Week 6/12 - CXL Growth Marketing Minidegree Review

I am participating in the CXL Institute Scholarship Program, and I’m going through the Growth Marketing Minidegree. I'm posting a new article about what I've learned every week. This is part 5/12. 

This week we're going to talk about the psychology behind landing page optimization, and touch briefly on copywriting. 

Michael Aagaard is the instructor for the landing page optimization course, where he walks you through his process of building and optimizing landing pages. 

I'm going to cover a few of the key lessons here, which I found most interesting and useful. 

I'm starting to see a pattern on how optimization is done. Peep Laja's course on conversion research uses a similar framework, and I suspect this is how most optimization projects are done. 

Aagaard suggests you start with a heuristic analysis of your landing page, just to capture initial emotional reactions, and to spot things that are obviously wrong or off. 

Heuristic walkthrough

The heuristic walkthrough is a key element in the optimization process, and probably an important part of any optimization process. 

It's important to note that this is not where the process ends — it's simply a starting point that eventually helps you get to the root of the problem. 

You want to do it quite early in the process before you get too familiar with the page.

Here are some things the heuristic analysis will help you discover.

• First impression / emotional reactions
• Credibility / trust
• Clarity
• Information hierarchy critique
• Copy / content critique
• Bugs
• UX issues

It's important to note that the heuristic analysis is not the entire truth. It's basically a starting point for further analysis. 

This is why Aagaard also suggests you take notes as you go, annotate screenshots, and take some sneak peaks in your GA account. 

Here are some activities that goes into the heuristic analysis: 

5-second test

Open the page, and look at it for 5 seconds. Do you understand what the page is about? If not, you need to work on the headline. 

I think this might be hard to do well if you're the one building the landing pages, especially if you've worked in your company for a long time. Because, you can explain your product in 1000 different ways, but your audience is most likely to understand a handful of ways. 

The easiest way to get someone to understand what your page is about is by combining a specific headline with imagery. 

People read the largest text first, and probably look at your image to validate what they think your headline means. 

If your audience doesn't understand what your page is about, they'll probably bounce pretty fast. 

Think of your page in "sections" 

We as marketers tend to think about our pages in full - we design our pages tog be viewed in full — from top to bottom. 

But, one really important thing to consider is that your visitors see your page in sections. 

Think about how your "screens" or sections stand out individually. 

Thinking of your page in sections can get you to find things to add or remove pretty quickly. 

Quant analysis

Look at session recordings, heatmaps and in Google analytics to find bottlenecks and potential problem areas. 

Heatmaps is a visual way of finding out where people click on a page, and the visualization looks like a heat map. Red (hot) areas are where people click most. 

In my own experience, heatmaps are not the best way of identifying problems, but it can help you discover some critical UX issues. For example, if you see that people click on sections or elements that you know are not clickable… you could either make that element clickable, or redesign it so that it doesn't look clickable. 

Also, scroll maps are similar to heatmaps, but it shows how far down the page most visitors scroll. These can be useful if you have a long page, because you most likely have some important information at the bottom that you want more people to see. So scroll maps can be useful to help you rearrange your page sections. 

Customer research / Information mining

Information mining is essentially a task where you gather information from customer reviews, customer interviews, polls and surveys. 

This is probably one of the most important steps, because the voice of your customer is very powerful. 

Here's the deal:

You might think you're selling a product or service to your audience… but the truth is that your audience is actually buying your product or service. 

There are some subtle but important nuances here to take not of: 

Your audience does not care about what you want them to buy. They don't want to buy what you are selling specifically, they want to buy a solution to a problem. 

This is why most landing pages have horrible conversion rates.

Most marketers will write a headline based on what they think their audience wants to buy, or worse, based on how they want to sell their product. 

They don't take into consideration what problem their audience actually wants to solve. 

Aagaard suggests to conduct interviews with internal stakeholders, like Customer Success, Sales and customer-facing staff, to get a starting point. 

Then, you move on to website polls and surveys to validate your internal findings. 

However, one of the most powerful ways of finding out what your audience really wants is to listen in on sales calls or join real sales meetings.

Most salespeople for example are focused on reading their prospect and making sure they don't push too hard. They're focused on selling, not finding marketing insight.

So as a marketer, you can attend sales meetings just to listen to what your prospects actually say. 

Make sure to take notes, and write down specific quotes word-by-word. 

You will quickly gain valuable insight, and probably realise that your website is not very aligned to how your prospects explain their problem.

But this is a good thing! 

Because after 5-10 sales meetings or calls, you will probably see a pattern. For example, you might sell a marketing automation solution, but the truth is that your prospect most likely wants to buy something that can help them make their communication more effective. 

Your prospect might not even think in terms of "I need marketing automation". Instead, they'll probably think "I hate writing emails every week, how can I make this more efficient?" 

They want to do more, with less. 

This is the kind of insight you only get from surveys, and real customer interactions. 

Summary

Thanks to one of the first courses in this minidegree, I decided that I needed to get closer to our own customers. 

So, I started listening to sales calls just to see if our own website copy was aligned with how our customers think. 

Not very surprisingly, it was not. I have yet to changed anything, because I feel I haven't listened in on enough sales calls, but I am starting to see a pattern. 

I'm finding new objections, motivational triggers, and a few deal breakers in (almost) every sales call. 

This has been some of the most enlightening weeks in my career to date — and I can't imagine a more effective way of getting to know your customers than actually writing down quotes word-for-word, customer goals, and their motivational triggers. 

So far, I have notes from around 5 or 6 meetings. I would like to join at least 10-20 more sales calls before I form an hypothesis and redesign a pageor two. 

If it wasn't for the customer-centric marketing course in my second week of the scholarship, I would probably never have done this. 

Combined with Peep Laja's course on conversion research, and Michael Aagaard's course on landing page optimization, I would probably not have known what to do with this information. 

So, for me, as a solo marketer, this has been incredibly valuable. 

I'm looking forward to next week when I will continue the copywriting course with Momoko Price. 

Copywriting is one of my favorite subjects and activities, and combined with the information over gathered from our sales calls… I think the end result will be very rewarding! ??