The universe delivers (more landing pages!)

Season 5, Issue 8 a marketer's wet dream

Warning: This is a longer than usual Mehdeeka, you might want to save it for when you’ve got some reading time.

A few weeks ago we had an issue dedicated to landing pages, and despite spending a really long time on it I was kind of like, all I did was say why the examples I hand picked were bad. Today we have the opposite! An incredible landing page I found while actually shopping for software.

Let me set the scene. A client wants to set up a calendar booking system and asked me what I would recommend, I have been in and around a few and thought ‘let me actually look it up and see who’s best for this specific client’s circumstances’ and I started by googling Chili Piper pricing.

All of a sudden, what did I see? A sponsored result. Interesting.

My Mehdeeka-topic-senses started tingling and I also remembered another client having recently asked me about directly comparing their product with a competitor’s with a ‘name and shame’ approach.

BUT WAIT THERE’S MORE! I’ve been saving this landing page for probably about a week, and so to prep this issue I revisited the journey to find… they’re either A/B testing, or they’ve changed it up, because there’s a new ad (with the same search term):

I’m basically frothing.

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Let’s start unpacking

I’ve put the landing pages and corresponding ads side by side:

This comparison, as well as the stand alone pages, have also been added to my growing folder of saved landing pages which you can check out any time here.

We’re starting BOLD with a direct call out to Chili Piper (side bar: I always think it’s one word Chilipiper which is also a typo made here, and in the PCC ad they have Chili-Piper. Not sure if it’s genuine typos and sloppy proof reading, or if it’s a slight at Chili Piper…) and a clear differentiation which is cold hard bottom line dollars. Ok, RevenueHero is cheaper, got it.

This reminds me of people who put self-marked skill rankings on their resumes. The ‘latest from G2 data’ does give it credibility, but I’ve already rolled my eyes and moved on without noticing it.

ROI, social proof, and then more specific ROI and value props. We start getting into why it’s cheaper - because they don’t charge you for every single form submitted, there’s some sort of quality control.

And here we find out the quality control is that they charge for meetings booked, not forms submitted. This is very in line with how SDRs get commission and sales team targets, so I can see a sales leader being super happy about this. And, love a pricing calculator.

An overkill testimonial which is way too much text to read but maybe someone doing due diligience would read it. But if they’re at due diligence, they wouldn’t be on a PPC landing page.

I like the header here, and we start getting to feature parity/comparison.

But then we go back to more testimonials? It feels too soon. Maybe it works? Maybe we will see whether or not it works when we look at version B!

Closing it out with a Hubspot call out (interesting, shows they’ve done some persona research and know most of their customers use Hubspot rather than Salesforce? Could be saying something about the company size they’re chasing?) and general integrations.

Finally, the CTA to book a demo.

Overall I really like this landing page and I do recommend reading through it. I do think it’s a bit long and there’s easy cuts to be made to it to make it more succinct and pointy, but there’s a strong (and classy?) emphasis on the comparison to Chili Piper, which ties back super nicely to how you found this page via Google, and it’s a smooth experience.

I am usually against naming the competitor you’re comparing yourself to because there’s a lot of risk in that - it could totally blow up in your face, and if you’re not very good or very mature as a product it makes you look like an arrogant teen trying to be an adult. But I think this was really well done, and given the Hubspot call out, I’m going to deduce they’re going for smaller companies who are wanting the Chili Piper product at discount prices, and that’s how Revenue Hero has positioned themselves here.

I’d never head of Revenue Hero before but after this they are stuck in my head.

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Compare the pair

Alright just for convenience, here’s the link to A, the link to B, and the link to A and B side by side.

First observation - they almost halved the length of the page.

Next, the obvious A/B variations is having the top two elements side by side vs stacked on top of each other, the hero value proposition is completely different (but, importantly, both match the value prop of the ad), and they’ve swapped the order of the social proof vs the ROI statistics.

The price calculator has moved up in version B, which is pretty in line with this variation being more focused on price. The wall of text testimonial is still there, so I guess it must be working for them.

The feature parity section is still there but with a variation on the header, the second lot of testimonials, and a final big change - they’ve gotten rid of Hubspot’s name.

A note here: my Chrome was set to different zoom rates when I was collecting the screenshots which is why elements look bigger in A, but that’s just me (I checked.)

A lot of the length being cut is actually attributed to those first two elements being side by side rather than stacked, and only one section was cut from variation B (which is the more in-depth part of the ROI - an interesting choice if you ask me, I would have cut one of the testimonials before I cut ROI and value props.)

The target of variation B is less clear than A which had the Hubspot mention.

What have we learned?

This page actually makes me re-think my aversion to comparisons! They don’t all have to be tacky! I really think this can be used as a “best practice” example for how to differntiate yourself in such an up front way.

The headers in particular is what stood out to me, it’s not just self-inflation about how good you are and then using grey and sad imagery for the competitor. The headers really addressed customer concerns, showing they’ve done their research. Compare RevenueHero’s headers like “a more cost effective solution doesn’t mean compromising on features” with this Thinkific vs Teachable landing page, which just kind of reads like a regular landing page with a feature comparison thrown in. Really lean into it and own it.

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Link round up

Squirrel365 allows you to take a colour paletter from Coolors and see what it looks like in a dashboard format to check if your colours work well together.

Here’s an alternative to Optimizely. With Google Optimize being sunsetted, Optimizely is the most commonly suggested alternative but quite pricey. VWO seems to do all the same things and is cheaper.

Speaking of confidence in comparing your product to a competitors, Lululemon ran an event where people could bring in fake Lulus and exchange them for real ones (for free):

Lululemon’s decision to engage with it directly through the Dupe Swap is both a gesture to bring new people into their stores and a wager that many will see, feel, and recognize the difference between the dupes and the real Align pants.

Gong have an interactive product demo that… I am kind of surprised I don’t think is that good? I feel like for how little effort it is to put these together, there’s a lot of room for improvement that would really only take an extra 2-3 min to write some more navigation instructions. A future Mehdeeka in here perhaps.

Ciao!