in the right voice. It sounds complicated, and what I’m advising anyone to build a landing page is to use moderation. That can actually save you a ton of time and effort. A culmination of experiences from working with many clients and building many more pages has taught me what I’m sharing with you today. I have 1 story in particular that touches on a lot of points that I’ve shared so far. Jennie Wright [00:11:07]: I enjoy the challenge of helping people fix or improve projects that aren’t giving them the results they were hoping for. And sometimes, It worked that they had someone else do it for them, and sometimes they were giving it their best shot and doing it themselves, and I respect that. I have high praise for those who try even if they fail. 1 new client a few years back bravely took on the task of creating a landing page in Kajabi to sell a mini course they had created. The software seemed like the right choice for their skill level, and it also has the core software built right in. No issues there. They did succeed in building a functional landing page. However, it wasn’t getting any results. Jennie Wright [00:11:47]: I could tell what they were trying to do, and when I consulted with them, I even offered up some guidance as to things that could help. I’m more than willing to give suggestions and let people choose if they wanna implement them themselves. But sometimes they ask me to take over. So let the games begin. I get a lot of satisfaction making results spike up when I start making changes to a project. And there were some really key problems with this page that was affecting its performance. There was too much space given for the business logo and the hero image. This limited space is available for a tagline, and it could really help capture people’s attention, answering the question of what the page is for and about. Jennie Wright [00:12:26]: Yes. The logo should absolutely be present, but it is not the purpose. The purpose comes first. Don’t worry. The logo will attach itself to the purpose, and it will do more like, it’ll do more in a subtle manner. Although there was content that thoroughly explained what this product was and what they would receive in the course, the specs, and what was missing and qualifying in the value statements, There needed to be a description of who it was for, and there need to be points that can explain what to expect as a result of completing the mini course. The value isn’t in the number of videos or downloadable worksheets per dollars spent. It’s in the need for a solution and the solution to the problem itself, and that is what was missing on this page. Jennie Wright [00:13:10]: And one more thing. I am not an artist, but there were some visual balance issues within this page. How much space was allotted for different elements and the font sizes and the spacings. They all needed to be adjusted so they flowed when somebody was reading the page. Her colors and photos were great, and the outline of of the course itself was solid, but the page was only converting at 2%. Once I made the changes, it jumped to 11% and then peaked at 13%. This is an amazing result. Instead of 1 in 50 people, it turned into 1 in 8 people buying the mini course when they got to the landing page. Jennie Wright [00:13:48]: There can be key elements or pieces of content that can be missing or there should be some finessing that needs to be done on a page. It’s important to make sure a landing page isn’t lacking something that definitely needs to be there and can make a really big difference. Now there’s some main things that ensure landing page has every chance to succeed. If you take a look 1 step back from when people arrive on the landing page, it’s the thing that got them there. Whatever it is, an ad, a link on your website, or in your social media bio, maybe it’s from one of your emails. That gateway piece of content is doing its job to get people to arrive on your landing page for a specific reason. The reason needs to be crystal clear when they arrive. There should be no confusion, No continuity issues whatsoever. Jennie Wright [00:14:34]: Nothing will bounce people off a page faster than feeling like they’re in the wrong place. If you’re getting people to go to an online location for something, it better be there. The hook, as a lot of people call it, is the thing that should be there. It’s the reason they have to click on your link and have expectations. Not only that, the hook should be driving force behind your call to action within your landing page. They should feel compelled to take action to acquire whatever the hook is leading them to. Maybe it’s a freebie or a paid service or product. The main thing is that you promoted the offer, and then they arrived to see if it’s something they should invest in. Jennie Wright [00:15:14]: I don’t want you to think that the hook is some cheesy marketing ploy. It’s not. Not at at all. Almost every advertisement or offering has a hook in it. I think sometimes when 2 people meet for the first time, There’s almost certainly could be a hook right there. So they spend more time with each other and the relationship grows. The hook is the most compelling element or content on your landing page. And if you don’t have 1, your results are really gonna show it. Jennie Wright [00:15:41]: While you’re compelling people to take you up on your offer, It’s really important to keep in mind what it is that you promised. It’s common knowledge that you build trust in businesses. You must always deliver on what you promised. Whatever your landing page is offering, make sure it’s delivered in its entirety, even overdeliver. If you don’t, where it gets around. And if you ever want a landing page associated with yourself to work in the future, it’s best not to damage your credibility. It’s quite elegant and actually really simple. You keep the consistency and the promise of what’s offered on the landing page. Jennie Wright [00:16:17]: What you promised will be there and then after you deliver on that same promise. It’s this process that will earn you extra street cred and likely grow your amount of return and dedicated customers. Oh, and here’s one that really niggles at me, maybe you and definitely the potential visitors to your page. Make sure you’ve checked it for spelling and grammar errors. Believe me. When people spot mistakes on pages like these, Most of the time, they keep thinking about it, and it draws their attention away from your offer. I know that many people who spot your first spelling mistake subconsciously continue to look for more. That’s not what you need. Jennie Wright [00:16:55]: Another part of proofing is responsiveness. Check to make sure that your page, what it looks like on a tablet and mobile formats as well. The days of just desktop website visits are over. Your page needs to be optimized for tablet and mobile just as much as your desktop version. And make sure your links and buttons work and your video plays properly and all of that. Okay. Now now I’ve done it. I think I’m beginning to sound like a nagging parent, but you know what? I’ll happily play that role if it helps you produce the best landing pages for your business. Jennie Wright [00:17:29]: Alright. I hope you’ve enjoyed listening to this episode all about landing pages, and hopefully, you gained some knowledge on what you can do next time about the ones that you create or any that you wanna fix up. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Acquire, and this episode was developed with the help of my partner and producer who always encouraged me to reach potential. Please make sure to check the show notes wherever you get your podcast for details on how you and I can connect on social media, and please consider hitting the subscribe button. Thank you so much for listening.