CXL Growth Marketing Review (Week 6)

Hey there!

Welcome back to the CXL Growth Marketing course review.

To give you a brief, I am taking this course on Growth Marketing by CXL. Every week, I publish my review on what I have learned from this course. If you are new here, please go through the previous parts.

• CXL Growth Review Week 1 — Course 1 and 2
• CXL Growth Review Week 2 — Course 3 and 4
• CXL Growth Review Week 3 — Course 5 and 6
• CXL Growth Review Week 4 — Course 7 and 8
• CXL Growth Review Week 5 — Course 9, 10 and 11

The third module has a couple more lessons (Attribution and Excel for marketers) which I haven’t completed yet. So, I am going to keep that for another day. In this blog I am going to review the first course of the fourth module — Conversion.

In this module there are two courses — Landing page optimization and product messaging & sales page copywriting. The whole module takes roughly 10 hours to complete.

Landing page optimization by Michael Aagaard

Michael Aagaard is a conversion optimization veteran, international keynote speaker and public speaking coach. In this lesson he covers the entire landing page optimization experience, including basic neuroscience, quantitative and qualitative research, information hierarchy, wireframing, and design.

What is a landing page?

A landing page is any page on which visitors lands or enters after clicking an ad. For effective conversion, the page works independently from the rest of the site. This is usually done to:

• Shorten the journey from click to conversion
• Deliver on any ‘promises’ made in the inbound ad
• Speaks to user motivation & addresses barriers
• Answers important questions & creates clarity
• Creates a clear path to the conversion goal

Now, when creating a landing page, a lot of thought has to go in. But, the human brain is structured in such a way that there are two ways through which we answer questions — Fast thinking and slow thinking. I will be explaining what I am going with this in a bit.

Fast thinking is intuitive, we plunge the answers to the question almost immediately. For instance, what is 2*2. We answer his almost immediately.

Slow thinking is more analytical. For instance 19*234. This might take some time.

When it comes to Landing Page Optimization, we need to take some time to ensure that we approach each questions analytically.

A simple path for the landing page could look like:

search → PPC Ad → landing page → form → confirmation

And, a complex path might involve the below steps:

email subject line → email → product overview → product page → cart → checkout step 1 → checkout step 2 → checkout step 3 → confirmation

Wireframing and Information Hierarchy

A logical and well-structured information hierarchy is the backbone of any high-converting landing page. Deciding what information is most important, and how much information is necessary will act as the foundation to the entire page. Key things you need to know are:

1. Who are you communicating with?
2. What do you want them to do?
3. Where is the traffic coming from?

The best way to ensure that is by doing a 5 second test, where you show the landing page or fold to someone for 5 seconds and find out if the messaging reaches them. If they are not able to find out what the messaging is about, there is no point in proceeding.

Creating landing pages have a close association with the awareness level of the reader. They are broadly categorised into:

• Problem aware — The reader knows the problem that they are facing.
• Solution aware — They also know the solution to their problem.
• Product aware — They are aware about your product as well.
• Most aware — They know the features that your product offers.

Once you classify the awareness level of the reader, you need to curate the information that has to go into the page. This is ideally done by interviewing three types of people — your customers, sales and support. I have listed below the questions that you need to ask each of them.

Customer Interviews

• What do you think of product/service x so far?
• What problem were you trying to solve with product/service x?
• Has product/service x helped you solve that problem?
• If you were the CEO of our company tomorrow, what’s the first thing you would change?
• When you were evaluating product/service x, what questions or concerns did you have?
• Can you describe your buying process — what were the steps? Was anyone else involved? What were their concerns?
• Was there anything that almost made you not buy?
• If a friend or colleague asked you to explain what product/service x does, what would you say?
• Is there anything important I missed? Anything you want to add?

Support Interviews

• What are the top 3 questions from potential customers?
• What do you answer when you get these questions?
• Are there any particular aspects of X that people don’t understand?
• What aspects of X do people like the most/least?
• Are there any major deterrents?
• Are there any major drivers?
• The elevator pitch — if you only had 30 seconds to pitch our product/offer, what would you say?
• Did I miss anything important? Got something to add?

Sales Interviews

• What is the main problem evaluators are trying to solve with our product/offer?
• Based on your experience from talking to evaluators, what is the decision-making process you typically see (FOR B2B: how many people/departments are involved?)
• In this process, are there any ‘aha moments’ that bring evaluators closer to either ‘yes’ or ‘no’?
• What are the top 3 questions you get from evaluators?
• At what point do they realize whether our product/offer is the right/wrong fit for them?
• Are there any major deterrents?
• Are there any major drivers?
• The elevator pitch — if you only had 30 seconds to pitch the product/offer, what would you say?
• Did I miss anything important? Got something to add?

Once you are done, you can proceed with writing the content. You can find how to leverage customer research and analysis to create strategic messaging, including voice-of-customer research, copy teardown, message mining, value proposition design, message hierarchies, and conversion-focused message design in my next blog post.

As a last part of this blog, I would like to highlight how landing page design is all about visual hierarchy, which means creating designs that easily identify the elements that should stand out to create a logical flow that guides users through the landing page experience. The 6 most important elements of hierarchy in design are: Size, Space, Font, Color & Contrast, and Direction.

Focusing on the 6 most important landing page design elements help save time and avoid the less important aspects. These elements all help answer questions, reinforce motivations, address barriers.

That’s all folks!