Dodgeball Marketing Podcast #24: What Makes a Great Landing Page?

Michael Utley: Hey everybody, welcome to the next episode of Dodgeball Marketing Podcast. This is episode 24, I'm Michael, this is Chris.

Chris Raines: How are you doing?

Michael Utley: Good, happy Friday.

Chris Raines: I always feel like we have to interject some small-

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: I don't like banter, let's get to the stuff man.

Michael Utley: Yeah, we hate to waste time. Hey, we want to talk to you about what makes a great landing page. This is a really good topic.

Chris Raines: I love this topic.

Michael Utley: Yeah. Chris, I'm going to throw this one over to you, this first segment. But tell me, what makes a good landing page call to action? Let's start with the call to action. A landing page is like, you're doing some advertising, you're driving people to a page, you're not necessarily throwing them into a website to try to figure out what to do, but you're throwing them into a page that's just for that campaign. How do we think about the call to action on this page? What are the elements? How does that work to make it as effective as possible?

Chris Raines: Yeah. I think of calls to action in kind of two ways. One is, make sure that it's benefit-oriented. So you see a lot of pages where you'll see a form. Maybe it's get a quote, maybe it's schedule an appointment. Maybe it's get more information.

Michael Utley: Get more information.

Chris Raines: Download the ebook, get access to the training, whatever it is. And that's the thing that they want, but the button that activates what they want says something like "submit".

Michael Utley: Yeah. Kind of sterile. Yeah. And submit, it's even like I submit to my authority, it's even got kind of a connotation of like-

Chris Raines: Yeah, that's kind of creepy.

Michael Utley: Submit.

Chris Raines: So for me, a good rule of thumb to what your call to action should be, is try to finish the sentence from the user's perspective of, "I want to..." Right. So if you're a home remodeling contractor, what does the person want when they get on your website? "I want to get a kitchen remodeling quote." So, take the "I want to" off. Your button, if that's what action you're driving on your site, your button should say, "Get my free remodeling quote," or "Get my kitchen remodeling quote." So always make sure to make sure the button communicates benefit to the customers. There's almost no instance where you should say "submit".

Michael Utley: Yeah, if you take that little nugget of insight, that also kind of applies to the rest of the page, right? You can kind of start with that submit button and explode it out from there so the headline, the way the form is framed up, how you're presenting the forms.

Chris Raines: Exactly. And that's the second one, how you're presenting the form, and how you're presenting this call to action. I call it the action block or whatever.

Michael Utley: Okay.

Chris Raines: And make sure that it stands out from a design standpoint. So an example would be, if you've got a really spartan design, that's kind of black and white with few uses of color, you don't want your call to action button to be say, gray. Make it your brand color, make it stand out. Or likewise, say your brand color is more orange, and your offsetting color is green or something, that's your brand colors. If the prominence of your design element, all your other design elements is orange, you want to make sure your call to action button is green. Make it stand out. And a lot of times you see people draw a box out and make the box background a different color, something to make that action area stand out and lift it in prominence in the design flow. And that just tells people, "This is the important thing on the page. This is what I want you to do."

Michael Utley: That's great.

Chris Raines: So one, make sure it's benefit-oriented, and two, make sure from a design standpoint, from color and prominence, make sure that it stands out.

Michael Utley: Excellent. Good. Yeah. And the next one is me. Put forms contact above the fold. This is really an extension of thinking about a good call to action.

Chris Raines: Right.

Michael Utley: We really think in terms of, there are two things that are going to happen on any kind of landing page. It's either that someone's going to give you information, or they're going to advance some sort of purchase decision. And so really the formats that this can kind of work through is pretty limited. It's either them calling a phone number, filling out a form, or starting some sort of purchase process.

Chris Raines: Right.

Michael Utley: And sometimes that form is that first step. If you're not doing ecommerce, ecommerce is obviously kind of a different animal, but for any kind of lead generation or anything where you're developing and gaining an audience, we often think in the West in a narrative format that starts with developing a character and a plot, and then there's a big conclusion at the end. It's sort of a rhythm that we have with the way that we think about how to structure things. "Well, they need to know this, and then they need to know this, and then they need to know this, and then they'll be primed and ready to act, and we'll have that form at the bottom of the page." But actually, with the internet, it works more like journalism. In journalism, the way-

Chris Raines: You don't want to bury the lede, right?

Michael Utley: Yeah, don't bury the lede. But in the old days, what they would do is actually physically lay it out with the most important stuff first, so the editor could literally come in and cut off a story from the bottom, and have something to work with that wasn't nonsensical. So they would literally structure it just like an upside down pyramid. What's the big deal? And who, what, where when? And then just to fill in with details until they ran out of space that day. So what we do with the internet, is we think in terms of what's the big call to action? What's the big reason that they're there and the benefits to them? So you're promoting that, with what we talked about with call to action, but in terms of the mechanics of how to take those next steps, we want those at the top.

Michael Utley: We want to start with that part of the story, not necessarily ramp up to it, assuming that somebody is going to read through this whole page. Sometimes people have been there before, and they're just popping in, because they're ready to drop that phone number into their contact so they can call you later. Or, they're filling out a form because they know they're ready to move ahead. And they've got the right people bought into something. You never know kind of what's in their minds exactly, when someone's coming to a page and filling in a form. They may already be familiar with your brand and kind of ready to go. Don't make them work for it. Put that stuff right at the top above the fold, as we say, on the website.

Chris Raines: And I'll say one thing too here, there are instances where you want to demote that. So if you have a page that's maybe not necessarily a PPC landing page or something, where you want to educate someone on, let's use the kitchen remodel example.

Michael Utley: Sure.

Chris Raines: You want to educate someone on all the different most popular tile options for a backsplash or something. For that, you probably want to promote the educational piece, and maybe put a link to fill out a form at the bottom. So I think it might be worth saying that it has to do with the user's intent.

Michael Utley: That's right. Yeah. Other pages and how they got to you. If they're coming in through a search engine, they're trying to do some educational content.

Chris Raines: Right.

Michael Utley: You may not have the form right there at the top. Interestingly though, on your point, we are on services pages on websites now experimenting with a form above the fold even on those interior pages.

Chris Raines: Okay.

Michael Utley: Treating them like landing pages. And it seems to be working well.

Chris Raines: Perfect.

Michael Utley: But yeah. Good. Let's talk about the next one here. So Chris, tell us about social proof on landing pages. I feel like there are two or three different elements that fall under this category, but what are the things that make up social proof? What is it, and what are some of the examples of it?

Chris Raines: Okay. Social proof, if you've never heard of the phrase, is basically testimonials from other people and it comes from a book by Robert Kiyosaki. Is that his name?

Michael Utley: I don't know.

Chris Raines: Am I confusing with the Rich Dad, Poor Dad guy? I might be.

Michael Utley: I don't know.

Chris Raines: I've already butchered his name, but he has a book called Influence. And it's essentially an outline of all the ways that people are influenced to make decisions. And so, there's things like authority, and there's things like consistency and things like that. One of those things is social proof. And it's basically communicating to a person that other people that are like you are experiencing a positive outcome from whatever you're selling. So in digital marketing, the way that we do that is through testimonials. So I'm a big fan. I'm a big fan of really promoting social proof as high up on the page as possible. Don't put it at the top, but people need to see... When people come to a website, I like to think of their threat level immediately as, and their distrust starts high, and it's up to you to bring it down.

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: So one of those things is authority like, "Oh, Better Business Bureau. Oh, they've been in business for 20 years."

Michael Utley: So we can have badges and certifications.

Chris Raines: Exactly. That's another way-

Michael Utley: In addition to testimonials. So two different social proof.

Chris Raines: Right, right. And so social proof, you want to think of two things. You want to include people that are similar to the type of people that you're trying to sell to, right? So if you're selling HR software, you want to put, "Peggy, HR Manager in Anchorage says, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." And videos are really powerful here if you can get videos. It's a little harder to do.

Michael Utley: A video testimonial.

Chris Raines: A video testimonial, because you can't fake it. People know it's real if it's a video. Text, you can see it, it's prominent, but it's possible to fake that stuff if you were a dishonest broker, right?

Michael Utley: Right.

Chris Raines: So yeah, those are the things I would say about social proof. If you can get it, use it. And I think every landing page should have some amount of social proof. It's that essential, it's that powerful, so go out of your way to get it. And if you can use the person's actual picture, that's better-

Michael Utley: Authenticity.

Chris Raines: Than just the quote. If you can get their permission to use their picture, that's better. If you can use their real name, that's even better. And there's privacy concerns, you want you work that out. But yeah, use real picture, real quotes, and make sure it's the type of person that you're trying to sell to.

Michael Utley: That's great.

Chris Raines: Yeah.

Michael Utley: Good. Yeah. Next step, use video on your landing pages. Video really increases the conversion rate of a landing page. If you're running a paid search or a social advertising campaign, and you're getting someone to a page, you really need to have made the most of what's going to happen on that page. There's a lot of expense. You've got the media costs, you've got the campaign planning, all the creative work that goes into planning the campaign, and then, you've got the missed opportunity if you don't really get their attention. And so thinking about the experience people are going to have once they're on the landing page, it's not an afterthought. It's kind of the meat and potatoes of doing any kind of advertising campaign or anything where you're driving activity with media. And so video, generally, we regard it as providing a 30% lift to the conversion rate of landing pages.

Michael Utley: That's the number that we use. That's kind of a conservative number based on our experience, and some stats from HubSpot. But we have found that anytime we test with or without video, video just works better. And one of the biggest ways that we see that is time on the page. Video is something that since broadband, so for 10 years, 15 years, everyone's comfortable consuming information as quickly as possible. And we have an amount of bandwidth when we're speaking, we have an amount of bandwidth when we're typing, and we have an amount of bandwidth when we're texting. People are used to this. Video conveys so much information so quickly. They're like, "Man, just show it to me. Just show it to me. I'm not going to read a whole bunch of stuff here. Show it to me."

Michael Utley: When people see the box, that standard kind of shape with a triangle button somewhere, they kind of intuitively know, "I'm going to get all the information real fast." And those videos, get right to the meat and potatoes, get right into what you want them to know. Don't feel like you've got to have a branded animated logo and all this crazy stuff, just get right into why they're on the page, what you want them to know, the features, the benefits, the service, the product, whatever you're doing, get right into it on that video. And these videos don't need to be long, or don't need to be TV commercial quality. This isn't meant to be stagey. It's meant to be informative, quick, structured the way where they're intuitively getting trained up on what you're talking about right away. Video is really good on a landing page.

Chris Raines: It's the crown jewel of all marketing assets, really. And I would say too, just to add to that, anytime you have a product where a transformation happens, or you need to see how something works, I'll give you an example. I just bought a standing desk for the office here, and it's right there. And the video on the landing page helped me convert. Why? Because I need to see how hard is this thing to put together? Is it going to take me three hours to put together? Is it a bunch of pieces? I watched the video, and there's really no other way to show it except through video. You've got to see the sequence of events.

Michael Utley: Right.

Chris Raines: So you see it put together, you can see it move up and down, and it really gave me a full immersive view of what this product was in a way that only video can. And that's why they paid money to have these videos created. And it converted me. They got $900 out of me because of that video, where they might not have before, because I would've had that question of like, "I don't know about this. Is it hard to put together? How long is it going to take to put it together? What are the pieces? What does it look like?"

Michael Utley: Right. And if you think video production is expensive, wait till you see a non-converting media campaign. Good. So let's wrap up with this next one, Chris. Landing page tip, get rid of distractions. Attention ratio should be one-to-one or very close. As we wrap up here, what does that mean? What does it mean on a landing page to get rid of distractions?

Chris Raines: Yeah. Anything that I would call a distraction on landing page is anything where there's a link or an opportunity to do something that that page wasn't designed for. So the idea of attention ratio, and there was a person that came up with this phrase, attention ratio, and I forget their name, and I should be attributing them, but maybe we'll put it in the description. But the idea of attention ratio is on one side of it, it is the goal of the page. And on the other side of that ratio, if it's a fraction, it's like this. The bottom half is the amount of links available on that page, or things to do on the page.

Chris Raines: And the idea is, it should be one-to-one or as close to one-to-one as possible. So, if your goal is, get a quote for kitchen remodeling, then you don't need... Any time you put a link on the page that says, "Read about our team bio, check out this article about us," that diminishes it. It goes from one-to-one, to two-to-one, to three-to-one, to four-to-one. And the idea is, the further away you get from one to one, the more ways you're distracting people, and the more things you're giving them to do, and they're going to do those things, and then they're going to forget about your primary call to action.

Michael Utley: Right.

Chris Raines: So people are on the internet, they know that there's ways to click around, they know there's lots of stuff to do, so you really have to pay attention and focus. Every landing page should have one goal.

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: There are times where you might have a secondary call to action. So maybe it's schedule my appointment, and the secondary is check insurance availability, something like that. But you really want to go one-to-one as much as possible. That's going to help your conversion rate. It's going to focus the attention on what you want people to focus on. So one-to-one, and that might mean, Michael-

Michael Utley: That's good.

Chris Raines: . . . removing the header and links on the header so there's no-

Michael Utley: Not taking people to a website experience, but to a landing page experience.

Chris Raines: Yeah.

Michael Utley: And segmenting your campaign so that if you have two sort of main audiences, clinicians and patients, and you're bringing a new medical product to North America, for example, you may have two separate campaigns, so that you're managing that experience on how you select people to bring into that experience. And you're able to remove the distraction for 50% of the people with every visit. That's a 50% improvement. That's huge.

Chris Raines: Right. Yeah. If you're trying to target new customers, you don't want to see "log in" at the top.

Michael Utley: Yeah. You don't need it.

Chris Raines: You know these people don't have log in, so it's just irrelevant to show that to them. So one-to-one attention ratio as much as possible.

Michael Utley: Excellent. Great. Thanks. This has been, what makes a great landing page? Drop your comments and your notes below, and hit subscribe, and thanks for being a part of what we're doing here at Dodgeball Marketing. We'll see you on the next one.