Growth Marketing Minidegree by CXL Institute — Week 5 Review

After a pause due to some unexpected situations, I was finally able to resume my learnings with the Growth Marketing Minidegree by CXL. I’m so excited to finally continue this part of my marketing learning journey. As I said several times before, this is one of the most complete online marketing courses out there, and it’s 100% worth your time. If you ever been in doubt about purchasing the course or applying for the scholarship, I highly recommend you do it.

If you are interested, you can check out my past articles about the program here:

· Growth Marketing Minidegree by CXL Institute — Week 1 Review

· Growth Marketing Minidegree by CXL Institute — Week 2 Review

· Growth Marketing Minidegree by CXL Institute — Week 3 Review

· Growth Marketing Minidegree by CXL Institute — Week 4 Review

Now, for this week’s content, as I wanted to start slow, in this article I’ll be focusing on one of the courses I’ve enjoyed the most so far: Landing page optimization by Michael Aagaard. The reason for that is, I’ve always been drawn to design. Every time I think about designing a website (which currently is an easy thing to do, even if you don’t have coding skills), I immediately just jump to the “design” aspect of the page and not necessarily on the content or research part. I think that’s usually how it goes when you are new to the whole thing. However, that’s one of the pitfalls of creating a website. Of course, design is extremely important, but before focusing on design, there’s a lot of work and research that must be done to ensure that your users have a minimum amount of friction. Like everything related to marketing, in every marketing sub-subject, it all comes down to the user, the customer, your audience. That will always be your starting point and sometimes, it easy to forget that.

So, for starters, what do we mean by landing page? I think that sometimes there’s some confusion when using this term. A landing page is not necessarily only your home page. A landing page is, essentially, any page that comes up after you click on the link and it has the main goal of converting your visitors. For example, you are advertising an ebook, you’ve created a page where you explain what’s in the ebook and a form where visitors are asked to put up their information so they can download the ebook file. When the visitor clicks on that ad, they will be instantly redirected to that page. That’s a landing page. You might also be using a link like that on a newsletter, or you might just be advertising your home page in general (which generally is not very recommended in marketing but more on that later). It has a clear conversion goal.

Landing pages are useful and essential for businesses because besides having all kinds of functions, they are a great way to guide your users to a certain goal. Here are some more benefits mentioned by Michael:

· Shortens journey from click to conversion

· Follows up on promises made in ad source

· Speaks to user motivation

· Creates clarity

· Answers important questions

· Creates a clear path to a conversion goal

What is landing page optimization all about? It’s about making sure your user has the most efficient and effective experience on this page with the goal of winning their conversion. As growth marketers though, we might be fixated on using that to just focus on A/B testing that page all the time. As Michael likes to emphasize, “A/B testing is not an excuse to not conduct research!” Doing landing page optimization is mostly about spending time doing research.

The steps of landing page optimization consist of:

1. Conduct Research

2. Form/Validate Hypotheses

3. Create a treatment

4. Conduct Experiment

5. Analyse, experiment data

6. Conduct follow up experiment

And let’s emphasize Research another time for anyone in the back who didn’t get the memo!

When doing our research, you can break into 3 types of research:

· Heuristic walkthrough: This is about empathy and understanding of your user.

· Quantitative research: What are the problems and where are the problems?

· Qualitative research: Why are these a problem?

Psychology

The cool thing about learning lading page optimization is that there is a lot of psychology involved. In this course, we start to understand some important psychology facts that should be considered when working on the landing page optimization process, like fast vs slow thinking and cognitive biases. We need to know these things because this is how our visitors’ brains are working when they are navigating our landing pages.

Humans have 2 different modes of thinking:

1. Intuitive thinking: Fast (something that happens to you), in the moment, emotional, subconscious.

2. Analytical thinking: Slow (something you do), effort, logic.

Cognitive biases:

· Priming: Exposure to one stimulus influences response to a subsequent stimulus.

· Framing: The way you deliver a message has a direct impact on how it is perceived.

· WYSIATI: What You See Is All There Is.

You might be wondering how you apply this knowledge to your landing page optimization process. Well, if we are not conscious of these biases when we are designing a landing page, we might create confusion for our users when we create a landing page. One example Michael gives on the course is if we use technical jargon the most field experts would understand, but not necessarily our target audience. They might make assumptions or jump to conclusions and that will make it much harder for the user to decide or take the action we want them to take. Make sure to do some research on your own about these terms.

Neuroscience

In this course, we also get a small and brief introduction to neuroscience and two of the most important brain chemicals that affect the landing page experience: Dopamine and Cortisol. Very basically, avoid cortisol triggers:

· Violating expectations

· Ambiguity

· Disempowerment

· Multi-tasking

· Pressure

· Stop words

Wireframing

How do we structure the information on our website? If you have any experience in building, essentially anything, you will know that is always highly recommended to have a good guide beforehand. A wireframe is basically a blueprint of your page. They have the goal of arranging the elements of the page in the most effective way to reach a specific goal. It helps us visualize the landing page early on, prioritize content and build a structure in which is easy to align copy and design.

A key point here is understanding information hierarchy. Information hierarchy is about the copy we will be using on your page, we need to know this when building our wireframing. It helps us answer important questions like what information is most important and how much information is necessary? You don’t too little information on your page where the user just doesn’t understand what’s going on or too much information where the user just gets lost and overwhelmed.

Landing page copywriting

I think a lot of us can get a bit scared of copywriting. I’m not a great writer. To be honest, I don’t think I’m even a mediocre writer haha. So that can make us discouraged from diving into copywriting and understanding how to do it well. The fact is that you don’t need to be an English (or whatever language you are working on) major to do good copywriting, as long as you understand what it is about and what’s the goal. You just need to communicate the right message to persuade the visitor to take the goal action. Here’s a good guide from Unbounce.

Landing Page Design

The landing page design has 6 important elements

1. headline

2. images/video

3. features/benefits

4. credibility

5. expectation managers

6. call-to-action buttons

With these elements, you want to: answer questions, reinforce motivation, address barriers.

“Go through the information hierarchy and flash it out with the 6 design elements. Add your copy, and turn it into a wireframe (mockup) and start tweaking”

Other important things to consider: study visual hierarchy, color theory, and typography.

Audit

The whole process of landing page optimization looks like this:

1. research

2. audit

3. wireframe

4. copy

5. design

6. implement

7. test and optimize

We’ve seen an intro to all of these except implementation, A/B testing, and auditing. Implementation most of the time where the developers take charge. A/B testing I already covered a lot with one of my past articles and Audit is what I will cover now.

Auditing is easier after you’ve done the research, so firstly, Michael suggests going through your research notes and then put them together in a list of proposed tweaks and changes. Follow up with an information hierarchy exercise (who, what, where), figure out what information is missing, what to add, what to remove, the question barriers. Then onto visual hierarchy by critiquing the page, ask some fundamental questions like:

· Does this page look reliable?

· Do the right elements stand out?

Put together some new recommendations to improve that

Move on to copy auditing:

· Does the message between source and headline match?

· Does the copy answer questions, address barriers and reinforce motivation?

· Does it make sense?

· What should be added removed or tweaked?

Auditing is a process of asking questions! Remember all the elements we’ve seen so far and make sure it matches with the page you presented.

That’s it for this article. More interesting things coming up next week like Product Messaging and some Channel Specific Growth Skills.

Stay tuned.