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Season 5 Issue 4 - Landing pages
Building on from the issue a few weeks ago about websites and different functions/modules you might want, there was a lot to go deeper on and one topic that I really wanted to talk about more was landing pages.
BUT before we get there, I want to say I found an example of the original advice from last week’s issue working for someone! Shout out to running experiments and using data and research as a basis for decision making:
What makes a good landing page?
Note: I can’t put screenshots of all the landing pages I’m going to be discussing in the newsletter because it won’t fit in inboxes so I’ll be linking to files in a G Drive, sorry for the multi-tab experience but bear with me. Here’s the link to the full folder, links below will be to specific landing page files to make it easy to follow along.
Top notch landing pages are hyper focused on getting the page visitor to do one thing and one thing only. That one thing can be anything - sign up to a newsletter, register for an event, buy something, download an ebook, whatever.
The important thing is that page exists only to get you to do that one thing. No distractions.
That’s why it’s quite common to see landing pages without a navigation bar, with a simplified design, and with hyper focused content on it. A really good landing page will also have consistent messaging with whatever it was that drove you to the page.
For simplicity’s sake, we’re going to just focus on paid ads that drive to landing pages, not native forms or driving to content like blogs and so on. So, what you saw on the ad (and what enticed you to click) should match the page you land on.
This consideration of CX or UX counts towards whether a landing page is “good”.
So let’s start with an example from Mr Yum, I went through their current ads to find a few different landing pages and discovered they’ve got multiple ads running, highlighting different value propositions. On the left we’ve got why one customer switched over from a competitor, and on the right we’ve got a video about multi-venue management being easy with Mr Yum.
So far so good. But then… all the ads they were running were pointing to the same landing page. And to top it off… the landing page is just a very long form - no copy or content on the page.
The next level up from this is Dovetail.
Once again we’ve got multiple ads touting different value props - the left is on the flexibility of the Dovetail platform and the right is on time savings. Quite nice, but they have the same caption, that is an easy improvement they could make. As for the landing page…. yep all the ads they’re running go to the same one.
It has a number of improvements over the Mr Yum one though:
Navigation is removed, it’s a dedicated page on a subdomain (try.dovetailapp) so it’s possible this is being managed through Unbounce or some other landing page specific system
It opens with a customer value prop
The content of the page highlights use cases
Adds social proof with customer logos and a testimonial down the bottom
The not so good:
There’s no form on the page, if you decide to act on the CTAs they take you to another page
The header of the page kind of matches the second ad, but it doesn’t match the others, so there’s a disconnect in the messaging and experience of going from ad > page
Look, I know making new landing pages for every ad is a lot of work, but it’s worth it. And if you’re A/B testing ads to see what gets the best click through rate, that’s great, but don’t do 5 variations, you’ll slow down how quickly you get to a result and you’ll have 4 losing variations - not ideal for customers to see.
A philosophical aside
I asked myself “why do we do this”, as in “why do marketers who know best practice and have it in their ability, not follow best practice” - why are we launching ads that go to disconnected, one-size-fits-all landing pages? There’s probably a lot of answers, and in my experience the most common reason is someone above you is pushing you to “just get it out” or some similar iteration of “I want it/I said so” without giving you the time or tools they need to succeed.
So what is a good response to that? Try making a trade off with whoever might be pushing you to ship half finished work - “I can do this, but in order to get the work done, something else will have to slide, can I get a deadline extended/a piece of work given to someone else/this other piece of work has turned out to be a time suck with no value can I completely drop it?”
Usually, if you have a clearly defined trade off you’re proposing, the person will just say yes because they really want the first thing they asked for.
Another thing to try is actually documenting the process of launching a new ad, and putting in the process that it needs a matching landing page as part of the “definition of done” - if you’re working with tech minded leaders they’ll go for this.
Secondly, there’s a silver lining to big brands that are touted in the media as being local success legends having shitty landing pages. It, in a weird way, means we’re all in this together. I remember a period in my career where I felt like I was so behind because I wasn’t creating 1:1 landing pages for ads because I was being rushed. Turns out, marketers at tech darlings are dealing with the same shit we little people are.
Finally we’ve got a set of 3 ads from Employment Hero. They’re each quite distinct (in fact 1 seems to be regionally generic, 2 is specifically for Malaysia, and 3 is for the UK), and happily, so are their landing pages!
The three landing pages (click here for 1, here for 2, and here for 3) are also very distinct. 2 has a banner that appears when you scroll down saying demos are available in both English and Malay, and the “as seen in” section features local media and publications. The localisation is really nice, so if you’re looking for some case studies on a brand doing localisation well, huge shout out to Employment Hero.
It’s not clear in the screenshots, but the images on 2 are actually animations/gifs that show how the product works. I’m not sure how long this link will work for, but here’s the actual page link so you can check it out (for future readers who click this after the page has been retired, sorry!)
It’s really nice to see one clear brand displayed in 3 very different ways, so definitely check out all 3 variations.
Some quick hits on landing pages
When I first started thinking about doing this issue, I actually clicked on an ad from the newsletter Dense Discovery (big recommend on subscribing to this one) and the landing page said “Welcome Dense Discovery subscribers” and as someone who chronically “right click open in new tab” so I have a mess of tabs open, this reminder of why I had opened this tab as a “save for later” reading page was a nice call back.
Not Australian, but Butter has a really nice and simple landing page of above the fold/customer value prop > social proof > ROI > how it works > summary of the value > CTA and use cases.
And finally, some Atlassian examples of how different landing pages can be. This Trello page is to sign up to a challenge that will demonstrate the value of the product and teach you some new organisational skills, this page about migrating to the cloud is for a very different audience, this Jira landing page has strong messaging and a very differentiated brand/tone, and finally this Confluence page is the most “traditional”.
I only recently learned that you can see what ads a company is running on LinkedIn the same way you can on Facebook. If you also didn’t know, just go to any company page, click “posts” and then click “ads”:
And then we have tools. I mentioned Unbounce above, I’ve used it and I like it. I have also used native landing pages from Pardot, Hubspot, and Marketo and, they’re fine. They get the job done. You don’t need a fancy landing page tool, but it does make things more flexible, like for trying new designs.
Google Optimize has a bit of a learning curve to it, but it’s free and does the job and tracks experiments well. If you’re having tool envy, remind yourself a good craftsperson never blames their tools.
The actionable part
Here are my tips for refreshing the way you look at your own landing pages (because we all get a bit blind when we’re too close to our own work):
Check out other landing pages, even from companies that are super different from your own or for different subject matters (i.e. an event page if you’re doing a product demo page, a fintech page if you’re HR tech). Critically evaluate them, what do they do well? What do they do badly? Now cross reference this with your own.
When you’re going hard on one focus (for example, pushing product value prop), run an exercise where you rewrite things from a different focus - try use cases, personas, or pain points to refresh your point of view.
Revisit the 5 B2B emotions and see how you can introduce an emotional narrative line to your page (to be honest this is the Mehdeeka I revisit the most out of all them)
When you need tough love and to beat yourself up a bit, line by line ask “what is this sentence trying to do” and ruthlessly cut it down.
A mini reader survey
Can you please click this link if you work from home (majority or all the time) and this link if you work from the office (majority or all of the time). You’ll be treated to a little surprise gif, but please don’t click both or this won’t work as a poll. Thank you!
This week I have links!
After last week’s dessert, we’ve got links again. First of all, this incredible read which very succinctly sums up building a SaaS in terms of where your attention should be at what stage, and it’s very relevant to marketing (it’s not that long but you will want to give it your attention).
Second up is a LinkedIn post that is nicely tied into today’s theme, about running A/B tests using a 5 second methodology.
A break from work related links, this piece from Vox talks about how we as humans always hesitate to do something as simple as give a compliment because we’re worried about how we look, but on the other hand receiving that little compliment truly has an effect on someone’s day. The overall message is to do more of this kind of thing and get out of your own head because it’ll make both you and the person you’re complimenting feel good.
I had a similar conversation with friends recently where we said we’d all had experiences where commented on an Instagram story when we saw them in real life, but they never interact with it on Instagram and so we dall assumed no one liked what we were posting (the posts in question being things like pictures of what I’m cooking for dinner - low stakes stuff). That conversation ended with a pact to react to each others’ stories and hype it up when we do like something - why keep it to yourself when you can share the enjoyment?
Finally: This tweet showing McDonald’s 1996 website.
Next week!
I am organising some interviews around Google Analytics. If you have questions you’d like me to ensure get answers, just reply to this email and let me know what you want to know!