CXL Growth Marketing Minidegree Week 5 Review
By: Tanyo Gochev
Tags: Digital Marketing, Growth, Cxl Institute, Online Courses, Growth Hacking

Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash

In my fifth week of going through the CXL Institute Growth Marketing Scholarship, I watched the following courses:

Landing page optimization.

Product messaging

Here’s everything I learned during the week.

1. Landing Page Copywriting Fundamentals

For those who don’t know, a landing page is a page where people land on after clicking your ad. The only goal of a landing page is to shorten the journey from click to conversion.

It follows up the promises that you made in the ad.

Here’s what a good landing page does:

Answer questions.

Reinforce motivation.

Address barriers.

To create a good landing page, you need to start with your information hierarchy. You can do that by answering the following questions:

Whom are you communicating with?

What do you want them to do?

Where Is the traffic coming from?

Also, you need to be familiar with the level of awareness of your prospects. They can be:

Problem aware.

They know they have a problem, but they don’t know any solutions.

Solution aware.

They know that they are solutions out there, but they don’t know which one is the best.

Product aware

They are familiar with your product and brand, but they don’t know how your product is better than the competition.

Most aware

They know your brand and have probably bought from you before.

2. The Five Most Important Copy Elements

Headline

Headlines have to match the message in the ad. Their goal is to capture the attention of the user and make them read your landing page.

Benefits/Features

They present important information about your product and show the value of your offer.

Credibility

This section makes you trustworthy and answers questions about the quality of your product.

Expectation manager

It ensures that your users know what to expect from your product.

Call-to-action

Make users click to buy your product.

3. The Six Most Important Design Elements

Headline

Images/Video

Features/Benefits

Credibility

Expectation Manager

Call-to-Action

You should go through your information hierarchy and flesh it out with the 6 design elements.

4. Visual Hierarchy

The visual hierarchy has five important principles:

Size

The primary elements of your page should have the biggest size. The secondary elements have to be small, and the tertiary elements have to be even smaller.

Space

You need to leave white space for your text and visual elements to “breathe.”

Font

You should use simple fonts that are large enough to read.

Color and contrast

You have three types of colors — primary, secondary, and complementary.

Direction

See if your visual elements look at the direction of the copy and your button.

5. Form Design

Your form should make sense on its own. It has to be independent of your landing page. Think of it as a landing page within the landing page.

Make sure it’s optimized for all devices.

6. How to Audit Landing Pages and Build an Optimization Strategy

Research

Start running heat maps and recordings to understand what your customers do on your page.

Do a 5-second test with usabilityhub.com or some other online tool.

Interview your sales and customer support people to get a deeper understanding of your customers.

Read the reviews to learn both the good and the bad of your products. Make sure you pay attention to the words that your customers use.

Interview your audience to learn more about the user experience.

Audit

You should start with your funnel and see if the landing page experience is coherent with your ad. You should then try to improve your information hierarchy and find out what info your page is missing.

After that, you should focus on improving your visual hierarchy. You need to know if you emphasize the proper elements.

Wireframe

After you have done your research and audit, it’s time to create your new landing page wireframe. Take everything you have learned and put it all together in a wireframe.

That should be the first version of your landing page, showing your new information hierarchy.

The next step is to create a rough copy outline that matches the message of your ad and addresses key questions. After that, you can start building your visual hierarchy to ensure it catches the attention of your visitors.

Copy/Design

You need to make a creative brief to share all the background information with your stakeholders, copywriters, or designers.

You can use a tool like Photoshop to put everything together to show it to the people who have a good idea about your audience (your customer support people.)

After that, you can show it to your stakeholders, so you can get approval for them. The next step is to involve the designer and help them understand your vision for the project.

Implement

Now that you have done all the work, it’s time to put your brand-new landing page online. Take your time to gather enough data, so you can start optimizing.

Test & Optimize

It’s time to do various tests like:

🔴Testing on different devices.

🔴Testing on different browsers.

🔴Speed testing.

🔴Testing for any bugs.

🔴A/B testing.

7. How to Conduct a Copy “Teardown.”

This section is already part of the Product messaging course.

The best way to conduct a copy teardown is to base it on proven persuasion principles.

The first element of the teardown process is the MECLab’s conversion heuristic formula that goes: C= 4M + 3V + 2(I-F)- 2A.

And no, this isn’t a course on mathematics. It’s a persuasion formula that where:

C=probability of conversion.

M=motivation.

V=clarity of the value proposition.

I=incentive.

F=friction.

A=anxiety.

The second element of the copy teardown is Cialdini’s seven principles of influence, which are:

Social proof.

Authority.

Liking.

Scarcity/urgency.

Reciprocity.

Commitment/consistency.

Unity (us vs. them.)

The third and final element of the copy teardown process comes from Claude Hopkins’ book — Scientific Advertising.

He shares four specific rules to follow if we want to sell more to our customers:

#1: Be Specific

“A man who is being specific is either telling a truth or a lie, and people don’t expect advertisers to lie.”

#2: Offer Service

“The best ads ask no one to buy…[They] are based entirely on service. They offer wanted information. They cite advantages to users. Perhaps they offer a sample …so the customer may prove the claims without any risk. Some of these ads seem altruistic.

But they are based on a knowledge of human nature.”

#3: Tell the Full Story

“But, whether long or short, an advertising story should be reasonably complete.”

#4: Be a Salesperson

“When one tries to show off or does things merely to please himself, he is little likely to strike a chord which leads people to spend money.”

8. Introduction to Message-Mining

Message-mining is the process of researching the web for reviews of your product or similar products, so you can understand your customers better.

It works because the customer is way more effective than us, marketers at explaining the real value of your products. After all, they are the ones that bought them.

Message-mining is good for:

Identifying key messages.

“Swiping” memorable copy.

Here’s how to message-mine like a professional:

Make a list of keywords.

Google {keyword] reviews.

Check popular review sites.

Collect into a spreadsheet.

Categorize and rank messages.

9. Mining Messages From Your Customers

Before you start surveying and interviewing people, you should know their level of awareness. Only then you can start asking them questions. It’s best to create separate surveys for each audience.

Visitor surveys are great for revealing:

Pain points.

Purchase prompts.

Anxieties.

On the other hand, customer surveys are excellent for revealing:

Unique value/benefits.

‘Aha’ moments.

Desirable outcomes.

To design a good messaging survey, you need three components:

Questions

Goal: Extract key messages (motivation, value, anxiety.)

Invitation

Goal: Get the recipients to pay attention, open up & engage.

Targeting

Goal: Engage a specific audience (without pissing them off.)

10. Crafting Effective Unique Value Propositions

Your unique value proposition is the reason why your customers should buy from you instead of your competitors. You can ask yourself questions like:

What’s your differentiator?

What’s your unique advantage?

When creating your landing page, you should always ask yourself, “So what?” and then prove each claim you wrote.

Here’s how you can find your unique value proposition in 7 easy steps:

List all the key features of your product.

Pinpoint the ones that are unique to your brand.

List customer pain points for each feature.

Define desirable outcomes for each pain.

Rank each pain/outcome by severity and frequency.

Edit the top-scored outcomes into your unique value propositions.

Score all your UVPs and go with the best one.

11. Message Hierarchies

Storytelling is the key to selling because the human brain arranges thoughts in a story. Therefore, you should aim to create a story for your visitors using your copy and design.

That’s everything I learned from the two courses.

Stay tuned for my next article.

Thank you and don’t forget to…