For Starters #23: A Landing Page Might Even Be Too Much
Landing pages have been widely advocated as a low-cost prototyping technique for new product offerings for two decades now. Compared to over-investing in a full product build ahead - they were a revolutionary innovation in themselves.
The primary model was; create a 1-page website describing how amazing your new product will be - probably just copy and a few illustrations, maybe with a video walkthrough or animated demonstration. Then, buy up Google ads for all the relevant keywords. Interested people will click on the ad, land on the page, and either pre-order, enter their email address, or both. Easy-peazy. We’re in business!
At that time, Google ads were cheap (I ran them for nearly every ridiculous idea I had). Text ad formats were still novel. Ad products on other social media weren’t yet as mature either. Today, Google ads, Meta ads, and LinkedIn ads will gulp down your budget faster than a custom dev shop. Worse yet, the bulk of the traffic will be bots - not people.
These days, landing pages themselves are likely to be an over-investment - or more specifically, the likelihood of capturing nascent traffic off 1-page website that just appeared is is nil.
For a landing page to be successful these 12 things need to be in place:
A plan to for who you want to reach
Compelling copy describing your offer with a clear “call to action”
Design for the page; layout, graphics, video? Including a post-”call to action” view
Web host
Domain name
Payment method for pre-orders?
A post-”call to action” view
Process to validate email addresses
A plan to do something with the email addresses (and pre-orders) within the next month
The ad copy and creative
Defining the target audience for the ad
Deciding on budget and campaign duration.
Each one of those bullet points is a separate decision, separate effort, and likely more than two steps. In the verbage of Getting Things Done - two steps mean it’s a stand-alone project. A dozen new projects just to gauge interest on a potential offering? That’s clearly over-investing. We can do it in fewer.
Depending on your comfort and familiarity with online marketing and ecommerce technologies - you may already have many of these decisions made - you may already have the digital infrastructure to support all of these things at your fingertips. There are even online providers that specialize in landing pages - I’ve used many of them. Personally, I have infrastructure in place for the bulk of the bullet points (WPEngine, Stripe, MailChimp, etc, etc), which means the hardest points are the first two - a plan for who I want to reach, and compelling copy.
Good copy is all you need. You could start selling at #2 and ignore everything after. If you can put compelling copy in front of a potential customer - in-person, over the phone, via email - you have everything you need. You don’t need a landing page - yet. Probably.
I’ll admit, the traditional landing page campaign was key to unlocking one of my most satisfying successes over the past couple years.
My co-founder and I ran super narrowly targeted Facebook ads pointing to a landing page with a couple of short qualifying questions and an email capture. Names started rolling in dozens at a time. My co-founder personally followed up with each respondent within 24 hours. Within a few weeks, we had a handful of highly-qualified leads - all we needed.
So, yes, the model does still work.
But, this wasn’t our first prototype - it was our fifth.
The landing page and ad campaign came after multiple rounds of phone calls and emails. We knew the magical keywords, we knew the value proposition, we knew who we were looking for, where they were, and what problem they wanted to solve. We just needed to confirm the message strongly resonated with a few dozen highly-qualified prospects.
Like I said, a very satisfying success and absolutely worth a few hundred dollars in ad spend.
Landing pages are not discovery. Landing pages are like surveys - they’re fantastic low-touch tools for validating patterns of customer demand at scale.
To execute both well, you need to know the exact the words your best customers use to describe the problem, you need to know their context. Learning what those words and context is demand discovery. Landing pages and surveys are horrible for that.
Recently a founder sent me a Figma file of a landing page they were about to build. The copy was solid, the “call to action” was clear. Sure, the design could be simplified some. They also had all the digital infrastructure in place.
Including a list of 20 people that were interested in buying!!!!!
I encouraged them to pause the construction of the landing page - at least until they reached back out those those 20 people.Especially considering it sounded like their near term revenue goals could be met by a small percentage of those interested people saying yes.
I joked that they might hit their revenue targets before the landing page is built and published.
The clarity of thinking is the win here.
Without envisioning the landing page, they wouldn’t have such strong copy.
But paradoxically, the moment the copy is complete - the landing page itself is no longer needed. The next smallest step is to send out those 20 personalized, text-only emails - using the copy as talking points - and pointing to some online payment link - even something as unsophisticated as PayPal. This will take…a day? Half a day? A fraction of what a the rest of the process will take.
Whether it be email, DMs on your favorite social media, or Reddit posts - you likely have ready access to the people you want to help. So, start there.
Reach for the ads and landing page once you need to get beyond those networks.
You may never need to.