CXL Institute Growth Marketing Minidegree Review Part 4

This is part 4/12 in my series reviewing the CXL Institute growth marketing. I will be posting a new part every week.

CXL Institute offers some of the best online courses and industry-recognized certifications for those seeking to learn new technical marketing skills and tools highly useful to growth professionals, product managers, UX/UI experts, and any other marketing profile looking to become more customer-centric.

I was given an amazing opportunity to access and review one of their online course tracks, the Growth Marketing Minidegree. For the next few weeks, I’ll be discussing the content of the course as well as what I think of it as I go through it. Here is part 4!

Today we are going to talk about Landing page Optimization. This week our Instructor was Michael Aagaard.

Look, I know you know your stuff. But no matter how much of an expert you are, it never hurts to go back to the beginning. So, before we dive deep into the landing pages, let’s do a quick overview of some landing page basics. Again, I know this is a review for you. But bear with me (and who knows? Maybe a refresher of the fundamentals will do you good).

Let’s start with the most basic of questions: what exactly is a landing page? If you went by the name alone, you might think a landing page is whatever page your potential customer lands on when they visit your website ( Recently, I saw most of the marketing agencies use their home page as a landing page, this is wrong, check it now, go to google and search “Best digital marketing agency NYC”).

But you’d be wrong. Just because someone visits your website and lands on your homepage, that doesn’t make your homepage a landing page. If you EVER use your homepage as a landing page — and actively send traffic to it — you might as well take a lighter to your ad money and watch it go up in flames.

A landing page isn’t just where your potential customers land. It’s built with a very specific goal in mind — to convert those potential customers like. Depending on your goals, “converting” might mean collecting email addresses, selling your newest product or service, or gathering registrations for an upcoming event, webinar, or virtual summit. No matter your end goal, the most important characteristic of a landing page is that it’s designed specifically to take your web traffic and convert it to reach that goal.

Some people are in such a hurry to get their offer out to the market, and they don’t take the time to get to know the people they’re making an offering to. And that’s the biggest mistake you can make. Before you even think about building a landing page, you must know who you’re building that landing page FOR. If you don’t know your audience, you can’t build a page that speaks to them. Your customers are looking for a personal experience, and if you have no idea who they are, you can’t deliver it.

Be warned: if you skip this step, be prepared to hemorrhage a massive amount of time and money.

Before you build your landing page, at an absolute minimum, there are three basic questions you need to be able to answer about your audience:

Who are they?

What are they struggling with?

How does your offer solve their problem?

Without the answers to those three questions, you’re shooting in the dark. With those answers? You have a roadmap to creating a personalized landing page strategy that will connect with your audience on the deepest level.

How to use Google Analytics for Landing page research: Google analytics is the best source to start with. I already told you, you need to understand who your audience is ( If you want, you can join CXL’s Google analytics Course, this is one of the best courses I have ever seen). Are they coming from mobile or desktop?

Mobile and desktop are completely different things. Most marketers create desktop first landing pages, but you see your traffic is from the mobile version, then you need to create a mobile-first landing page. I recommend creating two versions of landing pages, one for mobile and another one for desktop. Google Analytics will also help you decide what you should do next, is your landing page converting enough? Why are they dropping, and where are they dropping? This is a gold mine for you.

Qualitative Research: You need to ask a few questions to understand this process. You can run 5-sec tests to solve the issue. Recruit some people and ask them what they think about the landing page within a 5secs.

1. What’s your first impression?
2. How does it make you feel?
3. Is it clear who the source is?

Ask them and analyze the answer. The more you analyze, the more found the truth.

You also Interview some of the questions for detailed understanding.

1. Is the content structured in a logical order?
2. Does anything seem confusing?
3. Do you have any unanswered questions?
4. Is there anything you would add?
5. Are there any UX issues?
6. Are there any bug/technical issues?

Now read their reviews, read as much as you can to understand whats the actual problem.

Season Recording, Heat map analysis: There is too much software out there; you can choose any of these to understand your audience. Season recording and heatmap analysis will help you understand how your audience behaves when they land your landing pages? How much are they scrolling? If they are leaving in which part on your landing page? This is a great help when you have nothing. Use these data wisely. But do not trust them blindly. This is not the eternal truth.

Feedback pools: Feedback pools are also great to help to collect the data directly from your visitor. But do not ask them too much. Use short MCQ-type questions for better results. Asked them some basic questions like

“have you looked at any alternative of Product x” or maybe “what’s your biggest question related to Product x.” Now collect the data as much as possible. Collect at least 1000 data for better results.

Copywriting: Now you collect all the data, write a copy that people can’t ignore. Write Answer some of the biggest questions, use testimonial or video testimonials for a better experience. You can add an FAQ if you need it. I highly recommended joining Momoko Price’s copywriting course from CXL Institute. One of the most important things is Your headline is one of the most important pieces of copy on your landing page. Just like skimming a newspaper headline to see if they want to pick up a copy of the paper, your audience uses your landing page headline to decide whether you’re worth the time and energy it takes to continue reading. And if your headline is a dud, literally nothing else you do matters — your audience won’t make it past that first line. It would help if you had a headline that speaks to people. It needs to jump off the page and immediately grab people’s attention. Your headline should be:

Informative: it lets your audience know where they are and why they’re there.

Engaging: it hooks their attention and makes them want to keep reading.

Relevant: it’s an accurate representation of what’s to come on the rest of your landing page (people don’t like to be duped, and if your headline doesn’t match the rest of your content, it doesn’t matter how informative or engaging it is — your audience won’t convert.

Visuals Design :

Your copy is important, but no one wants to look at a landing page that looks like a page out of a textbook. The right visuals will elevate your landing page, make it look more polished and professional, build the value of your offer, and drive conversions in a big way — up to 300%.

Photos:

Photos are a tricky thing. If you have a photo that perfectly supports a bullet point in your offer, then sure, you’ll want to include it. But don’t slap a bunch of photos on your landing page just for the sake of making it “look good”;

It won’t add anything to the experience and can detract from your messaging. And always, always, ALWAYS use custom photos. Stock images are easy-to-spot, scream “generic,” and will 100% turn off savvy customers.

Colors: Color is more than just the visually stimulating portions of the rainbow. The colors you choose for your landing page play a huge part in how your audience receives it. By leveraging the principles of color psychology, you can use color ninja-style to appeal to your audience’s unconscious color associations and specific emotions and actions. For example, let’s say you want to frame your company as trustworthy (who doesn’t?). Then you’d want to incorporate blue into your palette, which inspires confidence. If you want to create a sense of excitement to drive purchases, red will give your audience that jacked-up anxious feeling that puts them in the right mood for dropping big bucks. You want to use color but remember: you don’t want too much of a good thing. Don’t go crazy — stick to three colors in your palette; more than that, and you risk looking like a bag of Skittles threw up on your landing page.

White space:

Color is powerful, but you know what can be even more powerful? A lack of color. White space visually breaks up the elements of your landing page and makes it easier for your visitors to understand (how much easier? Studies show that using white space increases website visitor comprehension by nearly 20%)

Call-To-Action:

As I’ve mentioned, landing pages are all about getting your visitors to take a specific action. So guess what the most important part of your landing page is? Yes, Call to action. It would be best if you told them that builds the benefit and value of your offer so that they can’t say no.

So, for example, a bad CTA would be a button that reads “sign up now.” This tells your audience zero things. Why Should I sign up? What’s going to happen when they sign up? What does this button even do? Now, a button that reads “Start driving traffic to your website today!” — that right there is an example of a good CTA. It shows your audience exactly what they can expect when they click the button — and what valuable goodies are waiting on the other side.

Now put all the things together and create your first landing page. Test it. Create A/B testing. CXL has its A/B testing calculator; I highly recommend you should check

This is part 4/12 in my series reviewing the CXL Institute growth marketing Minidegree. I will be posting a new part every week!