Transcripts
1. Introduction: The topic of conversion optimization and specifically landing pages, is really important today, because the competition for paid and paid spend online is getting more and more intense. Hi! My name is Ryan Engley, I'm the VP Product Marketing at Unbounce. Unbounce is a landing page and conversion platform that gives marketing teams and agencies a way to build high converting landing pages in a fraction of the time it would take working with the developer. Over the past few years, I've had the opportunity to speak at a lot of different conferences, all about customer success, and how marketers can improve the results in their campaigns. Today, we'll be giving a brief introduction on conversion optimization. We will talk about your marketing funnel and where landing pages fit within your marketing funnel, then we'll dig into some of the key fundamentals. We'll talk about attention ratio, we'll talk about message match, and then we'll get into the five critical elements that every landing page needs. The content in this course is super relevant for anyone who's interested in digital marketing. Please add your project into the project gallery, we'd love to see what you've created. Using landing pages effectively, is a critical component of any marketing strategy, especially when you're focusing on getting the best possible ROI from your marketing spend. So, let's get started.
2. Marketing Funnel: First off, where do landing pages fit in your marketing funnel? Well, if you look at the full funnel and you start at the very top, your top a funnel traffic can come through a lot of sources. So, let's say Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google ads, Bing, any one of the places where you're trying to move prospects from some other piece of content, or some call to action through to your web properties. Now, let's say you're promoting an upcoming webinar on Twitter, or maybe you're promoting an e-book you've created through Facebook, or possibly you might be running Google ads to a page where you're trying to collect lead information, so that you can book a consultation with somebody. Now, technically, the landing page is any page that your prospects would land on after they click the call to action in your campaign. So, the landing page exists after the click or post-click and it's where the conversion takes place. Now, the conversion can be any number of things. If it's a form fill, then it might be a form filled to sign up for a newsletter, or maybe download an e-book, or maybe book a consultation or it could be a button to click through to another page into a shopping cart, let's say if you're selling a product. Ultimately, the conversion is like the key driving motivator for your campaign. It's the main thing that you want prospects to do when you started the campaign in the first place. For our purposes, instead of thinking as a landing page as just any web page, we're going to define it as a campaign specific page, with a single call to action. Now, that we've covered where landing pages fit in your marketing funnel and when to use them, let's dive in and look at why landing pages are critical to use instead of say some other page on your website.
3. Attention Ratio: So, when you're running campaigns, you're going to have some sort of campaign goal in mind. This is going to be your conversion, and if you're trying to get more conversions, let's say more ebook downloads, or more newsletter sign-ups. You could work at driving more top of funnel traffic, basically getting more eyeballs on your stuff. But, that can be really costly and really difficult. So, if you're working to acquire more traffic or you're paying to drive more traffic, it can be really inefficient if that's how you want to improve conversions. Think about the leaky bucket. If you have holes in your bucket, yeah, sure you can get more water by filling the top, or you can actually plug the holes, and that's what we'll talk about here. Let's step back from landing pages for a sec and talk about your website, and why your website isn't great for marketing campaigns. Your website is a bit of a jack of all trades. It's going to house the majority of the information about your company or your brand. It needs to represent your brand well. It's going to house any marketing resources that you've created. Usually, it'll have a ton of content for SEO purposes. Sometimes, it will have information about your team and your company, and who knows, case studies, all kinds of background information, which is great for people who want to explore and find out more about your company or your business. But, if you're running a marketing campaign and you have a single call to action in mind, your website's not going to do you any favors. The reason being that your website is full of links and various ways for people to explore. But, when you're running a campaign with a call to action, you don't want people exploring your website. You want to focus them on your single call to action, which is why you want to work with a landing page instead. This concept, the ratio of things that prospects can do on a web page versus the number of things you want them to do is called attention ratio. Think of it like this, imagine you're running a marketing campaign for a new real estate development, and your campaign goal is to get prospects to fill out a form and request a tour of the new development. That form fill or the tour request is your one call to action for the campaign. Let's see what this might look like if you were sending prospects to a generic website. On that website, you have your main call to action, your form fill where you're asking prospects to request a tour of the development. But, on the site, prospects can also look at and download floor plans, they can check out any other developments that your company has built, see awards that your team has won, look at the team behind the project, and then of course, find you on social media. The problem here is that the prospects may get distracted. They see your links to social media, click on your Facebook icon, all of a sudden, they're on Facebook, and they totally forgotten about your page, and they're onto the next thing. That's because your website's attention ratio is too high. There are too many things that prospects can do versus the one thing you want them to do. Asking your prospects to convert on a site like this is basically like asking a three-year-old to tie his shoes at Chuck and Cheese. You might have that one thing that you want them to do, but there's so much going on, and focus is so low that the chances of them doing that action are slim to none. As attention ratio goes down, conversion rates go up, and for your marketing campaigns, the ideal attention ratio is one to one. So, that's going to be one thing that prospects can do on your page and one thing that you want them to do. This one-to-one attention ratio focuses your prospects attention and keeps them focused on your call to action. It improves the likelihood that they're going to convert on that call to action. The only way to achieve this is to create a dedicated space for your campaign with a single call to action, a dedicated campaign landing page. Now, in the past, building a landing page for every single campaign would have been a near impossibility. Nowadays, solutions like Unbounce exists, so you can just take control of your campaigns and build them yourself.
4. Message Match: So far, we've talked about where landing pages fit in your marketing funnel. With attention ratio, we talk about why landing pages are more effective than your website, and now we're going to dig into more of the details around how to use the landing pages properly to improve your conversion rates. See, attention ratio is great, but it's really only half the equation when it comes to the fundamentals. It's great to focus your visitor's attention on your call to action, but it doesn't really matter if you focus their attention if they don't stay on the page. With our next key concept, message match, we'll talk about how you can keep more of your visitors on your page after they click by putting yourself in their shoes and imagining things from their perspective. Let's pretend you're on Facebook and you're scrolling through your news feed and you come across an ad for something like wooden sunglasses, and you see them and you think to yourself, oh man those are actually kind of cool. So, you click the ad and then you land on a product's page and you hunt around to find those wooden sunglasses, but for some reason, they're nowhere to be found. You scroll down a little bit, hunt around, and because you don't see them, what do you do after a few seconds. You click your browser's back button and go back to what you were doing before because you think you made a bad click, the expectations that were set for you in that ad with those wooden sunglasses, it's not delivered, it's not followed through after you click and land on the page. In this example, we're talking about a physical product, but it's exactly the same thing with messaging. If you set a particular expectation with your ads and someone clicks that ad and then lands on a page and you don't follow through meeting their expectations, your visitors will think that they've made a bad click and they'll leave as well. That's an example of poor message match, but now how do you flip this around and make sure that you do it properly when you're running your own campaigns. The example we've been using so far is for a condo development. So, let's stick with that and say that you're running a Google ad for waterfront condos, and your ad copy says elegant waterfront condos register for your free tour. You want to set it up so that when a visitor clicks that ad and lands on your landing page, they see exactly the same message. That message tells them they made a good click and it tells them that they've landed in the right place and it'll keep them on your page for longer. Let's look at a real example of how this would play out with a Google ad and then a matching landing page. Here, the search terms are waterfront condos, and for the first ad result we see, "elegant waterfront condos, schedule your free tour". As a visitor seeing an ad like this the expectation would be that when you click through you see something about waterfront condos and you see something about scheduling a free tour. Here's an example of poor message match. Imagine you've clicked that ad and then this is the landing page that you land on. Your ad was for waterfront condos and you clicked through expecting to see something about waterfront condos, but here the headline says, "Retirement living at its finest. The city's premier retirement community." You were searching for waterfront condos and now it's talking about retirement. If you saw this, you'd probably think this isn't for me and then click your browser's back button and head back to Google. Now, over here we have an example of great message match. Again, searching for waterfront condos, the headline here says explicitly, "elegant waterfront condominiums", and then right below it was the second part of that ad, "schedule your sweet tour today". This is an example of great message match and for the visitors clicking your ads, setting an expectation like this will keep them more engaged on your page, and then ultimately drive more visitors to your call to action, and improve your conversion rates. So far, we've talked about where landing pages fit in your marketing funnel, we've talked about attention ratio and why you want to use landing pages instead of say a generic website, and we've spoken about message match. So, how you can match your visitors' expectations and keep them engaged on your landing pages, and with these two concepts alone, you'll be off to a great start and be very successful. Now, we're going to dig into the five critical elements of every landing page and how you can drive conversions even higher.
5. I. Unique Selling Proposition: Just like a birthday cake which needs flour, water, eggs, oil, and sugar, there are five important ingredients for every landing page. These five elements are a recipe that will give you a solid foundation to build a page that will inform and ultimately convert your visitors. The five elements are: your unique selling proposition or USP, your hero shot, your features and benefits, your testimonial or social proof, and call to action. As we go through these five elements, you can follow along using the accompanying worksheet with this class, and there's many, many different ways that you could build a page like this. Today, I'm going to show you what this looks like in Unbounce. In addition, if you want to use the page that we're going to be creating here, you can download it as a template from this class. That way, you can personalize it yourself in Unbounce, and by the end of the course, you'll have your own landing page ready to go for your marketing campaign. The first of the five elements is your USP or your unique selling proposition. Sometimes this is also called your UVP or your unique value proposition. This is a clear statement that describes the benefits you offer, how you solve your customer's needs, and what distinguishes you from the competition. On your landing pages, your USP doesn't have to be a single statement. Instead, it can be a story that you tell throughout your whole landing page. There are a lot of ways that you can break this down, but today we're just going to consider your USP in terms of your headline and your subhead. Your main headline is going to be the first thing that people notice when they hit your page. So, it's really got to do some heavy lifting. It's the main headline's purpose to keep people on your page and tell them that they're in the right place. So, we talked about this in message match. But really your main headline needs to tell people that they made a good click and that they're where they're supposed to be. For your supporting headline or subhead, people will often think of it as just like the second half of your headline. Basically like, an expansion of the headline. But your main headlines purpose is to keep people on the page. Your supporting headline should give them an idea of what to expect, maybe what your call to action is, and really it's key purpose is to encourage visitors to want to scroll further down the page for more information. Now, let's hop into Unbounce, and see what the USP looks like on an actual landing page. Here we're in the Unbounce page builder. On the left, you'll see where you can add new elements onto your landing page. So, things like Text, Images, Buttons, and so on. Within the page Canvas, you can move elements around or you can edit your text. Everything you need to customize your landing pages to make sure that they are just right for your campaigns. You can download this template as part of this course and then upload it into Unbounce, so that you can customize it and follow along. If you would like some additional resources on how to use Unbounce, you can find them linked to this class as well. Okay, back to the Five Elements we were talking about before. Here you'll see the main headline, Live Large in the Sitella, an Elegant Waterfront Condominium. The purpose of the headline, again, is to tell your visitors that they made a good click and that they're in the right place. So, your headline should match the expectations that you set with your ad or wherever you've sent this to people, so that they can click through to the page. Here with your subhead, you're setting expectations so that people will know what to expect on the page. Schedule your suite tour today, tells visitors what to expect as the call to action and will encourage them to scroll further down the page. A great test for your USP is the five second test. Just show someone your landing page for five seconds, then hide it and then ask them if they can tell what your page is about. If they can, you're doing awesome, you can move on, but if they can't tell you what it's about, then you need to go back and rework your headline, subhead, and other page copy. The key thing to remember here with your headline and subhead is that your headline needs to tell your visitors that they're in the right place and keep them on the page, and then your subhead needs to encourage visitors to scroll further down. Now that we've covered the USP, let's take a look at the next element, which is your hero shot.
6. II. Hero Shot: The saying that a picture is worth a thousand words is especially true in our short attention span world of the internet. Your hero shot is a visual representation of your product or service and it should show, rather than tell your prospects, what you're offering on the page. Let's look at our hero shot in context of the landing page that we've been building. Here, the background of this page section is our hero shot. An architect's rendering of the building could have worked really well as could have a photo of the suites themselves. But since our unique selling proposition is our waterfront location, then a photo of that world-class water view makes an incredible hero shot. This hero shot is contextual to the value proposition, Live Large in the Sitella, an Elegant Waterfront Condominium. It really helps to reinforce the waterfront. Here, our hero shot doesn't show what we want to sell, which is condos, it shows our prospects what they want to buy, which is a great waterfront lifestyle. Even though we think about your USP and your hero shot as two different elements, it's really important to think about how they work together. Yeah your USP will tell your visitors that they're in the right place and keep them on the page, but your hero shot will also reinforce this point and tell them what the page is about visually. Now, that we've covered your USP and your hero shot, let's dig further down the page and dive into your features and benefits.
7. III. Features and Benefits: The third critical element of your landing page design are your features and benefits. Once you've generated interest and kept people on your page, your features and benefits will show your prospects the benefits that they can expect to get from your service, your product or your offering and your features should help show how you can deliver on the promises that you've set with your benefits. You can also think about it in terms of buyer needs. The people who come to your pages, if you consider them as buyers are going to have key needs that motivate them to look for a solution and your features and benefits will explain how you solved those problems. Writing effective features and benefits or creating a great value prop are really huge concepts. There could be an entire class dedicated to this. So, if you're interested in learning more about crafting great features and benefits, check out some of the resources that we've added to this class. Here we are back on our landing page. We've reinforced that our visitors are in the right place with our headline and we've set expectations for our call to action encourage visitors to scroll down the page with our subhead and we reinforce that concept with a hero shot in the background. When you scroll down, you'll see our features and benefits listed here shown side-by-side. When building up the features and benefits for your landing pages, it's really important to have a great understanding of your buyers or your target audience for the page. I mean, if you're going to be giving away something like an e-book, it's not a buyer but still you're going to need to know and understand your visitors motivations, the things they're looking to solve. For our condos, we can imagine that our buyers are perhaps a little bit older, they have some money to spend and they're looking to solve very particular problems. One of them, if they're selling their house and they're looking for convenience is that they want to live in a convenient neighborhood. So, if we've done customer interviews and we find that this is one of the key problems that they want to have solved, this is what we would list as our main benefit. So, here we show a convenient neighborhood including the picture of that neighborhood, and then below it some of the features that help reinforce that. The fact that our building is steps away from the downtown pavilion and that it's just a short walk from the trails down by the river, it's perfect for people who enjoy a vibrant nightlife with cinemas, upscale lounges and it's great for people who want an escape to nature. For our second benefit, it's more about the building itself. Again, if people are looking for convenience, they want to know that things are taken care of for them. So, we show off our luxurious amenities. Here we talk about the various types of suites that people can choose from, the high-end finishes, the decor and the fact that our building includes amenities like an all inclusive fitness center, two private cinema rooms and a rooftop patio with a pool. In one of the previous lessons when we spoke about the USP, I had mentioned that your unique selling proposition doesn't just have to be tackled in your headline and subhead but instead it's a story that you can tell throughout your page. Like it or not, a lot of the visitors that come to your landing page aren't going to read all of your text in exacting detail. Instead, they should be able to look at your headline, your subhead, scroll down, quickly browse your two benefits and go on and then have a pretty good idea what your page is about. With your features and benefits, beware of falling into the trap of talking about your features in terms of technical specifications or the kinds of things that you want to sell. The sole purpose of features, is to explain how you can solve the problems that your prospects have and the problems they have directly relate to the needs they had when they came to your page in the first place. Ultimately, your features and benefits need to relate back to the key problems that your prospects want solved when they arrive on your pages or to the gains that they can expect to get from your product or service. Your features and benefits though can't be considered on their own. You have to think about them in context of the overall narrative that you're building for your page. Now, you set an expectation for your prospects with your ad or your email whatever it was that got them to click in the first place. When they arrived on your page, you reinforced that concept with your headline and then your subhead told them what to expect and encourages them to scroll further down. Your hero shot is like a one two punch that further reinforces that and when you get to your features and benefits this is just one step further down your funnel, ultimately leading to the goal of your page which is your call to action and your conversion. Up to now, the various elements of the landing page we've spoken about really speak to what visitors can expect from your page. If they've been persuasive enough, your prospects are probably going to be interested to continue. However, they may lack some trust and they may not fully believe that you can deliver on the promises you've made. In the next section, you'll see how you can leverage social proof to build trust with your prospects and show them that you can make good on your offer.
8. IV. Social Proof: As much as you might think that you're trustworthy, and you may try to persuade your prospects on your own, whatever you say is going to be so much more credible and believable if you have someone else backing you up. Your prospects are going to look to see if you already have some loyal customers, or if there are other brands who can stand behind you, and demonstrate that whatever you're offering is credible. On your Landing Pages, social proof helps you earn trust and persuade through herd mentality. As much as you might think that you're super credible, and very honest, a lot of people are going to be skeptical about what it is that you have to offer. You'll be far more believable if you have someone else, a loyal customer or another brand backing you up. On your Landing Page, social proof acts as a stamp of approval and helps you show that you've earned credibility. You can incorporate social proof onto your Landing Pages in a number of different ways. You could look at customer quotes from people you've worked with in the past who have great things to say about your product, service your brand, or working with you. You can incorporate them as case studies, which may be really in-depth studies with successful customers who've seen really great results from what it is that you're offering, or it could even be like a badge or a review from a third party review site. Quite often, people will leave reviews on services like Yelp, or app Capterra, or G2 Crowd, and you can usually embed those on your pages as well. The social proof that you use on your Landing Page should be contextual. It should fit into the overall narrative that you're building in the Landing Page overall. If you're talking about a particular feature or benefit or a particular offering, it's ideal if your social proof can reinforce that key thing. If not, it's okay for it to reinforce your brand overall. One key thing to remember with social proof is that the purpose is to earn trust. So, if you're going to be using case studies or testimonials, you need to use real quotes, from real people. Ideally, it's great if you can use a photo and their name. Otherwise, people will think that you've made this stuff up and instead of earning trust, it's going to hurt you. Let's dive back into our Landing Page and see what social proof looks like there. On our Landing Page, we've included social proof further down after we've had the chance to speak about our features and benefits and show people what are building offers. Now, the thing for most prospects is that after they read that stuff, they may be skeptical, and not totally believe that we can deliver on the claims that we're making. Here the social proof serves to reinforce the fact that we are in fact a credible builder, and that the expectations that we've set out are legit. As mentioned before, if you're going to include quotes or testimonials, it's really important to include some real facts about the person who shared that quote. On our page here, we've included a photo of the person, her name, and we've included her job title, and the company that she works for. All of these details together helped to make the person more tangible, and again helps show that you are credible and that these are real people you've worked with, they're not just made up. Here Lindsey has quoted saying "The sweeter incredible, I'm really impressed with the lux layout in the fitness center. I've never seen an onsite gym offer so many classes are complimentary David's T." This speaks exactly to one of the features and benefits that we've listed earlier, which is about the luxurious amenities in the building. Lindsay's quote helps to reinforce the narrative of the page. Or one thing to keep in mind when you're considering social proof is to be aware of social share buttons. So, things like Facebook-like Widgets, Twitter Widgets or LinkedIn share Widgets, they're great and they are a really good way to show that people are engaged in your page and it's a great way to get people to share your content. But if you think back to the concept we spoke about earlier, attention ratio, anything on your page that users can interact with, that is separate from your conversion goal, is a distraction. So, if you want to use things like Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn share Widgets, we encourage you to put them on your thank you page, so that visitors can share your content after they've already converted. It's a concept that we call conversion momentum. Once they've already converted on your page, they're likely to convert a second time, and if you put your social share buttons there, you'll expand your reach and get more people to your page in the long run.
9. V. Call To Action: The last of the five key elements of your landing page is your call to action. Your call to action is arguably the most important of the five because without it there's no place for your prospects to convert. The call to action is where you finally ask your prospects to do the one thing that you wanted them to do when you built out the campaign in the first place. So, if for example you're running a campaign to earn newsletter subscribers, then your call to action would be the form and the form button where you ask your prospects to sign up for your newsletter. To illustrate why this is important, think about your marketing campaign as though it were a marathon. From the very beginning you've been trying to figure out how to get people onto your page, you had to keep them on the page, you had to keep them interested, convince them with your features and benefits and eventually your social proof, and now they're just about there. If this were a marathon this would be the last mile before the finish line, you're so close and so with your call to action you just need to push them over that last little bit of the marathon. Depending on your campaign goal, your call to action is either going to be a form and the form button or it'll be a button or a link going somewhere deeper in your marketing funnel. Let's take a look at the call to action on our waterfront condo page. If you're landing page copy does its job then your visitors should know exactly what to expect when they encounter your pages form. Here our subhead says that you can schedule your suite tour today and that's the expectation that we want to set for prospects when they arrive on our form. Nonetheless, there's still a few things that you can do to ensure that your form works exactly like it should. Number one, you want to make sure that the form itself is very prominent on your page, that it's easy for prospects to see and it should be very clear to them what to expect and why they should want to give you their information in the first place. Second, you want to include the fewest number of form fields possible to still get you the highest quality conversion. Think about it like this, in our waterfront condo example we asked for name, email and preferred suite type, if we wanted we could add a fourth form field requesting let's say income which would be great because then that would let us know what people could afford and whether or not they'd be a good fit for the building. The problem is that if a prospect arrives on your page and sees that you want their income, they might be scared off and then they might not fill out the form in the first place. Ultimately, it's a balancing act between getting the information you need and then getting people to fill out your form. So, you may have to test a few different options to find that perfect balance where you get the right level of information from your prospects but it's not so much that it scares them off. Lastly, you want to use a button label that sets clear expectations with your prospects for what will happen when they submit your form. On our waterfront condo example the button label said, request a tour. You can think about it like this, the button label should complete the sentence, I want to blank. So, let's say you were asking people to sign up for a newsletter the button copy might just say, sign up for the newsletter. In our experience we've seen that a very clear button label that sets clear expectations with prospects can have a very positive impact on your conversion rates. So, that's it. We have call to action which is the last of the five key elements of your landing pages. We've covered the basis for what you want to make sure you include for the highest converting pages. Now, one thing to keep in mind is that while these five elements are a really good foundation, just like your basic recipe, there are any number of ways that you can tweak your pages from here on out. One of the best ways that you can do this is by AB testing or iterating on your pages to ultimately see what performs best and what resonates best with your audience.
10. Next Steps: So far we've covered many of the key fundamentals of landing pages. We've talked about when to use them, why to use them and how to create them. But not only will landing pages help you improve conversion through strong attention ratio, great message match and then of course, the five elements of a high converting landing page. But using a landing page also gives you a way to isolate and test each individual component of a page so that over time, you can test and iterate to improve your conversion rates by trying new ideas. At the beginning of the course, I used an analogy where I said that you could think about your marketing funnel as a leaky bucket. Now landing pages are one of the key ways that you can plug some of the holes in that leaky bucket or the leaky funnel since it's your marketing funnel. Through testing your landing pages, you can see where there's still room to improve so that if prospects are leaking out your funnel at various places, you can potentially improve your messages, maybe improve your hero shot, improve the design of your pages, so that even more of your prospects make their way through your funnel. Today, if you want to test your pages, it's a pretty manual process. There's a lot of work that goes into the research to find out what to test, and then of course, there's the work and modifying your pages and then running the tests and making sure that your results are valid. In other parts of technology, we're starting to see that machine learning, artificial intelligence are being used in really innovative ways to automate more of the manual difficult work that some of us have in our lives. So well, today if you want to improve the conversion rates on your pages, it's something you have to test manually. Who knows what'll happen in the future? Maybe we'll be able to have machines learn automatically what works for our visitors and improve conversion rates for us. While it's cool to think about the future, there's no need to wait for what may or may not happen, for where we're at today [inaudible] already has a bunch of built-in features to help you AB test so that you can validate your ideas, test your hypotheses and improve your conversion rates. So there's no need to wait, you can get started with that concept today.
11. Final Thoughts: Ryan Engley: Although the concepts that we've covered in this course are our recommended best practices for using landing pages, just keep in mind that these are really a base. They're a bit of a framework from which you can get started. There's no real set rules to how this should work, which is one of the fun things about marketing. I mean, there's always so much to learn and so many ways to improve. If for some reason, you happen to feel overwhelmed thinking about all of the elements of the page, attention ratio, message match, just remember that even by moving from sending traffic to your website to sending traffic to a landing page so that, as we touched on earlier, you can improve attention ratio and improve message match, you'll automatically see higher conversion rates than you did before. If throughout the course you've been building your own landing page, or you've been filling out the accompanying worksheet, we'd love to see what you've done so far. So, please upload your projects to the project gallery. Ultimately, if you have any questions about anything we've covered so far, please share your questions with us. We really hope that these concepts help you to improve your marketing campaigns. Thank you so much for taking this course.
Ryan Engley, VP, Product Marketing @ Unbounce
