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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 and my weekly.
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Newsletter at Nick Co Email, I'm here.
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To share everything I've learned. The wins, the losses, the experiments, the.
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Tactics and the insights.
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All so you can unlock your next.
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Hundred thousand dollars in revenue.
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Today's episode is a good one, but before we dive in, let me tell you about our chosen sponsor for this week's episode.
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Sharma. All right, welcome back to another episode of Limited Supply. I'm actually calling in from a remote location here today, which is why I've got a bit of a different background. But it is crunch time. We are right in the middle of our Q4 sprint, so I had to make sure that I got this one out. And today's episode is actually going to be a bit of a rant. It goes off of a newsletter, two newsletters I wrote over the last two weeks. So if you're subscribed to the newsletter, which is at Nick Co Email, then you may be somewhat familiar. But I just want to add a little bit more color. And really the topic of today's podcast as well as the last two newsletters stemmed from a client I was working with where there was just there was a desire to build landing pages, which I think there's always a desire. Anybody who's running any sort of ad traffic or Facebook traffic is always trying to run traffic to pages that are, you know, optimized. To handle that traffic, but there was just not any. You know, there was the desire to have it, but like the skill set and then the tools in order to make sure that these landing pages are being done properly with the right team and the right process and the right elements and the right modules and developed in the right way and qaed in the right way and tested the right way, and all done in a timeline that's respectable and in a cost that's respectable that wasn't there. And so it kind of inspired me to first just talk about why you need to have an efficient design process. And then I want to go into basically, how do you. What is that design process? Or at least what's the one that I use? Because I may not know your business, but I can tell you what I've done, and hopefully it'll help. So, you know, when I was at Hint Water, I started working there in 2017. And hint is a beverage company. It's a flavored water company. And the thing in beverage that you're always told is that it's a game about shelf space. It's all about the real estate on the shelf. The more shelf space you have as a beverage brand, the more sales you get. And your goal as a beverage brand is to basically dominate the aisle. That's why if you go down grocery stores, you'll notice Coke, Pepsi, and Keurig, which also owns Dr. Pebble, Snap, Dr. Pepper, Snapple. Those are kind of the three big players in beverage. On the, you know, snack side, you may have Frito Lay, which is Pepsi. They pretty much own the aisles, and they dominate the aisles. They play chess, right? When you're a beverage brand trying to get into a college football stadium, Coke or Pepsi already has that. You're a beverage brand trying to get into a baseball stadium. Coke or Pepsi already has it. You're trying to get into an airline. Coke or Pepsi already has it. If you've noticed, everywhere you go, it's Coke or Pepsi, right? You go to in n out, it's Coke or Pepsi. If you go on an Air Delta Airlines, it's Coke or Pepsi. And the whole thing is this concept of, like, well, in retail, it's called slotting. In stadiums and airlines, it's probably some combination of, you know, cutting big breaks for the actual costs and. And then paying some fee on top of it, sponsorship fee or whatever. But one thing I realized was when I got to Hint, and my job was basically director of performance marketing, was that I was way better at getting people to the digital shelf than any of these legacy brands, right? And online, none of these guys were competing with me in a way that, well, one, they could keep up, but two, in a way that was just competent. All of these large kind of CPG players are entirely focused so much on digital content or digital media, but they're not focused on driving any sort of digital sales. And because they're not driving any sort of digital sales, and because their digital stuff is usually managed by agencies and contractors, they have no real sort of feedback loop or, you know, practice that actually shows them what's working and what's not working. And so the biggest opportunity for me as a marketing person, you know, 20 years old at a beverage company, was to crack the code online and try to figure out how do we build feedback loops, how do we test faster, how do we gather data, how do we test different angles and messaging and creative? You know, when I would look at what these big guys are doing, I would think, wow, these guys are basically launching one campaign a quarter maybe, or one cam, you know, one big campaign for a big moment, and. And then they're letting it rip, and then they're testing, and then they're just basically analyzing what happened. Whereas, like, I can go into Facebook, put 96 pieces of creative using ad espresso into an ad set, run it, and within five grand to spend, I can get a pretty good idea of exactly which creative is actually working and which ones are not. Now, keep in mind, this is 2017. So much different than what you might be doing today on Facebook. The best part is that I could launch a test, and within a week I would know the messaging that works, the type of creative that works, the landing page that works, the offer that works. And within basically two to three weeks, I already run multiple tests, and I already know which one is working. I know that each test leads to new learnings and faster learnings gives me an edge in the market where consumer attention is gold, right? The website is the storefront, and I can redesign that storefront however I want. But the faster that I decide to experiment and the faster I discover what resonates with customers and what doesn't, I'm going to validate that. Speed is the strategy for me. And it was so obvious. I remember going to BevNet in 2018 and hearing from somebody that hint was one of the most advanced direct consumer businesses that existed. This was literally a year after. But it was all just about testing and learning and optimizing and not being romantic about what didn't work or what did work, but rather just using the data to go forward. The other thing was every time we would design stuff, we would actually not just design them by graphic designers, we would be designing them with designers who understood performance marketing and optimization and UX and visual identity and how to handle cold traffic versus warm traffic. What are the types of things you have to educate them on? Whether it's different benefits or value props or the hierarchy of those things in that order so that you don't confuse somebody. But most designers are not conversion focused designers and most brands who hire designers to help them with web projects are not necessarily hiring conversion focused designers to do those because they're not as easy or as accessible. You know, when I was building Sharma Brands, which we now sold to Lunar Solar, the one of the hardest roles to hire was really good, talented web designers who understood everything from design and messaging and tone of voice and ux, but also how to think about conversion and customer journey. And you know, one of the things that I realized when I was working with this brand that I mentioned at the beginning last week or two weeks ago was that when we had hired the designer, it was more of like a software UI designer for a B2B company. It was not necessarily a designer that understood how to handle a website, let alone a consumer brand website, let alone a consumer brand website that is, you know, a nine figure brand, let alone one that is also selling direct to consumer online. So all of those things put together, you sort of need to have a conversion focused design, sorry, conversion focused designer. Because no matter how much, you know, input you can give or things you can change on top, if your fundamentals don't have that kind of DNA or that thinking in it as it's being designed, it becomes very obvious to the end consumer who's basically shopping that page. Now the other thing kind of leading off of that is your designers. They need to have an understanding of how to read data and how to understand what is essentially going on as a result of the work that they're creating. So in this case we're talking about designers, but I actually think this applies to all creators. So whether you're a copywriter, whether you're a graphic designer working on static ads, whether you're a video editor making videos, whether you're a content creator, internally or externally, you should have analytics to what the creative is that you're putting out. When you can see the feedback, when the creatives can see the feedback, they're going to digest it differently than your analytical brain or your ab testing Brain or your Excel brain might. And they're going to pick up on things that can actually make this much better. In addition to that, if you can ever give them things like, you know, for example, hey, this landing page drove a bunch of questions. We should take these questions in, internalize them, answer them, and then put them in the content so they get answered before somebody has them. Any of that kind of stuff always helps. Now, the last thing before I get into kind of my process is I just want to go through the five question framework, which I've always used. And this is basically the five questions I always ask. And essentially the way I like to do it is basically answer these five questions over and over and over again. So, you know, any good landing page, I always think of a good landing page. It's like a red carpet where you're walking Kim Kardashian down the aisle or down the carpet and you near her are the assistant. So it's on you to have all the answers at all times, you know, basically ready to go. Right? So that said, the way I like to build, the easiest way to build landing pages for me is just answer these five questions in as many different ways and modules and content displays and graphics as possible. The first one is what is the product? So don't assume your visitor magically knows what it is. You have to tell them very clearly and very simply what you're selling, because a confused person will never convert. The next one is why does this exist? What gap in the market or customer pain point are you addressing here? You want to basically answer what does this brand deserve to exist at every touch point? How will it benefit me? So this is pretty. This is probably the most important one. This essentially tells your customer this is exactly how you're going to benefit when you consume or use or take or buy this product. It's not value props. It's not that this is a nonstick pan. It's not that this is Teflon fee free. It's that you can use less oil when you cook because it's nonstick. It's that it's easier to clean and put away because it's nonstick. You understand how it's benefits versus value props. Fourth one is how fast do I get it? A lot of performance marketing brands do this one. Well, it basically says like how, how many days till the order ships? When is the order going to be delivered? You know, there's apps like Pretty Damn Quick that exist that help you do this, but sometimes just as simple as adding that messaging near your cta, your add to cart button, or your buy now button, or even in the checkout itself about when the order shipping, when it's going to arrive. You know, I always have this thing I like to do too where in my shipping rules, shipping rules are just like named by whoever, your admin or your ops person. You can just change that to be like, you know, VIP shipping in parentheses ships in 24 hours. That's going to get a higher conversion, obviously. And then the last one is why should I trust this brand? So how do I know that this brand is legit and that this, that this product is going to live up to its promises? This is where all of the social proof comes in, whether it's customer reviews, testimonials, press logos, endorsements, trust badges, awards, certifications, etc. Etc. Etc. Now these are all kind of the thoughts that come to mind as I get toward the process of how I build landing pages. But one quick thought before we get into that is that your design process as a brand in order to build landing pages quickly is a competitive moat. If you look at some of the fastest scaling supplement brands, whether it's Groons or Create or Armor or Cowboy, Colostrum, whatever it is, ima. I mean all these brands are examples of companies that have been built off the back of Facebook ads. And how well by perfecting their messaging, their angle, which could be seen as the same thing, they're creative and then their offer. And when I say offer, I essentially mean anything that is basically in a post, click, post, ad, click, experience. So when you click the ad, you get to the website, you get to a landing page. All these brands I just mentioned are all running landing pages and multiple variations of landing pages. You'll see that they have some similarities. Like if you go to Groons or Armor, you'll see they have some similarities, but for the most part they're pretty much all running their own landing pages. IM eight when we built that site, we built it as a conversion machine. So majority of that traffic actually goes to PDPs and converts pretty well. But all that said, there's, there's a, like the ability for you to build really high quality landing pages in short amounts of time and to have an idea Monday and get something live by Thursday or Friday is going to be a moat. It's the reason why some of these brands have been able to become category leaders within, you know, a year or two. It's because they're so fast at doing it. They're so good at doing it, they've got a process down and it allows them to get ahead. Okay, so I'm going to talk about.
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Kind of the few ingredients that I.
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Like and then we'll get into the actual process. So the first thing that I like to make sure I, you know, talk about is the strategy. Now, strategy in your landing page is probably the most important piece of it. Regardless of how beautiful your pages, maybe how, you know, fancy your copy sounds, how nice your icons are. If you don't have a strategy specifically around your content, your offer and who's coming to there that you're going to help convert, you know, it's just not going to work. And a great example of this is, I'm not sure if you've heard of comfort clothing. I had Hudson on the podcast a couple weeks ago. If you go to Comfort look, their website is not a crazy fancy Shopify site, right? It's actually a super basic Shopify site. You're not going to find it on any sort of design award website, but it does do probably $100 million a month or close to it in revenue. And why? Well, because the strategy is very clear. The UX is very clear. The value props of what Hudson is selling and the benefits of his products and the reviews, the social proof. Everything I mentioned before is so clear. It's proof that you don't need fancy UI if you've got everything else. But you've got UX and you've got ui. Your UX is your user experience, right? Your UX the convenience for the user. It's how easy is it to understand what you're selling. It's how easy is it to add products to the cart? You know, does anybody get frustrated? Your UI is how pretty does it look? So you might have, for example, you know, you might have. Well, I'm trying to think of an example of UX ui, like cutting through a garden with a short path versus a long path. That's much prettier and maybe that help illustrate it in your head. I don't know how else to describe it, but UX is basically for your customer, right? UI is for yourself. So always start with UX and focus on ux. You want to make sure that the flow, the messaging hierarchy, the copy, all of that is locked in. And, well, I guess we can just get into the, the process. But typically how I like to start is I like to put a something at the top, right? Either some sort of a customer Persona and a primary benefit or pain point. You're going to speak to brands like.
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So let's say we're picking a. Let's do an example together. We're gonna, we're gonna write at the very top. The angle is gonna be better sleep and the audience is gonna be women going through menopause, right? So what I'm go to do is I'm going to write this at the top and this is going to help me. I like to do this when I write too. I like to put sort of a reaction at the top because I like to make sure that everything ladders back up to that. So that's what we're going to do here. We're going to put the demographic at the top, so menopausal women and then the, the, the benefit that we want to focus on, which is better sleep. Now what this will allow me to do is as I go through the process, as long as that's on the top, I'm going to make sure that everything I'm putting down on paper or in a doc or in a figma file ladders back up to that. So the first step I do is I like to open up a blank Google Doc. And I don't know why I like Google Doc over Word Doc, but I got both. I end up using Google Docs and I put those things at the top and then I like to just dump everything. So you don't have to organize anything. You don't have to organize, you know, the hierarchy of the messaging, just anything that comes to mind. Any ideas, things about why you're better than competitors, you know, customers, questions that customers ask you, any sort of catchy headlines you hear, any sort of customer pain points, questions you find often in your Instagram DMS or customer service dms, you know, product benefits, features, fun stories that, you know, customers have interacted with. Anything that comes to mind, throw it down on paper. And this also includes like testimonials. You know, if you have any visuals you want to Include whether it's a chart, a graphic, you know, how it shows how the print, the product gets absorbed into your bloodstream, whatever it may be, throw all of it on there, does not have to be organized and, and then just keep adding to it. So try to think about, okay, what is it that's going to get menopausal women to want better sleep? You know, is there any research we can go out and search for? Grab, pull back in and dump in the dock. Now this doc should take probably an hour, hour and a half. You, if, if you finish it within 15, 20 minutes, you're not looking hard enough, it's not full enough. You want this do like three to five pages long and you just want to have a ton of shit in there. The idea is that it gives, just gives you more to play with and you'll see why in the next step. So the next step is to then outline the sections that you want within your landing page and then slowly start to organize the brain dump into the sections. So again, you're not thinking about good design or how it's going to be laid out or how it's going to fit, right? That tends to happen when you start building a landing page in figma. When you started in Figma, you're immediately thinking both all three things, research, organization, and how it snaps into the design. But the truth is you're not going to get your best content that way because you're not going to allow yourself to even put it down on paper to then filter it. You're just going to try to filter it in a quick way that you can do in your head, which is just not going to be as, it's just not going to be as good. So your typical flow or your section outline might look like, you know, a hero section, you have a problem section, a solution section, you have a benefit section, you got social proof, you got a shop section, comparison chart, you know FAQs, you have a founder story, you've got press testimonials, you got ugc, you got research, you've got, you know, maybe another section on customer stories, maybe a section on giving back where your ingredients are sourced from. So you've got all these sections, right? And you can then organize all the content across five pages into these sections. You might find that you have too much stuff in one section allows you to split it up and tell us the same thing a different way. Right? If we go back to those five questions, the whole goal is to basically take these five questions, just answer them over and over and over again. So if you're duplicatively, duplicatively big word answering, then that just means that you're doing it right. Right. You're not doing anything wrong by saying the same thing in a slightly different way again and again and again. Now, once you have these sections kind of built out, just again, not designing anything, just hero. And then you just paste all your stuff for the hero there, right? Maybe some social proof, an image you want to use, whatever it is, a catchy headline. Once you have all that, then go in and open up figma. And what I like to do is I like to take, I create a new Figma blank canvas. I take all the copy that I have written, command A. So select it all, copy it, throw it into figma and just paste it. You'll see it'll just paste in like a tall rectangle. And from there I like to create a mobile screen frame. So you press F or click frame and then you look for like an iPhone 16, right? Something that's regular mobile optimized size. Now once you have that, I make, I put two of those next to each other. So two screen sizes next to each other. The reason is I just use the left one just to understand what is above the fold. And then the right side is actually where I'm putting the design in. So now on the right side, right, I know that the on the right side one, I'll first extend that all the way down. So now I've got a short iPhone screen and then an iPhone screen that has the width of an iPhone. But I just pulled the length all the way down so I could build a long landing page. And in the hero section is, you know, I know what's above the fold, I know what's below the fold. So I can kind of arrange that properly. But this is essentially where you now start to organize all the content you have on the left side and put it in the right side. And if you've got a swipe file of landing pages that you like or that you've saved, you know, I recommend you always as you're on Instagram, I mean, you're on Instagram all the time, click those ads, screenshot, landing pages, screen, record them, save them to a swipe file, send them to your buddy on, on dm. So you just have a place where they're all there. But this is essentially where you, you know, kind of you can put your swipe files on the side if you want. Otherwise just take your content and start arranging it every step should be arranged there. This ideally too is still being done by somebody who knows the brand and the product really well. You don't want this part to be done by somebody. Well, I guess you can if they understand conversion design. But ideally in a perfect world, this kind of happens internally just because you know exactly what's being what, how people talk about the brand, what pain points they have, what they need to hear in order to be sold, et cetera. Now here you're basically combining marketing strategy with everything you know about the customer and the angle, plus all the raw content you gathered, and molding it into a magical flow, right? So this, this is something where it's on you to take everything and sort of put it in and you don't have to worry about a page being too long. I think my philosophy is always that if somebody's ready to go, they'll just click or they'll leave and if they're not, they'll just keep scrolling. So as much as you want to put into there, I think is fine. You want to also make sure that everything is then laddering back up to that demographic and that angle. So is the comparison chart laddering back up to menopausal woman? Is the FAQ laddering back up to better sleep? Is the shop section, you know, promoting get better sleep? Is there, you know, senior citizen discount maybe? So whatever it may be, right, you want to make sure everything on the page is basically laddering back up to that. Now once this is done, this is where it should go right back to review. So whoever you know, ideally from the brand is basically reviewing the copy, the layout, the functionality, making sure that from a messaging standpoint and offer standpoint, everything is within brand guidelines. Nothing is sort of out of whack. From there you go into back in the figma with a designer and you essentially add all your brand colors, your visual identity, brand layout, all that stuff. So iconography, illustrations, graphics, colors, fonts, you know, the whole nine, your lifestyle, imagery, studio imagery, all that stuff comes in in the next phase, which I call the UI phase. From here it basically looks like a very polished on brand webpage, but still very much focused about conversion. And the key here is to maintain the integrity of the wireframe, but also making it very aesthetically pleasing and on brand. So by the end of this step, you want to have a dev ready design file of the landing page inside figma. And what does it mean to be dev ready? Well, it just means that if there are any sort of developer notes that need to be included, there you know, hey, this rotates, this side scrolls, this scrolls slow or fast. You know, this is supposed to happen when you click this. All those need to be in there, usually like little sticky notes around Figma. And then the last piece, or I should say second to last piece is now developing this inside Shopify. Now there are a billion landing page builders out there. I, for the longest time I was a huge proponent of just using Unbounce. I still think if you have no other choice, can't develop in Shopify. Unbounce is still a great tool, especially if you're starting out everything is drag and drop, that said subdomains. So for example, let me explain. When you use your Shopify site, right, you're using your own domain and Shopify is tracking everything. When you use a subdomain like shop.orgainprotein.com you're basically using an Unbounce or one of these other third party tools and they're then hosting your Facebook pixel, your Google Pixel, your, you know, all your pixels are then hosted there. And what it does is when your user goes from landing page to Shopify checkout or landing page to Shopify pdp, it causes these crazy issues with tracking users. Well, whether it's from an analytics standpoint like for example, anybody who uses subdomains to track to do landing pages has a messed up conversion rate inside their Shopify window, inside their Shopify analytics. And I also know there's a brand that does about, you know, quarter billion dollars a year in revenue. They were used, they were doing this with a partner and up until recently they're CAC8X and they are seeing triple and quadruple counted events inside Facebook because that's what's being reported back. It's just messy data that gets reported back to Facebook. Not only Facebook, of course, Klaviyo, all your other ad platforms, TikTok, Snap, Pinterest, Google, YouTube, etc. And it messes everything up because as you know these platforms, the way they work is they ingest data, they analyze it, they use their own things, they make decisions off of that. So if you're feeding it wrong data, it's going to mess it up completely. It's like why you never want to send, you know, you don't want to send 100,000 shitty site visitors to somebody's site. It's going to completely ruin everything that they're doing from an ad standpoint. Now once your page is developed inside Shopify, and the reason I like to develop it inside Shopify is once you've got it developed, all your modules, as long as it's developed properly, all your modules can now be applied and copy pasted and modified. So if you've got a comparison chart that works really good, you can put that on every single PDP and change the text, you know, within two seconds from the iPhone app on on your phone. If you've got a really good hero section that you now want to duplicate this page and test it with four different products, you can easily do that because it's now a template. So the reason that you want to put it in Shopify is one, not only is everything easy to duplicate, edit and track, but two, it's just congruent, consistent, easier for the team and you don't have to worry about issues or glitches or friction, whether it's for a user or for for yourself. As you're consolidating and track now, the next step is just basically to QA everything. So obviously make sure you're going through everything. Check the coupon codes, check screen size on different devices, check with different Internet connections. You'd be shocked how many times site speed is the culprit for pages not working well. And then you go up and you launch it. So you launch it, you monitor it and you optimize it. None of these pages should, or I should say some of these pages will crush immediately because you know, if you're driving landing page traffic versus PDP or homepage traffic, it's obviously going to do better. But that doesn't mean that like that is the final result. So if you're Normally converting at 2% on your website and your landing page gets you to three and a half or four or five or six, doesn't mean you can't get to eight, right? I've had landing pages, I get to 12%. That started at 6% and we thought six was awesome, but we just kept thinking, okay, let's just watch user session request recordings, heat maps, et cetera, and let's just continue to optimize and just continue making it better. Okay? That's essentially my process for building a landing page. I think landing pages are extremely important and if you're only sending traffic to your site, then it better look like im8 where it's an entirely conversion optimized website. Most websites don't look like that. Most websites tend to be Shopify templated themes and very similar to email flows or automated flows. A lot of Shopify websites get set up once and then not really optimized for a long time. Until it's now a new website project or there's a new product going live. So all that said, that's my process to build landing pages. That's the reason I think it's so important to build landing pages. Remember, some of the biggest brands in consumer that exist today were only started a couple years ago and basically did this. Like this was their playbook. Good product, good messaging, good angles, good landing pages and good offers. And they were just very romantic about testing. They were not romantic about how something looked or how it felt or whatever it was. They were just romantic about we need to constantly test, optimize, learn and eventually win. That is today's episode of Limited Supply. I hope it was fun to listen to wherever you are at whether you're dropping your kids off in the morning, you're on a run, or you're at the gym. If you've got any questions on landing pages, if you want me to make some landing pages for you, shoot me a DM or shoot me an email. You can also fill out our contact form on the Sharmabrands.com website. In any case, have a great rest of your week and I'll see you next week. Thanks for listening. We'll be back next Time to cut through the noise on CPG retail and E Commerce. If you enjoyed this episode, why not share it with a friend? And be sure to subscribe wherever you listen so you don't miss the next one.