The Secret To Great Landing Pages Is Simpler (And Harder To Execute) Than You Think transcript

This is the kind of thing that happens all the time when you're running ads, but you can't always share it. But I got permission from the client to share this time. And I thought it was a great illustration of this thing that there's sometimes this idea that landing pages are like magical. Landing pages are things you add to your funnel to make things convert more. But anybody who's actually tested their landing pages knows that very often landing pages actually don't do anything and sometimes they even hurt performance.

And so as much as it seems like a great idea to run good landing pages, it it it actually isn't obvious at all that they're good. But we're we're building more of them all the time and digging into our landing pages is part of our service more all the time in part because of course we've built an AI flow to help us build landing pages pretty fast and at a lot of scale and that allows us to move pretty quickly building what we think are really good landing pages.

And then also my recent episode with Brad Plock walked through how we test landing pages that has really helped us here because if we remove the need to do post-click split testing and you can actually test your landing pages just by launching creative alongside your existing winners with a new landing page and it works, then that is just a huge win. [music] And so go back to that episode, listen to that episode with Brad, really helpful.

I actually got great feedback on that episode. So people really liked that a lot. Super tactical look at landing pages. Um I'm going to put the link for that in the show notes. So don't forget to just um check that out. >> [music] >> So the ability to test landers faster has motivated us to put more effort into building more landers and pretty much within a couple weeks of doing this more aggressively for our clients, we we had a huge winner here and it sort of illustrates everything that I think can be really good about landing pages.

So like I said, I think there is a mistake that people make which is that landing pages are somehow magical, that something is really important there. Instead, the way I want you to think about what a landing page accomplishes is that a landing page allows you to make your messaging more complete through the funnel. And all this goes back to this idea that the the sort of base unit of a given ad is the message. So, any bit of direct response advertising, any advertising at all, has at its core an act of communication.

And that act of communication communicates a message to people. And the more you can communicate the message more completely, the better you can do. So, this landing page that I'm going to show you really clearly illustrates the way to think about how that can work not only at the ad level, but at the landing page level. And and maybe the way to start to think about this is by differentiating between a PDP, collection page, or home page and a landing page, okay?

Any of those examples, I mean, I've sent traffic for most of my career to PDPs and collection pages and home pages and not really worried too much about it. For many, many ads, they'll actually convert as well as anything else that you do, if not better. And there's all kinds of reasons for that, but there's also a limitation there. And the limitation is, by definition, your PDPs, your home page, your collection page, have to be able to speak to a wide range of people because customers are going to come to your page.

The 25-year-old woman who buys your product and the 55-year-old man who buys your product are both coming to that same page, even if they're buying the product for very different purposes. The guy who's buying your product cuz it helps him clean something really well versus the gal who's buying your product because it helps her relax. I I don't know. I don't I don't even know what theoretical product I'm talking about.

But I just imagine a product that has both those value propositions. They both might end up on the same PDP at some point of the checkout process, okay? And of course, that doesn't even speak to the returning customer who's just looking for a product. And so, when you have a PDP or collection page or home page, by definition, you have to speak to a wide range of audiences. That is actually one of the things that's really great about it and why great uh CRO work and home page and and and sort of development of those pages often answers everybody's questions, it does a great job presenting the product with a lot of clarity, and and most times the reason these are are really good is like collection pages are merchandised well, they get the right product to the right person, or PDPs give customers all the information they need to make a purchase.

So, in the carousel, you can see it clearly. In the thumbnails of the carousel, you can see it clearly. You know, the detail, whatever. All of those things give people the information. This is what it's made of. This is how long it'll last. This is the guarantee. Blah, blah, blah. All of those things. This is what it is. This is what the product is. So, you just understand what it is. And that's great. The problem is there are times when you want to speak to something much more specific than that, particularly at the ad level.

And if, like us, you develop every ad from the perspective of the message is the most important thing. The message drives the ad, then the landing page becomes an obvious extension of that. And here is the critical idea. When I see landing pages doing well, the reason why they do well is not because they're listicles, is not because they're advertorials, is not because they're beautifully designed, is not because they exist at all.

It's because they convey the message all the way through the funnel, and they have an offer commensurate with that message and that customer. And when you get those two things right together, you can unlock a whole bunch of spend. If you know anything about the way that I work, you know that I am doing so much of what I'm doing with help from my friends at More Staffing. More Staffing is a Philippines-based recruiting firm that helps you get connected to the best Filipino talent across every part of your business.

It's not just ad creative and that's what the thing is. Every single part of your e-commerce business. They know this because they were built on the back of an e-commerce business that employed a bunch of Filipino talent like in every part of the business. Operations, supply chain, graphic design, video editing, you name it. Every part of the business in some way was touching [music] Filipino talent. And when the founders of More Staffing saw that, it was like a lightbulb went off and they said, "Why don't we do this for other brands?" And that's because it's not just about how cheap can you get someone to work for for you.

So many people think about Filipino talent as, you know, $5 an hour virtual assistant, and that's kind of it. But the beauty of More Staffing is that they will help you look for really great professionals who have deep e-commerce resumes, who understand the things you're doing, and can help drive for you a bunch of value in your business by being real contributors. And you can actually get access to the best of that talent at a much, much lower price than equivalent talent in the US.

And that makes it a really big win because now you can pay really competitive prices in the Philippines and attract and retain great talent. And at the same time, it's much less than it would cost to do the same thing in the US. You could build a lean business with a lean off backs, which is key to e-commerce. My life has been overhauled lot of ways by working with people from More Staffing. I don't think that's too much to say.

It's just been a really, really big important thing in the businesses that I'm working on. It should be for yours as well. If you're developing landing pages, like I'm talking about in this episode, and you need great talent to be part of that process beyond just sort of the ad creation side of things, go to morestaffing.co/af. Put together job description. They'll help you do that. Take some interviews. See who they get you.

See what resumes you get back. I bet you'll be amazed. morestaffing.co/af. Go get started today. And that is what happened with this landing page from She's Birdie. So, I'm going to show you this page right now. She's Birdie makes personal safety alarms for women. They They're just very loud little alarms that uh uh a woman can carry with her. Really anybody can carry with them, but mostly designed for women. Um can carry with them.

They're They're cute, so they they don't feel weird to carry and um and almost an accessory. And that allows that and that and then they make a super loud noise if a woman feels in danger in some way to draw a bunch of attention to herself. That's the product, okay? Really great product, brand that we I've had their founder or their not their founder, but one of their their CEO, Ritu Mashiko, on the show before. He gave me permission to show this page.

Um I I just think this is an awesome uh version of this, okay? So, so, um so, I'm going to do a thing here, which is I'm going to show you this on mobile because I would never dare show you uh a landing page uh on uh on desktop since nobody in this real world will ever see it that way. And the thing I want you to see about this, actually, is that this is a really flawed page. It's not the best landing page in the history of the world.

There's a lot of things that I think can be done better, and yet that it is completely smashing for this brand. Completely smashing. Now, what do I mean by that? What I mean is it has immediately become the top spending uh uh all of our top spending ads uh are are immediately going to this landing page in the account. Like, completely taken over. We launched it yesterday. Today, it is like 90% of the account of the spend.

It's a bunch of ads that already existed that are already conveying this message that are now going to this page, okay? And uh and so, it's just completely crashing. The the uh ROAS on it is really good. Everything is is is very good. And and it's just it's just demonstrably clearly the case that it is pushing our spend forward a lot, and it is because of this lander. I It's actually too early for me to tell you how much it's pushing our spend forward, but I think it's going to double our spend.

Like, it's it's really making a big impact. Um so, okay. That's the deal. Now, here's what I want you to see first. The I want you to think about this page through two lenses. First, and if you're if you're not watching this, you're actually going to get the point of this cuz I'm going to I'm going to read it still um so you can see what's happening. But, if you're just listening, it's fine. The The first thing I want you to know is see is the message, the way the message happens here.

And this is such a good illustration of what I even mean by the idea of a message, okay? The landing page says, "10 reasons why the college safety bundle is everything she needs to stay safe on campus." So, what you see here is that the product has been bundled in a certain way to create a new product called Not the Birdie, Not the Birdie Disc, Not the Birdie Box, which are three variations of the Birdie, but the college safety bundle.

So, we created a product, called it the college safety bundle. And here's a little hack or little tip. Often times, naming the product with the message or the angle or the persona or something like that in it is is uh is a is a really good way to um take your message and drive it all the way through the funnel here. So, so you you create a bundle called this. I've seen this with other brands as well. I had one brand that had a a bundle that was related to bloating.

Um and and when we took the product and we when we we gave it a sort of more general name in the category that it was in, but then uh on one side, but then on the other side, we we gave it a bloating name. Um the bloating one crushed crushed the other ones despite that it was related to the same product and the same offer, etc. So, um so it's just changed created a bundle, created, you know, ghost product, whatever, a new product where you have the name of the product changed to match match the angle.

Um in this case, right, the college safety bundle, 10 reasons why the college safety bundle is everything she needs to stay safe on campus. So, now we have positioned the product for a very specific purpose uh for a very specific person in a very specific way. We're not just talking about general women's safety anymore. We're talking about college safety for a college-aged girl, okay? Those are Now, that is who we are talking to in this specific way.

So, we've created the idea of congruence through the funnel. And this is where the message, delivering all the way through uh the landing page, really helps, okay? So, that's the first thing. So, we've taken this product, we've positioned it towards a specific person. And the ads that are pointed to this are all pointed to the same persona, talking to a woman going back to college. Now, I am recording this in July. This this angle is going to matter a lot over the next month and a half where a bunch of women are about to go off to college, maybe for the first time ever, maybe not, but there are a bunch of women who are about to go off to college.

Uh and because of that, there is this opportunity or there there is going to be a need for a lot of people all at once at this particular moment to do this. This is another thing that works really well with landing pages or or landing pages can work really well. If you want to message a specific seasonal moment, um it is often helpful to do that via a landing page. This is why everybody does this for a sale moment, right?

Your 4th of July sale has a 4th of July sale page or something like that. And it allows you to sort of uh use this page, bring it up, and do that. Now, I won't probably turn this off when sort of like go back to college time of year is over, but I imagine it will decline in spend a lot, okay? So, you can use this to message a particular seasonal moment for specific customer. And I've talked about this a lot lately. So much of what works right now when you talk about like how to drive true variety in your creative approach.

When you talk about true variety in your creative approach, so much of what works right now is variety of message, okay? Diversity of message. Speaking really specifically to really specific people. There's a subset of people who are off to college, and that's who you want to talk to. Or in this case, perhaps their moms or dads who are going to send them off to college. That is the persona for this. And there may be plenty of other people who can use Birdy.

Some other woman who just moved to the city. And she might look at this page and be able to do the little translation work in her mind to say, "Oh, this applies to me, too." But she also might just pass on this offer. That's okay. The ability to speak to the most possible people is the ability to speak to individuals really effectively, and to pile all those stack all of those individual messages on top of each other.

It's not to speak one message to a lot of people. It's to speak a lot of messages, each of which can reach more people more effectively, if that makes sense. Okay? So, this carries that through. So, we've got the college safety bundle speaking to that woman. And now you've got 10 reasons why. You've got the listical style, tried and true. Go for it. Run the listical. The listical just works. People don't read. It's really clear, etc.

And if we start going down this page, you'll see a bunch of different stuff here. Now, like I said, I actually this page could be a lot better. This little video in the background has nothing to do with college women. It doesn't show that at all. So, maybe we could message that better. The thing is, we were not letting that kind of thing stop us from getting this page live. More than getting it perfect, it was about getting it live because we had the message in the in the offer that we wanted, and then we were trying to get it in a certain time, okay?

So, there's that. Um then you just go through the listical stuff, all the usual things here. We don't really need to break this down, right? Uh reason number one why this works, one bundle every campus, uh every campus scenario covered, okay? The 11:00 p.m. walk back from the library, the early morning run on unfamiliar trails, the dorm room door anyone with the call it key code can open, etc. Now, you might be wondering what is this product?

Let's go jump down to the bundle so you can see what this is. There are three products here. Again, I actually think this product could be a lot clearer. You could tell a little bit more what actually it is. But what you can see in this image, if you're looking at it, is the Birdie 3.0, which is a a keychain Birdie, the Birdie Box, which is if you're looking at this is the leopard print one, which is a an alarm you put on your door.

So when your door opens, if you set it, it makes a really loud noise. So basically like if you're in a dorm room or hotel or just you just want safety in your house or whatever, um it makes a really loud loud noise there on your door. So that's so that's the door attachment. And then the Birdie Disc is the one you see on the bottom. The Birdie Disc is one that you can like attach to yourself when you're running or walking or something and you don't have your keys with you, you're on the go, and it kind of has a similar function to the Birdie 3.0, but but a different um way that you use it, okay?

Different way that you carry it. And so that's all three of those products at once, and it's the college safety bundle. And it says here 20% off college safety bundle for a limited time. The customer can then go pick each of their colors for each one. They can go go to all this. Again, I think this color selector could be much clearer so you can actually see the color on the product. It's a little bit confusing right now, but you know what?

It works still. And it didn't let it stop us. And you go and you can add to cart straight from here. Shout out to my friends at Ecom Experts, former sponsor of this show who I'm still happy to shout out, who worked with us to help tie this in to the products really well so you could add to cart straight from this page. You didn't have to go to another page cuz you have to actually be able to do the full offer selection on this page, right?

So um you know, you if you're selecting your product right here all on this page in this case, which I think is helpful for this particular angle, where the color selections are all there, etc. Now, like it this ties into Shopify where um that that worked. Ecom Experts is really good Shopify dev shop that we love working with. Go check them out, okay? Ecom Experts. Um so they they sort of like after the design was done, they polished up to make sure the page functions properly and all those kinds of things and then tied it into the website.

But um, but that's the basic idea. And what you have now is 20% off when you buy all three together, okay? Very simple, very straightforward offer. And that those two things, that message, which I sort of belabored a little bit, and then the offer, uh, and I think you can also stack the 10% off offer on top of it, by the way. That message and that offer together where you've got here's how this fits into your life. There's these three different birdies.

You're going to you're going to want one of each. Covered in every scenario. And then um, and then uh, and then an offer for when you buy all three together, a bundle discount, very standard kind of discount. Those things all come together to create a really, really effective landing page. >> You know you need more creative. [music] That's the way you get to the kinds of ads that make you want to go make more landers like this.

And therefore, [music] you should be working with my friends at Behind the Scenes Studio. Behind the Scenes Studio, BTS Studio.com. They're a Philippines-based >> [music] >> ad creative agency that you can use either as an extension of your existing team of designers, editors, [music] or >> [music] >> you can use them for creative strategies and help you pre-ban your sending business volume >> [music] >> And I know that Behind the Scenes Studio is good for Asia >> [music] >> and my team is stacked.

They're that good. They're doing everything well and they're very very efficient. BTS Studio. You can hire our kind of [music] head of creative to launch campaigns and I have been doing that to make things like cascading that down through their team. They're really good and they're affordable. >> [music] >> They're reasonably priced. They're just really, really good. If you're a seven-figure, eight-figure brand that's trying to extend your creative team [music] with additional resources, additional edits, all those things that are done in a way that is amongst the best practices for Facebook ads, >> [music] [music] >> And the fascinating thing about this page is the way it works is that not only is I think the I think the message is working really really powerfully, but that bundle is crushing [snorts] other products we have in terms of AOV to the tune of 10 to 20%.

That's a really big lift on your ads. And if you're doing that, if you're lifting your AOV 10 to 20% and converting the same or more customers, getting more reach, you have just unlocked something massively because now every click is a lot more valuable to you. You can reach way way more people, and that's exactly what's happening here. I say 10 to 20%. I don't have a hard number because it depends which products you compare it to.

Also, like our highest value ads have a higher AOV than our cost cap incremental attribution ads. Like so, anyway, it depends, but it's between 10 and 20% depending on what you compare it to and what which ads you're looking at. And it's just really really powerful. And that is the key to me to doing this whole thing well. Don't get caught up on listical versus not. Don't get caught up on all of these little details.

Instead, get caught up on matching as best as you possibly can the message to the ad message that is already working it. I think process-wise, the simple way to do this and what we have been doing with our clients more and more is we're looking at our top spending ads, and especially when those top spending ads do have a really specific angle, and that's the next landing page we make. So, we go make a bunch of ads, and we're not making a landing page for every ad, but we're going and saying like, "Okay, this ad is starting to get some spend.

What happens if we give it a lander that creates more congruence through the entire funnel with that with that customer, and then maybe even give a specific offer to that customer as well." And depending on the team setup and the complications are related to offer building and some of that, we do more of it. And I'll just tell you, we aren't actually amazing at this yet, but this is why I'm telling you to build a process for it, because that is the steps that we are building here.

We are trying to look at every one of these wins that we have and say, okay, how do we do this more and more and more? Because now we take that and say, okay, how do we break that down and make this repeatable for more clients? We don't just want to win on this page, we want to then say, okay, how do we replicate this? And that's where I said, like I said, you go and say, okay, what's the top spending ad and does it have a really specific angle?

If it does, go build a lander for it. For many of our products, like Brad said when he was on my podcast that I referenced before, for many of our products, we're not getting hung up on being able to check out in on this page versus not. The easy way to launch here is, um, okay, if you want to just carry the message all the way through and you don't even have a different offer yet, fine. Still make that and then make it so that when you click the order now button and the the CTA on the page, it goes to the PDP where you can actually place the order and customize any ways you need to or whatever.

Or if you need to do a little bit of dev work or something like that, like I said, get somebody like eCom Experts on your team who can kind of get you over the finish line uh once they have the delivered page and go there. I also like Brad's point a lot from the previous episode I did, which is like, really interrogate that copy, especially in the beginning of it. Make sure it really communicates the message that you want to communicate, because that's really what's driving so much of the value here.

So, to run that back, look at your ad account. What are your top spending ads? Do they have some kind of angle that is really specific to a specific kind of customer? If some of your top 10 ads do, go make a lander for that and even think about building an offer for that. And critically, if you can do it, make the offer in some way that ties to that customer. In this case, one thing I love about the offer is that the offer makes perfect sense for the persona that we talked about.

The idea of like the complete college safety bundle is really logical. That person's moving into a new dorm, so the Birdie Box makes a lot of sense, okay? They probably are going to be walking around or going for runs or a lot of people are are, you know, in some way have some kind of anytime you're not moving around with your keys, so the Birdie Disc makes sense. And then just having one on your keychain all the time with a birdie 3.0, it's very easy to imagine how that person that you're speaking to can use all three of those products.

And there's nothing here where like you're trying to shove extra products needlessly in there. It's just a a really smart bundle that that is easy to imagine how it lives in that world. And what we immediately turn around and did was say, "Okay, what other people can we talk to like this, you know? What about the gal who moves to a new city?" Um and and maybe she wants these kinds of things when she goes there, okay?

And there's a million more things like that. The general like hiker active lifestyle person. And maybe you do different products. Maybe it's like just a disk and a and a 3.0 for for some of these customers and in depending on the sort of scenario that you're speaking to. And in arranging those offers to to reach those those customers. Don't just throw an offer at it. Don't just throw a landing page at it. Think, who am I talking to?

What is the right mix that allows us to work? How does it work well for me financially? Like is there some set of products that makes more sense than others? And then go and push that through. That's the key to great landing page work. It's not magical, like I said. Don't just make landing pages, extend your messages. Build offers for a specific customer and then go launch those alongside your other ads and watch what happens to your spend.

You can see really big spend increases really fast. And again, this is a validation of the exact thing that Brad said when he was on my podcast, which is that Meta was able to pick up on it really quickly with the new lander and start delivering content to the right person at much more scale really really fast. In a manual bid incremental attribution setup, also things I've been talking about. We're scaling it extremely quickly.

Because because now we're seeing, "Oh, it's getting performance according to our bids." and just increases our spend day over day really rapidly. We don't even have to go and guesswork on auto bids or or testing or whatever it is, okay? It just works. We start scaling, raise the budget, make sure the cost cap's in a good spot, and let it rip. It works. You just have to do the hard work of thinking carefully about who you're talking to, how to talk to them, how to give them the offer that makes sense.

You do that stuff really well, you can get really far really fast. All right, I hope that's helpful to you. I try whenever I can to show you real stuff from real ad accounts and this is definitely one of those moments. Big thanks to Richie and She's Birdie team for allowing me to show that. Big shout out to my friends at More Staffing and behind the scenes studio sister companies really that are Philippines based talent in two different parts of your business.

Go to the show notes, get connected with both of them depending on what you need. They are just both great partners that I'm so grateful for. >> [music] >> Go check them out. Email me podcast@ajfgrowth.com and of course you can leave a comment on this episode if you have any questions or thoughts or anything like that, send it to me. I want to see it and hear about it because I respond read and respond to every single one of those.

You can also subscribe wherever you're watching or listening. Share this with somebody who to whom it would be helpful. Both of those things would be both helpful to me and I hope helpful to you as well. And if you want to work with us and you want us to develop landing pages like this for you as part of our service, we're building it out more and more all the time and and getting better and better at making that a regular thing that we are doing [music] as part of our basic ad flow.

It's already part of it but it's becoming a larger part of what we do. Go to ajfgrowth.com, fill out the intake form, tell us a little bit about your business. Let's see what we can do for you. Thanks so much for watching or for listening. I will see you next time.