Why Early Bootstrappers Should Think Differently About Landing Pages
To avoid the nightmare you must, above all else, stay focused on the purpose of your Landing Page. This purpose depends on what part of the startup lifecycle you are in.
The purpose of the landing page when you are starting a company is to test your Brand Promise with your Target Audience to see if anyone actually cares about your offering.
The purpose of the landing page when you are starting a company is to test your Brand Promise with your Target Audience to see if anyone actually cares about your offering. This is done before building anything. You are using this to make sure that you can affordably reach people who want your idea. In other words, you are avoiding building something no one wants.
If you are in the early stages of bootstrapping a B2C company, you’ll want to use landing pages in a very specific way. There are lots of blog posts pitching landing pages as the silver bullet for sales funnels. But if you are still in the customer development phase — where you are trying to understand who your audience is — then your approach to landing pages should be very different than if you have established product market fit. It’s about finding your direction rather than optimization. Here’s a simplified version that shows the extremes of the range:
This article focuses on the A part of the range. Here you are still very much doing customer development and finding out who, if anyone, is in the market for your solution. The idea is to use landing pages to cost-effectively (ahem, cheaply) validate your business idea before you spend your in-laws’ or favorite uncle’s seed money.
To stay on focus, let’s make this into a formula and explore:
Sounds great, but how? Let’s unpack…
Brand Promise
Introduce Yourself
Your brand promise is a combination of who you are as a brand (snarky, adventurous, powerful, irreverent, strait-laced, whatever) and the promises you are making to your customers about how their life will be different by choosing your product.
It is composed of:
- Images & Videos that evoke emotions and enable the potential customer to envision themselves living differently because they’ve bought your product.
- The copy (text) on the page that speaks to your ideal audience in a way that matches how they speak and think.
- And, sometimes, music that ties it all together and evokes the same emotions as the visual elements.
All of this ideally works together to send a very clear signal not only of the promise, but who the promise is meant for. If the customer has dreamed of being the kind of person the promise is meant for, then they’ll lean towards a yes. If it’s not clear who the promise is meant for, then no one will say yes.
Here are concrete examples of how much is communicated through the combination of imagery (in this case the background setting), the wording and the font* choices. The Jeep and Subaru examples are fun to look at because while they are both for outdoor types, it’s easy to see that they are aiming at very different people.
Ask If There’s a Fit
How will you know if people respond to your brand promise? You must give them a meaningful call to action. One that, if they answer it, clearly demonstrates that they have found a need that they care enough about to overcome some form of friction.
Demonstrates clear response to your brand promise: They give you your email address so that you will tell them when your product launches.
Not a clear response: They click on a link for more information, scroll to the end of the page, or they stay on the page for a long time. (No friction.)
Target Audience
Target Audience is who you believe wants your offering. The more clearly you can describe exactly who your target audience(s) are, the better you will be able to understand if anyone truly cares enough for you to build out your offering.
At this point in the game, you have two main dials to turn to tune the description: demographics and psychographics. Demographics are the more census-like characteristics — things like age, ethnicity, income, education. Psychographics captures things like personality, interests, beliefs, values, lifestyle.
Again, you’ll want to be pretty specific. Just saying that your offering is for middle-aged people or for guys will not answer the question “should I build this?” You want to get specific about who you’re selling to so that you know how to sell to them. See how adding details to the target audience, clarifies how the brand promise fits?
- Singe Men aged 35–50 who make over $70k interested in off-roading and ATVs
- Young (under 35), Christian, married, no children, interested in travel and music
- College educated, income over $100k interested in fine dining and luxury goods — lives in a large metroplex
Does Anyone Care?
This is also shorthand for “can I affordably reach the people who care?” and “do people care enough to make this worthwhile?” It’s a way of looking at the results from [Brand Promise + Target Audience] to figure out if you should move forward or not.
It’s important for the call to action have some sort of friction (like giving you their email) to create a decision point for the visitor. They are demonstrating that what you’re offering is worth allowing you to have access to their inbox. A secondary benefit here is that you now have a way of reaching the interested folks without paying for advertising again.
While number of email addresses received doesn’t guarantee buyers, it does give you a more meaningful indicator that there is true interest.
Your next step is to determine if you can reach enough people affordably.
If we continue with the example of getting someone’s email as the call to action then you can determine how much it cost in advertising in order to get an email. Let’s say that you ran two advertising campaigns to test your brand promise against two different target markets and got these results:
- Campaign A cost $100 and returned 4 emails. Cost per email: $25
- Campaign B cost $110 and returned 20 emails. Cost per email: $5.50
Was it worth it? Depends.
- How much are you selling your offering for?
- What are your assumptions about the lifetime value of the customer?
- How long is the sales cycle?
But the important thing here is how to use your landing page to validate your brand promise effectively so that you can have the data you need to model out if you can affordably reach people who want what your are selling.
Shout out to Matt Price, partner at Measure + Grow, and a badass startup guy! This article is based on a great conversation that we had with him on our YouTube channel. Lots more interesting conversation here: https://youtu.be/1Xq9WfKmbsU
