Adwords Landing Page Principles Transcript
Good afternoon. This is Thomas Green with ethicalmarketingservice.co.uk. I get asked a lot about Adword landing page principles.
This is not specific to Adwords necessarily, but it will help if you are trying to create a landing page or traffic which you are paying for. So cold traffic that you don’t necessarily have a relationship with the people that are going to this page and it’s not like a main page on your website.
So the first principle… Also, before I start, I’m going to reference people that I have learnt these principles from. It doesn’t necessarily mean that I agree with everything.
A lot of them are copywriters and copywriters tend to be more on the hypey side and my personal opinion is I like more fact based statistics when I like to speak to people, but I would like to reference these people just because it’s not like I have come up with this information on my own.
I have learnt it from other people and I think that once you learn something from someone, they should actually be given credit for the lessons that they’ve helped you to learn.
So, as I said, the first principle is testimonials. These are often underused rather than overused on the Internet and is more important what other people say about you than what you say about yourself.
And the more detail given about the person who wrote the testimonial, for example, a picture, a full name, the town they’re in, the website they’re from, their specific location, etc, the more impact that has on the response rate that you’re likely to get.
That principle is from Dan Kennedy and it’s also taught that the correct way to do testimonials is to guide people when they… If they’re a customer of yours and they’re considering writing a testimonial for you, is to guide them to speak about a particular objection, a common objection that your business has.
So if you’re speaking to a potential customer and they all have, or a lot of people have a similar objection, then ideally you want to have a testimonial which addresses that objection so that they can see that on the page.
A lot of people just have random testimonials and ideally you want to address specific objections that your potential customer has.
The next principle is a guarantee. I learnt this from both Jay Abraham and also Dan Kennedy. Any kind of guarantee or way to reverse the risk to the customer has a huge impact on if they take action or not. Ideally this would be emphasised heavily.
It wouldn’t be somewhere down the bottom of the page or somewhere that’s difficult to find. The more conditions the guarantee has, the less impact it has on conversion.
So a lot of people are used to terms and conditions in insurance and that type of thing where okay, in the small print it actually turns out they’re not covered for anything.
Well, the less conditions it has… For example, We offer a satisfaction guarantee, which means there aren’t any conditions. The more impact that has on someone who’s willing to take action on what you provide.
The longer the guarantee, the higher the conversion rate and vice versa. So if you have a guarantee of like one or two days, then it’s likely you’re going to have lots of people exercise that guarantee and if you have a guarantee that’s, for example 90 days, then the less likely it is that someone is going to exercise that, their right to a risk reversal.
If there is no way to guarantee your transaction, meaning that you deal in very high value goods and it would potentially bankrupt your business in order to offer a guarantee on a transaction, there is normally something else that you can guarantee as a selling point.
An example of that might be service orientated. So if we don’t get back to you within 24 hours then you’re entitled to ‘X’ and it leads us on to the next point, which is differentiation.
If you have a guarantee then it means that you’re doing something different than everyone else who is offering the same thing. Differentiation is something I learned from Jay Abraham. If there is anything different about you over your customers, it should be repeated over and over.
It is important to do this and the question that I learnt from Dan Kennedy is why should the customer do business with you over any and every other option available to them? If there is not something different about your business, it should be created. It’s kind of common sense, but at the same time very few people do it so I guess it’s not actually… doesn’t meet the definition of ‘common sense.’
When you’re in a market place full of people all offering the same thing, you need to make sure that you’re doing something different.
The next principle is call to actions. I learnt this from… It is a basic thing that you learn when you’re doing any type of marketing education.
Mainly I learnt this from Frank Kern. It should be very clear which action the customer should take on each page. If it’s a buy button, for example if you have an online store, it should be very prominent.
If it’s a phone number it should be large and it should instruct the visitor what you want them to do – so “Call now,” or ‘X’ on this number. If it’s a form that they have to fill in, they should be told to input their details and an explanation of who will contact them.
It is odd that people need to be told what they need to do in terms of what action you want them to take, but you really can’t… Once you look at the studies and the examples of having a call to action versus not having one, it’s indisputable that they do work.
The next principle is to educate the customer. I learnt this from Jay Abraham. Normally when you tell the customer things, you kind of expect that they know things that you actually haven’t communicated it.
So a better way of saying that is you know a vast amount about your business and a lot of times people do, when they’re the business, they do expect that their visitors or their customers know things that they actually don’t know.
And when you educate the customer it helps them make the buying decision, even if it’s very simple. So don’t assume that they know things which they actually may not.
Address as many reasons as possible that they may have for not making the purchase or enquiring.
Be formulaic. If you know these rules then you can break them, but this principle I learnt from John Carlton.
The basic copy for a sales page or a landing page should be three parts – so what is it that you’re selling? What will it do for them? And then what you want them to do next? That is the basic outline for how it should be structured.
Again, I said, if it turns out that you want to structure it differently, then at least you do know that this tried and tested in terms of a formula for a sales page.
The next principle is an irresistible offer. Again, this is a Dan Kennedy… He has actually taught that in many of his courses.
The offer must be clear. It must be of great value and there should always be a reason why you are offering it.
So to be more specific, if you have an offer on your page, it terms of irresistible it should be “If you take action now, then you also get X,Y and Z.” And X,Y and Z should… or it’s desirable to have it be as valuable as the thing that you’re selling.
I know that sounds difficult, but if there is a way that you can make it as appealing as possible, then that is going to compensate you.
Now it would be good if I could give some examples here, but perhaps I might put them in the comments section below, and maybe that might help.
The next one is links. This is actually something I’ve learnt from observation rather than from a course or from a mentor.
When you’re sending traffic from, for example, Adwords, if you send them to a normal page on your website often the visitors of that website will click around and if you don’t have a particular path that you want them to go down and you’re not following the principles that I’ve outlined previously, it’s very often that they’ll leave and that will be costly to you.
If you’re going to put links on the landing page, which Google does prefer from the point of view of user experience.
They don’t like a page with no links on it whatsoever – then they should be strategic. Often I’ve put links at the bottom of the page so you’d have to scroll all the way down in order to see them and they’re not prominent.
So they’re not necessarily hidden. I don’t recommend blending them in so that they’re invisible or anything like that.
It’s just that when you’re deciding where your links should be on a landing page it should be very tactical, and if you decide to have them at the top of the page like any other website, then they should support all of the principles that I’ve previously followed.
So they shouldn’t be allowed to go to an ‘About Us’ page which does nothing to help you close that customer from a visitor to an enquiry or a sale.
So often the customer doesn’t really care how long you’ve been in business and they don’t care what your message is and that sort of thing.
Really they want to know how it affects them and what they’re getting out of it rather than hearing about you.
So conclusion would be that all of these things do matter. So if you can do all of them then you will be head and shoulders above the rest of the people on the Internet, and if you’re going to just send traffic to a website which isn’t really thought out, it’s probably going to cost you.
A lot of the best marketers on the Internet and the best people or businesses who get the best results, it’s very purposeful.
So every step of the way it’s tried and tested and it’s, as I said, strategic.
I really hope that helps. Do let me know in the comments section if you think that I have missed something out. Often there’s, for example, stuff like free giveaways in order to get people’s details. Hopefully that’s included in the irresistible offer.
Please rate and subscribe if you like the video and as always, you can visit us at ethicalmarketingservice.co.uk if you’re interested in Adwords management. Thank you very much for listening.