Everything You Need to Know About AI Copywriting (& Get Your Content Team On Board Too)
An AI copywriting tool able to generate content at the push of a button? Copywriters the world over shudder at the mere thought of it. A machine that writes emails, headings, landing pages, and more?! Madness! But as this copywriter—who’s very much human—will tell you, there’s nothing to fear. Imagine a world where you don’t have to agonize over every word, but rather plug your requirements into a machine—and presto!—the work has been done. It means you can spend your time editing, refining, and optimizing copy for various personas and channels, not brooding over draft 4.5 trying to make it all make sense. With AI, meet your new copywriting assistant that takes care of tedious writing tasks so that you can focus on what really matters: getting campaigns to convert. So, how can you use AI copywriting tools in your marketing efforts? Let’s start with everything you need to know and explore how you can incorporate AI into your marketing stack—without alienating your human creators: (You can also fast-track straight to your burning questions here: ) 2. Will AI Replace Copywriters? 3. How to Use AI Copywriting Tools 4. What is the Best AI Copywriter? 1. What is AI Copywriting?AI copywriting is content generated by machine-learning software. It does this by training an algorithm to crunch millions of web pages looking for patterns. It then uses that knowledge to generate new content on a set topic. Artificial intelligence tools have become remarkably clever in their ability to mimic and understand language—even slang. Headlines, emails, ads, meta tags, even product descriptions—the possibilities are endless. You simply add your parameters and let the machine do the rest. Talk about time-saving not having to tackle content word by word, right? Chris Frantz, Vice President of Snazzy.AI—an AI copywriting tool part of the Unbounce family—explains:
Understanding the basics of AIArtificial intelligence can become very complicated very quickly, which is why there are often misconceptions about it—ugh, thanks for that, Skynet. So let’s break it down in simple terms: What do we really mean when we say “AI”? In one corner, we have Artificial General Intelligence. This is what most people think of when someone says AI. Y’ know, the story of the robot who learns to love? This is something we only might see sometime within our lifetime. Even then, probably not an advanced version of it. In the other corner, we have Artificial Narrow Intelligence—ANI. This is the AI marketers have at their disposal today. ANI focuses on narrow problem-solving applications, performing one type of task or function, typically better and more efficiently than a human ever could. We’re talking chatbots able to understand subtle nuances of human speech, personalized digital experiences, and enhanced PPC campaigns thanks to automated smart bidding. AI-generated copy is but one of these exciting solutions. We’re at the beginning of a bold new era of marketing--with AI making your life as a marketer easier and your campaigns more effective in the years to come. Want to know more? Here are some exciting examples of AI that are changing the face of traditional marketing. Did you know Unbounce pioneered a new marketing approach called conversion intelligence? We believe the best—and most efficient—way to get more conversions lies in combining the data-crunching power of artificial intelligence and the creativity and experience of marketers. It’s you, your know-how, augmented by machines. Here’s what that future looks like. 2. Will AI Replace Copywriters?No. AI will not replace copywriters. But it will change how they do their jobs. Just because an AI content writer is carrying most of the load in creating content, it doesn’t mean that content is entirely ready for use. Have a look at this video where a person wrote the first few lines of the script before letting AI take over the rest: Although entertaining and impressive for sure, it’s not exactly nuanced, is it? There are still a couple of significant limitations to AI copywriting. Machines aren’t renowned for their subtlety and human touch—and looking at the video above, from a certain point, the story just doesn’t quite make sense anymore. It’s also important to remember that even though text created by AI isn’t copied from anywhere on the web, it’s also not quite original. The content is generated based on copy patterns already out there and published—so in a sense, you’re creating a copy of a copy of a copy. This isn’t really an issue for meta tags and product descriptions since you’re mostly talking to bots anyway, but you’ll always want an actual human to go in and add some creative flair for anything a bit more in-depth. When you partner with a machine to write content, it’s not about handing over a big project and never thinking about it again. You’re still going to need a human to finetune it, but you’ll be able to produce at a much faster rate than you would have on your own.
Does this mean copywriting will be automated in the future? Yes, probably. But the art of copywriting won’t ever be lost. It’ll just be adapted to something new. Did you know that in the 2021 Conversion Benchmark Report we found that emotional language—whether positive or negative—was a key influencer in landing page success? We studied more than 44 thousand landing pages and over 33 million conversions using machine learning and found different industries and audiences had entirely contrasting preferences. As it turns out, to get that sweet ROI, tone matters. A lot. And that’s why it’s essential that a human with the know-how and expertise *partners* with AI writing tools. 3. How to Use AI Copywriting ToolsThe best way to use AI copywriting tools is simply by starting to experiment with them. The possibilities are endless for what you can create, and every marketer’s needs will be different—you just need to find what works for you. To guide that journey, here are a couple of best practices to keep in mind to make sure you get the most out of your AI experience: AI copywriting best practice #1: Set parameters and define the contextAI tools can create several variants of different content types in seconds. Product descriptions, emails, mission statements, and more. So it’s key to set specific parameters for the generator—what kind of copy you’re looking for and what information it needs to include. AI can’t actually think for itself, so without a clear idea or task, the machine will fill the blanks. Let’s look at an example drained of context: What’s this copy for? Who is the target audience? Is “furry hats” the product or the company? With so many questions left unanswered, here’s what we got back: Yes, it’s endearing--buuuuuut, what are we actually going to do with this jumble? Let’s see what happens if we give the machine just a bit more info: After giving the machine a clear what, why, and how about our fictional company, here’s what we got back: Although this copy isn’t 100% ready to publish—you might wanna check those facts and quotes the tool added in—with a few tweaks, you’ll be well on your way to a pretty good “about us” blurb. The rule of thumb when working with a machine—the same as it is when working with a human—is a clear brief. After all, if you ask stupid questions, you’re going to get stupid answers. If you’re still not happy with your results, just tweak your parameters—your new copy is just a click away! Different tools each have their own measures to set content parameters. Within Unbounce’s Snazzy.AI content creation platform, you can create a company profile and define your audience, branded keywords, and a general company description for super-fast content creation without retraining the tool every time. Within the tool, you can even customize different content templates for tone and length. It’s all about creating content in minutes, not weeks. AI copywriting best practice #2: Spice it upAI is amazing. It has incredible data-crunching power and can understand and make sense of content in a way that’s beyond impressive for a machine. But it’s neither creative nor original. For certain types of content, this isn’t too much of an issue—let’s be honest, meta tags aren’t really created to inspire. But for content that carries brand weight like a value proposition, or something that requires engagement like an email, you’re going to want to take the AI-generated content as a starting point and add in subtle persuasive tactics yourself. Have a look at this example of a sales outreach email created by AI: It does the job, sure. But it really does the bare minimum. Would you respond to an email that *looks* like it was sent by a heartless bot? Probably not. That doesn’t mean you need to pour hours into writing and rewriting, though. Most of the work has been done. It just needs a bit of zhushing up. Add in a clear campaign goal, some personality, and brand flavor, maybe also a few fun graphics and a striking subject line, and—BOOM!—you’ll be serving up a great mailer. (P.S. Copy is only one part of the email experience. Get inspired for your next outreach campaign with this email marketing guide.) AI copywriting best practice #3: Personalization is key“Buy now” “Click here” “Sign up” “Learn more” These are the CTAs we all know and love. They’re simple, to the point, and littered across most web pages. When it comes to effective, high-converting CTAs, though, you don’t really wanna go that way. Personalized CTAs have been found to perform 202% better than basic prompts. The thing is, though, AI copywriters are most likely going to recommend generic CTAs—remember how AI copy is created based on what’s already published? Yep, see for yourself what happened when we asked an AI copywriter to create a landing page for a new product release … CTAs aside, how awesome is it to see a complete landing page written and conceptualized in a few clicks? But at the end of the day, it’s estimated that people only read 28% of content on a webpage, at most. So it’s critical that the most important part of your campaign—your CTA—pops. Even if your AI-powered writer gets a bit more exciting when it comes to CTAs, you don’t really want to take risks here. Learn more about the art of effective CTAs with these real-world examples. AI copywriting best practice #4: Get some headline helpDid you know that traffic can vary as much as 500% based on your headline? Yup, this one’s a biggie. Just like CTAs, headlines are a crucial factor in determining whether or not your content will be successful or not. Writing attention-grabbing headlines is an art. Although you probably won’t publish just any recommendation from AI, it’s a great resource to get ideas for your headline if you have no idea where to go. From here, you might wanna check the search results for these recommendations and see what pops up. How can you tailor your headline so that it stands out from the crowd? What problem is your content solving, and how can the headline address it head-on? The good news is that once you’re committed and happy with your headline—or multiple variants if you’re testing ’em out—you’ll be able to give the AI copywriter a clear direction where to go for the body copy. Remember, giving the machine context will make the whole process go much faster and give you much better results--talk about a win-win! (Psssssst … Do you really *hate* writing headlines? With the Unbounce Smart Builder, get custom AI-generated headline suggestions powered by conversion data to get you the best possible results—headline optimization, just like that!) AI copywriting best practice #5: Bulk up with researchBots are fantastic for menial work, but they’re not the greatest of strategic thinkers. And for that, there’s no replacement for good ole fashioned research. What makes your audience tick? What are industry-wide best practices in terms of language? Should you write an essay or keep things short and sweet? Competitive intelligence can give you these insights to help discover the secrets of a good conversion rate for your campaign. This knowledge then empowers you to optimize your machine-generated content. A good idea is to follow the conversion intelligence model to kickstart the process. It’s broken down into three simple steps:
AI copywriting best practice #6: Edit, edit, editPoor spelling and grammar scare 59% of website visitors away—yes, really. Regardless of how much you trust your AI-powered copywriter, you’re gonna want to double-check your content before publishing. This is also essentially how AI will be *changing* the role of the traditional copywriter—note the emphasis on change, not replace. It will mean moving away from sole creator to becoming a strategic editor, having a machine do the menial work while a human becomes the warden of spelling and grammar, voice and tone, and high-level strategic planning. CD Baby partnered with AI tools to see epic double-digit conversion rates. Daniel Parscale, former Digital Marketing Strategist, explains what this relationship with AI looks like:
After all, your time is far too valuable to sweat about writer’s block. Got an AI copywriter but still no idea where to start? Page goal! Voice and tone! Call to action! Get acquainted with the basics of great content and make each word count with the Unbounce guide to landing page copywriting. 4. What is the Best AI Copywriter?The best AI content writer is the one you work best with. There are many tools out in the wild that you can try, each with a different strength or focus. The more you experiment with AI copywriting tools, the more you’ll know what you need in each service. That said, all the examples used in this article came from Unbounce’s Snazzy.AI platform. What makes this tool stand out is that there are over 30 templates you can use to create content with AI—from fully-fledged landing pages, to Amazon listings and taglines. You can even have artificial intelligence create TikTok video ideas for you! Brainstorming? Yet another thing you don’t have to worry about. Welcoming AI to Your Marketing TeamArtificial intelligence is steadily becoming a more and more important part of the marketing team. It’s a time saver. It’s data-backed and—most importantly--it’s key to being competitive in the digital world. “But, but … AI will kill copywriting!” No, it won’t. It also won’t eliminate data analysts, marketing strategists, or campaign managers. We believe the future of marketing lies in conversion intelligence—an AI-augmented approach that sees the raw power of AI partnered with the know-how and creativity of marketers.
We’re looking at a future of more conversions and fewer hassles. And AI copywriting is just the start of it all. Via Marketing http://www.rssmix.com/via Blogger http://samanthasmeyers.blogspot.com/2021/08/everything-you-need-to-know-about-ai.html August 31, 2021 at 05:20PM
0 Comments
Video on Landing Pages Means More Conversions, Right? Wrong—Here’s Why
Adding a video to your landing page—whether it’s a product demo, customer testimonial, or an animated background—has often been championed as an effective way to showcase your offer to visitors. For years, it’s been widely accepted that videos can (and do) boost your conversion rates. Heck, at the time of writing this, we’ve got loads of content explaining why you oughta have one of those newfangled moving pictures on your page. But it looks like we’re gonna have to change that. At Unbounce, we love to learn—and lucky for us, we’ve got access to data from millions of landing pages (and billions of conversions) that we can use to determine whether marketing “best practices” hold up. It’s what conversion intelligence is all about: combining your know-how with mathematically validated insights to help you make informed decisions and get the best results from your campaigns. So, we decided to explore a best practice that we’ve believed for years. Does including a video on your page boost your conversion rate? The answer is somewhat nuanced, and we’ll get into the details below. The bottom line, though, is this: Videos do not boost your landing page conversion rates—and in some cases, might even harm them. How We Got Our DataBefore we get to all the juicy results, let’s talk a bit about our data set and how we went about our analysis. To ensure our results weren’t impacted by seasonal conditions (around Christmas or other holidays, for example), we looked at three separate and distinct time frames. We also wanted our analysis to produce current, reliable insights, so we used data ranging from late 2020 into early 2021. For each time frame, we examined approximately 35,000 Unbounce customer landing pages that included a mix of:
Some bonus info for the real data-heads. Conversion rates can vary widely, and it’s therefore necessary to remove any extreme outliers to avoid skewed data. Throughout the analysis, outliers are trimmed by removing all rates > Q3 + 1.5*IQR and rates < Q1 - 1.5*IQR. Any small cohorts are also excluded from the analysis using a lower limit of 100 pages. Video Doesn’t Improve Performance—No Matter Your Conversion GoalOverall, videos are used on only a fraction of Unbounce customers’ pages—and, out of those, embedded videos are significantly more popular than background videos. YouTube is the most common hosting platform, accounting for a far greater percentage of videos than Wistia or Vimeo. The plot below shows the median conversion rates for pages not using video, pages with embedded videos, and pages with background videos. The plots are separated based on the conversion goal of the page: form-fill or click-through. At first glance, when we compare pages without video to those containing embedded or background videos, we see very little difference in conversion rates for form-fill pages. While background video seems to perform slightly better, embedded videos don’t. (The number of pages using background video is also much smaller.) And, as you’ll see, the negative difference on click-through pages is even more striking. This tells us that, overall, video appears to have a minimal or negative impact on the performance of a landing page—regardless of the conversion goal. Note that the cohort size for background videos on click-through pages was below the minimum threshold and has therefore been removed. In Almost Every Industry, Videos Do More Harm Than GoodLet’s dig a little deeper and look at the impact of video on landing pages for different industries. Here we examined 10 industries ranging from business services to real estate and travel. Across the board, it appears that videos generally correlate with neutral or even negative page performance. You’ll see from the graph that, in most cases, the median conversion rates between the pages with and without videos are quite similar. However, some industries (like real estate) show a strongly negative effect when a video is present. This tells us that, for these particular sectors, the inclusion of a video could significantly reduce page performance. You might’ve noticed that some industries appear to have higher rates for landing pages with videos than without. Good news, right? Eh, not so fast. Looking at just the medians (as we are in the graph above) can be a little misleading. To have an accurate picture, we need to look at the distribution of conversion rates across the pages. And for that, we need to use a box plot. In this graph, the colored boxes represent where most pages sit. (We’ll note that the median isn’t in the middle, as pages’ conversion rates are rarely distributed evenly.) The vertical lines represent the range of the remaining pages, excluding extreme outliers. Essentially, this shows us how most pages are performing. Take a look at the finance and insurance industry. Our earlier graph showed that the median conversion rate for finance pages with a video is higher than those without. However, the box plot reveals that the vast majority of pages—with or without a video—actually have similar rates. That means there’s no apparent significant change to page performance when including a video or not. Think Video’s Good For Social? Think AgainLet’s examine whether certain traffic channels respond more positively to video than others. For example, we might hypothesize (given the increased use of video on social media) that video landing pages would perform better with visitors arriving from social platforms. But our analysis shows that people coming to your page from Facebook or LinkedIn generally convert on video landing pages as often as those coming from organic search or referral channels. If we break it down further (using another box plot) to compare how pages with and without a video stack up by traffic source, we get the full, ugly picture. The distribution of conversion rates is significantly lower on video pages than non-video pages across every channel. Yep, that goes for social media as well. Video Doesn’t Stack Up for MobileFinally, let’s take a look at how video performs on mobile and desktop devices. Considering the number of videos viewed on mobile, we might guess that landing pages with videos would be favored by users on those devices. In reality, video appears to have a negative impact on conversion rates for both mobile and desktop visitors. Looking at the box plot below, we can see that the distribution of conversion rates for video pages—from either mobile or desktop traffic—is significantly lower than for non-video pages. To Get the Best Results with Video, Use It IntentionallyThis data analysis shows that video landing pages perform roughly as well or slightly worse than pages without video. But does that mean adding a video to your page is always bad? No, not always. Our recommendation is for marketers to think critically before committing to a video landing page. (Especially if you have limited resources that could instead be used to improve other aspects of your campaign.) What will the video help you achieve that you couldn’t otherwise? What value will it provide to your visitors? If you’ve already got a video page that works, we certainly wouldn’t suggest you undo all your hard work. Instead, you can create landing page variants with and without video, then lean on tools like Smart Traffic to automatically route visitors to the variant they will most likely convert on. Via Marketing http://www.rssmix.com/via Blogger http://samanthasmeyers.blogspot.com/2021/08/video-on-landing-pages-means-more.html August 26, 2021 at 05:20PM
How to Build and Optimize CTA Buttons That Convert
If you spend 15 hours creating your landing page and three minutes on your call-to-action (CTA) button, you’re making a huge mistake. Every part of your landing page impacts your conversion rate, including that lil’ clickable zone. As it turns out, there are plenty of variables going into your CTA button and its ability to convert visitors. You’ve gotta combine the right copy, location, and design to optimize your results. A successful CTA button takes some TLC. This article will teach you how to give your CTA buttons the oomph they need to put the icing on your conversion cake. Find out what a CTA is and how you can supercharge it with a well-crafted button. WTH is a CTA?A CTA is a short phrase that leads visitors to the action you want them to take. It’s a critical part of every landing page strategy. Think of it as your grand finale—it’s the last text your visitor will read before they decide to convert. So, you want it to lay a clear path to your conversion goal. Most CTAs come in the form of a clickable button because it draws attention and asks for a simple action from the visitor. By mastering the techniques behind a compelling CTA button, you’ll get even more from your landing page. The Big Three Elements of a CTA ButtonEvery CTA button has three main elements to optimize: 1. CopyYou’ll see many marketers throw some popular phrases on their CTA buttons and call it a day. Think “Sign up,” “Try now,” or “Get started.” They get the job done, but they don’t optimize the CTA to its fullest. To get the best results from your CTA button’s copy, you need to consider your CTA as a call to value. Explain how clicking the button will change your visitor’s world. As Ross Simmonds demonstrates, you can turn a generic phrase like “Get started” into a customer-focused saying like “Plan your finances” or “Grow your following.” These phrases directly connect clicking the button with the main benefit the conversion provides. First-person language is another tactic that encourages visitors to convert. When ContentVerve rephrased a CTA to say “Start my free 30-day trial” instead of “Start your 30-day free trial,” they saw a 90% boost in their click-through rate. Another example you could use is “I want it!” instead of a second-person phrase like “Get it here.” Now, let’s combine the call to value and first-person language tactics. Here’s what they look like in action on a landing page for Firstleaf: The phrase “Send me the best 3-pack” gives the visitor a feeling of control over their conversion. While many CTA buttons give the visitor a command (e.g., “Order a 3-pack”), Firstleaf’s button lets the visitor ask instead. This button also emphasizes that the visitor will get the best 3-pack, not your run-of-the-mill 3-pack. As you put these tactics into action, remember that your landing page audiences fall in different stages of the conversion funnel. For example, if you have a landing page encouraging top-of-the-funnel customers to sign up for emails, you don’t want to be selling the value of your product yet. Show your visitors the value they’ll get for taking action at the stage of the funnel they’re currently in. 2. LocationYour CTA won’t get you the results you want if it’s not in a place where it’ll make an impact. At best, it will lead to fewer conversions, and at worst, folks won’t be able to find it in the first place. When you think about where to place your CTA button, size doesn’t always matter as much as noticeability. A huge button won’t make a difference if it’s jumbled in a bunch of other elements. You see, your CTA button should follow the natural visual hierarchy our brains use to process online content. Your most important landing page elements should fall in a Z or F pattern and visually “pop” through size, color, or contrast. Of course, your button’s position on your landing page content will also play a role in its effect on conversions. Consider placing your button “above the fold” or at the top of the page before visitors start scrolling. If you’d rather pitch your landing page subject first, you could also try putting it at the end as the “conclusion” to your content. Heck, you could take a page outta Indochino’s book and place your CTA button in more than one spot. They put their CTA on the top, middle, and bottom sections of this landing page: As you can see, the first CTA is more urgent than the two that follow it. The text leading up to that CTA mentions a drawing for customers who book an appointment by a certain date. If you use multiple CTA locations, try designating one as your main CTA and let the others catch any stragglers. You can also put your CTA button front and center with a sticky bar or popup. These features broadcast your CTA loud and clear at the top of your page or on top of it. Unbounce has tons of templates for sticky bars and popups that you can try adding to your landing page. 3. DesignYou didn’t think we were gonna overlook your CTA button’s design, did you? Its shape, size, color, and other visual elements influence its role in your landing page’s conversion potential. Let’s talk about color first. Color affects your landing page elements’ success in two ways: through readability and psychological color associations. In other words, you want to keep your button colors contrasting but complementary and use colors associated with the emotions you want your visitors to feel. Your choice of color should work with the rest of the colors on your landing page while keeping your button distinct from everything else. The Unbounce guide to conversion-centered design recommends assigning a specific color that you only use for CTAs. A properly sized CTA button will be big enough for visitors to easily find it, but not so big that it ruins the layout around it, as UX Planet puts it. They also point out that mobile landing pages have specific size standards. While Apple recommends keeping your CTA buttons at least 44×44 pixels big, Microsoft suggests 34×26 pixels. The design surrounding your button matters, too. If you placed your CTA button on a hero image, make sure the image directs your eye to the button, as suggested by Neil Patel. For example, you could use an image of a person to appear to be looking at the button. Wanna see how design can make a button truly pop? SnackNation’s got you covered: They use an orange button on a purple background—a color combination that sounds like it shouldn’t work yet nails it. Why? If you look at a color wheel, you’ll see orange and purple across from each other, meaning they’re complimentary colors that contrast well. Plus, check out the orange confetti in the hero image that pulls the whole color scheme together. If you have a hard time making a button design that feels right, try using a landing page template. Since professionals design them, their CTA buttons will already have optimized designs. For example, Unbounce’s Simple template uses a red button that draws your eye without clashing with the rest of the page. Always Use CTA Buttons That Work for Your AudienceWhichever of this article’s best practices you try for your CTA buttons, always remember that your audience’s preferences come first. Personalized CTAs have a 202% better conversion rate than basic ones. Use your data on your high-performing CTA buttons to guide your future decisions. Since every audience has unique preferences, try using a tool like Smart Traffic that helps you direct different folks to different landing page variants. You could create a few variants with different button designs, then let Smart Traffic direct visitors to the variant most likely to convert them. Via Marketing http://www.rssmix.com/via Blogger http://samanthasmeyers.blogspot.com/2021/08/how-to-build-and-optimize-cta-buttons.html August 26, 2021 at 09:25AM
How to Write Better Landing Page Copy in 2021 (With Tips)
When you’re crafting words for your landing page, you’re not just writing. You’re copywriting--writing for conversions. Every character could make or break your landing page. After analyzing the most influential elements for conversion in 40,000 landing pages, Unbounce found that copy (28%) influenced conversion more than two times as much as design (13%) did. Long story short, you can’t rely on flashy visuals alone to convert. You gotta sell with your copy, too. No pressure, right? The best practices for your landing page’s copy will depend on your audience and industry, but there are a couple of techniques you can follow to make any landing page shine brighter. This blog post will cover four methods for better landing page copywriting and five examples to spark your inspiration. You’ll be converting more visitors in no time. Four Rules for Better Landing Page Copy (With Examples)These four techniques will help you craft landing page copy that converts: 1. Get rid of jargonJargon--terms that only make sense within an industry—doesn’t always sound clear to visitors. This language automatically excludes customers who aren’t in on industry terms. Avoid using jargon when you can. In most industries, simple language wins more conversion than complicated terms do. The Conversion Benchmark Report found that in software as a service (SaaS) and law—two technical industries--lower word counts and lower Flesch Reading Ease Scores (FRES) resulted in more conversions. Content with a low FRES has fewer words per sentence and syllables per word, leaving less room for long-winded jargon. You don’t have to get rid of all of the industry terms on your landing page, but you do need to know what your audience understands. For example, you can get away with more jargon on business-to-business (B2B) landing pages, but you should be careful with business-to-consumer (B2C) pages. Keep your projection bias in mind and write your copy in a way your audience will understand. The home-loan process involves lots of terms that’ll go over your head if you don’t work in finance. A home-loan management service, ooba, cuts down on their landing page’s jargon by focusing on the results for the customer. The page mentions a few terms like “price ceiling” and “credit profile” that start to cross the jargon line, but it always follows up with simple explanations. Editor’s tip: Having trouble writing copy that speaks to your visitors? Thanks to Snazzy AI, Unbounce will have AI-powered copywriting features in the future. Plug in some details about your audience and let technology do the rest. 2. Back your writing with numbersNumbers are convincing, so they make more convincing copy. For example, 8 out of 10 people will read your headline, but only two will read the headline and the rest of your copy. That stat helps you understand the importance of headlines, right? (Given the emphasis on the headlines, would this be more effective if reworded? For example: “Only 2 out of 10 people will read the headline and the copy, but virtually everyone will read the headlines.”) One of the top examples of B2B landing pages from Shopify emphasizes the fact that the platform has more than a million users. This number works as social proof to build your trust in Shopify. If 1,000,000 other businesses are using Shopify, why shouldn’t you? As an employee engagement software, Peakon has users who want to improve business results wherever they can. Therefore, Peakon’s trial signup landing page uses statistics to make compelling points to its number-focused visitors. The “Increase revenue” and “Increase productivity” sections provide concrete numbers detailing how much Peakon increases revenue, productivity, and customer satisfaction. In the “Increase revenue” section, you’ll learn that revenue can increase by up to 0.6% for every 1% increase in engagement and Peakon increases engagement by up to 10% in 3 months. The “Increase productivity” section delivers a statistical triple threat. It explains how employees at highly engaged companies have 37% fewer sick days, 30% higher productivity, and as much as 2.5 times higher customer satisfaction rates. And you’re to assume that you’ll get a similar engagement from Peakon. 3. Tell a compelling storyEvery landing page tells a story. The difference between a boring landing page story and one that gets results lies in its framework. By following the right structure, you can present a gripping story that also markets your product. One popular storytelling framework across subjects is ABT (And, But, Therefore). It includes a setup (and), problem (but), and solution (therefore). This formula builds tension, then resolves it. You can apply the ABT framework to marketing through the PAS (Problem Agitate Solve) framework. It begins with an issue (problem), elaborates on that issue (agitate), and presents your solution (solve). Check out how this Twitter landing page from IronCore Labs uses the PAS framework. It starts with a problem (“How to Make End-to-end Encryption Work for Groups”), then agitates it (“A Lot of DIY End-to-end Encryption Solutions Are a Headache”). After setting up that issue, it offers its eGuide as a solution. 4. Energize your readers with actionable words and phrasesThe point of a landing page is to encourage action—a conversion. Your copy should help you reach that goal by urging your visitors to do something. Actionable words and phrases explain what your product enables the visitor to do and directs them to conversion. Let’s see how Snapchat uses actionable language on its Snap Kit landing page. The landing page starts off with an actionable headline: “Grow your app with Snapchat’s best features.” This title does triple duty by summarizing what Snap Kit does, framing that summary as a benefit, and offering a soft CTA to start using its features. Throughout the landing page, each headline is an action--share, unlock, make. These actions demonstrate how Snap Kit empowers customers to enhance their Snapchat experience. Go Above and Beyond With Your CopyAs you write your landing page copy, ask yourself, “Would I be interested in reading this as someone outside of my company?” You have to look for ways to infuse your words with value to keep your visitors’ attention. You might be interested in your content because you work with it, but you’ll need that extra something-something for people new to the subject to stay on the page. For more copywriting advice, check out the Unbounce Guide to Landing Page Copywriting. It’ll walk you through the steps to writing copy that converts. Via Marketing http://www.rssmix.com/via Blogger http://samanthasmeyers.blogspot.com/2021/08/how-to-write-better-landing-page-copy.html August 10, 2021 at 10:21AM
5 Ways Audience Research Helps You Customize Your Landing Pages
Before you can accomplish your goals, you’ve gotta help your audience accomplish theirs. Makes sense, right? But too many times, marketers fall into the trap of creating landing pages with only their own goals in mind. It’s no wonder visitors aren’t clicking on that CTA. Building a landing page that converts like crazy shouldn’t be left up to chance—it’s the result of using detailed information about your audience to create a persuasive combination of copy and imagery. “How Can I Make Sure I Appeal to Every Customer Demographic?”Marketers are often taught that if you’re talking to everyone, then you’re talking to no one. It’s true! A one-size-fits-all approach to your campaigns will never be as effective as one that’s both specific and highly relevant to your prospective customers and their needs. For example, your company might be selling a SaaS product and dump your customers into buckets marked “marketers,” “founders,” and “business owners.” But so much opportunity is lost from this approach! Demographic segmentation can be a stronger starting point that can make your landing page strategy more specific. Think about how their location, age, and place of employment might help you personalize your messaging and tighten your advertising efforts. On the page below, for instance, the location might not be as targeted, but other demographics like age, family status, and gender were clearly used to appeal to a specific persona (type of person). When you consider these types of details, your landing page takes the form of 1:1 communication, instead of an impersonal 1:many blast that speaks to nobody in particular. Your customers will feel the difference, even if they don’t know the experience has been tailored just for them. Sometimes, though, you don’t start out with the audience insights you need to create a landing page with the exact effect you intended. That’s when you need to do a little diggin’. Getting to know more about the customers you already have (and what makes them unique) can be advantageous to your strategy. You just need to do is put in the work to discover more about them… 5 Methods Of Audience Research1. Conduct Customer Interviews/SurveysCustomer interviews are usually viewed as a preliminary activity. You reach out to ideal customers to get feedback on your Minimum Viable Product (MVP), and that’s it. *See ya next year!* The problem here is that it leaves behind a great deal of opportunity. Customer insights can provide a ton of value between your launch and development stages. To improve the product for your customers, you need to make sure that they’ve got some skin in the game. By using continuous research, you can co-develop a product that your community loves, especially because they helped inform it. You need to be talking to your customers all the time. Here are a few tips to help your next interview be short and deliberate as opposed to long and aimless. Start with the big picture. It’s tempting to create surveys and interview questions centered on a product feature you think will be helpful. But this sets you up for confirmation bias. Instead, focus your questions on the user experience. If your product is meant to make content distribution more simple and scalable, resist asking about tools your customers might already be using. Ask questions that help you understand their barriers and needs to execute at a high level. Decide how the feedback will be used. You want to respect your customers’ time by asking questions focused on them. A common mistake in customer interviews and surveys is asking questions about making your company’s messaging better. Yes, that will always be the end goal. However, language is important. Your customers want to know how you can help them, not the other way around. So, before you script your questions, decide which area of the business you want responses for. This will help you be more strategic and help you script questions that give you actionable feedback. Write your questions, then write ‘em again. First drafts are rarely perfect—although they’re incredibly helpful in getting your ideas down on paper. The next step is to organize those ideas and refine them into smooth, targeted, and impactful sentences. At first, your technical knowledge of your product might naturally find its way into your document, but you’ll want to avoid jargon and keep it simple for your customers. Write like you’re talking to a colleague or having a conversation in a coffee shop. Consumers are much savvier at picking out sales pitches and inauthentic copy in the digital age than they were 10 years ago. Write with empathy, tell your customers exactly how this data will be used, and try not to leave anything up to interpretation. Curated Tip: It also helps if you can offer an incentive in return for their feedback. Something like a gift card, small cash reward, or donation has been known to increase response rates by up to 50%. 2. Monitor Social Media PlatformsOne of the best ways to engage in audience research is to go where your audience hangs out online. There’s a tendency to rely only on Google to find answers that provide more insight into your customers’ interests, online behaviors, and patterns. You might also look at competitors to see what they’re doing or review studies from industry-leading companies to see what’s worked in the past. But there’s a TON of insights circulating on social media platforms that you can also learn from. Facebook You can still:
Other Social Channels Jump on Quora, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, LinkedIn, and YouTube to find out what your audience is curious about and how they engage with those topics online. Building a community online means showing up, participating, and adding value. To understand how you can add value, you can use social listening to be a fly on the wall who observes the typical interactions in your industry. With these insights, you can craft strategic messages knowing what works and what doesn’t. 3. Competitive AnalysisYou might want to focus solely on your brand and avoid looking at competitors to prevent being influenced by their tactics or—in all honesty—getting a little intimidated by their presence. But the reality is that understanding your competitors’ positioning helps you better refine your own. Your main goal with competitor research should be to understand the sentiment consumers have towards competing brands and products.
But the most important question your messaging must reflect on is, what sets us apart from the competition? 4. Google Analytics or Site Performance Reporting AlternativesWhen you’re seeking to connect with your audience online, you need Google Analytics. This is one of the first tools many marketers integrate into their tech stack to get a solid understanding of the traffic they drive to their landing pages. Google Analytics helps you capture demographic data from the composition of your audience, but it goes a step further by segmenting high- and low-value users so you can modify your spending to target a larger group of interested consumers. The power of a paper trail can also never be underestimated. Google Analytics brings you into the user journey of each demographic to see how they’ve landed on your page, which pages they’re spending the most time on, and the Customer Lifetime Value of users acquired through specific advertising efforts. These types of metrics give you the knowledge to create more intentionally and spend more efficiently. 5. Use Audience Research ToolsThere are many tools available today that can help you streamline your research efforts to create continuous feedback from your desired audience. Here are a few of our favorites:
Analyze Your FindingsNow that you’ve traveled far and wide to collect data on your target audience, it’s time to deconstruct what it all means. Not all users in your audience will be the same. Splitting them into subcategories based on similar patterns will help you deliver campaigns in a way that feels personal to each segment. Aside from demographic data, you can also group users together based on: Lifestyle/Psychographics: Through your social listening tool, you can pinpoint particular traits and cultural trends that users in your audience relate to online. Though this isn’t as clear-cut as age and location data, these aspects of your audience are key to scripting messages in the context of their problems. This helps you build relationships with an audience that feels you know exactly what they’re going through. Keywords: In tandem with understanding the language your audience uses, you can also segment based on keywords. However, you need to be careful with the words you use. A simple mistake is using market keywords to define your customers. Nuh-uh. By doing that, you’re still casting a wide net. As we learned above, if you’re selling to everyone, you’re selling to no one. Instead, use long-tail keywords to get specific on your audience segments. Search Engine Results Pages (SERP) can help you segment main commercial keywords with either transactional or informational content which serves as a helpful guide to determining your audiences’ search intent. For example, if you’re selling coffee, rather than just using “coffee” try: Coffee near me You want to put yourself in the shoes of the customer and target search entries from a first-person perspective. Cross-reference the data you’ve gathered with what your brand offers to capitalize on industry gaps and opportunities. Research can truly be your best friend. Optimizing Your Landing Pages Based On ResearchAlright, you’ve done the research. You’ve analyzed your findings. You’ve segmented your audience groups. Now it’s time to put those insights to work and make some magic happen by optimizing your landing pages based on what you’ve discovered. Tailoring CopyWith a firm understanding of your audiences’ search intent and the phrases they use, make sure your landing copy reflects that same communication. It helps to have a checklist to ensure you’re focusing as much as possible on the customer perspective, rather than your own. Is there a common experience you can use that illustrates the pain point that you solve? Are you naming your customer demographic in the copy? (e.g., dog owners, millennials) Do you have a strong value proposition? Are you avoiding complex jargon? Are you encouraging action? It also helps to add statistics that complement your value prop throughout your copy and use social proof to show the benefits of your product. People are more likely to believe what they can see. Tailoring CTAsYour research will give you a better understanding of where your audience is in the buyer’s journey when they come in contact with your brand. With this insight, you can tailor your CTAs to move that prospective buyer to the next stage. Just sayin’. Refining ImageryThe images you use also have a major impact on your audience. Consumers are more likely to spend more time analyzing the imagery on your landing page before moving on to reading your copy. So, make sure your images reflect who your audience segment believes themselves to be. If it’s a coffee-loving millennial, reflect that in the imagery. If it’s a digital nomad, reflect that in the imagery. If it’s a creative SaaS entrepreneur—well, you get it. Setting Up Before You Go Heads-Down In ResearchYour first thought might be to dive straight into research. As a marketer, your mind is already wired to:
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. The foundation of any productive research is having a solid understanding of the specific purpose of your landing page. Starting with the right value proposition can save you hours building a landing page you think your audience will care about. Your value prop is a clear message that communicates the primary value you provide to your customers. Here are a few ways you can do that:
Right Time, Right PlaceWith the help of your audience research methods and tools, the next step is to analyze the customer journey you’ve mapped out to predict where consumers are going to interact with your landing page, and how. You might think that a similar model—the marketing funnel—is enough to understand the user journey, but the following two frameworks have one major difference to keep them separate… Much of the buyer’s journey is now completed online and, in the B2B world, buyers expect to receive unique content aligned with where they are in their journey. This is where your audience research comes in. This allows you to match content with critical touchpoints throughout your funnel. Put It All Together and… Voila!Don’t let your extensive research dive go to waste. Your audience insights will definitely help you optimize your landing page, but they can also help you optimize other parts of your marketing strategy. via Blogger http://samanthasmeyers.blogspot.com/2021/08/5-ways-audience-research-helps-you.html August 06, 2021 at 05:20PM
3 Reasons Why Your Marketing Needs Unbounce’s New Smart Builder [Announcement]
Whoever said, “life is a journey, not a destination,” clearly wasn’t a time-strapped marketer trying to dig themselves out from under a mountain of tasks by the end of the day. When it comes to building landing pages, you’re not doing it for the journey, are you? In fact, you probably wish you could just skip over the whole thing and get straight to the destination: more conversions. Smart Builder Lights Up a Direct Path to More ConversionsSmart Builder is our new AI-powered landing page builder that uses over 10 years of data (that’s 1.5 billion conversions!) to provide marketers a guided building experience. It speeds up (and smooths out) the journey to publishing high-converting content—no more guesswork, no more endless iterations. That means you can spend more time watching those conversions roll in. So how exactly does it work? To get started, all you’ve gotta do is share a little bit about your business and campaign—your industry, audience, and conversion goals. Smart Builder will then provide templates, section components, and even copy recommendations. It’s pretty dang spectacular, if we might say so ourselves. Smart Builder helps you adopt conversion intelligence—a new approach to marketing that pairs your know-how and creativity with AI to get better, faster results than you could on your own. The thought of working with AI might give you the heebie-jeebies—and hey, that’s pretty normal. The AI black box can stir up a lot of distrust among marketers. You see the input and the output, but what the heck goes on in the middle?
If you’re ready to shift your approach to marketing, it’s time to flip the switch. Once you see how easy it is to work with Smart Builder (and all the problems it can solve for you), you’ll never look back. Sorry, Ralph. We’re focused on the destination. 1. Build a Landing Page With the Team You Never HadWhen Unbounce first launched its Classic Builder, the goal was to make the building process accessible to anyone—no developer required. Smart Builder was created with you in mind. You don’t need specialized skills or an entire crew to work the dang thing. In fact, it’s the opposite--it gives those skills to you. You’re no longer working alone—meet your new teamSmart Builder is your Design Assistant: Not so long ago, landing page templates were a huge blessing. Instead of building a page from scratch, marketers could start off with a foundation, which saved them time. Now, there are so many options that it’s become a curse. If you’re not a designer, picking a high-converting template can be overwhelming.
Smart Builder is your In-House Copywriter: The 15-second rule states that you have less than 15 seconds to grab your reader’s attention. Your headline—a mere few words—plays a big role in captivating your audience right away. Sounds like a lot of pressure (and the perfect trigger for some serious writer’s block). With Smart Builder, you can ask for copy recommendations to help you create those snappy headlines. Based on conversion data in your industry, it’ll serve up several alternative headlines (and rank ‘em by how impactful they’re predicted to be). Smart Builder is your Developer: Using landing page templates, you might feel like your creativity is constrained by the layout. If only you could swap out that section, drag up that headline, or stretch that photo—then it’d be perfectly on-brand. Now, you can bring your ideas to life. With Smart Builder’s responsive templates and grid system, everything snaps into place as you customize your page. Fiddling around with resizing and double-checking the mobile design are things of the past. Editor’s Note: Smart Builder is still in beta—which means there are more features to come. For example, soon you’ll be able to generate high-converting recommendations for even more copy on your landing page. As Smart Builder grows smarter, so will your team. Try it out today! 2. Know What Converts Before You Click “Publish”Marketers are working harder—but for most, results seem to be getting worse. What gives? In an increasingly competitive landscape, you know you’ve gotta put in the effort. You’ll spend hours researching best practices and considering all the different elements. (“Green and orange are both high-converting CTA colors, so I should go with one of those, right?“) But despite this effort, you still wind up guessing what’ll perform best. (“My favorite color is orange—I’ll try that.”) And that’s the crux of the problem.
Unfortunately, if you wait to publish your page to see what converts, you’re at risk of squandering your budget. And when ad clicks are now coming out at 16 bucks a pop, most businesses can’t afford that kinda testing. You’ll have to bring in a whole lot more conversions to offset those that bounce. With Smart Builder, you can expect a higher return on ad spend because each decision you make is guided by industry-specific conversion data—not on guesswork, intuition, or what Joe says worked at his last job. (Damnit, Joe.) 3. Win Back Time to Grow Your BusinessDo you often feel like you’re being pulled in so many directions that you can’t get anything done? You fall behind, you rush your work, and then you see lackluster results. While you’re probably bummed, you also know it’s the best you could do with the time you had. (“It ain’t a homemade lasagna, but this soupy Kraft Dinner will have to do today. Mmm, soupy good!”) Landing pages are one of many tasks vying for your attention, which means that optimization practices—like building landing page variants or mobile-friendly landing pages—are usually an afterthought. Here’s why that’s a problem. If you only create one landing page (even if it’s eye-catching as heck), you’re limiting yourself to one audience segment. With variants, you give your landing pages the highest chance of success by appealing to many different kinds of visitors. Let’s say you own an ice cream shop: You wanna highlight all your flavors to lure in every sweet tooth—not just those who crave chocolate and vanilla, right?
So go wild. Create variants that highlight different selling points. Or feature different hero images. Swap around the copy and sections. Try out those bold ideas. There’s no need to block off extra time in your calendar. Because when you find ways to speak to each and every prospect, you’re on your way to growing your business. #BigBusinessEnergy. Lookin’ for the cherry on top of your Smart Builder experience? Once you create a few variants, turn on Smart Traffic, our AI-powered optimization tool that automagically reads your visitors’ attributes and sends them to the landing page most relevant to them. Unbounce customers see an average 30% lift! Marketing Ain’t What it Used to BeHave you noticed that your workdays are becoming longer and more challenging than before? Your tasks are piling up because you’re spending way too much time (time you don’t have) figuring out what’ll resonate with your prospects and convert them into customers. No, you’re not overanalyzing it. You’re caught in the middle of a big change to the marketing world, which is making the competition fiercer than the cast of America’s Next Top Model. Over the past few years, the internet has gotten incredibly crowded. Advertising space is in high demand and online buyers are being bombarded by more choices than ever before. What’s that mean for marketers? A double whammy of towering ad costs and the challenge of standing out from an ever-growing number of competitors. What’s the solution? You’ve gotta change how you think about landing pages. To build relevance, you gotta build smarterIn order to attract and convert your audience, your landing pages need to feel tailored to each and every visitor according to their needs, preferences, and expectations. They need to be relevant. But you can’t build relevance quickly and accurately with the landing page builders offered today. Why? Because most page builders rely on your marketing intelligence alone. Building relevant landing pages isn’t so easy on your ownThis is why you gotta start working with conversion intelligence. More and more marketers are catching on. In fact, marketers’ use of AI increased by 190% from 2018 to 2020. It’s become pretty darn clear the next big power move in marketing is adopting AI and practicing conversion intelligence. That means—for your landing pages—the answer isn’t more time, expertise, or predictive superpowers. What you need is a landing page builder powered by AI. You need Smart Builder. And it’s come at the perfect time. The Future is Smarter, TooAt the pace the consumer world is changing (and with how little time you have), we couldn’t just tell you to get out there and build more, better, and faster. We had to create a builder that’s smarter, so you can grow smarter, too. But it doesn’t end here. Our goal is to continue to grow and evolve our conversion intelligence offerings to help you optimize the entire conversion funnel—pre-click to post-conversion. Conversion intelligence is your competitive edge. As long as you show up, we’ll keep up our side of the bargain—which is providing you with all the right tools to maximize conversions. Today that means building relevance. But what will consumers expect next? With that question as our North Star, you’ll always remain light years ahead with Unbounce. Ready to flip the switch to a smarter way of marketing? It starts with Smart Builder. Via Marketing http://www.rssmix.com/via Blogger http://samanthasmeyers.blogspot.com/2021/07/3-reasons-why-your-marketing-needs.html July 22, 2021 at 06:20PM
Conversion Intelligence—The New Era of Marketing
Change is hard. In a world where it seems like the next big thing is just ‘round the corner every day, there’s comfort in holding on to the old way of doing things. It’s part of the human condition, and history is littered with examples of people who weren’t able to recognize—or capitalize on—trends and events as they happened. Lightbulbs, bicycles, and laptops are but a few of these once-misunderstood tech inventions. Just a few years ago it was even considered ludicrous for the internet to be used for ecommerce. This is also where we believe digital marketing finds itself today—on the cusp of something new that’s about to overhaul traditional processes, manual data-crunching, and tedious testing by partnering up with artificial intelligence and machine learning. We’ve seen the signs and are calling it: The world is heading into a brave new world of marketing with more results and fewer hassles. Are you ready to join us in this mind shift? The Problem with Digital Marketing TodaySince opening our doors 10 years ago, Unbounce has existed to help small businesses grow by making access to essential digital marketing tools easy. But over the past two years, we’ve seen that growth come to an abrupt stop. And we aren’t just talking about the effects of the pandemic. SMBs are suffering and there is no end in sight. Today, we’re seeing small businesses falling behind while large corporations with big budgets are dominating the competitive landscape. We can’t say it any clearer: Digital marketing needs an equalizer. Now.
COVID-19 brought a massive wave of new competition to the digital space, forcing brick-and-mortar businesses online and accelerating strategies by six years. To put that into context, over the last year alone, social media ad spend in North America increased by a staggering 92.3%. Today, Google indexes more than 35 trillion web pages, with 500 000 new pages going live each day. If it were a country, it would be the most populated place in the world. Sure, that means there are more opportunities than ever before to attract potential customers online, but there’s also a lot more competition. Google ads are getting steadily more expensive with CPC inflation, and we’re not just talking about the go-to keywords that were nigh impossible to get anyways. Even niche businesses feel the heat—searches for meat delivery have increased by no less than 925%. It’s scary out there. With 40% of small businesses saying that attracting customers online will be their greatest challenge over the next year, the days of getting ahead simply by being online are over. And here’s the thing: It won’t be going back to how it was before. 48% of small businesses say they will stick with ecomm long after the pandemic—and then we’re just mentioning one specific market segment. Though we hate to say it, welcome to the “new normal.” Conversion Intelligence—A Smarter Way to MarketWe can go down the rabbit hole of stats citing that marketers don’t have time, budget, or the resources to optimize campaigns. But at the end of the day, what most marketers want is more conversions. And that’s why we are pioneering a new way to do marketing called “conversion intelligence.” We believe that the most optimal results from your marketing will come when you actively and openly pair your own expertise with the power of AI. As a company with deep knowledge and experience supporting the growth of small businesses, it’s our belief that conversion intelligence is the disruption SMBs need to get a step up in the digital marketplace. It’s time for business to get more and go further by working smarter, not harder.
Think of conversion intelligence as a change in your approach to marketing by pairing your expertise with data-powered AI insights to create and optimize the highest-converting campaigns possible. It’s you, and your marketing know-how, augmented by machines. A fun yet poignant example comes from chess. The computer always beats the grandmaster. However, when players and computers team up together for a round of “Cyborg Chess”—with the player leading the strategy and the computer providing the tactics—the bionic team generally wins. Relative newbies to the sport have come out victorious over grandmasters AND the most powerful chess computers in the world. Think of conversion intelligence as your chess computer. AI will provide actionable insights and recommendations, but you’re still the one making the calls. It’s about predictive data meeting the creative power of a marketer—and there’s an endless amount of possibility in what you do with that. There are many AI-powered marketing solutions released to market each day. Exciting tools that enable conversion intelligence specifically, range from predictive email tools that let you create and send variants to the respondents based on previous click data, to AI-assisted ads that can match inputted copy and images to create a unique user experience.
This brings us to the magic question: What exactly differentiates conversion intelligence from your current marketing stack in getting you in front of more potential customers? Well, it’s all about serving relevance … Relevance, the Cooler Sibling of Personalization—and the Key to Conversion IntelligenceThere’s been a lot of talk about “personalization” in marketing circles over the past decade or so, but it hasn’t amounted to much. It’s mostly resulted in an onslaught of {f_name} fields in promo emails rather than a real personalized experience. It’s no surprise that 80% of business owners who invested in personalization projects will stop funding by 2025 due to a lack of ROI. Just because personalization is dead, it doesn’t mean generic is the way to go. It’s about rethinking what we were taught about personalization in terms of relevance. Relevance happens when serving visitors unique marketing experiences that match their needs, preferences, and expectations. It’s not just based on what they’re searching for or what they’ve already told you—but based on behavioral and predictive data. Many of the biggest companies today already get that distinction. Look at how Netflix does it, for instance. They’re not serving up the same lukewarm recommendations with your name attached, they use AI to promote the latest, most relevant content for each and every customer—saving the company $1 billion a year.
It’s about providing directions before users ask for them. Anticipating the next thing a customer would want to buy based not only on the last thing they bought but who they are, and what kind of interactions they prefer. That’s not personalization. It’s relevance, and it’s a game-changer. A Note on AI ScepticismThere’s no silver bullet when it comes to marketing. Although there are methods like conversion intelligence that can make the job much easier and effective, it might not be for everyone. For some companies, the ultimate goal is complete automation—simply turning something on and having the work done in a flash without needing human input. For others, they might just not be ready to embrace artificial intelligence in their efforts quite yet. And that’s okay. But that doesn’t mean this train is slowing down anytime soon. Nine out of ten Fortune 1000 companies have an ongoing investment in AI. Between 2015 and 2019, the number of enterprises using AI grew by 270%. Within the enterprise model, marketing and sales prioritize AI more than any other department. Big business is powering ahead with AI, and you can be sure it’s not just to sound hip and techy. It’s a major step-up to get ahead in the game. For Unbounce, Landing Pages Just Aren’t Enough AnymoreWhen landing pages came to prominence in the early 2000s, the idea of quickly creating a standalone page for a campaign was revolutionary. Landing pages rode in on a white horse and reduced friction for marketers by ensuring a message match and minimized distractions by closing the gap between clicking the ad and converting. And the results were incredible—within our builder alone we’ve seen no less than *1.5 billion* conversions over the last 10 years. But as the digital landscape became more competitive, simply having a landing page wasn’t enough anymore. Proper targeting and testing can lead to a conversion rate boost of more than 300%. Three hundred!) But that requires near-constant monitoring and optimizing.
And right there is the gap. For smaller teams with limited resources, campaign optimization isn’t really an option. We see it in the Unbounce builder—fewer than 50% of customers regularly republish their pages. This is a metric we look at to signify tweaks and updates to campaigns. We realized that this wasn’t due to a lack of wanting higher conversion rates. Most marketers just don’t have the capacity to monitor and optimize campaigns for optimal conversions. Even for big marketing teams, who can easily run 36 A/B tests at a time, that kind of optimization isn’t scalable—you’re still only refining one landing page, for one audience segment who would only ever convert on page A anyway. So much for “relevance,” right? Using Conversion Intelligence to Build Relevance in Landing PagesWhat if you knew that using less than 300 words would double your conversions? Or that by adding a video to a lead-gen campaign page, you might be lowering your conversion rates? How about that mobile users in North America will convert at a much higher rate if the first thing they saw was pricing? With our Smart Traffic feature, we divert visitors based on their personal attributes to the landing page variant where they’re most likely to convert. Different variants work for different audiences—who needs one champion when you can have five? And it works—we’re talking an average conversion rate lift of up to 30%. (Uh, hello relevance, and hello campaign optimization!) And then we’re not even mentioning the long line of upcoming products.
We believe that conversion intelligence is essential for businesses to be competitive in their digital marketing efforts. And we also believe that access to it shouldn’t just lie with big companies with the infrastructure and resources.
Within Unbounce, this means developing a full-scale conversion intelligence platform to help marketers get the most out of their campaigns—over and above landing pages—by effortlessly optimizing their entire marketing funnel for the best possible conversion rates.
Lookin’ Ahead to a New Way of Doing Landing PagesArtificial intelligence is not a new concept anymore, in fact it’s already part of our daily lives. And it’s steadily changing the face of marketing—and Unbounce too. Later this month, we’ll launch the Unbounce Smart Builder—a game-changing landing page builder that will change the way you build landing pages. With AI-powered insights baked in from the get-go, you’ll be guided to create landing pages that get the highest possible conversion rates based on your industry and conversion goal. Yep, this means you can now optimize as you build, serve your audience a relevant experience, and get that competitive advantage right from the start.
Welcome to the era of conversion intelligence—the future of landing pages, and the future of digital marketing. Via Marketing http://www.rssmix.com/via Blogger http://samanthasmeyers.blogspot.com/2021/07/conversion-intelligencethe-new-era-of.html July 07, 2021 at 06:22PM
Landing Page Strategy: The Complete Guide
Whether you’re announcing your new business, creating an event page, or promoting a new product, you’re going to need more than a shiny landing page to get people to sign on the dotted line. What you need is a landing page strategy. Chances are, if you browse the web as often as the rest of us digital humans, you’ll click on a “Learn More” call-to-action (CTA) 26% of the time if it mentions a brand you’re aware of. When you click, you’re expecting the content to match your interests and browsing habits. It’s a marketer’s job to make sure you’re not disappointed. Thinking like the consumer is the first step for marketers designing landing pages to achieve a single, focused goal. With only seconds to hold a visitor’s attention, creating a high converting landing page is both an art and a science. Table of ContentsWhat Is a Landing Page?A landing page is a standalone web page created specifically for a marketing or advertising campaign. Whenever a consumer clicks on a link in an email or an ad on Google, YouTube, Facebook, or similar places on the web, they’re redirected to “land” on a specific page that provides more depth to the headline. This makes for a much better user experience than landing on the home page and being expected to figure out where the information referenced in the ad can be found. But for a page like this to do its job, you gotta know the purpose of that landing page. Do you want to:
The options are endless, but your marketing strategy should determine which choice is most relevant. Let’s take a look at three different types of landing pages you can use to make the most out of your page visits. 1. The lead capture pageThe most common use of a landing page is to capture information about your leads. A lead is someone who is already consuming your content and could potentially become a customer. They could be following you on social media, attending your events, or even be engaged members of your email list and never missing a message (thanks for the open rates, fam—we see you). But they’re yet to pay for a product of yours. You want to design the forms for these people because they already have a relationship with your brand. An effective lead capture page requires a list of elements we refer to as “the six-point punch.”
This lead capture form by ActiveCampaign makes it simple for the visitor to get what they came for. They use a 1:1 attention ratio, which provides a single-centered focus on the CTA. An eye-tracking study in 2006 showed that users often read web pages in an F-shaped pattern: two horizontal swipes followed by one vertical swipe down the page. The left-hand side of this page is used to build trust by showing real-time updates from people who just signed up for the same plan that’s being marketed to you. They also leverage the vertical format by adding one, single form field and reassuring the visitor with another trust element representing the high volume and global reach of their customers. 2. The click-through pageMediators, insurance brokers, and real estate agents all share one common attribute: they serve as the middleman. It’s their job to warm you up to the product (or outcome) before making the hard sell. Click-through pages serve the same purpose. Think about it like giving a pitch presentation to a potential investor. Before making the ask, you start with a big yet simple statement that communicates the value of your product or service. You position your business as an opportunity instead of a risk. You show the successes, stories, and proof of customer satisfaction. You share your startup story. Then, you make the ask. In this example, Shopify’s headline alone is convincing enough to click-through using the “Let’s talk” button. But as you scroll down the page, that bold statement is reinforced with:
These pages reassure customers about the benefits and product experiences they can expect to get when they sign up. (You’ll notice the big difference here is that there are no form fields.) Use these pages to walk your talk. 3. The splash pageWhile not technically a landing page, a splash page can serve the same purpose for visitors before they’re able to access the rest of your website. It’s an opportunity to:
When contactless delivery was introduced as restaurants pivoted to find a new way to do business, many would have used splash pages similar to the example below to communicate their new methods and provide more information about their safe procedures. Another common use of splash pages is prompting users to join your email list with big and bold single-focus CTA. You can build popups like this one using Unbounce to turn any high-traffic page on your website into a lead-generating engine. Customizing Your Pages by AudienceOkay, time to take it to the next level. Another core aspect of landing page strategy? Tailoring your pages for your audience. Attracting new leads will require an understanding of the language they use, the trends they’re tapped into, their industry culture, and more. The better you can pinpoint a lead’s place in the buyer journey, the more effectively you’ll be able to nurture their process from interest to post-purchase. You might ask, “But how can I keep them engaged throughout the whole journey? What if their preferences for content change? How can I account for that?” Those are the right questions to be asking. Because it’s tough to maintain lead engagement and account for all the different attributes of your audience—especially when they’re changing over time. It’s almost like you need a machine that combines user preferences to automatically adjust content and send page variants to their most relevant leads. Wait a minute—there is! Smart Traffic is an AI-powered algorithm that matches visitors to the page variant where they’re most likely to convert. The magic of marketing is making your customers feel like you tailored your message for them throughout their journey. While A/B testing creates two buckets for your leads to land into, Smart Traffic creates multiple buckets. After only 50 overall visits, Smart Traffic begins optimizing your page variants tailored to different prospects, devices, and traffic sources as a way to match people to the page that those similar to them have converted on in the past. I know, right? Segmentation allows marketing messages to combine buyer intent with demographics to create a personalized feel of communication. Incorporating personalization into your marketing strategy can cut your customer acquisition costs in half. Visitors are more engaged when messaging is more specific and relevant to them. And the last thing we want is to waste time and money on targeted campaigns that don’t convert. Writing Landing Page CopyIf you’ve ever heard that the money is in the headline, you better believe it. ActiveCampaign — “Powerful Email Marketing.” Each one of these statements is speaking to a specific customer need. Now that’s what you call a value prop. While crafting an attention-grabbing headline is an accomplishment, it’s not the only important piece of copy on your landing page. Marketers compete for attention with millions of other companies trying to entice page visitors to stay and convert. The best action you can take to help yourself win over your viewers is to explain the transformation of your product in concise and persuasive sentences. A jaw-dropping 2018 study showed that 29.5% of landing pages in the business services sector had over 500 words of copy. That’s a lot to read! But if these businesses had lowered their word count to fewer than 100, they could join the pages converting 50% higher. If each landing page is one piece of a larger puzzle, then the copy needs to play a similar role. Here’s a step-by-step process you can follow to create high-performing and persuasive landing page copy: Step 2: Plan Your Information Hierarchy — What information is most important? Step 3: Write Attention-Grabbing Headlines — How can you communicate your value prop as clearly as possible? Step 4: Craft Persuasive Body Copy — How can you use psychology to create audience-centric copy? Step 5: Find Social Proof that Resonates — What benefits, influencers, or companies you’ve engaged with would make page visitors go from skeptics to believers? Step 6: Convert with a Call to Action — Where’s the best placement for your CTA, and how can you make it action-oriented? The latest addition to the Unbounce family, SnazzyAI, can help you get over the hump of writing compelling content using AI to auto-generate copy for you. This service provides a host of templates for Google ads, product descriptions, investor pitches, and more to end writer’s block and accelerate campaigns. (I know, we’re super excited too.) Want to see why SnazzyAI is the perfect fit for Unbounce? Learn more about how this new technology will help marketers and entrepreneurs grow smarter and faster. Designing Your Landing PagesAlthough persuasive copy increases your chances of converting page visitors, we all know what the people really want. COLOR. Well, OK, that’s not all they want. But a study showed that over 94% of the first impressions formed on a page can be attributed to design. Your headline might have prompted a consumer to click, but before they read another word, it’s your layout, color, contrast, and readability that will make them stay (or bounce). This is when you wanna use the visual hierarchy format to structure your content. You can design page elements that interact with one another to signal importance by following the principles of visual hierarchy. Let’s use an example. Look at Stripe’s homepage and take a few seconds to list the elements you notice in the order that you see them.
Rather than going with a vertical layout, Stripe leverages the predictable F-pattern to optimize their page according to how our brains naturally scan for information. First horizontal swipeThe most critical data, in this case, is the headline. If left-aligned or placed at the top left of the page, it will be the first element visitors are likely to zero in on. Without even reading the words, the bold font and large size communicate, “YOU NEED TO KNOW THIS.” The images to the right side of the page provide two more data points to boost consumers’ confidence in the product: sample client results and a sample payment process. Their purpose is to give you and your customers an idea of how the platform works. Check this out, though: Stripe has a host of pages under their Stripe Docs library that can walk leads from creating a product on their platform to learning how to generate revenue reports--before they even sign up. What you see on the right-hand side can be thought of as a “mini-demo,” which assists 69% of consumers in making a purchase decision. Second horizontal swipeDid you read the description paragraph when you scanned left-to-right the second time? Wouldn’t blame ya if you didn’t. Though, this time around, the CTA is more pronounced. The CTA has one specific request and stands out due to the color contrast between the gray button and white text. They’ve also gone ahead with a multi-focus approach and added a second CTA in case page visitors feel like they still need to talk it over with a sales rep before signing up. The diagram above shows heatmaps from user eye-tracking studies of three websites. This is a powerful representation of data that analyses where users click, how far they scroll, and what they look at or ignore on your page. The red areas depict the highest activity, yellow indicates fewer clicks and views, while blue represents the fewest of the two. A heatmap (or heat map) is a graphical representation of data where values are depicted by color. Heatmaps make it easy to visualize complex data and understand it at a glance: Final vertical swipeThe last look at the page gives you a birds-eye view of how all the elements fit together. At the bottom of the Stripe page, they’ve laid out the logos of a few trusted clients to demonstrate their authority and credibility. But you can go beyond logos to provide other types of social proof, too. Testimonials, reviews, and case studies have a massive impact on your conversion rate because about 97% of consumers use that information to govern their purchase decisions. It functions more like a personal suggestion from a customer lens rather than “sales jargon” from the company itself. If you think of your social proof as a recommendation from a trusted friend, there are myriad creative ways to turn your customers into advocates with User-Generated Content (UGC). UGC is any form of content generated by customers of your brand. It can be product review videos, blog posts, or even online discussion groups. The main thing UGC delivers is an inside look at how a product enhances customers’ day-to-day lives. According to a study, 75% of consumers will publicly share a positive experience with a brand. This is your opportunity to participate in the community you’ve built, and kindly ask to repurpose that content. You can integrate a widget at the bottom of your page that shows UGC content from your social media feed and links out to specific posts. Keep in mind that you should craft your landing page design to elicit emotions that build trust and excitement for your consumer. Write down how you intend to accomplish that and plan accordingly. Landing Page OptimizationLanding Page AnalyticsEver heard the quote, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it?” Well, if you don’t want all your hard work to go to waste, you’ll need to identify which key metrics carry the most weight for your landing page before you start creating it. It’s easy to say, “Duh, conversions mean the most, obv.” But it takes a much more intentional effort to know how to optimize related metrics to fuel the high conversion rate you’re looking for. 1. Unique pageviews: Pageviews are the first metrics that will soar. Similar to likes on Instagram and Twitter, it feels nice, but there’s little insight into who these viewers are or where they’re coming from (i.e., social, paid, or organic traffic). On the other hand, “unique views” represent the number of people who have viewed your pages, no matter how many pages they viewed. This means if you had one new visitor that visited three pages, that would increase your unique views by one and your page views by three. 2. Sessions by source: THIS is where optimization becomes a targeted effort. After setting up your landing page, you’ll need to get into distribution mode using paid advertising strategies and organic content to drive traffic to your page. As customers begin to notice your promotions, you’ll want to identify which marketing channels are creating the most sessions for your landing page. If your paid search ad conversions are through the roof but your social display ads aren’t doing so well? Well, that’s when you’ll want to transfer your ad spend to the method generating the most results. This metric teaches you that it’s better to be in one channel with high-yielding pageviews than it is to be everywhere at once. 3. Average session duration: You need to use your best judgment regarding the amount of time spent on your page warrants an update for optimization. However, if you’re explaining a new product feature and the average session duration is still under 10 seconds, then it’s time to sound the alarm. This generally indicates that some portions of your page are confusing, and visitors want to grasp the concept right away. Otherwise, the solution isn’t for them. Here are a few updates you can make if the average time spent on your landing page is low:
4. Bounce rates: Although this metric makes everyone shiver, it’s helpful for the same reason as session duration. Bounce rate measures the percentage of sessions in which someone leaves your site without interacting on your page or visiting other pages. To put your mind at ease, a reasonable bounce rate for ecommerce and professional services sites is around 40-60%. If your bounce rate is higher than that, one of the following areas need your attention:
5. Page speed: Your page design could be the most beautiful content you’ve ever created, but it’s not going to have the intended impact if it takes too long to load. Did you know that 83% of visitors expect your page to load in three seconds or less? Broken images and buffering symbols are the silent killers of landing pages. While you may want to fill your page with large images, links, and plugins, those same elements could be the culprit to a slow load time that exceeds a visitor’s patience. Here are a few actions to take to cut back on load times:
If you need help measuring your page speed as it is, check out Google’s PageSpeed Insights. Driving More Traffic to Your PageNow that you’ve created your landing page using the six-point punch formula, it’s time to enter the second leg of the marathon: distribution. And no, not just sharing a link on Facebook or LinkedIn like you’re posting your kids’ artwork on the fridge. Content distribution is where you want to budget your time and narrow down the channels for optimization, as the number of pageviews reveals the highest sources of traffic. Here are a few tactics you’ll want to experiment with: SEO Here’s an example: Primary keyword → “House slippers” Secondary keywords → “fluffy house slippers,” “best house slippers,” “memory foam house slippers” Another SEO strategy focuses on building backlinks—this is when you reach out to writers and publications in your field, asking to link from a page on their website to a page on yours. A high number of backlinks helps build a high domain rate (DR), which places your landing page higher in organic search rankings. In layman’s terms: how often do you make it to page #3 when you’re searching on Google? Regardless of the search engine, the fact is that if your answer isn’t on the first page, you’re much more likely to adjust your search entry than you are to continue clicking through pages. Paid campaigns Using keywords to position your landing page in the correct category is one thing. Leveraging user search phrases to build efficient search ads is another ball game. A study conducted in 2019 showed that 50% of visitors brought in through PPC traffic are more likely to purchase than organic visitors. This. Is. HUGE! Here’s a list of some other paid strategies to reach your target audience and capture more conversions: Build awareness with Display Ads: Reference your buyer personas to understand your customers’ browsing habits and what image/copy mix resonates with their demographic attributes. This way, you can create a campaign that reaches them with the right message at the right time. Google’s Display Ad Network reaches over 90% of internet users. Grabbing a slice of that pie is a low lift and boosts your visibility. Offer rich experiences with social ads: Social media platforms are hyper-focused on giving users an inside look at lifestyles worldwide. People buy into experiences, so give them one where they can see themselves using your product. Visitors would love to experience your product before jumping in. They begin researching your brand online before subscribing to a newsletter, downloading a free resource, or paying for a product, and 87% of their purchase decisions are based on what they find on their own. Retargeting ads You know that hot tub you were looking at two months ago that always seems to pop up on the side of websites you’re browsing or smack dab in the middle of your Facebook feed? That’s a retargeting ad at work. Retargeting leans on tracking technology to identify individuals who have previously engaged with your brand and re-engage them with paid ads across different platforms. This means that you can stay on the radar of someone that visited your landing page but didn’t convert. Think of the reminder emails you get when your online shopping cart is still full. You can even take this a step further by creating lookalike audiences to find new visitors that are likely to be interested in your business because of their demographic or behavioral similarities to your existing customers. Want to see how retargeting can boost your ROI? See ad examples from brands like AirBnB and Nespresso to inspire your next campaign. Build. Optimize. Convert.With the six-point punch formula, the visual hierarchy, and the strategic metrics for analytics and optimization, you’re ready to craft a landing page strategy that creates more conversion than you could imagine. Smart Traffic can help you design multiple page variants and optimize for audience segments at the same time. To accelerate your go-to-market launch and the learning you experience post-launch—you need this tool in your tech stack. Make sure you use this guide as a blueprint whenever you need a new landing page because, as we all know by now, it’s not just about the page itself—it’s about the strategy that builds it. Via Marketing http://www.rssmix.com/via Blogger http://samanthasmeyers.blogspot.com/2021/06/landing-page-strategy-complete-guide.html June 29, 2021 at 05:22PM
How to Build Successful Restaurant Landing Pages That Sell More Food
via Blogger http://samanthasmeyers.blogspot.com/2021/06/how-to-build-successful-restaurant_24.html June 24, 2021 at 07:24PM
How to Build Successful Restaurant Landing Pages That Sell More Food
via Blogger http://samanthasmeyers.blogspot.com/2021/06/how-to-build-successful-restaurant.html June 24, 2021 at 05:22PM |