JLD: What’s shakin’ Fire Nation? JLD here with an audio masterclass on the six strategies for a landing page that sells out your product. To drop these value bombs, I have brought Reese Spykerman on the mic. She is a marketing triple threat -- a copywriter, designer for more than a decade, and business strategist who has helped hundreds of clients scale their brands with high-converting websites. And Fire Nation, today we’ll be going over the six strategies for a landing page that sells out your product. We’re gonna talk about the 30-second website test and why a landing page is different from an actual website. And so much more Fire Nation when we get back from thanking our sponsors.

Reese, say what up to Fire Nation and share something interesting about yourself that most people don’t know.

Reese: Hello Fire Nation and thank you so much for having me on, JLD, and you know, here’s my interesting tidbit. Burger King is one of my secret weapons that makes me a marketing triple threat. My degree is in journalism. I spent more than a decade doing website design, today I marry design, copywriting, business strategy, for students and hundreds of businesses and people, including a couple of your past guests, Bernadette Jiwa and Chris Guillebeau. So, okay, what’s the deal with the Burger King part? It’s my second office away from home. It actually makes me better at what I do, because I get to observe how everyday people behave. The more we can objectively observe and understand people, the more we can build our emotional intelligence not just as marketers, but as human beings too.

JLD: I thought, personally, you were gonna talk about how their flame-broiled marketing campaign was such a good differentiator between McDonald’s and Wendy’s and all the other things and I thought that was going to be part of your inspiration, but I’m glad you went that way. It’s so important, Fire Nation, to be amongst the people. To go out into the world to see, to hear, to observe, and very importantly to listen, listen. And as I told you earlier Fire Nation, during the intro, we’re going to be talking all about the six strategies for a landing page that will sell out your product. So, Reese, this is where you’re an expert. This is where you are an acknowledged leader. I wanna dive right into this topic.

So, first off, let’s just break it down. Why is a landing page such a valuable tool for any product-based business?

Reese: A landing page, when it’s done well, it has the potential to move and even sell out your products more so than your main website can do for you. And this works whether you’re in the physical e-commerce product space or you’re selling digital products. And listen up. All you service-based business owners who are listening today, you too can leverage some of the strategies we’re going to be talking about. But back to a product-based business, you can use a landing page for everything from highlighting one of your best sellers and pushing that product even harder for more sales, to trying to move a product that you’re struggling to get sales for. The conversion rate of a well-designed landing page tends to be higher than that of a home page or a main website.

Like here’s an example. One of my clients had a conversion rate on her main website of around two to four percent. We added a landing page. It has an average conversion rate of about 14 percent.

JLD: Wow.

Reese: But listen, this is cool. That’s actually fairly conservative. I’ve seen studies and examples where many landing pages are converting at 20 percent, 30 percent, or higher, depending on your product, your market, and of course, how well you do it. When you tie it to an advertising campaign, you can send this really focused, targeted traffic to a page. They’re gonna come into that page hot. They’re gonna have a specific expectation, versus a customer who comes to your main website and they’re like hey, I’m just trying to do some general research about your business. So, here’s the thing; for any of your audience listening who have been investing in paid traffic, they’re just sending people to a main website, they’re going to likely see a much bigger bang for their advertising buck if they drive that paid traffic to a landing page that uses some of the strategies that we’re going to break down today.

JLD: Fire Nation, I mean we’re talking about a five to seven X higher conversion, and that’s on the conservative side. And I can completely buy into this because, listen, websites can be busy. They can be confusing. They can be daunting. There’s so much stuff on there. There’s about me pages. There’s pictures. There’s quotes. There’s pop-ups. There’s all these things and people are like, oh my god, what is going on here? Whereas, a landing page can have one clear objective and whatever that objective is, to sell, to convert, whatever that might be, it’s simple, it’s clear, and it’s the only thing a lot of times that the individual can do on that page. So, they’re either going to leave and do nothing, or they’re gonna actually do something on that page, which is what you want them to do to convert.

So, what does make a landing page different from just a regular old-fashioned WordPress website?

Reese: Well, you kind of broke it down pretty well.

JLD: It’s what I do, it’s what I do, Reese.

Reese: To reiterate what you said and expand on it a bit, look, your main website, it’s general. It’s broad. It’s usually building brand and product awareness, and if you are in a product-based business-like e-commerce, it may function as your main hub for people who buy from you repeatedly. But compared to your main landing page, it has so much noise and clutter as JLD just told us. You have all these differing goals and actions you are asking your visitor to make on a regular website. And so, what happens is, people come to your website and their eyes are going all over the place. If we think about their mindset and the browsing path they might take, it’s gonna look like a lazy Sunday meander. They’re going off on various paths. They might see a creek on the right and they’re like, oh, I wanna go check out that stream.

So, you know, you can optimize your website. There’s various ways you can do this and boost your conversion rate. But I really love when I’m working with a new business to focus on building a landing page. Because what happens is they can often get quick revenue wins. They can use that revenue and apply it to their main website and then do bigger tweaks over there. It can take longer to overhaul your main website, but a well-written, well-designed landing page is like giving your visitors a really linear path and a map that you’re guiding them along from point A to point B as you kinda said.

So, let’s look at an example. If we’re thinking about a product, let’s say you sell handbags. And you have a category listing page for hundreds of different handbags for your customer to sort through. She’s got to sort through them, make decisions about them. Every decision she’s gotta make, even subconsciously, fatigues her. And then she finally gets to a page for the handbag that catches her eye, she has even more decisions to make. Like what color should I choose? What size should I choose? But if you were to take the same thing and apply a landing page to it, one strategy you might do is to say okay I’m gonna take the brown laptop bag. I’m gonna eliminate all these other choices. This is one of my best sellers, I’m gonna make a landing page just for it.

You drive traffic to it, and suddenly this visitor, she doesn’t have to scroll through all the other choices on your main website. She gets to this brown laptop page and it’s very focused. And so, a main website, look, you’re going to have all these decisions. These noise, these goals your customer has to sort through in her brain and in her browsing process. But an effective landing page, it removes all that for her. All these decisions, they’re gone. All she has to do is decide do I want this brown laptop bag now.

JLD: Fire Nation, when you break it down like that, you can definitely see the differences and the benefits of just that focused landing page over a regular website. And what I loved when I was looking over what we were gonna be talking about today, Reese, is that you what you have created are specifically six strategies for the landing page that is going to sell out your product. So, I want to see some time, go through these six strategies so Fire Nation here really kind of has this concrete step-by-step guidance so we can take this knowledge, take this information, and make their landing pages better.

Reese: So, here’s where we’re going, and then we’ll go deep. The six strategies are: number one, micro-size your market. Number two, focus on one product. Number three, create a compelling hook. Four is present the proof. Five is make it scannable. And six is connect it to a consistent funnel. So, JLD are you ready to break these down and up?

JLD: My fingers are hovered over the keyboard. I am taking notes.

Reese: Great, okay. Before I break these down, I think there’s a caveat that everyone should hear. This is a simplified system, to get them thinking, especially about customer-centric design. And that’s really my big goal here today, to build your empathy muscles. Because it’s going to help your business and your marketing across the spectrum, whether we’re talking about your landing page, or a product brochure. In addition to these strategies that we’re covering, there are all kinds of techniques and tools I use, like you gather data, or you split test. They inform these strategies, but I want to keep this really understandable for people so that they can shift their thinking and get really inspired about the possibilities for their business.

So, with that out of the way, let’s get to these strategies. Number one is micro-size your market. And it’s really tempting, I think, for a lot of businesses to try to catch as many fish as you can with your efforts. But there’s the saying, I’m sure you’ve heard it, that the riches are in the niches, or niches depending on how you say it. And you know, this holds true for your landing pages too. You want to hone in on one market.

And by that I don’t mean let’s say you sell cologne and you’re gonna target men. Uh-uh. I mean you’re gonna target a specific subset of men, let’s say single men aged 24-30 who live in America’s heartland, work in hospitality jobs, and play board games on the weekends. This is gonna shape your advertising targeting strategy, and it’s going to shape how you approach your landing page content. How do you position your product? It’s going to be informed by your research about this market, these men. And the copy and the imagery that they’re going to find appealing is gonna differ from like say, men who are married, Gen X men who live in a big city, work in tech, and go cycle on the weekends.

Now what’s cool about landing pages is, if you have the budget for it, you could sit down and determine maybe three or more different markets and audiences. You could sit and build a unique landing page for each. Now on the surface, they might look very similar. Like don’t get overwhelmed. Oh, my goodness I have to build three disparate landing pages. You don’t. But you take one, you duplicate it, and then you go and then you tweak your images, you tweak your copy, to match each of those markets and what you know about them. And one of the cool benefits of doing this if you have the cash to do it especially, because advertising can get pricey, right? It’s going to give you a lot of data about what market your products are appealing to more than other markets.

So, that was number one, strategy number one. Micro-size your market and really get granular. Love to hear your thoughts, JLD.

JLD: Riches are in the niches. There’s a truth to that Fire Nation. You can’t serve everybody and when you try to resonate with everybody you are going to resonate with nobody. So, I love that. number two, Reese.

Reese: Alright, number two is you want to focus on one product. And I touched on this a little bit when I brought up the example you’ve got a handbag without variations. Whenever you can remove choices for people, it’s going to improve their focus. And this doesn’t mean choice is bad. We all want to customize and tweak the things we buy to make them ours. But when you’re thinking about your first landing page, focus on one product or maybe a product and one size variation. Like one of my clients did a sample pack and a large tub as the two options to buy.

So, let me give you an example. Let’s say we’re talking about a yoga company. You have a yoga company, it sells products like mats, t-shirts, blocks, bags, and clothing. Well what you could do, you could create a landing page that focuses on a new high-end anti-smell material mat you’re rolling out, or maybe it’s a mat with an amazing aesthetic design. Or, check this out, you could make a landing page to help bump orders for a product that you’re struggling to sell.

Maybe no one is buying your yoga blocks. You don’t know why. So, you’re gonna build a landing page and drive traffic to it with ads dedicated just for those blocks. And what you want to do with your content and your images is you’re gonna tell the story of why this yoga block will make your customer’s life better. And it can like, what’s really cool about this approach is, let’s say for whatever reason, your blocks go gangbusters. Well it might also indicate to you that there could be a problem on your main website. Maybe those blocks, they’re getting buried by other products. Maybe you need to consider adding the blocks in your checkout process as an upsell, like hey, you might like a block too.

Or here’s the thing, marketing such an experiment, it doesn’t always go right. Maybe everything falls apart, no one buys your blocks. Well, it might tell you that you aren’t explaining your benefits in a compelling way. It might tell you we have a pricing problem. So, a landing page can do more than sell out your products, it can also give you a lot of data. And especially if you focus on one product in your suite, which was strategy number two, focus on one product.

JLD: Focus, Fire Nation, you know I love this word. Follow one course until success. I’m obsessed with that. And I love that one part you shared, Reese, about removing choices. That will improve focus, Fire Nation, and when your focus is improved, you are going to win at a higher level. You are going to convert at a higher percentage. Number three, Reese.

Reese: In my opinion, number three is the most important strategy. It’s this: it’s create a compelling hook. So, what do I mean by hook? We’re talking about the top of your landing page, the very first things that people see before they even scroll down, whether it’s on desktop or on their phones. And here’s what you need: you need an effective headline. You’ve gotta grab people’s attention and speak directly to what matters to them. And here’s a secret: your product and features are not what really matters to people deep down. What matters to them is what your product can do for them. How does it transform or improve their life?

One of my clients owns a coffee creamer company. We could have written her headline at the top of the page with something really direct and like hey, get this great, organic coffee creamer. But what that’s doing, it’s only showcasing the product. And I think so many businesses are tempted to do this because they've spent all this time with R&D on their products. They’re very proud of it. I understand this. Instead, if we think like a customer, which is kind of the goal of this whole conversation today, what I did is I went into her customer reviews. I started digging, what are people saying? I came up with the headline of never drink another unhealthy coffee again.

JLD: I’m in, I wanna drink it right now.

Reese: My theory about this headline is that we're piquing curiosity. We’re making you stop and wonder, is my coffee unhealthy? Why? But if you are someone, like you probably are, who cares about what you’re putting into your body, we’re offering you a promise that even with your coffee you can stay healthy. And, we’re borrowing language from the customer. It’s a really powerful way to write your copy.

So, that was headlines, that’s one part of creating a compelling hook at the top of the page. The other thing you want to do is you want an image or a photo that speaks directly to that niche market you’ve decided you’ll be targeting. Let me share a case study with you. The company set 37signals had a landing page for a high-rise product. What they found is that using a large image of a person as the background of a short landing page, versus a landing page that they had before that had had a few illustrations and a lot of copy, it had a 47 percent increase over using the landing page that didn’t have an image of a person. Images of people are really powerful and the important thing that I would love for your listeners to understand is that too many companies try to put a picture of their product in this hook, the top area of the page, and that’s not really speaking to people’s desires. It’s not really connecting with them at a human level.

There are so many ways that you could approach looking for an image for your landing page, but I want to give you a quick tip, what I do. I love to use photos of people that look really natural and almost photojournalistic. And I don’t know if you’ve ever been through stock image sites, JLD, but you see those really heavily posed looks, and people look almost kinda robotic in their eyes, like we can’t connect with them. Here’s a quick test. You go through a stock image site or you could go to one of my favorite free sites, which is Unsplash.com. A quick test you can ask yourself is this: does this person look like someone I could have a conversation with in line at the coffee shop? So, that was strategy number three, you want to create a compelling hook. Something captivating or disruptive. It speaks to your customers desires in both copy and the image.

JLD: Fire Nation, create that compelling hook. And I just love how you put those words in this order, which is what is going to speak directly to them. That's what you’re trying to do. Hit their core. And Fire Nation, we still have three strategies for a landing page that sells out your product, which we’re going to dive into as soon as we get back from thanking our sponsors.

So, Reese, we’re back, and as we teased before the break, we have three more amazing strategies for a landing page that is going to sell out your product. So, break down number four.

Reese: Yeah, we’re at the halfway point. Number four is simple; I think people are gonna grasp this one quickly. It is present the proof. And what that means is you want to include customer reviews or testimonials on your landing page and hey, the more specific the better. Because it’s one thing to have a review that says this is a great company, but it’s a whole ‘nother if you have a customer review that’s like this: ever since I started eating Jim’s Jerky, I can run longer distances and don’t feel exhausted at the end. I don’t know what they put in it but my body feels energized and nourished. I mean such stark differences between the two. So, more of those specific customer reviews you have, those are the kind you wanna include on your landing page.

And the other thing I love to do is I like to add visuals to this area on a page. So, what that means is say like five little stars above the review. It’s kind of this quick visual symbol that our brains have been trained to associate with something positive. If you’re using a review platform like Google Reviews or Yotpo, and maybe you have an aggregate score, you could preface all those individual reviews with something like 4.8 stars on Yotpo. What this all does, it adds credibility, it builds trust, and this is so important especially if a customer is coming into you cold from an ad. They’ve never been exposed to your brand before. You need these little markers like reviews. They help gain trust. They show that you are a legitimate company that other customers have happily purchased from.

And there is one more way that I love to add proof. It’s if you have ever had media placements, and for example, even if you’ve been on Entrepreneurs on Fire, right? You could put that logo as well as other logos on the side. Or, if you have received any awards, you know you’ve got this great ranking. What those do is they’re like a form of leverage. Your brand gets to borrow the trust and reputation of other places. Because when our eyes see logos that we kinda know, or even if we aren’t familiar, that presence of a logo, we kind of associate that trust factor with your brand. So, those are the two ways that I love to present the proof. And that was our fourth strategy.

JLD: And Fire Nation, once you’ve gotten the proof and once you’ve won the quote unquote award, like you keep using that. I mean back in 2013, Entrepreneurs on Fire was awarded Best of Apple Podcasts. Like that was an award that was presented to us, and now guess what, wherever I’m being introduced, wherever I’m talking about the podcast, I’m always saying awarded Best of Apple Podcasts. You know they don’t give this award out to the same podcast twice, three times, four times in a row, you get it one time and that’s just it. So, I just say hey, Entrepreneurs on Fire was awarded Best of Apple Podcasts. You know, I don’t note that it was back in 2013, I don’t get too specific.

I just say this is what happened to the podcast, this was awarded, and it gives that instant credibility so that you can present that proof. And I love that you talk about getting super specific. Like the more specific you can have your testimonials and your reviews, the better. Break down number five.

Reese: Yeah, absolutely. And I just want to reiterate, it doesn’t matter when you got an award, that’s yours for life, man. You wanna leverage that thing to the hilt. And I don’t blame you. If I had gotten that award for my podcast, I don’t have one, but if I did, I would be using it left and right, so you are a smart man.

JLD: Heck, yeah. Holla.

Reese: So, the fifth strategy is you want to make it scannable. Listen, a study by Microsoft showed, this is so sad, we humans have even a shorter attention span than goldfish.

JLD: That is sad.

Reese: I know. People lose concentration after a mere eight seconds. I mean this is the world we live in now. We can’t fight it, so we need to learn how to work with it. If your landing page looks too overwhelming, people might nope right out of it. So, you want to combat this by making it as scannable as possible. Now alright, truth. How to execute as well is kind of an art and a science. But I wanna give your audience a few pointers to keep in mind if they’re building landing pages themselves, or maybe they’re guiding their assistant with it. And it’s this, first of all, use bullet points.

Second, use headlines and sub-headlines to help ensure you don't have these long, overwhelming blocks of text that a lot of people aren’t gonna want to read.

You want to use, third, visual aids like icons. So, for example, you could create three key benefits of your product. You find icons that represent those benefits visually. Lay them out on the page in a three-column row with each column above a brief description of the benefit. It breaks up your page.

Then the fourth is use a product demonstration video to show instead of tell, which is really great for your customers who might prefer to watch instead of read.

And the fifth one is really important. You have got to make this page phone friendly. So, more than 50 percent of people are going to view your landing page on their phone. It needs to hold their attention there, too. If you have something you think either looks beautiful or scannable on a desktop, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s doing the same job for you on mobile. Those text sizes and that styling doesn’t always translate well to mobile. So, you need to make sure that you keep it clean, you keep it free from distractions, and easy to read without requiring people to do the old pinch and zoom. That was strategy five, make it scannable. The good news is we are in the final quarter.

JLD: Final quarter, I love it. Bullet points, icons, make it mobile-friendly, but Fire Nation if anything, make it scannable. Take us home, Reese.

Reese: Strategy number six is connect to a consistent funnel. It’s probably one of the most important strategies up there right after create a compelling hook, and here’s what I mean. For your landing page success, you need congruence between the ad that drove people to the page and the page content itself. So, if your ad copy has a particular promise, a feature, or a transformation, and then people get to your landing page and the top of the page, that hook area we talked about, as well as the rest of the page is focused on something completely different, you are disrupting your customer in a negative way. They’re clicking on an ad with one set of expectations. Those expectations aren’t met. They feel let down; they feel confused. And you in those cases are probably going to see a high bounce rate -- people bouncing right off your landing page because that disconnect is so strong.

Now, I don’t want to get into the weeds of like testing, seeing what types of positioning resonates. But I will say that what some companies do, especially if they have the revenue to do so with, is they’ll run several different ads with different images, different headlines, different body company. And maybe the landing page on the get go doesn’t match, but what they see the ads for to test, alright well which one is getting the most click throughs, which is resonating most with my audience, and then they’ll update the landing page to match that test. And they’ll take that winner and apply it to the landing page copy.

So, you might do that in the beginning, but ultimately you want consistency across your whole funnel. This means the ad, the landing page, and the checkout page, should all feel like they are in a very similar ecosystem. Because the more we make it consistent, the more we build trust. It helps people feel grounded. It signals to them hey, I’m in the right place, I’m in the place I intended to be, and it’s also reassuring in a way, too. And you know I just shared the six strategies with you, I’m going to recap them quick. They were micro-size your market, focus on one product, create a compelling hook, present the proof, make it scannable, and connect to a consistent funnel. And listen, I have two super-fast extra treats that I would love to share with your audience if that’s okay with you.

JLD: We love treats, Reese. We love treats

Reese: Okay, these are good treats, and they’re short and like quick wins for people. So, the first win is when you have your landing page, do not put your main website navigation at the top of your page header. You want people to stay on that page. You want them to perform the action you want to take, which is usually like buy your product, or you know get a free call, whatever it might be. If you remove elements like navigation or even social media links, that’s great, because those things pull people away from your landing page.

And the second quick tweak, is to make your call to action button stand out. This is a hill I will die on. This usually means a buy it now button for product-based businesses. You want to make those buttons obvious, bold. You want to not use the color for those buttons much elsewhere on the page. They should stand out more than anything else on your landing page.

JLD: Fire Nation, those six tips with those two little treats, you are ready to ignite. And lucky for us, Reese, you have created the landing page lifesaver framework, and this just makes it super simple to execute all of these strategies. So, take us home, tell us more.

Reese: I was in the bookstore the other day, I saw this adult coloring book, and you could create ultimately these impressionistic looking art pieces. And the way it did it is it labeled each are of the piece to be colored with a number, so if it said four and you looked and four was this orange, that’s what you colored in. And what it did, is it made an easier process to create beautiful art.

My landing page lifesaver framework is similar. It breaks down and streamlines a landing page into a few key areas. So, if we think about your page from top to bottom, you kind of know alright, here’s what I need to have at the top of the page in that hook area. Here’s where I could put in areas or elements that build trust. Here’s how I keep it from looking like one long page and block of text that makes people want to snore. Here’s where I put my first call to action button, here’s where additional call to action buttons go.

Because when you have a framework like this, it makes it so much easier for you to like not freak out about where everything goes and focus instead on the really important elements like what's my position? What’s my headline? What’s my copy? How do I emotionally resonate with people on this page? And when you’re first starting out, a framework is frankly, it’s like a relief. You know, it’s a map. And when you get better, you’ll learn how to break the rules. Maybe you don’t lean on the framework entirely, but in the beginning it’s so helpful to have one of these things.

And you know, it’s kind of like stock market trading. There’s a lot of systems and different trading styles and this is one methodology that helps beginners get rolling with a landing page.

JLD: So, if Fire Nation wanted to learn more about you, I know you have a great call to action for us. Break all that down. Where do we find out more about you? Where can we get some more goodies and treats from you? Let’s do this.

Reese: If your listeners go to designbyreese.com/fire, here’s what they get. Free gift, ten common website mistakes that lose you leads and sales and how to fix them fast. They will get that immediately. Then they also get my follow-up email series which has the three secrets to turning your website into a magical selling machine. I would love to see your listeners over there, and I have really enjoyed this conversation with you today JLD.

JLD: Reese, you’ve broken this down beautifully. I love the six strategies going through all the way from micro-sizing your market to connecting to a consistent funnel and everything in between. Because Fire Nation you know this, you’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with, and you have been hanging out with RS and JLD today so keep up that heat. And if you head over to eofire.com and type Reese, that’s R-E-E-S-E, in our search bar, her search page will pop up with everything that we’ve talked about today. Best show notes in the biz. And your direct call to action is designbyreese.com/fire, designbyreese.com/fire. And one more time Reese, what are they going to get there?

Reese: They’re going to get the ten common website mistakes that lose you leads and sales and how to fix them fast. And they get a follow-up email series with the three secrets that turn your website into a magical selling machine.

JLD: Reese, thank you so much for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value, with Fire Nation today. For that we salute you, and we will catch you on the flipside.

Reese: Thank you.