It seems like everybody wants to turn their business into a well-oiled machine with a brand new landing page. It’s not the cure-all for every business, but if you’re using some kind of a funnel to sell a product or service you should use a landing page.
Landing pages increase your chances of making sales by flushing out the traffic of people that just want free stuff. Every online business needs to focus on creating a stair-step approach to selling products. This means that you create products for all price ranges.
A landing page offers freebies. An informational video, an ebook, or a case study is a good place to start. If you’re more aggressive you can give away books, video courses, or physical products. The more aggressive you are the higher you can charge for your better products. For instance, Russell Brunson the owner of click-funnels gives his books away for free in the hopes you purchase all of his products.
If you enter his funnel, you can spend as much as $10-$25,000 dollars. Check it out if you dare.
What is a Landing Page?
A landing page is a standalone webpage dedicated to driving traffic from an ad to a sales page. It’s highly underrated and underutilized, and I hope to change your mind about why you need this.
Think about a traditional funnel. There is an ad that is short in nature and meant to hook the viewer into getting something for free or cheap.
Here is the typical structure…
Ad –> Landing Page + Free Gift –> Webinar or Sales Page + Free Gift (if not offered before) –> Product Checkout Page
A lot of people offer a free gift to collect the client’s information on a landing page. That means the business creates a piece of content and shares it in exchange for the ability to contact the client at a later date.
The Purpose of a Landing Page
The purpose of a landing page is to get the reader to the sales page. Nothing else. It should be a slippery-slope of copy and images that get the reader to click. It’s a 30-second read at most, and what I’m hoping for is a skim and click.
A good way to think about a landing page is to think that it’s bigger than an ad and much smaller than a webinar. If I did things right with my landing page, the reader should be able to get a preview of what the webinar or sales page and click.
The landing page should be persuasive enough to get the reader to immediately click on the webinar link and view that before reading the free content gift. This is why some people put the gift in the webinar. Try both. They both work.
Catchy Headlines
Every piece of sales material you have should have eye-catching headlines that entice the reader to instantly open. They should appeal to the emotion of the reader so well that they don’t even read it. It should be a knee-jerk reaction instead of a logical thought.
If they have to think about it, you already lost them.
What Makes a Catchy (Persuasive) Headline?
Try to make your headline contain as many of these as possible.
- Specific to the target audience. This means it can have their location, name, and/or industry.
- Proves the content solves their problem.
- Highlights current events.
- Uses the same language as the target audience. (i.e. Millennials speak differently than baby-boomers)
- Shows the core values of your brand.
Sub-Heading
The sub-heading of a landing page expands upon the title. If you’re solving a problem you definitely want to show this again just in more detail.
A sub-heading should be 1, maybe 2, sentences at most. It also needs to be catchy enough to keep the reader’s eyes moving along.
Lead with Benefits
A great landing page shows the difference between features and the benefits of the product or service you’re selling. Do you know the difference between benefits and features?
If I were to say my product makes you money, that is a benefit. Features create benefits is the way to think about it.
A feature of a productivity app creates more time for the user.
Benefits come first because they create the knee-jerk reaction. That gut-feeling that the reader is in the right place and the right thing to do is click.
Include Key Features or Don’t
Including certain key features on the landing page is something you should consider, but it might deter people from using the product if they are the perfect fit. If your competitor advertises that his product has a better feature they might win because of that if you include that on your landing page.
I’m not saying that you should omit features parity issues. What I’m saying is that features should be talked about on the sales page where you have the time to explain why you chose that feature over a better one. Maybe it allows you to charge less or possibly give better customer service. If you talked about it on the landing page you might not have the opportunity to defend yourself.
Choosing whether or not to include your features on the landing page is a decision that you should do some testing. We’ll talk about testing later.
Testimonials
Testimonials are great ways to improve the knee-jerk reaction to click on a landing page. Include quotes, graphs, charts, and pictures of the customer that enjoyed your product. People love graphs that go up and smiling faces when thinking about using a product.
If your product is endorsed by celebrities or industry influencers, include them on the landing page for more social proof. You could even include a short video-testimonial for a testimonial with more teeth.
Call-to-Action
Don’t give your readers more than one option. If you use your landing page as a way to generate business, you want to give them one option.
Giving a customer the ability to call to place an order, order online, mail-order, or come into a physical location is asking for trouble. Don’t ask either. Tell them to come in, and create the urgency to get them to do it immediately.
Maybe time stock is running low or a sale is ending. It doesn’t matter what you say, but make sure there is no reason to wait.
Split-Testing Your Landing Page
Split-testing a landing page is the most important part of selling online. It doesn’t matter how pretty your website it or how perfect the lighting is in your video if the funnel fails you need to fix it. It takes an honest eye to look at the negative parts of an ad and improve it.
Usually, it will take a few tries before you get it right. You might find out that your business needs videos or images with young people. Finding the right combination of copy, images, and videos is vital to the success of the landing pages you create, so try as many as you can in the shortest amount of time you can.
Where to Find Good Examples
Competitors
I always recommend subscribing to competitor’s email lists, clicking on their ads, watching their sales materials and even buying their products to understand everything they do well. You also learn what they do wrong, which helps you beat them.
Ads on Facebook
Anytime you’re using Facebook, you’ll see ads. It’s full of them now, which makes Facebook annoying, but also gives a marketer idea to improve your ad strategy.
Use this guide to critique the landing pages and see what you can gleen from other’s mistakes. Sometimes the best landing pages are found by accident. Keep an open mind and try to emulate the pages that work the best.
Clickbank
Clickbank has tons of companies looking to sell products with this very same technique. Sign up for a variety of them to see what they are doing. The best part is you can how well they are doing with the metrics Clickbank provides.
Right Here
Here are 100 examples of landing pages done well.
Choose Your Sales Strategy After the Landing Page
After you’ve created your landing page, you need to choose how you’re going to sell your product or service. Online webinars are great options, so check out Webinar Jam to see if it’s a fit.
Furthermore, consider sales letters or even virtual sales letters. How about a whiteboard presentation? If your product is convincing enough, skip the sales pages and go right to the product page. All of these are great strategies to choose from, but they all might not work for you.
That’s the key, know what works for you and you’ll never struggle to get more business. Some companies work better with good branding and a blog. Others need to run ads and this strategy. Test and you’ll find out what works, and don’t be afraid to fail, because you will until you don’t.
For more information on running an online business, check out this article, Easy 4-Step Approach to Building an Online Business.
