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Everyone wants to grow their business, but not everyone has the time or patience to learn all the ins and outs of marketing, sales enablement, and making the most out of a CRM such as HubSpot. Join the Web Canopy Studio team, a HubSpot Diamond Partner Agency, as they chat about various topics all designed to help you grow your B2B business.
Hey in today's episode, we are talking about all things, Landing pages, the, what the, how the best practices and so on.
If you are new to landing pages or you're not sure what to do with them or you just need to make them convert better.
This is the perfect episode for you.
My name is john I'm the ceo of web canopy studio and this is the website conversion show.
What is up everybody today, we're talking about landing pages, specifically landing pages on your website.
And I want to kind of start off by going into the definitions of what a landing pages because I hear it used all the time and it's used by a lot of different platforms and they're used a lot of different ways and so landing pages in general kind of have this ambiguous or mixed mixed use terminology within the phrase itself because we have some platforms and some people referring to landing pages as pages with forms.
We have some people referring to the landing page as your home page, they'll call it the landing page.
1:00
We have other people referring to landing pages as just any general page on your website.
And so what I want to do is kind of take for like all of our preconceived notions about what a landing pages and I want to watch them up into a little ball and just kind of throw it off to the side for a little bit and let's talk about what a landing page is specifically in the context of hubspot.
So it's no surprise if you've listened to this podcast or watch any of our videos before we do a lot of work inside of our agency with hubspot.
1:30
It is probably today, I don't know that there is a better platform to build a website on specifically and so I want to just zero in on on landing pages and the terminology of that word within the context of hubspot.
Okay, and so again, there's so many different variations of the landing page or what it is, but in simplest terms related to hubspot, landing pages are generally pages on your website that have some kind of a form on them and they are pages where people are exchanging information with you for something in return.
2:06
Now that could be so many different things, but you know the most common ones are like lead magnets, downloadable checklists or guides and things like that.
So people are submitting information on the form on the back end of that.
They are receiving a free free model, free give away free checklist, something in return.
2:28
Okay, another way of thinking about that would be like your demo request page if you're a product or software could be your consultation page or your contact page if your service based business.
And so those kind of pages, generally we would consider those a landing page.
All right now, there are a few different things that kind of go into that and what what landing pages should do or what they what their existing to accomplish.
And so, you know, one of the most important things that I think is, is worth noting is your landing pages are meant to have a user taken action.
3:04
We want people to go to your website to go to this landing page, however they get there, could talk through campaigns, we could talk through cts on the site and so on, but regardless they're now at a landing page and we want them to take a specific action.
And so inside of that page, we want to make sure that those pages are essentially a dead end, that there's not a lot of options to take.
3:25
Why, because when people are presented with lots of different options, lots of different things to click on, lots of different banners and things that they just don't generally take that action that you want them to do because they get their like the, you know, the shiny object over here thing makes them look over there and they go down that rabbit hole instead of doing the thing that you want them to do.
So we want to treat landing pages as a really phenomenal tool to get people to take action and exchange their contact information with as much detail as you need based off of the kind of, of landing page that you're working with and the kind of campaign that you're working within.
4:03
We want to get people to exchange that information with you for something in return.
So specifically within hubspot for Landing page is one of the things that I think really stand out and why hubspot is such a valuable tool that I think if you're not using it today you should probably look into too at least getting one of the free versions or even starter to just play with it and test out.
But landing pages are one of the most route functionality like core foundational tools of what hubspot is.
4:34
It goes back a long time as as a piece of what that that platform was able to do and he had built into it because the value of having everything in one place is so immense.
Okay so for example we have a U boat landing page as somebody comes that landing page, they fill out a form, they are created as a contact inside of hubspot.
Now that seems simple.
4:59
Yes, if you're using hubspot you're totally aware of that, that makes sense.
But to a lot of us who are not using hot spot as we start to think about all the different systems that we're using, we have email marketing systems, we have crm, we have websites, we have ad platforms, we have data and reporting, we have all these different things that we're using and in many cases we're connecting with APIs and integrations and we're using Xabier and we're doing all these different things that are really creating vulnerabilities and we've talked about this at length in previous episodes, but whenever you have different systems that have to connect and have to do different tasks, you're creating an opportunity for something to go wrong, You're creating the ability for a connection to break or a software to not be working and now your whole system is messed up and so on.
So helps kind of eliminates all of that with their landing page tool and tying that to just automatically creating something on the back end of hubspot.
The value of that.
5:57
Also as somebody fills out a form on a landing page, they get created as a contact record in hubspot immediately, I can do an immense amount of actions based off of that automatically through automation.
And so hubspot has the workflows tool.
And so one of the things that really stands out to me would be to trigger various actions based off of that form submission.
Okay and again this is really important for why hubspot as a stand alone tool for landing pages really brings that that that extra level of comfort and security because you don't have to worry about connecting things and making it happen elsewhere.
6:38
So I have somebody fill out a form, I immediately in a workflow, send them a follow up email, I immediately notify a sales person that this person filled out this demo request form, I immediately trigger a workflow or an email follow up work flow that's sending multiple emails, not just the initial delivery of, here's your confirmation but now I'm enrolling them in maybe a marketing qualified lead sequence of emails inside of a workflow.
7:08
I could also use different things inside of that automation to add to or remove different scores for lead score and different value properties inside of their contact record.
I can create a deal inside of the crm and the pipeline and I could do, you know virtually any other thing inside of the hubspot platform depending on what level of, of of hubspot you have.
7:33
But there's so much that just happens again immediately.
I'm also doing things on the sales side based off of actions, like very simple actions on landing pages because I can populate my forecast and knowing that if somebody fills out, let's say I have this really valuable form landing page on my website around getting a quote and I know that I close, let's say I close 15% of the people that fill out that quote form.
8:04
We close 15% just hypothetically making this up and then let's say I start having more and more people fill out that form on the landing page.
What I can do is start to get really granular and project out my forecasted revenue for this month next month and so on.
and manipulate that a little bit based on a simple form submission.
So there's not a whole bunch of different things that have to tie in to do that, I don't have to create a lot of these calculations, it's literally just a part of spots functionality.
8:33
So I think when you're looking at the landing page tool inside of hubspot, it's extremely valuable and it really opens up a lot of doors for you.
It also lives inside of themes.
So if you're using, let's say CMS hub or marketing hub, you are aware and familiar then with, with hub spots shift recently to within the last few years to using themes as their website instead of just individual templates inside of the website tools.
9:03
So now your landing pages can match and and follow the exact website outline that you're using, which is really quite awesome when it comes to the benefits that landing pages are really providing for your website.
There's a, there's a ton obviously right, and we've kind of talked through some of those already, but the biggest one that, that stands out to me the most obviously there's things like revenue, right?
9:26
Like we can always increase our revenue if we do a really great lead generation program and we're gonna have people, you know, book calls and we sell them things and now we're increasing our revenue, when you're using hubspot and using other tools you're able to tie that back into attribution.
So we get that, but in general, the really great value of landing pages comes down to proper lead generation but then tracking that and making adjustments over time.
So many people look at their website as like a one and done thing like we build our website, we build a campaign kind of like brush our hands off, we've got so much going on other places, we're gonna go do other things.
10:06
Now when we're actually focusing on landing pages and and specifically like marketing campaigns as a whole or your website as a whole, we have to treat it like it's the scientific method right?
Like I don't know why we would treat marketing any different than we would anything else that we're doing.
10:21
And so at best at best your your marketing efforts, your landing pages, your lead generation campaigns at best they are just an educated guess and you can go through all of the different things inside of your history of marketing, inside of what's happening inside your company and so on and you can make really great educated guesses and assumptions based off of the data that you've looked at that's telling you oh we should do it this way or we should say this thing and that's wonderful.
But at best it is just a guess.
You do not know that that is going to work.
You're just using the data and the knowledge that you're given to say that that is going to work and so you test it out.
11:02
But the problem is like I said like most people just leave it at that and they don't go back and and actually test it.
So what should we do?
Well, we should treat this like as a science project, right?
We should do some kind of of scientific process and look through an evaluation of whether or not the things that we tried our hypothesis if you will actually does work actually does what we wanted to do.
11:27
So as we launch a landing page, but you can do this with anything like anything you have going on inside your marketing.
But as we launch this landing page, we want to be able to see if the things that we thought were gonna happen actually happen.
And so the best way to look at that is through conversion rate right?
The best way of looking at the people that come to that page, do they go through the page and fill out the form in the manner that we expected them to.
And you have that data is like raw data at the end of that.
12:00
And inside of your, your analytics, you're able to identify how many visits you had, you're able to identify how many people started to fill out the form, how many people actually finish the form and so on.
So what we want to do is look at that converted rate of form of people who came to the page into people who submitted the form and do two things.
We want to look at the value of that contact, are they the kind of target that we want, Are they the right kind of people filling out this form?
12:30
Because in many cases we could just be putting out information to the world and People are like, oh yeah, I definitely want that discount code to Disney World, but is that my ideal customer?
No.Okay.
So I did nothing to benefit me just because I had 50 people download that.
Right?
So if it's not relevant to what you're doing, then there's no point in trying to continue to have a bunch of people download that who are never, ever, ever gonna be a customer unless you're trying to just be helpful and fruitful to the world and that's great.
12:58
But if you are, you know, trying to really make sure that you're talking to the right people and then you're getting the right people into your system.
You want to make sure that it's the right kind of of contacts that are filling out your forms and coming to the site in first place.
So we want to check first whether or not it's the right kind of people, the right kind of target audience that are coming.
So are they qualified?
And we can go down this rabbit hole on another episode about what, what constitutes qualified lead and how do you determine that?
13:26
But the other thing would be how many people are doing it and how much of a, of a value are they bringing to the actual form submission process itself.
So if I have 100 people look at this page and I have two people fill out that form.
I need to know if I am okay with that conversion rate, 2% conversion every does that constitute a successful page to me or am I not even close and I like way off and and that's up to you to determine that could be perfect.
It depends on what it is.
14:00
If it's like, You know, fill out this form and you're maybe it's a checkout form or something like a 2% conversion rate to buy something arguably depending on how much it costs.
Like that's not that bad.
That's pretty good.
If it's a 2% conversion rate of you know, your best possible clients, you have 100 of them come to your site and you want them to download a free checklist of how to do something?
Well 2% is probably not very good at all.
So we need to determine what that value should be.
14:30
And in a lot of cases, depending on who it is that you're talking to.
You know, it's a really tailored campaign and you're giving away like a free lead magnet, we see things that are 40 50% conversion rates on a lot of those I would settle for around 30 as as okay depending on what it is if you're giving away some kind of lead magnet and so on.
if you're going to a completely cold audience, then you're gonna need to have a much lower conversion rate as your metric.
So that's gonna be up to you.
But those are the things that that really stand out to me for, you know why we would need to be focusing on that and like what kind of information we're trying to gather out of it.
15:07
Now, the last thing that I want to talk about with this is around best practices because there's again, there's a number of different ways that you can build landing pages, there's all kinds of different templates and themes and and different platforms that you could even do this on and, and you know, we've talked about tying in different integrations and and so on, but at the core of what it is at the root of, of, of using a landing page for things like growing the revenue and lead generation and getting the right kind of people into your crm and so on, creating a better user experience and all these different things at the core of what we're doing, we have to make sure that we have a very simple foundation of things and the more that you do these best practices, the more likely you are to drastically improve your, your landing page performance and your overall conversion rate and the quality of the people that are coming through in your lead generation.
15:59
So the first thing that you want to do is obviously make sure that you're using the right kind of template or theme.
And so if you're using hubspot, you're probably familiar with themes, you wanna make sure that you're using a theme that is compatible with the rest of the team that's on your website.
In many cases, if you're using a theme from like the Mark place for example, there are already landing page assets that are there for you now.
there are lots of different things that could and could go wrong with with some of those themes depending on who built them and what's included in them.
16:29
I highly recommend themes that are built by web canopy studio because those are awesome, but you want to make sure that you're using the right theme and that the themes are editable and that they're they're user friendly and that they're very easy from a dragon drop module based inside of inside of the page editor.
and and landing pages specifically, you want to make sure that they don't have navigation if you can.
Now, arguably there are some reasonings why you would have navigation on your landing page so that you can go to the different pages kind of already talked about.
That general rule of thumb is to not have navigation, you don't want people to have a way to click out of the website.
So if you could have your landing page with just your logo at the top and there's not all the normal navigation that you'd see elsewhere, that's really ideal.
Next.
You probably want some kind of hero image or, or header image.
That's something that's graphically pleasing.
Could just be like cool gradients.
It could be something that is related to the offer itself of what you're giving away.
But this is a subconscious play on making people realize in the back of their mind that this is pleasing, this is related to what I'm doing.
I know that, you know, it's easy to brush that off that it's not important, but I can't I can't urge you enough, like you really need to think about the graphics that are going on on that page.
I would also want to make sure that you have a compelling headline and that that headline matches the message of what brought them there in the first place.
So if you're talking in an ad about doing X, Y Z.
And then the landing page that they go to when they click on the ad has nothing to do with that or it says that completely different message, you're missing the boat.
So your message should be almost the exact same message that they see when they come to that page and it should match in style, like the overall look, the user experience and it should match in tone.
Okay, so you want to make sure that that is appropriate.
Lastly, making sure that I call the action inside of that form is appropriate, that it's telling you very clearly what you're doing.
You want to literally tell people to do a thing, don't give them lots of options to do different things.
You want to tell them the one thing to do and point an arrow or something.
But like click here to download this thing, they're not going to do it at a high enough frequency if you don't literally tell them the things that they need to do.
So those are like the root things.
There's obviously a couple of other things that I would recommend.
There's different things that you could do depending on what the offer is.
I like to again, use different kinds of forms depending on what kind of page it is or what the offer is.
So a clear and concise form generally like first name, last name email, that's probably enough for a lot of your really like core assets that you're converting on, like lead magnets, maybe a demo, if you're, if you're really using this as a step to get on someone's calendar, that landing page probably should have a little bit more information in the form.
So you might want to ask company phone number state if you're doing things regionally and so on.
But please remember the more questions you ask, the more friction you're creating for somebody to fill out that form.
But ideally if you need to use these landing pages or these forms as a way to help get more information about the person you're engaging with, you're gonna have to make sure that it's, it's relevant to the amount of information is relevant to the value of what they're getting on the back end of that.
Duh, it's gotta look great on mobile because depending on where you're at, most people will probably engage with your landing page on a mobile device.
So I think that's it.
Those are like the core things about landing pages, what you should do with them, how they're going to help you best practices for them, how you use it with hubspot and so on.
Please let us know if you have any questions, we'll be happy to help.
I do have a call to action a bit of an offer ourselves
We're releasing a landing page page theme pack inside of the hubspot marketplace.
It has tons and tons of landing page assets, including a lot of how to videos, a lot of different, bonus materials and pdf inside of those landing pages that you're gonna get access to that will help you create so much more value for the contacts and the clients that you're bringing in inside of hubspot, let me know if you have any questions.