Your landing page might be broken — here’s how to fix it

Landing pages are a critical but often ignored part of the bigger picture. You’ve spent time and money on the ads driving traffic to these pages, so you better make sure they’re set-up properly.

You must understand features versus benefits.

In short:

• Features – what you have to offer the customer.
• Benefits – why the customer should care about what you have to offer.

Let’s say you sell guitar strings.

What are the features of good guitar strings?

• Made with high quality, anti-rust metal.
• Unique clear coatings.
• Crisp and clear sound.

Now how about the benefits of these features? Remember: why should the customer care?

• The strings won’t damage your fretboard due to rust.
• The strings will last longer meaning you won’t have to buy new ones as often.
• The strings will make you and your guitar sound better.

Always center your landing pages around WHY people would want to use your service, instead of luring them into converting with coupon codes and special limited time offers.

If you offer me a coupon code that takes 10% off your guitar strings, but I don’t realize the benefit of your strings over anyone else’s, then I’m not going to buy yours. This is ESPECIALLY true if your strings are still more expensive than other strings even after the discount.

Bringing this back to digital marketing, your customers are going to want to make more money, fix their ad campaigns, increase their conversions, and so forth.

You need to show them why they should care about you, through your landing page, and THEN they can consider if the price is worth it– see the difference? Take care in wording this properly, however.

Now, this isn’t all to say that you have to be all about benefits and not features. If you’re saying that you can help clients convert better, you must actually understand such principles.

“Your internal voice doesn’t typically think in terms of features when you’re not problem aware. Instead, you might say something like ‘man, I wish I had more time’ or ‘I don’t know how to code’. Leading with the benefit makes it so your copy says something like ‘get more time back’ or ‘design beautiful landing pages, no code required’ and start a dialog with that person’s internal voice.

Listing features is important, but you’re speaking to the logical side of your visitors brain. It’s important you do this of course, but it’s much harder to keep someone engage if you haven’t hooked their emotional brain first.” – Tommy Walker, Marketer at Shopify Plus

Some examples of landing pages.

I found these just from clicking on ads in my Newsfeed.

Here’s a landing page for HubSpot’s CRM:

Why should I care about their CRM? Right there on the top: because it’ll help me take control of my sales process.

Next, one from Udemy. Pay special attention to the boxed area.

Why should I care about this course?

Because I’ll get a better job, make more money as a freelancer, and protect any network from hackers and loss of data.

One more for good measure:

Why should I care about when I work? It helps me schedule next week in minutes, saves me an average of 8 hours per week, and improves employee accountability by 25%.

Why, why, why.

Believe me, people aren’t buying because they love your message– they want solutions. So offer them something useful. People don’t buy shovels– they buy the promise of a dug hole.

What are effective ways you tell your potential customers why they should care?