Lessons

Lesson Info

Anatomy of a Product Landing Page

The anatomy of an actual landing page. Tons of different examples and opinions out there. We're gonna see the breakdown of section by section, but it's just the simplest, cheapest way. We're not gonna build out a whole site, that's ridiculous. We want to think first about the content. Whenever you design anything, we want to focus on, first of all the audience, which we've already done. When I teach about design in other classes, we say, okay, we need to understand the audience then we need to understand the content. By that I mean what are we promising as the outcome or end result? What are some of the benefits? Remember, I said we won't talk about features initially. We wanna tell people about benefits. This is getting a little bit into marketing sales, but what are the benefits? Then maybe briefly share how it works, features, not necessary, but we could include that and then we wanna have one call to action. We don't want to have, oh, give us your email, and go like our Facebook pa...

ge, and read our blog, and watch this video, and do all these 17 other things because if you think about it, it's gonna distract them from taking that one action you want them to do. Also on the landing page, we wanna think about just for content any social proof we can add. Even if I'm the lawn mowing person and I really haven't had customers yet, maybe just offhand, I've mowed my neighbors' lawns in the past to be a nice neighbor and maybe they could give me testimonials or something like that. We wanna try and include some social proof like that even if they haven't been an official customer under our official business, which we don't even have a name for it yet 'cause it doesn't matter. Anatomy of a landing page. Whenever you think about this and you'll notice this now when you're on other landing pages as well, even if you're going through, say, a checkout process, Amazon does this, where once you get to checkout and once it's time to pay, the rest of the navigation goes away. It's very difficult to go back and start searching for something else once you're in checkout and this is kind of a user experience strategy where you wanna put blinders on the person to get them through that experience, to make sure they checkout and don't drop off and get distracted. Our landing page, we want it to have no navigation, no linking off to your wonderful about how this company started story, which is very wonderful, but no one cares about that right now and it's a distraction. No linking off to Facebook or anything like that. At the top, we wanna have really, really focused, focused headline. Something that's gonna grab people's attention and we'll see a bunch of different examples of that. Then, we want to get into some of the benefits and then maybe some of the features, but we'll see a few versions here. Now, we wanna give people some type of offer. Yes, we're asking for their email address, but ideally we're offering something to them in return. I'll give you some examples of that. Maybe it's a discount, maybe it's an add-on service, who knows what, but we can brainstorm what that might be. Then, we just wanna have that single call to action. Now, there's many ways this will manifest obviously, but as you are creating your own landing page, you really wanna think about these components. You know you've been to landing pages where you scroll and it's like you're scrolling through a very long page. That can get kind of distracting. Maybe your landing page becomes one of these longer, more content-rich experiences, but for now we're gonna keep it very, very simple. Some landing page tips here. I can't stress the first one enough. A lot of people think that they need to learn HTML and learn how to code to make a landing page or something and it's completely unnecessary unless you really want to learn that, but there's so many different services out there to give you a starting point and we will look at one of those today. Within these services there are all kinds of pre-made templates and here's the secret. These templates have been tested, so they know that this template with this green sign up now button is more likely to convert, meaning more likely that the person will do that action, give you the email, checkout, register for whatever. You wanna make use of those templates. I feel like templates kind of get a bad feeling a lot of times, but it's gonna save you a lot of time, a lot of money, and you're benefiting from the collective knowledge that is from the community of everyone else that's used that landing page. That company is able to say, you can actually sort some of these and say, show me the best converting landing pages first. We're gonna use a pre-existing template and then we want to replace text with visuals where possible. Oftentimes online, we think people are gonna read all the words that we write and we hire a copywriter, and we spend many weeks, possibly months writing the copy for whatever it is that we're putting out onto the internet. The sad news is, no one is reading that. (giggling) If you're a copywriter, I apologize, but if you're a copywriter you also know that it's about making it scannable, readable, not using very technical terms here, but making things chunked out if you will. You'll see what I mean by that, but we don't wanna have paragraphs of text. One way to do that is use visuals where possible, whether that's well-selected stock photography, images, combining icons with words, doing some type of little diagram, a process diagram or something, but this will help communicate everything that is in your three paragraphs of text in an instant and people who are lazy online and are not reading will be able to, in a just second get the gist of whatever that message is. You wanna have that one call to action. We'll see this in our examples too. We want to embrace white space. For some reason, I feel like people love to make things cluttered, get the page, have everything on it, maybe try and put it all. This is a great one too. Lots of people think everything needs to be above the fold in, online, and this really came from, if you think of newspapers 'cause there was a literal fold. The paper has to fold, but online there is no fold and it comes from the idea, on your monitor the scroll part where, the bottom of the page where you eventually have to start scrolling, but the thing is the fold is dependent on what size computer screen you have. Do you have the resolution up so if you're, have sight issues, maybe it's much larger, your text. The fold is a myth, basically, is what I'm saying. We're gonna embrace white space. Not cram everything at the top of the page. Keep it short and we don't wanna get fancy with too much design out there. Just because there are design elements out there, just because there are cute fonts, just because there are backgrounds that look lovely you can use from stock photography, a lot of times this gets distracting. from the message that we want to tell people and from the action that we want them to take. Writing, now that I just said no one (giggling) reads, people will read the headlines and we want to create compelling headlines. You'll see how this manifests on our landing page, but the trick is, I recommend you write as though people are only reading the headlines. We're gonna replace text with visuals, we want to use their exact language. As I said, we wanna refer back to that market research that we did and if they use the language of, "My gross lawn", then we wanna try using that language as well, because that is representative of how they, the user, the customer speak. You might have in-your-head language, but that is not the language that the everyday person uses. We also wanna use really short chunks of text, not these long, long paragraphs, 'cause we know people don't read, they scan. Writing strong headlines. We've said we wanna focus on the features, not the benefits, because the benefits can sometimes just feel sterile, not very human, like three gigabytes of storage, or mow your lawn with the whatever horsepower lawn mower, or the certified, organic this and that. That's nice, but does it connect with me on an emotional level? Does it help alleviate a problem in my life or an obstacle? No, but when we start talking about the features of, wow, your lawn will be so healthy and it won't have pesticides on it or something. I'm making this up, but you get what I mean. We wanna focus on those benefits, not the features to start. The feature is what it does, the benefit is the outcome, the end result, the side effect. Benefits let people imagine their outcome so they can start to see their kids playing on the lawn, it's all good, we're all gonna have a big barbecue, it's a great weekend. Like I said, benefits really are emotional. If you think back to whenever the iPod came out, which I don't even wanna calculate how long that was, but Apple I don't believe used language like, store one gigabit, gigabyte of music on your phone. Maybe they did later on in some of the marketing or way down on the page that you went to to learn more about the iPod, but on the initial advertisements, commercials and things, the emphasis and the story they were telling was that benefit of a 1000 songs in your pocket, or whatever the number was. The feature versus benefit, I feel like this is a great reference point. If you're kind of wondering, is this a feature, is this a benefit, think of that Apple example, because the feature, store one gigabyte of music, half the people don't even know what gigabyte. There's no context, whereas if you say, 1000 songs in your pocket, then in people's minds they're thinking, wow, that big binder of CDs which I think we all had when the iPod came out, all of that stack of music can fit on that thing? That is a lot more compelling for people, so focus on those benefits for sure. Headlines for lawn man, Mike the lawn man. Great way, whenever you're starting out, to write your headlines, and the workbook has another activity that you can go through to write these headlines, but first thing I like to do is write out all the features and then write out all the benefits. Then, you have a great starting point and, again, you reference back to your research. It's all on one place, you're saving time, and you're not rifling back through pages upon pages of hundreds of results. Some of the features might be same day mowing, that sounds nice. Schedule in advance, ultra quiet mowers, organic lawn care products, vetted and trained professionals, transparent pricing. All of those are nice from a business perspective and it sounds good, but when I am first learning about this product, these benefits are things that I can more relate to that are going to tug at those problems and obstacles that I have. The benefits are have a healthy lawn, it just elicits a more emotional response. Bring your lawn back to life, I could connect with that. Reclaim your weekends, that is a great benefit. Have the best lawn on the block and I would say too, you don't have to think of these benefits. A lot of these benefits are hidden inside the research you did, so you don't have to be a copywriter or be winning awards in creative writing. You can just refer back to the research you did and you will find a lot of these, and it'll be a great jumping off point for you to maybe brainstorm more. But, never stress about your lawn again, have a lawn you actually, actually use.