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Episode 131: 5 Elements of a High Converting Landing Page
501 Plays3 years ago
Today's episode is a special crossover episode with my other podcast over at the Till Agency, Stuff Marketers Say. In this episode I chat with one of my co-founders Jesse about the importance of lead generation and the elements of a high converting landing page. Basically it's a lot of the stuff of what we've learned through creating our own landing pages and what we've learned now through running ads for quite a few clients.
For show notes visit...https://daveyandkrista.com/audience-5-simpl…ge-that-converts/
Recommended
Transcript
Clear Headlines on Landing Pages
00:00:05
Speaker
You'll get a landing page is making sure that it's very clear exactly what it is that you are providing for someone on that page so that they don't have to go in and read 100 bullet points to have any clue of what's going on. And that's where that headline comes into play. A lot of people will just three tips to X, Y and Z. They'll just like put the headline or the name of that opt in or that download on there, which isn't necessarily a bad idea if the download or if the title effectively communicates
00:00:33
Speaker
what it is that it's doing and how it's gonna help somebody.
Crossover Episode on Lead Generation
00:00:52
Speaker
Today's episode is a special crossover episode with my other podcast over at the Till Agency, Stuff Marketers Say. In this episode, I chat with one of my co-founders, Jesse, about the importance of lead generation and the elements of a high converting landing page.
00:01:07
Speaker
Basically, it's a lot of the stuff that we've learned over the years of creating our own landing pages and what we've learned now through running ads for quite a few clients. If you're interested in more marketing advice, be sure to check out and subscribe to the Stuff Marker Say podcast. We focus on all things related to digital advertising and we have interviews with some pretty awesome business owners doing some awesome stuff.
00:01:30
Speaker
And we're also doing a giveaway. If you're interested in the Till team coming alongside your business to help you get started with ads, you'll want to check out the details of the giveaway. You can find these details in the show notes. So over on the Davian Crystal website on Till's Instagram or on the DK Instagram. So plenty of places to enter. Now let's get to the episode.
Auditing Landing Pages for Optimization
00:01:58
Speaker
Welcome to another episode of Stuff Marketers Say where we talk tactics, strategies, and learnings that are practical and to the point. In this episode, Jesse and I are talking landing page best practices. It doesn't matter how good your ads are if your landing page isn't converting. That's exactly what we get into into this episode. We dive into exactly what elements we're looking for when we audit landing pages for our clients and just things that we've learned along the way. Let's get to it.
00:02:28
Speaker
All right, we're back with another episode of Stuff Marketers Say. It's me and Jesse today. And by me, I mean Davey. Anyways, Ryan is doing all sorts of fun stuff. Closing on the house today, moving in. Exciting for him. Yeah. It's been a long process for him. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm sure he's excited to have that done and over with. I would say moving though, one of my least favorite activities.
Dedicated vs. Embedded Landing Pages
00:02:53
Speaker
Yeah, that's I think a fair way to put that it is because there's always things that come up, right? It's never goes as planned. I feel like it just takes so long to adjust after a move. I mean, we're seven months post a move. And I feel like we're just, you know, in the last few months kind of getting back in the groove. Yeah. I mean, you had some big adjustments to coming from city downtown.
00:03:14
Speaker
ish life to country living. More rural. Yeah, for sure. Definitely a little bit more of an adjustment. Today, we're talking landing pages for those who are tuning in. So we're going to talk about landing page best practices. We're going to talk about a few things that we've learned from, I mean, just troubleshooting, I think.
00:03:31
Speaker
dozens, hundreds of funnels seemingly, you know? So, excited to jump into that with you. Definitely excited to chat landing pages. If you're listening to the podcast, you've heard our intro and it's supposed to change almost every time, you know? It's just Ryan saying something like cliche marketing advice, right? You know what I'm talking about. I know what you're talking about.
00:03:54
Speaker
One of them is something about the price being raised at the end of whatever, right? Some people have taken that to think that our podcast is going from free to paid in 24 hours. So I've gotten a couple messages about that and looking back, I'm like, okay, I could see how you might think that. It's just there to sort of be a parody of, you know, the typical marketing stuff that you hear. It's pretty funny. Also, can I understand the confusion?
00:04:22
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And a few quick till updates that we should talk about as well. One, we are going to do some Q and A's coming up in the next month or so. All right. So be on the lookout for that. If you want to be the first to know about that, you should sign up for our mailing list. And you can do that by just going to the till website. You can download our case studies. If you're interested in potentially running ads, or you're just looking for case studies in your industry, you can download a guide to iOS 14, how that's impacting, basically tracking.
00:04:50
Speaker
an attribution. So you can download a guide to that if you're looking to set up your business manager account so that ads aren't shut off and so that you are in the best position to track conversions. And then what else do we have? We have that, a quick start guide for Facebook and Instagram ads. So basically, if you're looking to get started with ads,
00:05:09
Speaker
Go download one of those. You'll be on our email list. You'll get notified when we do these Q and A's. Bring your questions. It's not a webinar, I
Expected Conversion Rates
00:05:17
Speaker
guess is what we're trying to say. We're not selling you some course at the end of it. Show up with your questions and we will answer them live for you the best that we can. Yeah, it should be awesome. It's going to be a great way to, you know, whether you've been running ads and you've been running to issues with iOS updates or you're just jumping into ads.
00:05:36
Speaker
trying to figure out what's the best way to see the best ROI for your campaigns that you're running. We're happy to help and jump in there and get as specific as we need to, to help you, you know, have the most success possible. Yeah. I am pumped about that. I think that's going to be a lot of fun. So check out that, get on the email list, be the first to hear about that, submit your questions beforehand, come live with your questions. It doesn't matter to us. Anything else we've been working on? I mean, I'm sure there's other things. Those are the big ones. I think the things that I'm most excited about at least for sure.
00:06:04
Speaker
I did just get our website to load in sub one second. Sub one second page speed times, so that was fun. I probably spent too much time tweaking that. Because at some point, going from 1.2 seconds to sub one second, it's like... That diminishing returns factor. Yeah, that's right. For sure.
00:06:23
Speaker
Anyways, let's dive in. I know people are waiting for landing page best practices. And I would say that just kind of give this some context why we're talking about this. Because at the end of the day, just because your ads are converting well, or if the metrics around the ads themselves look really good, click-through rate looks really good, just a lot of engagement on a given ad, that doesn't necessarily mean that person is going to convert. And so one
Agency's Full Funnel Consulting
00:06:46
Speaker
of the biggest issues that we see are with landing pages.
00:06:49
Speaker
And so, through running the amount of ads that we've done and spending the amount of money that we have on Facebook and Instagram and other platforms, we've learned quite a bit about best practices for landing pages. As an agency, it would be really easy for us to come in there and say, hey,
00:07:06
Speaker
to our clients that maybe aren't seeing the best results on the back end to come in there and say, hey, our metrics look great from the ad platform. Our click-through rates are great. Our CPMs are low. You fill in the blanks there. But if it's not converging in the long run, we feel like we're not serving our clients the best. That's why we offer what we call full funnel consulting, where we are looking past that click. We are giving feedback on landing pages. And a lot of the feedback is going to be that when we give those feedback to clients and we see those results is where a lot of
00:07:33
Speaker
the best practices that we're going to talk about today come from. But that's something that we feel like is really, really important, so important that we're willing to spend a lot of time with our clients because that could be the gatekeeper for the success down the line beyond the ad. We have to be able to see that success beyond that ad click or else it's not going to be worth anybody's time in the long run.
Form Placement on Landing Pages
00:07:55
Speaker
Absolutely. And I would say that for us, there's a few different... We see it as having a few different responsibilities. I mean, one, we want the client to get whatever end conversion they're looking for, which often doesn't happen on the ad, right? Or really almost never happens on the ad itself, unless we're using an instant experience, which we're going to talk about in a little bit here. So the fact that having a landing page, making sure that forms are working, I mean, all those things are really important to us.
00:08:20
Speaker
because if that end conversion isn't happening, no matter how good the ad metrics look, our clients are going to be happy. We're not going to be happy with the results. So it's important to get that piece right. So one of the things I want to talk about just at the outset here is using a landing page versus just a form embed on a given webpage. So you might be thinking, especially with a lead campaign,
00:08:40
Speaker
a campaign where we're running ads to a downloadable or something that some sort of lead magnet freebie offer. Some people don't use landing pages for that. They just embed a form on, let's say, the homepage of their website or the about page or whatever, a blog post, something like that. If you're running stuff to a blog post, that might not be too bad of an idea if you know the conversion rate of that blog post is good. But in general, you're going to want to create a landing page for that
00:09:06
Speaker
specific offer, whatever you're running traffic to. So if we're going to be running a lead gen campaign, so if you're doing this yourself and you want people to sign up, don't drive it just to a homepage or to some other page on your website where there's a ton of other stuff going on where people might be distracted and not actually complete the action that you're looking for. So just wanted to mention that at the outset. I didn't know if you had anything else to say about that, Jesse.
00:09:29
Speaker
The opt-in pages, you hear a different language for what those are called. They used to be called a lot more squeeze pages because you're squeezing them through this.
00:09:37
Speaker
page where they can either do what you want them to do, usually opt in or purchase a product, a low ticket item or something like that, or leave. Those are the only two choices that they have. That's why we usually recommend removing menus from your pages and not having a sidebar with an about section like you would on your blog. Things like that that really have zero distractions. You get them there, especially because they're cold. A lot of times when they click from the ad, they maybe don't care as much about all the other things. They just want to know
00:10:06
Speaker
Hey, how can I get what it is that this ad told me that I could get speaking specifically more about info products and things like that but in general that those rules typically apply across the board.
Setting Realistic Conversion Goals
00:10:17
Speaker
Yeah. And I think you're probably good just set the goal of the outset here. Like when we're looking at landing pages, we're looking for, you know, I'd say above 50% conversion rates, right? Like, so, you know, half the people who hit that page should be completing whatever action we're looking for. And this is, I'm talking specifically about lead gen right now. And I know that what we look for, for webinars, for instance, it might be a little bit lower, you know, maybe 40%, maybe a little bit lower than 40%, 30% somewhere in there.
00:10:42
Speaker
But for simple downloads, certainly, or simple freebies, closer to 50% and beyond. Of course, if you're running a purchase campaign, the conversion rate's going to be lower on that given landing page. So basically, the bigger the ask, the lower the conversion rate. But if you're running a lead gen campaign to a freebie, would you say 50% is a pretty good goal? Yeah, I think that.
00:11:04
Speaker
if you're an industry that has a little bit more competition, if you're not hitting that 50% mark, it's going to be difficult for you to get costs that are acceptable for you to actually have an ROI on the back end. That just makes it worth it. One other note before we go a little bit further here. When we talk about landing pages, you talk about the difference, or not the difference, but how landing pages sometimes called squeeze pages. Technically, a landing page is really
00:11:27
Speaker
it could be any kind of page, right? Your homepage is a landing page, your about page is a landing page. Really, we're talking about in the context of some sort of offer, a page that has some sort of offer on it that we're driving traffic to. So just for some clarity there. But let's just dive into some of the elements that should go on a landing page. So we have this goal of about 50%, especially for freebies. And then maybe it's a little different based on the actual conversion we're looking for. What are the sorts of things that should go on a landing page?
00:11:56
Speaker
Yeah i think the first thing that we need to take a look at when you get a landing page is making sure that it's very clear. Exactly what it is that you are providing for someone on that page so that they don't have to go in and read a hundred bullet points.
00:12:10
Speaker
to have any clue of what's going on. I mean, that's where that headline comes into play. A lot of people will just three tips to X, Y, and Z. They'll just like put the headline or the name of that opt-in or that download on there, which isn't necessarily a bad idea if the download or if the title effectively communicates what it is that it's doing and how it's going to help somebody.
00:12:29
Speaker
I personally prefer to use a little bit more of a benefit-driven headline that doesn't necessarily have the name of the download. I don't think the name is all that important on that landing page. I think that headline, though, is really key. I think that's one of the most important things, especially when we're talking about how much traffic, when you're driving traffic from Facebook or Instagram, is going to be from mobile.
Benefit-Driven Headlines
00:12:51
Speaker
You just don't have a ton of real estate to drive that point home. That's where that headline becomes really, really important.
00:12:58
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And to your point, I mean, the title of the the guide might be something like three Facebook hacks to, you know, to better results or something like that. And that doesn't need to be the headline on the landing page. So what you're saying, it can be it can be if you feel like it effectively communicates that, but it doesn't have to be.
00:13:15
Speaker
Yeah, and I would say in that example, I don't think that's particularly benefit driven. So it could be like three Facebook hacks for making more money on ads or something like that. That really gets to the benefit of the guide. And this is one of my favorite ways to test names for guides as well. Because you can just swap out the headline there and you can change the name of the guide pretty easily without actually changing the content.
00:13:39
Speaker
Yeah. And you'd be amazed at how many people download things simply by reading the headline. And they don't even read like, you know, so much else on, on the page. Some of my best converting landing pages that I've ever seen are basically a headline you should often form, you know, with like a graphic here and there, but that's it. And sometimes those convert really, really well, because if you're able to communicate
00:14:00
Speaker
what those benefits are how they're actually helping someone achieve what it is all the way down the line and you're reaching a little bit there you don't want to give in the next step they want to know if i do all of these things how is it actually going to change.
00:14:14
Speaker
my life, make something easier, help me do something better, you know, whatever it is. Yeah, for sure. And speaking to your other point about just really conveying the benefits of the landing page and how you do that, we see a lot of paragraph text in things like italics, you know, or some sort of script. You want to really make it as easily read as possible, skimmable even. And so often, you know, the best way to do that is just through bullet points.
00:14:39
Speaker
three to five bullet points that, again, are benefit driven and really convey what somebody is getting and why they should download it. That's usually enough. You don't have to write a book. And remember, paragraph text is just generally harder to read. If you're going to include paragraph text, it really should be maybe two, three sentences tops. I wouldn't go much beyond that. And if you're going to include paragraph text, it's not a bad idea to like bold certain sentences or italicize certain sentences. That way, if someone's scanning, they're able to pick out those most important points.
00:15:09
Speaker
If you're having trouble kind of deciding what you want for your benefits to be, a good test that you can use is what I like to call the so that test. You may hear this, I don't remember where I picked this up from. I didn't come up with this, but basically you read your statement. So if, you know, if our thing is like, you know, we have three hacks and one of the hacks is using dynamic creative options and in your creative for your ads, you know, we're teaching you how to use dynamic creative so that
00:15:37
Speaker
it drives your CPMs down and your engagement up. So you're connecting whatever it is that you're teaching them to the end benefits. That's a nice little way to be able to kind of easily tell yourself, oh, is this actually talking about a benefit or am I talking something feature based on what we're actually teaching? Yeah, I think that's awesome. I think that the so that test really can transform all of your copy and make it that much more effective. 100%.
00:16:04
Speaker
Moving on, bullet points, social proof. I would say that social proof is something we recommend being everywhere, all over the place. As strong as social proof as you can make it, that might be testimonials, badges, places that you've been featured.
00:16:19
Speaker
that are relevant to your industry but social proof goes a long way and I would say that sometimes I land on a landing page and it looks kind of sketchy but the social proof is strong and so I'll download it anyways you know or I'll purchase or whatever you know whatever it might be.
Social Proof and Credibility
00:16:35
Speaker
Right. I mean, at the end of the day, it's like, especially if you're listening and you are in a industry that you care about design and aesthetics, that might be hard to hear and might be hard to believe. Right. But at the end of the day, I think social proof can make up for a lot of weaknesses. Never never skimp on social proof. You look at Amazon, you're reading 10,000 reviews on a product and deep down, you know, hey, these are probably just review farms.
00:17:03
Speaker
But there's so many of them. You're like, ah, it can't be all of them. And you still buy that product over another product simply because of that social proof. And that's why that can be so effective is because we like to believe in other people rather than the company telling us about why I should buy their product.
00:17:19
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, I think we see you see ourselves in other people, you know, too. I mean, this is why before and afters, especially when we're talking about the fitness industry are so important. And you can't, you know, for those of you in the health industry, right, you can't use before and afters on ads, but you certainly, you know, can throw them on your website.
00:17:37
Speaker
Moving on, this is something that I feel like I wish we had Ryan here for, because this would be the first
Mobile-First Landing Page Design
00:17:42
Speaker
thing. He's like, it needs to be mobile friendly. And not just mobile friendly in the sense that like, oh, it's responsive, so it looks good on mobile. But the first thing, the first criticism I'm going to get from Ryan, and I take care of a lot of our landing pages,
00:17:55
Speaker
you know, or at least I'm kind of the first line of reviewing landing pages often. But when it goes to Ryan, Ryan will almost always be like, Hey, the form isn't above the fold, you know, or it's a little bit cut off, get the form above the fold. And, you know, depending on what we're using to build a landing page, like maybe that makes the desktop look sort of like weird, you know, or like not formatted.
00:18:16
Speaker
exactly how I would want it. And he's like, well, I don't care. Cause 80% of our traffic is coming from mobile. So yeah. So, you know, we're going to do this. We're going to make sure it looks good on mobile first. And he's right. We should design for mobile first and then go to desktop. And this is especially true.
00:18:33
Speaker
for landing pages, I think. Design for mobile first. Make sure there is a form above the fold or some sort of call to action above the fold that's going to get you to a form. But I would say really the minimum form fields should be above the fold. Definitely. And even if that's just a button that then pops up and then kind of like auto scrolls to a form, you know, if you're a little bit more design conscious,
00:18:58
Speaker
And you don't want to have like, you know, massive fields above and you feel like you're having trouble fitting all that. You can just put a button and then auto scrolls to something there. It's not it's not necessarily the first preference, but.
00:19:09
Speaker
It's an acceptable substitute if you're having trouble fitting everything above the fold. Yeah, I would agree with that. And we occasionally do that on our landing pages for sure. The only problem with that is that occasionally the page is taking long to load. For some reason, it could be a slow internet connection on the user side. They start clicking that button. The button doesn't work. And so they think the form doesn't work or the landing page doesn't work and they click back. So that's why I think if I have the option of having the form fields above the fold, I'd rather do that.
00:19:37
Speaker
That's pretty much it. Imagery, I think, is important. If you can have some sort of relevant image that shows off what it is that the person is getting in their download or something that at least hints at it, I think that's always a good idea versus having no imagery at all. Anything else come to mind for you? We can speak to the imagery. The next step in that is just making sure that your ad, when someone clicks on an ad, they land on your landing page, they need to feel like they're in the right place.
Ad and Landing Page Congruency
00:20:07
Speaker
that congruency aspect from ad to landing page is really, really important. People are very skeptical when it comes to what they're clicking on. People are nervous that they're going to enter their information in the wrong place. They're going to get hacked or X, Y, and Z. They're going to get malware or whatever.
00:20:24
Speaker
And so not that your site or your landing page can just be, Oh, it doesn't look that sketchy though. But if it doesn't feel like they're in the right place after clicking on something, if the language isn't can grow in, if some of the imagery isn't congruent, a lot of times people will be like, like I'm in the wrong neighborhood. I need to get out of here. We have to remember that so much of the benefits of doing lead gen like this is you're able to get in front of a really cool audiences with very minimal ask.
00:20:46
Speaker
get them on your email list and allows you to buy time to build trust for when you actually want to sell them something. We want to make sure that we aren't scaring people off by not being congruent, not sending people somewhere that they get there and they feel like, oh, this isn't what I clicked on. And so that's a really important point. It's usually pretty easy to do, whether it's through similar language, similar colors, similar imagery, that's usually enough to make people feel like, oh, yeah, I'm supposed to be here.
00:21:12
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And I would say that congruency is one of the first things that we check for. So congruency is going to be one of the first things that we look for just making sure that look and feel is congruent between the ad and the landing page. And then if somewhere to click over to the website as well. So there's definitely
00:21:29
Speaker
I think examples where we sort of break that rule. For instance, on the ad side of things, trying to do things that maybe aren't on brand but would catch somebody's attention. But there's always a fine line to walk for sure between doing something that definitely catches somebody's attention but doesn't do so in a way that's going to help you build trust with that person.
00:21:49
Speaker
You know, tailoring messages, you know, to cold audiences, I think is important. That's another note we have here. And I think especially when we're doing lead gen, I think we always have cold audiences in mind first, you know, I mean, people who have been kind of around for a while, who are warmer leads or warmer prospects, we definitely want to capture emails as well. But at the end of the day, I think who we're writing for, who we're creating that messaging for is cold audiences first.
00:22:17
Speaker
Exactly and a good way to kind of think about that is read it from the perspective of someone like do they need to know about your products they need to know who you are are there like references in there that they wouldn't get if they are on your email list are they especially in an industry where you're selling a product that isn't necessarily like.
00:22:36
Speaker
a super well-known style of product. I remember bath salts were getting super popular. That was something that a lot of people were capitalizing on the warm audience of people who knew they were. The people that were most successful were the ones who were explaining what that process was or what those things even were to cold audiences. It was a no-brainer because
00:22:58
Speaker
So many people who started using products like that were all about it. And then people that had tons of social proof from those people on those ads. But then as they were explaining that and making it clear and explaining what it was to people who didn't know, they were really, really successful. And that's a small example, but something that I think really proves the point of if you're able to communicate that to cold audiences in a way that doesn't require them to have any knowledge of it whatsoever, you're going to be a lot more successful.
00:23:25
Speaker
Yeah. And you're really only going to scale with cold audiences too. So pretty key. As far as troubleshooting a landing page. All right. I feel like we've covered most of what goes into a good landing page.
Consistent Testing of Landing Pages
00:23:35
Speaker
I would say one of the things that we always do, I mean a rule on our team. I don't even know how many times we've explained this to the team, but you always, always, always have to check that the landing page is working from start to finish, that the pixel is firing, that the form is working, that the, you know, you get the email,
00:23:53
Speaker
or whatever it is that you're supposed to get on the follow-up. But you got to make sure, even if you think it's working, even if you're like, I know I set up everything correctly, you need to actually test it. Yep. Absolutely. I can't tell you how many times, even me personally, when I've set things up, I'm like, you know, why isn't this ad performing well right out of the gate? I think I thought this copy was so good. And then, you know, I go to find out, shoot, I forgot to connect the form.
00:24:17
Speaker
or whatever it is. And nine times out of 10, if it's like a glaring issue where even if Facebook's reporting like, you know, a conversion or two and it just like falls off, nine times out of 10, it's going to be a technical issue when results just take a complete nosedive. So it's definitely something you want to take a look at, especially if it's something that's been running for a little while and you start to see like a pretty big spike in cost. Sometimes Amazon, you know, when Amazon went down, hosting went down, it was like, you know, the entire internet went down.
00:24:45
Speaker
And then so many landing plates builders are hosted on Amazon or Google's or Microsoft's platforms.
00:24:51
Speaker
When stuff like that happens, it's always gonna need to check to make sure that everything's still working. Yeah, for sure. Especially if you have a big team or multiple parties that are going to be testing different things or swapping different things out or making updates, it's always good to have somebody every once in a while just making sure that results seem consistent, nothing seems off. And again, no matter how small the change, even if you're just going to a landing page and making a quick copy update, just testing that the form still works after that and everything still seems like it's all good.
00:25:20
Speaker
As far as if it's not a technical issue, one of the first things that we're going to be looking for is adjustments to headlines and copy and just messaging in general. We try not to change too much at once because then we don't know exactly what's moving the needles. Would it be fair to say that's one of the first things we look at? The headline, again, copy above the fold because we want to be able to test things incrementally. If you have a landing page you just spent
00:25:44
Speaker
10 hours creating another copy. Four, you don't need to go in and then redesign the entire thing. We want to test those things that are above the fold first, test that headline, make some changes to that before you jump in and start tearing everything apart because you feel like it was a disaster. A lot of times, you may be able to just tweak the headline and all of a sudden see better conversions.
00:26:04
Speaker
sometimes the smallest changes can make a really big difference. Yeah, for sure. And from there, changing the design, I mean, really, I guess one of the first things we look at, we look at technical stuff, we look at where the form is, then we'd probably start looking at headlines and then bullet text, things like that. So that's probably just about the order that we'd go in. Yeah. And then if you still aren't seeing good results there, then the next thing that we do is probably say, hey, let's test a different offer.
00:26:27
Speaker
because sometimes there are things that just we feel like a great fan it just there's no interest in it and that sometimes is the case and there's no like shame and and starting from scratch from the ground up with it with a new offer and that's one of the reasons why we really recommend that you don't spend six months putting together something that's going to be so perfect because until you test until you figure
Testing Copy and Titles
00:26:46
Speaker
out
00:26:46
Speaker
Hey, are people willing to give me their email address for this thing? You just really don't know. We've been doing this a long time and I'll always say I'm happily proven wrong if we can get something out the door quickly and test it. And if it doesn't work, great. Let's test something different. Yeah. And there's so many different hacks here. I mean, one, I've already alluded to, you know, you can change the landing page copy to see if that results in higher conversions before actually going back and having to redo the guide, right? So you can change the headline, you can change even the title of the downloadable, right?
00:27:14
Speaker
because no one knows until they actually download it. And as long as the, again, there's congruency between the landing page and what people are actually downloading, nobody's going to be upset necessarily by that, right? So you can really play around with the messaging, right? And dial that in before actually having to change the guide. But if you do need to change the guide and you want to test some stuff, you know, and you have a couple of different blog posts on different topics that you think interest people, what you can do is you just run traffic campaigns to each of those blog posts, see maybe which is, you know, the most popular post. And then from there, create maybe
00:27:42
Speaker
some sort of content extension, some sort of guide off of that blog post. There are so many different ways you can test that. Heck, you could create a guide and maybe one landing page isn't working. You could create maybe three landing pages that are just a little bit different and run traffic to all of them and then keep the one that works. I mean, there's just an endless possibility of tests that you can run before taking the time to actually create another guide from scratch. So one of the great things about Facebook and Instagram
00:28:10
Speaker
Definitely. One thing that I think maybe we should talk about is for people who are saying like, OK, like this all sounds great, but I have no idea how to create a landing page or maybe, you know, you're not the most technologically savvy.
Tools for Creating Landing Pages
00:28:22
Speaker
Maybe you have someone else update your website and all this is kind of going a little bit over your head. There are lots of ways for you to be able to create landing pages, whether it's
00:28:31
Speaker
using third-party softwares. I'm actually pretty partial to using third-party softwares like ClickFunnels or LeadPages, or you know, there's a million of them out there. We've been using Converty lately, but there's a million of them out there for you to use, and I'm partial to those because it usually just makes it really easy for you to update those things. It automatically takes the headers off your site. It allows you to use different domains and things like that, so it really allows you to do those things really easily, and there's usually a dedicated support team to help you do that. There's templates that are built in,
00:29:01
Speaker
that are built to convert well. A lot of times, you just have to change the content, change the colors, and at least for initial tests, they're usually pretty good. You can get those up and running pretty quickly. If those are things where you're like, hey, I really don't want to spend another $20 a month or $200 for a lifetime membership or whatever it is, there is another option that Facebook offers you called an instant experience. Instant experiences are
00:29:23
Speaker
really awesome for a couple of different reasons. One is they don't have to leave the platform for someone, Facebook or Instagram, to actually visit your landing pages, which is great. They make it pretty easy to design them. There is, especially if you're not a developer, those instant experiences are going to be a little bit more cookie cutter sometimes, but it allows you to still create a landing page and you still may need to like connect things to a form.
00:29:49
Speaker
Hey, I just want something up. I want something quick. Instant experiences could be a great way for you. Another one I'm just going to be using Facebook lead forms where you talk all about, you know, that download, you click on the Facebook ad and then Facebook is going to auto fill their email address and name. They can click on it and it's going to give you their email address.
00:30:07
Speaker
That does require a Zapier integration to your main list. If your mailing list, you know, ConvertKit, Mailchimp, Flowdesk, you know, whatever you're using doesn't have a native integration with Facebook to be able to send those leads to that. But I believe that you could use a free Zapier account. I could be wrong there. Maybe you may need a paid account to use the Facebook leads integration, but essentially I'm sure that you've seen it. You've clicked on an ad, you're able to fill in the name and email just right there within Facebook and then
00:30:33
Speaker
you can send those directly to your list and then send them to download from there. So there are other options there as well to kind of cut down on the amount of steps that you need for the end user to actually download what you need or what you want them to, but you just want to throw those options out there for you too.
00:30:48
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. Again, I feel like Ryan has tested a lot with instant experiences, so it'd be great to hear his opinion on those at some point. We'll have to recap that in another episode. But instant experiences, again, great for people who don't want to deal with building a landing page outside of Facebook, want to keep everything there. And again, typically those are going to load a little bit more quickly because they're built within Facebook and people don't have to leave the platform.
00:31:11
Speaker
As far as landing page stuff goes, I would say hopefully a lot of people are on modern website builders, which typically make it pretty easy to build those landing pages out on your website. I think there are definitely some advantages to that. One of them being just cost. If you're already paying for some sort of website platform, then it makes it easy to keep everything there. And then once you have one, you can typically duplicate it and create others just using that same templated design.
00:31:36
Speaker
So, that's an option as well if you're trying to cut down on cost. One of the reasons we use lead pages for a while, but stuff like that gets expensive, especially when there's options out there like Converty, which we've been really happy with. And Converty, I think, is C-O-N-V-E-R-D-Y. They have a life team offer. We got it because they had a good 30-day money-back guarantee. And we thought, if we didn't use this or didn't work out, we could take advantage of that.
00:31:59
Speaker
But it's been great and they roll out with a lot of new features pretty frequently. But again, lifetime offer and it wasn't that expensive. It was like 300 bucks. And I want to say we were paying at least close to $100 a month for lead pages. This has been a pretty good alternative. ClickFunnels, I want to say starts at 100 bucks a month. If you want more of the features, it jumps to 300 bucks a month. So there definitely are platforms that are pricey, especially if you're just getting started.
00:32:23
Speaker
If there's a barrier to entry for you to getting landing pages up and running, I mean, cost is one of those. Like Davey said, there are other options on your own website, again, Facebook lead ads or Facebook instant experiences. All those things are great options. And I don't think that if you have good copy and you kind of nailed down your offer and then some of those other things that we talked about and you pull those into what we're talking about now, I don't think that you're going to see a huge conversion difference of the messaging is there, you know, whether you use one over the other. Yeah, absolutely.
00:32:51
Speaker
Well, I think that covers it. What do you think? Yeah, I think so. Awesome. Of course, if you have any questions, you can go to the show notes for this episode and you can leave us a comment and get back to us there. You can send us a DM on Instagram and we'll get back to your question there. And if we don't have time for whatever reason to get back to your question, we'll try to answer it on a future episode. But when you send us questions that just automatically becomes content ideas for us. So if you do send us a question, there's a good chance that we're going to get you in an answer in some shape or form.
00:33:20
Speaker
Like we mentioned at the beginning of the episode, you can download a guide to iOS 14, a quick start guide for Facebook and Instagram if you're not familiar with that world and it's to Facebook and Instagram ads specifically. And then you can also download one of our newest guides or it's not a guide rather, you can download our case studies if you're looking for
00:33:39
Speaker
examples of ads strategies that work in different industries. Be sure to check out that. All of those things will get you on our email list and you'll be able to learn about things like our upcoming Q&A sessions. And we're going to try to make those industry specific just so that we can provide the most value for the different industries that we work with. So thanks, Jesse, for your time. Yeah, of course.
00:34:13
Speaker
Thanks for tuning in to the Brands That Book Show. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider subscribing and leaving a review in iTunes. For show notes and other resources, head on over to dvandchrista.com.