Nick Sharma (0:01)

Welcome back to Limited Supply, the podcast where we get deep into the tactical and strategic side of E commerce, digital marketing and building consumer brands. I'm your host Nick Sharma. I've spent the last nine years building, scaling and investing in brands and through this show. In my weekly newsletter at Nick Co email, I'm here to share everything I've learned. The wins, the losses, the experiments, the tactics and the insights. All so you can unlock your next hundred thousand dollars in revenue. Today's episode is a good one, but before we dive in, let me tell you our chosen sponsor for this week's episode. You may have heard of Applovin before, or maybe not, but let me tell you why you need to pay attention. Whether or not you realize it, you've interacted with Applovin as a consumer. They're the largest ad network for mobile games, reaching 150 million people per day.

Unknown Co-Host (0:50)

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Unknown Co-Host (1:36)

Welcome back to another episode of Limited Supply. I hope you're excited. Today is going to be a fun one. It's going to be a quicker one and we're just going to basically go through a bunch of landing page tips. These are, this is me looking back at a ton of landing page studies, a ton of customer acquisition funnels, a ton of performance marketing for brands that don't have strong brand awareness and really looking at what worked and what didn't work. I think a lot of the times there are really beautiful landing pages shared and they're coming from really beautiful brands. But it's hard to in my opinion at least, you know, the same reason I don't like to hire a growth marketer from a brand that is a very well known brand because I mean, simply put, you just have to do less, less things from the get go or I should say from you know, the 0 to 25 maybe in order to get things going. Obviously if you're a well known brand or a recognized brand and you're, you know, 100, 200 million plus, it's much different game. But a lot of times people are always asking me, you know, I need to hire a growth marketer, where should I look? And my recommendation is always go find people at companies who don't have good brand awareness. They've had to work much harder to hit those similar results and to hit their CAC goals and their ROAS targets. And they've also had to try, probably had to try. I have to put all the disclaimers in here. They've probably had to try a lot more things than somebody who comes from a brand that's really well recognized has had to try. Because fewer things work when your brand is less recognized. All that said, I put together some landing page tips in the same kind of vein of thought, which is for a brand that's not super well recognized but has got a product that delivers on its promise and a product that clearly works and helps people out. I wanted to put together landing page tips that whether you have a really good built up brand or you don't, this should still convert and work well. The other thing I'll say too is obviously this is gonna impact your numbers once somebody hits the site. So if you're having issues getting decent CPMs or decent click through rates, that's a whole other issue. And we can spend another episode on that, on just talking ad creative and kind of like tips, strengths, things to test tactics, practical ways to go about better ad creative. But for today, let's get into some landing pages. So again, like I said, looking back at several different landing pages and different CRO experiments, I wanted to basically note down what are the, you know, if I took, I've done those things where I do 60 landing page tips, 100 landing page tips, etc. What are like the ones that are the most impactful? So I'm gonna just go through those and if you have any questions, if you have any, if you want to see examples, if you want, if you want, if you want to send your landing page to me and have me check it out, DM me on Twitter, shoot me an email. I'm just nharma.com Mr. Sharma on Twitter. And yeah, let's get into it. So number one thing that I think most people don't do and a lot of people don't do it because they're drinking their own Kool Aid. So what do I mean by that? You're selling your product, let's say it's a beanie, but you're the one that wears the beanie all the time. You touch the beanie all the time. You have it on, you see it in your closet, you're looking at the webpage every day. So to you, you think that everything is already obvious, which is why you're not a great candidate to be one to kind of audit your own landing pages. But second to that is that you are, you already believe in the product, right? So which leads me to number one, which is you need to leverage a lot more social proof. A lot of people don't leverage social proof in their landing pages. And landing pages are entirely built to shorten or kind of, you know, rapidize, make faster that conversion funnel, right? The whole process of somebody learning about what you're selling and why you're selling the product and what does it do for them and how fast does it get there and how does it compare to other options that are on the market, is there an offer there, et cetera. That's really what is always on a landing page. But a lot of people always forget the social proof. Like, show me the proof that, you know, thousands of other people have bought this and not had issues. Show me the proof that, that you have valid. You have people that are willing to say that whatever your benefits are actually worked for them. So sometimes that's customer reviews. That's just plain text and cited next to their name and maybe a little picture. Sometimes that's something like a little line that says, I've seen something like 40,000 plus bottles sold. TikTok shop number one seller. You know, you can have badges like Allure's, Allure Beauty's, you know, top product or Cosmopolitan, you know, skin care awards winner. I'm just making these up. But these are all different forms of social proof. You know, UGC on your product page or your landing page, videos of influencers, screenshots of comments on Facebook, screenshots of comments on TikTok. These are all different forms of social proof. And you don't need to just have publications and paid celebrities. In fact, those are probably two of the least conversion impacting forms of social proof you can put into your funnel. Instead, I would try to focus on things that people feel are not fake. So comments, screenshots of TikTok and Instagram, Facebook comments, real customer reviews and you know, even, even like videos. There is, if you have any videos of your customers using the product, opening the box, showing you what's inside, that kind of stuff is, is the real social proof. But let's get to the next one. Next one is copy. So copy is 80% of what you sell. The the reason is because, well, it's twofold. One is if your copy looks complicated just from glancing at it, if it's too chunky, if it's paragraph heavy, if it's full of jargon, if it's full of keywords and buzzwords, then people are going to see that and immediately be turned off from wanting to read further. However, if your copy is easy to understand, it's displayed in a beautiful hierarchy, meaning you can clearly separate, right, by looking at it, the headline from the sub headline, from the bullet points, from the paragraph copy, copy to the copy under the iconography, to the, to the price point, to the, you know, the, the returns guarantee underneath the cta. Like if you can clearly see all those different pieces, that's step one. Step two is then making sure that your copy is actually good. It's gotta be punchy, savvy, focused on the benefits, not the value props. And it's, it's really your positioning, so your angle in which, how you bring somebody in through the copy, right? You have to make sure you're speaking to them in whatever your copy is. They need to feel like they can meet you halfway. Your copy should sort of throw something out there and it should be something that they can hook on to and lock in with. So if you're selling, you know, I always use the example of rice cakes. If you're selling rice cakes and you're selling to an audience of moms, you know, your line of copy might be something like mom's favorite snack, Mom's favorite after school snack. That throws the opportunity out for somebody of a moment to read that and say, you know what, I'm locking in, I'm now interested. I'm ready to consume the rest of the page. So that is why copy is really a huge part of it. It's the design and the hierarchy. But it's also, then what are you saying and how are you making sure that it's relating back to the person on the other side? One more thought on that that just came to mind. You know, YouTubers, if you've ever watched YouTube vloggers back in the day, you know that they are extremely good at kind of just speaking to the camera and making it feel like they're talking to you. And the reason is because they're very good at doing what I was just mentioning about the copy, which is how do you create something that's somewhat relatable or attainable or aspirational that the other person can reach out to and connect with. And that's how vloggers build such a big following. Okay, next one, number three, designing for desktop. Big. No, no. It's like having a surround sound system with no subwoofer. It still works, but it's not going to be the best. So why even go that way? Most of your traffic, again, caveat disclaimer. Most of your traffic should be mobile. It probably is mobile. I would imagine 80 plus percent of your traffic is mobile. There's very rare instances where brands have a large percent of traffic on desktop and there's some instances where they have discovery on mobile, but conversion on desktop, you know, those tend to be higher AOV things. Things where there's a lot of customization or a lot of optionality, which is again why you want to make landing pages somewhat easy. You know, merchandise it in a way where there's not too many options. I like thinking about the in and out menu. Few options make it easy, get people in and out and that's it. So main thing there, write copy for mobile, design for mobile. You know, even when you design for mobile and write copy for mobile, it fits better. It's a lot more efficient in mobile and then you can throw it into desktop and kind of rearrange things or maybe add some elements to fill space. But if you design for desktop and you put everything into desktop and then try to fit it to mobile, you're going to end up in a spot where your mobile is not optimized for mobile, meaning you will still have a mobile design. It's going to be a design within a little screen. But everything is, you know, for example, the biggest thing or the biggest way to notice this is like if you pull up a homepage mobile design and the CTA is not even above the fold. It's because it was designed in desktop and squished into mobile. Same thing on the PDPS or the shop section of a landing page. You know, when you see that shop section, you want to see the title at the top, the CTA at the bottom without having to make someone scroll. But again, if it's designed on desktop and fit into mobile, it's just way too long. You have to scroll too much to get to that cta. And you also just don't think of mobile first elements like a more optimized cart, a more optimized navigation, a more optimized add to cart section of that landing page, a more optimized variant selector so it's much better to challenge your thinking and basically design a harder way first into mobile and then expand it to desktop. Next one is make your pricing discounts and your offers a lot more noticeable and bigger, the bigger the price is, the less it actually feels to somebody that you're hiding something. So conversion rate actually goes up when your prices are bigger. You can use different color font, you can make it bold, you can use highlights, you can use a sticker, you can use another colored CTA with contrast colored outline. So you know, orange CTA with a black outline, red CTA with I guess a black outline, basically contrasting colors to really show you where the CTA is. And again, obviously you have to do this within your brand colors, but to be honest, you should actually look at a lot of. If you don't already do this, you should spend at least 30 minutes every couple days going on ads manager and seeing what people are launching and seeing their ads and where they're driving to. And you'll notice that a lot of the brands that are winning on a performance marketing basis, they care about their brand aesthetic, but they care a lot more about profit, as you should too. So focus on that. And that's why you know, some of these things, like making your discounts, your offers, your pricing, your stickers, your CTA's just making them pop a lot more. Or even having sub supportive copy, like you know, a dollar a day with this offer or less than $5 a day to use X or less than $2 a day to achieve X. Right. Like those types of things help. They help, they help people do girl math in their heads and justify it. And that's what obviously helps get the purchase and the conversion. So next one there, it actually goes a little bit off of the last couple points with copy and kind of positioning. But also don't discount what pictures do. And pictures can be. Well, we'll get to illustrations in a second. But for pictures, what I mean is a lot of times, you know, brands will do these nice photo shoots and the products look really beautiful. But again, that's just somebody who's sort of drinking the Kool Aid. It's not beautiful and, you know, appetizing to somebody who doesn't know the brand. And I think the companies that do this really well are like insurance companies, alcohol companies and telecom companies, and even like cable TV companies. All of their imagery is always focused around some sort of like joyous time or event or showing you the good life or what life will be like with the product. And that's what your imagery has to focus on too. So if you're selling a greens powder, you don't want to just show the greens powder. Everybody knows what greens powder is, but you need to show what does that morning look like when you're waking up and having the greens powder? What is your afternoon look like because you had the greens powder? What does, you know, like basically, how does life look with the greens powder in it? It's not that it's just a powder on your kitchen. You're. You might be dressed in a work outfit. You might be, you know, on a Soul Cycle bike. Whatever it is, you need to sort of show how this contributes to a lifestyle that is aspirational, that people are trying to get to. I remember too when I, when I worked at Hint, I used to go to SoulCycle and just take pictures of the bottle and the Soul Cycle bike. It wouldn't show the branding, but it was so obvious to people. When you see the bike, or sorry, you see the bottle in that little bike holder for the bottle and you can see a bike shoe next to it or a pedal next to it, you can see the lifestyle that you're trying to bring somebody into. And of course, this does include illustrations, icons, graphs, charts. You know, if you have anything that's education, focus or scientific supplements, for example, this is a great place to show a lot of those illustrations, icons, charts, et cetera. And last thing I'll say to the last couple points here is the more you can use numbers, the better. You probably remember back in the day buzzfeed, all those articles and quizzes and anything that would go viral off buzzfeed always had a number in the title. So the more you can put numbers in, the more trustworthy it is, but also the more real it feels to people.