cft

How Do You Engineer Value Into Your Landing Pages?

Let's explore what's wrong with this question.


user

Mauro Accorinti

3 years ago | 5 min read

Cartoon vector used was created by vectorjuice 

How Do You Engineer Value Into Your Landing Pages?

So… what’s wrong with this question? It seems pretty straightforward, doesn’t it?

Well, no.

The problem lies in the way the question is framed because… well, it feels a bit misguided.

Now don’t get me wrong, I think it has the heart in the right place!

It’s just…

Well, it’s like asking “How do I give value in an email?”

You see what I mean?

A landing page is just a vehicle for the message or offer you’re giving your leads.

Like, I could write my offer out on a crumpled napkin and it could give you the same amount of value as a page.

With that being said…

The real question being asked here is: “How do I give value to the people I want to show my offer to?”

And to answer that question, we’re going to have to view the 2 aspects of value. One of them on how we perceive value, and the other on something called “base value”.

Buuuut…

I’d rather not touch on the first one for now, for two reasons:

  1. It’s easy to abuse. And that’s because it has to do with either inflating the perceived value of a product (things like limiting the offer to increase demand and, therefore, price) or manipulating the psychology of others. (A common example is anchoring. You know those pages that offer 3 prices? What usually happens is one of them is way more expensive than the others, which makes the other two seem more affordable in comparison. Although that might not be the case)
  2. By itself, it doesn’t help you create and give real value to others. It just makes it seem like it’s more valuable. What we really want (and also what the spirit of the original question wants) is to focus on giving value. Not seeming like we are giving a lot of it.

So that being said, let’s talk about base value.

What is base value?

So when we think of giving somebody value, whether we’re selling bikes on eBay or gifting somebody flowers on valentine’s day, there’s something called “base value”.

And base value has to do with the level of “minimum measurable usefulness”® the thing you’re offering is giving.

Which is just a fancy way of saying:

“HEY, what am I getting out of this?”

And you can (kind of) figure that out by asking things like:

  • What kind of problems does my offer solve and how important/urgent are they for the other person? (Locksmiths become VERY valued when you’re locked out of your house at 3am)
  • How does my product make an aspect of the other person’s life easier? (Catering services make it so you don’t have to cook for 84 people at a party yourself.)
  • Can it save my clients money? Or hell, MAKE them money? (Good accountants are supposed to do this!)

And that’s handy, except…

People still value different things.

What can be a lifesaver for one person could be a HUGE annoyance for another.

And we HAVE to keep this in mind if we’re doing any sort of marketing. (Else we’ll probably piss a lot of people off)

Thankfully, there is a way to think about it that can improve our odds. And it starts by thinking about this base value idea as having 3 dimensions that stack on top of each other. These are:

  • Target Audience (Who are you selling to?)
  • Offer (What are you offering them?)
  • Communication (How are you communicating your offer to them?)

And this is where we can start talking about landing pages.

Who are you selling to?

Also known as your target audience, you can think about it as the general “persona” that would be interested in your offer. The sooner the figure this out (and validate it), the better. Figure this out by asking:

  • In what industry do the people who would find your offer useful be in?
  • What age group are they in?
  • Who has the types of problems that my offer solves?

Once you have that done, then you can decide on:

What are you offering the people you want to sell to?

If you decided that your target audience is going to be vegans in the 21–35 age range, then guess what?

Don’t offer a vegan a hamburger.

Your offer has to be compatible with the audience you’ve chosen. Thankfully, from here on, giving value becomes a lot easier once you ask yourself a few questions:

  • What kind of problems does my audience have? What can I offer that helps them solve it?
  • Can I offer them an ebook, video, article or audio that can help them with one of their goals?
  • What kind of content is my audience looking at? What similar products have they buy that gives me an indication of their real wants?

And then after figuring THAT out, you can tackle:

How are you going to communicate your offer?

People value good communication. But they also value certain modes of communication over others.

This has a little to do with copy, a little to do with persuasion, but more than anything…

It really has to do with what you’re using to talk to your audience.

  • Does your target audience prefer video? Or are they trapped in their office all day and wouldn’t be able to listen to it even if they wanted to?
  • Are you using helpful design elements to guide your reader’s eyes to the right sections in the right order? Are you spacing things out or are you creating GIANT WALLS of text that no sane person would possibly take the time to read?
  • Are you sectioning out your page/content and explaining your offer in a way that makes sense to your leads?

And then there’s the marketing aspects.

You can have the greatest product in the world, but if you don’t know how to explain why it’s great, selling it becomes almost impossible.

That’s why creating good landing pages is important. They should be able to put all of these 3 together, understand where your leads are in the bigger sales picture and bring them value in an easy and digestable way. (So that they continue to the next stage of your process)

And when you DO have these 3 dimensions of your page together…

You end up with an easy framework that helps you know what would give value to the specific group of people you’re trying to talk to.

__________________________________

I want to send you an insightful landing page idea every Wednesday

My name is Mauro [Maw-ro] and I’m the guy who wrote this article. I have a newsletter where once a week I send an insightful idea on how to improve landing pages for your marketing campaigns. If you’re interested, you can sign up to get them in your email here.

Upvote


user
Created by

Mauro Accorinti

I’m a front-end developer and digital marketer. My newsletter "In One Snap" features weekly insights to help marketers, designers and devs increase conversions on landing pages. You can get my free landing page swipe file (and sign up to In One Snap) by going here → http://bit.ly/Free-landing-page-swipe-file


people
Post

Upvote

Downvote

Comment

Bookmark

Share


Related Articles