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Welcome back to season 12 of limited.

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Supply, the only commerce podcast with unfiltered and refreshingly hot takes.

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I'm your host Nick Sharma and when I'm not recording, I'm behind the scenes.

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Scaling your favorite celebrity and consumer brands. Let's start talking all things direct to consumer I'm going to tell you about a software that my agency, Sharma Brands, uses. With our fastest scaling brands historically last click advertising channels. Think Facebook, Google or TikTok. They take too much credit for what they do. As a result, it's reduced confidence for brands to effectively scale their upper funnel structure strategies, which puts them in a pickle of higher CPAs. A few years ago without Prescient, I would have said there's no real way to track what channels like YouTube TV or even newcomers like Applovin are doing. But with Prescient you can now look at daily multi channel forecasting and optimize your paid media without any bias. Prescient allows you to see the halo effect that is usually unrecognized with top funnel channels and allows you to measure those down to the campaign level. See the impact your upper funnel media really has on E Commerce, Amazon and even retail stores. Plus, once you go live, since it's not a pixel based platform, you'll have data and results populating within a week. Try it out and go to prescientai.com Limited to learn more.

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Welcome back to another episode of Limited Supply. You know I was going through a lot of the emails that I get and there was a lot of feedback on a very specific episode recently in season 11 and it dove deep into something tactical. And lately I've been getting a lot of questions about landing pages. I think there's always this pendulum swing on both creative and the post click experience. On the creative, it's swings between stuff that's really nicely done, studio shot, professionally done, beautiful cinemagraph type stuff or UGC crushes. And a lot of times it just swings back and forth and you just have to be testing enough to where you see that you know one is working better than the other and and that you're making those changes on the post click experience. I feel like this happens too where there's some points in the year where your homepage outperforms a product page or a landing page or your product page outperforms your homepage or a landing page. And then there's other times where your landing page outperforms everything. It also depends, you know, like who are you targeting? Are you targeting somebody who knows about the brand or knows about the question or the problem that you' trying to solve for, or are you targeting somebody who has to first be educated on why they even need an infrared, you know, sauna blanket? So all of that said, today's episode, I actually want to go pretty tactical and go super deep into landing pages. This might end up becoming a two parter, just depending on how much we get through. But this is about it. This is from a 13 page newsletter that I wrote and I wanted to create this episode because everybody always wants extra commentary and extra color. So while I'm still gonna follow this format of the document that I wrote, I wanna add some just extra color. So the reason that I really wanted to focus on this is I think that a lot of times we talk about growth marketing or just growing a brand, growth hacking, whatever it may be. And a lot of it tends to just really focus on Facebook ads or media buying, kinda these things that are really just siloed and those are mostly just one function. But one of the things that we don't focus on is growth marketing being this kind of full funnel approach to marketing. Right? Like when I think of growth marketing, I'm not just thinking that you're optimizing Facebook ads. I think part of growth marketing is making sure that your Facebook ads are as efficient as possible. You're testing as many things, you know, you're testing whitelisting and advertorials and landing pages and different bid and cost cap structures and all of that good stuff. But I also think that growth marketing applies to, you know, your bio on your Instagram page, the highlights that are featured, what posts are pinned to the top, you know, what's the URL behind the Instagram profile? When you work with an influencer, what's the URL you're giving them? Is a coupon code automatically applied when they click the link? Are they being tracked or segmented differently based on the UTM that they have when they first hit the site? You know, like, I think growth marketing applies to everything the email pop up, making sure that your pop up is capturing as many emails as possible, which is why I like to use Alia or even making sure that your welcome flow is constantly being optimized. If you're doing pr, you know, are you making sure that you're maximizing that relationship by using an affiliate platform to incentivize these publishers to post as much as possible or include you in more things? So I think like this concept of growth marketing is much greater than just media buying, which is usually how it's talked about in, in our kind of like bubble or in our community, in our world. But, you know, one of the biggest levers within that is landing pages. If there, if you were to ask me, you know, what's one of the bigger levers you can test and play with that. Most brands don't. It's landing pages. It's basically everything that happens after somebody clicks an ad, right? Regardless of how good your media buying is or how good your creative is, if whatever happens after the click is not just as good or better or is not doing the job that it's supposed to, which is, you know, your ad is supposed to get a click, your ad's not supposed to sell somebody right away. Once they get to your site or your landing page, that's where you have to sell them. So if you're landing page or your website, your product page or collections page, wherever you're sending traffic to, if that's not doing an active job of focusing on bringing that customer down the funnel, you know, you're screwed. Like, you're just wasting dollars on the paid side. And at the same time, most brands, this is where they fuck up. They, they run a ton. You know, they have agencies, they're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a month on media and on creative and agencies to support that. And then people click and it's like you end up on a site built in 90, 90, it looks like shit. And it's Shopify template. You know, the cart's not optimized. There's no upsells, there's no bundling, there's no merchandising of bundles, there's no new customer offer. So anyways, this got me pretty frustrated and it was Easter Sunday, so I thought, why not let's do a little Easter scavenger hunt on landing pages and just go super deep. So the first thing I want to talk about is the difference between the problem versus product funnel. Now these, these are two funnels that mostly everybody plays within. I think there's a third 1 which is funnel 0, which comes before the first funnel. And that's just making sure that you're able to grasp through relatability to your audience you're trying to go to. So let me give you an example. Let's say you're selling a infrared sauna blanket from Higher Dose, right? Typically I say there's two funnels. Funnel one is you have to educate them on why there is even a need for the product you're selling. So if you're selling this higher dose blanket, maybe it's that your sleep is really bad. So you need to educate them why infrared light and why this sauna product is actually going to help you lead to better sleep. The second funnel is now distinguishing somebody, distinguishing to somebody why your product is the best option. So, you know, take Jolie. Jolie's a really easy example here. Funnel 1 talks about why Jolie makes a difference in your water quality. What is. And funnel zero to that could even just be the Jolie water report, which is like, hey, did you realize how fucked up the water is that you're showering in? It's your biggest organ on your body. You know, you're giving it the worst water yet. You consume purified water, but you're showering in tap water. Why is that? Right? That's funnel zero. Funnel one is now educating them on the need of clean water and what that does for them, benefits wise, you know, that's really making it about them. How do you take something that's a problem that they may or may not understand and make it about them so that they actually care enough to get to funnel two, which is now you've under. You've got somebody who understands what the problem is, right? They understand that showering and water filled with wash off prescriptions and chlorine and all these chemicals is probably not good for your hair, for your nails, for your skin. You know, you're probably drinking some of that as you're showering. And so now the funnel 2 is really just around, okay, why is Jolie the best option for this product that's currently on the market? And so I think a big part of even deciding when you're running ad traffic is you have to understand who are, you know, what is your objective here? Is your objective to sell somebody on the individual product you're selling or is it to actually first educate them and get them to understand what the need is? Some landing pages and if you've got a product that's maybe a bigger impulse buy, you can actually do this in one and we'll talk about the different types of pages you can run in a second. But other brands, you know, take eight Sleep, for example, or higher dose or you know, cookware, right? Like you have to actually break these out. These are generally run as two separate things. Your upper funnel kind of cold prospecting. These are people who you're educating on why, right? It's literally just why. Brand name question mark. That's the answer for what funnel one is. Funnel two is why. This one question Mark and that's what you have to answer there. So hopefully that's clear. But I wanted to establish that before we get into the types of landing pages. So there's a few different types of landing pages. There's obviously way more than what I'm about to say because a landing page is essentially any specialized page where you're sending traffic. But I want to focus on the few that I think are the most important, most helpful, the ones that I've seen drive the biggest impact. So the first one is a Hero bundle or a Hero product landing page. This is essentially focusing on a very specific bundle that you're merchandising for net new customers or a new product. Or if you're, I've talked about the supplement brands on here, who they create this like net new customer offer. You know, you get half off your first month subscription, you get a free mixer, a free, you know, carrying case, maybe three months to the Calm Meditation app, whatever it may be. But you can essentially use these landing pages and we'll talk about all the sections in a second, but you can use these landing pages to create that entire experience. You've got a merchandise bundle. It's like you walk into Costco and they've got these pre made bundles. When you buy a video game, right, it comes with an Xbox, an extra controller, two free games, you know, maybe something else. But the idea with these Hero bundle pages is the same thing. It's like put somebody on a red carpet, help them understand what the product is, why it exists, you know, who's it for, how's it going to benefit them, when does it arrive, you know, all these kind of main things, you're just answering over and over again and make a really good offer and they should scroll this page without having to realize or without having to leave and go ask a question to Google, to ChatGPT to go look something up. You know, everything from social proof to a comparison chart to why should somebody trust this brand to, you know, the deal, everything like that should be on this Hero bundle page. These are, I found these to be the highest leverage pages. Like if you can get one of these cranking to a point where it's converting very well, you can easily triple, quadruple your conversion rate you're normally used to. Now the second one that I like, that I love to pair with actually. And a lot of times I'll pair this page. You know, you have a Facebook ad, you go to this page, which is a listicle and then you can send them to a Hero bundle page or a hero product landing page. Or you could even go to a product page, depending on where all you want to go. But it's a listicle and you know, listicles, I'm pretty sure. Well, I don't know for sure, but in my world, listicles were made by Buzzfeed. You know, 21 pictures that'll restore your faith in humanity. You've actually probably seen if you've ever heard of like the native ad networks, Taboola, Outbrain, Zergnet, all these companies. The top spenders on these ad networks are publishers that run traffic to essentially slideshow listicles, which again, just shows you how popular the concept of listicles are and how much people love listicles. But all that to say listicle landing pages do phenomenal and they're so easy to build. I used to do this manually where I would basically go through, let's say your Caraway cookware, right? You can go to the Caraway actually has a page publicly on their site that has all the reviews. You can literally go through them and just make a tally. A trait or a benefit and a tally, right? So if I go to Caraway's reviews, I might see that, well, it's non stick and non toxic. Boom, put a check there. Somebody else writes, oh, they're very easy to clean. Boom, put a check there. One person writes, oh, I don't have to use as much oil because it's non toxic or sorry, it's nonstick. I'll probably put that under the first one and just add a tally to less oil. I would basically do this until I've got 15 things with a good amount of tallies next to them. And then I would just reverse them. So I would sort them by most tallies to least tallies and take the top seven, top five, top nine. I'm a fan of the odd numbers. I think it looks more real and make a listicle. 7 reasons why home chefs can't get enough of Caraway cookware. And you start with the most talked about benefit, then the second most talked, then the third, and you go to five, nine, whatever you want to go to throughout that, every two or three benefits, you've got a CTA that says choose my color. Explore the cookware set, whatever it may be something to get you to the next stage of the page. But the idea is that you've basically taken reviews and things that people are actually talking about and reversing it to match what consumers probably one, if they're talking about that and raving about that in the reviews that's clearly something they were probably looking for prior to being a customer. The other thing I'll say there too is looking at TikTok and Reddit. And customer service questions are also good because it helps you understand what are the things that people are confused about that you can get ahead of in a listicle and just allows you to display it better. These do really well for upper funnel channels as well. And the last thing I'll say is you've now got ChatGPT so you can actually just download all your reviews and give the prompt of sort the top 5, 7, 9 most talked about benefits, give them to me, give me supporting reviews as evidence. I would even incorporate some of these reviews into the actual listicle page itself. And what you want to do is basically to figure out success on this page you have to judge it from its click through rate to the next page. If you have anything under 30%, you're probably missing the mark heavily. You want to aim to 40 to 60% click through rate. That means about half the people who read the listicle end up going to the landing page. And then your conversion rate on the landing page should obviously be higher from traffic coming from the listicle. This is also a good, you know, going back to that growth mindset, right? If you think about analytics and measurement, it's a good reason to have individually built out landing pages so you can understand conversion rate per page. If you can't just track conversion rate by the UTM source, which a lot of times you can, but it's not as clean or that piece of it can get messy. So yeah, just another random thought.