Landing Page Optimization & Product Messaging (Review)
Week 5 of a 12 Week Series on Growth Marketing
Each week for 12 weeks, I am writing about what I am learning through the Growth Marketing Mini-Degree from the CXL Institute. This week, I worked through two courses in Module 4: Landing Page Optimization and Product Messaging.
In Landing Page Optimization, we outlined what a landing page is, and how it serves our overall purpose. A landing page is the first page that a user lands on after clicking on a link or ad to your site. It’s the page that hopefully has a clear CTA and concise messaging that matches the source, and meets the customer where they’re at. A good landing page speaks to the user’s motivations and clearly conveys value, while addressing pain points and removing barriers, creating an optimal environment for you to solve the customer’s problem better and faster than the competition can.
One lesson I really found impactful was how fast vs. slow thinking and cognitive biases impact the customer’s decision-making process. You cannot always see how your messaging is interacting with your customer’s existing cognitive biases. If we are unaware, their biases can distort the message we originally intended, and if we can’t meet our customer where they’re at, we miss the mark entirely. So understanding these biases are important for forming the messaging around our products and services and being able to message match.
Fast vs Slow Thinking
The idea that we operate from predominantly two modes of thinking, originated by psychologist Daniel Kahneman, attempts to detail the differences in how we make decisions, based on speed and/or ease of decision. Fast thinking is intuitive. It feels effortless in execution and doesn’t take brain power to “work” out the solution. If I asked you what 1 + 1 is, you wouldn’t have to “think” about the answer, you would just say “2”. This is an example of intuitive thinking. Although fast intuitive thinking is unconscious and emotional, it’s drawback is that it’s only focused on the present, thus can be susceptible to error.
The second type of thinking is slow thinking. Slow thinking is methodical, analytical, and logical thinking. It’s decision-making after deliberation. Slow thinking on the other hand, while it takes more time, can help us avoid small syntactic and semantic errors that can be missed by brushing over details. The professor uses a great example: if I asked you “how many of each animal did Moses bring on the ark?” you would probably answer “2 of each”, using “fast” thinking. But upon closer inspection of the question, you’d realize Noah is the one on the ark, not Moses. Only after also using our slower logical thinking, we can see the question was answered wrong due to inferring too much.
Framing vs Priming
How the message reaches the potential customer and how it shapes their experience is explained through framing and priming. Framing is the idea that how you talk about a product or service shapes how the customer sees the product or service. Priming is the idea that being exposed to a stimulus before another stimulus, alters how it is perceived.
So how do we form our message? Creating an Information Hierarchy helps us know the right amount of information and what information to put on the landing page. We also must be writing copy for the customer’s current awareness level of the brand, product, etc. There are different types of awareness levels that a potential customer may have when finding your site, and so this is something we must take into consideration when forming our message on the landing page. The types from most to least aware are: Problem aware, Solution aware, Product aware, and Brand aware. Most of the time, a person finding me through Google will be “problem aware”, but they won’t know anything about my business. So, if I want to meet that new customer where they are at, I want to include concise and helpful info somewhere on that landing page that educates them and reflects who we are as a brand in addition to how we can solve your problem. This creates a much more meaningful and lasting interaction.
In the course Product Messaging, we learned how to conduct an audit on our page copy and “mine” messages from customers. One of the most helpful portions of this course was in Google Sheets where we categorized feedback from customers into columns that are then further broken down into general feedback categories. For example, if “saving time” was mentioned in the review a customer left, this could be categorized as “Time Saving”, which may end being mentioned by other customers. Measuring this is a smart way to start quantifying which customer messages come through most often, and which information messaging should be included in our Unique Value Proposition on the landing page.
What gives your product a unique advantage and what makes it stand out as better? This is what your Unique Value Proposition is. If you already have a proven business model you are working with (sales, traffic, etc.), this will look different, as opposed to a company that hasn’t established an active user base. For example, let’s look at Nike’s landing page:
You can see that the checkmark logo is at the top, but nowhere does it say “NIKE”. Simply put, it’s because they don’t have to anymore. Nike’s brand awareness is so high that when people hit the landing page, they already know that checkmark means Nike. This is a great example of how a landing page can drastically change based on the user’s awareness level.
Message Hierarchy
How information is digested is just as important as what information when it comes to a landing page. If we look at storytelling, there is a formula for how to tell a fantastic story in a way that resonates with the audience. This also applies to how we structure our message on the landing page. Ideally, first we want to present our Unique Value Proposition, then communicate how we create value, while addressing anxieties, and lastly we present the call-to-action (CTA). A bonus with this is that we already know which messages resonate the most because we already have a Google spreadsheet that has categorized certain phrases that we can use to create copy that connects with the customer in a more meaningful way. Putting all of these elements together, we can create a landing page that addresses the entire decision making process from the subconscious biases, to how the information is aesthetically presented and digested on the page. Mission complete!
Next week I’ll be diving into email marketing and finishing off with Facebook ads. Wish me luck!
