A landing page is where you send prospects when you want to create awareness of your product or service and for them to show interest.
In March’s post, A Simple Way to Validate a Business Idea, we explained that one way to do this was with a landing page. A pre-sell page where you explain what you have available and your prospects can pre-purchase the product or service before it’s available.
You’re using the landing page as a gauge. You want your prospects to have all the information for them to determine if they are interested and want to buy. And you can decide if there is enough interest for you to move forward.
Here is an overview of what a good landing page needs. It must define the benefits to your audience and how it solves the audience’s problem that you identified from your past research. Below are the details of each section.
In our February post, Researching Your Audience’s Needs is the Key to Create a Successful Offer we looked at how to find the pains your market is experiencing and wants to avoid, the gains they want to achieve, and what they can do to make it happen. Using this information you can explain the solution of your product.
Define the goals of the landing page
There is one goal of a landing page. To see how many people want and will pay for your product and if there is enough interest to create and offer the real version.
Start by defining what success is for you. It has to meet your income goals. For instance, if it is your goal to initially earn $1000 per month or even $10,000 per month, the price you charge and the size of the audience you attract will have to be able to produce this income. The price you ask must be commensurate with the value of what you’re offering.
Your market doesn’t have to be large for you to have a successful business. But, it does have to meet your income goals. Ask yourself, what is the income you want? How many people represent enough interest for you to make this a business? And in what time frame?
Calculate the amount of traffic you need to opt-in to your offer. Not just traffic to the landing page, but people who will pay money. Take your monthly income goal and divide it by the asking price of your offer to see how many people must sign up for your product for this test to be successful. For example, to start you want to generate $4,000 per month ($48,000 per year). Your product is $199. You need to sell 20 units a month.
Of all the traffic who shows interest and comes to your landing page, are 20 people buying.? We’ll discuss getting traffic to your page and how to improve the conversion rate a little later.
Let’s review where we are in this process. You’ve set up a landing page where your product is available for anyone who is interested and can pre-order it while it is still being produced. You can make the offer more appealing by giving a discount for waiting.
The landing page should use the best insights of a sales page, along with a professional design and a clear call-to-action. Let’s review that.
The heading
The headline should be simple and direct. It needs to speak to the audience’s problem. This will get more prospects to click through. Everything that follows will connect your product with what they identified is important to them and should inspire them to take action.
Define and describe the product
What is the product and who is it designed to help? This is where the value your product provides will be explained. Who is your target audience?
Use this formula to make sure your product and solution is clear.
This product A is for this group of people B to solve this problem C, or provide these benefits D.When you have that defined you have what you need to write your landing page copy.
In addition to the benefits, you need to explain the details about the product and how it can be used.
Design, layout and image
Put a lot of effort into the landing page design, layout and images.
If you have an image of your product be sure to use it. If not try to find a relevant stock photo. We know that photos or graphics are processed by the brain faster than words and the aim is to connect with your prospect faster.
A good layout and design will give you a professional look. There are many landing page builders that have attractive pre-made templates. Again, you want to grab your prospect’s attention and make it easy for them to read and take action.
Call to action
A call to action is a critical component of your landing page. The CTA always has a button that takes you to the desired action. Use a color that stands out from your background and use a strong action verb that’s not too long. Examples include: Send me the information, I want access, or I’m ready to buy.
Here’s a perfect place to do an A/B test with different color and word options to see which one dominates. A/B testing is available in many landing page builders. You can test any of the elements on your landing page and see which one will boost your conversions.
Creating your landing page
There are many options to develop a landing page. If you have a website, the best option is to build a landing page on your own site. If you use WordPress, the theme you purchased should have come with a landing page template.
If not, you can use a landing page builder, such as Leadpages, Clickfunnels, and others. However, a word of caution, while these can be built quickly you do not own the platform and can run into constraints from the company down the road.
Another option is to sign up for a free ConvertKit.com account. You can build a landing page there and start collecting emails. If your business proves successful, you can continue to use ConvertKit on the website you build.
Getting traffic to your page
Next, you need to drive traffic to the page. There are several ways to do this but the fastest is to buy ads. Use Facebook or Google ads and target them to the audience based on the keywords of your product or the demographics of your prospects.
For instance, if your product is a course on handwriting invitations. You will want to use words such as wedding, parties, graduations, calligraphy, and other relevant words where you know there is a market.
In addition, you can post a compelling article on social media explaining what you offer. Also, you can guest post on other sites that have the audience you want to reach. But these are more hit-and-miss techniques. It’s a slower process and if you want to validate an idea quickly using ads is not only faster but you can analyze the metrics and see what’s working and where you can improve.
When you spend money on ads, you want to optimize them to get every prospect to take a look. The average landing page conversion rate ranges between 2% and 5% across different industries, with the average being 2.35%. One thing you want to strive for is to increase your traffic and your conversions. This article, What’s a Good Conversion Rate? gives you 5 ideas to increase your conversions.
Next step
Validating your idea is the least risky way to start a new business or launch a new product.
Now if you have determined that there is not enough interest to have a sustainable business, you will have to offer a refund to those who did pre-purchase your product.
Your option is to revise your offer or find a new twist on this idea that will appeal to a different audience, and go through the process again. Do not be disheartened. This is not uncommon. 80% of offers fail. Change your offer or find a different idea.
Hopefully, your product did have a large enough audience who bought your product. If you are happy with the response, the number of people who have pre-purchased your product and have met your income figures, then you are ready to start building the full version of the product.
Next month, we’ll look at tracking and testing your traffic.
The Solo Entrepreneur’s Guide
To make sure you get access to the next post, subscribe to The Solo Entrepreneur’s Guide.
The valuable content in this monthly publication will help you transition from the job world and create a self-reliant income, live life your way, and achieve wealth and freedom.
Leave a Reply