You Ask, I Answer: Landing Page Competitive Analysis?

In today's episode, Sally asks, how do you create high converting landing pages using competitor analysis? Well, that's an interesting question. Um, not one I've actually had asked before. There's a couple different ways you could think about this. The first is uh we should probably define what a high converting landing page is, right?

I'm assuming based on Sally's question that it's any landing page on your website that you're driving traffic to that you want to do well, that you want to convert at a higher percentage uh than other pages on your site. Now, the interesting twist on this is the aspect of competitor analysis. How do we use competitive data to build a landing page that performs better than normal? Landing pages are a function of three different things, right? Uh we're gonna go back to 1968 and Bob Stone's direct marketing framework.

And in that framework, he said there's three things that make direct mail work, which is back in the the postal era. Uh list, offer, creative, have you got the right audience? Uh have you got the right offer for that audience? And then is the creative good? And when we think about landing pages on your website, it's not that different, right?

If we send traffic to a landing page, that's our audience, right? That's our list updated for the modern era. Have we got the right audience? If we're sending traffic to a page that we need to convert, if the audience is unqualified, if the audience is poor quality, it doesn't matter what's on the landing page, it's just not going to have any any useful impact for us. Because even if they convert, the lead quality will be so terrible or the sales quality will be so terrible that it won't accomplish our goals.

So that's number one. Do we have the right list? And can you use competitive analysis for that? Maybe to some degree, but probably not. Second is the offer.

What is it that you're putting in front of somebody on a landing page? If you are if you've got the right audience, is the offer compelling, right? And this is absolutely where competitive data can come in handy. If you sell, for example, coffee makers, uh, what makes your coffee maker better than your competitors, right? Go and look at your competitors' offers.

Are they selling at a discount? Do they offer free shipping? Um they offer you know a pound of free coffee a month if you buy your the you know the expensive machine. What are the things that the competitor is doing from an offer perspective? And then using modern monitoring tools like social media monitoring and media monitoring and uh landscape monitoring tools, what are people saying about the competitor and their offers, the competitors offering, right?

Check review sites, look at uh when people make purchases on Amazon, for example, uh, or the e-commerce merchant of your choice, if uh things like that for B2C, for B2B, look at ratings and reviews on places like Captera and G2 uh crowd and stuff. What are the things that people find compelling about a competitor? And is that on your landing page? Do you have a similar offer? Do you have a better offer?

Um, if it's something that is competitive that you can't match uh for some reason, uh, can you minimize that when your explanation of the offer on your page? If you have something that is unique to you that is better than the competitors, and it is something that is a unique selling proposition that absolutely put that front and center in on your landing page in the offer so that people understand what it is that they're getting into. What it is that you're offering. And finally, of course, the part that every marketer spends too much time on is the creative. Now, that's not to say that creative is not important.

It absolutely is. The design, the user experience, the customer experience, all the things on a landing page that would make it high-converting and compelling. You do have to see like what else are competitors doing, and do they align with and adhere to either known best practices or things that you've tested for yourself that you know are effective. Go and absolutely do a uh screenshots of your competitors' landing pages, right? Take a look and see do they use red buttons or blue buttons?

Do they have a picture of a smiling person? Is there a dog on it? Whatever, whatever's on the competitors' landing pages. And then using software like Google Optimize, for example, the free uh website testing software from Google, go and run similar tests and see if those ideas that you're taking from your competitors, you don't want to copy and paste directly from a competitor's landing page, but you can see ideas and concepts, right? Do they have to use a big font or a small font?

What are all the creative aspects? You run some multivariate testing in a tool like Google Optimize, and you figure, okay, let's see if any of these creative things work. Now, here um, here is where everybody goes wrong. Everyone in marketing tries creative first. Let's redesign the landing page.

Let's you put more buttons on it. Let's make the call to action bigger, make some sounds play or whatever. In Bobstone's framework, creative came last, right? Because no matter how good the creative is and how slick the landing page looks, if you've got the wrong audience, it doesn't matter. If you got the wrong offer, you're just gonna piss off the audience, and even though that the landing page might be nice, it's still wrong, right?

You know, here's two percent off our our very expensive product. That's that's insulting, right? So resist the temptation to immediately leap into you know landing page optimization around creative until you are sure that you've got the right audience and you are sure that the offer is appropriate for that audience. That's the big warning. Don't put creative first.

I re I realize that a lot of people do that because it's easy to understand, because it's something you have direct control over. Uh it's easy to explain to the powers that be. Oh, here's what we're doing. You know, we're gonna we have 14 different button color tests. Okay.

And it's convenient, but it's also the least important in the hierarchy of making sure you got the right people and you've got an offer in front of those people that is relevant to them. Now, how do you know if you the offer is compelling? Well, again, this is where you have to do a lot of research into your audience and into the general audience, your addressable audience, running things like focus groups, surveys, um, one-on-one interviews, uh, depending on the the product or service, uh, maybe even you know, shadowing somebody to try and understand if the product or service that you're selling has a compelling offer, has a compelling use case that would convince somebody, I should pay attention to this, right? If you have a coffee machine that automatically uh starts brewing at a certain time, has a timer built in, but none of your audience has trouble waking up at a specific time, then that feature, that that benefit may be lost on them. On the other hand, if it prepares the coffee grinds for uh composting, you know, bundles up into this this little pod, and you find out that a substantial part of your audience really cares about composting, you've got a winner, right?

You can make the landing page look like it was drawn on a napkin when you'd say to somebody, hey, this coffee machine gets you uh compatible with best practices in composting, and you know your audience loves that, you're gonna win. Right. So that's how you create high converting landing pages using competitor analysis. You make sure you've got the right audience, you look at your competitors' offers to see if they're they've got something worth uh doing, and then you look at uh your competitors creative for ideas for testing in that order. Great question, uh Sally.

Thanks for asking.