Cracking Landing Page Conversion Codes in 2025 w/ Apryl Syed (Conversion Strategy Group)

Convert as much. But a person wearing a product has.

Used her background in psychology, NLP marketing and her experience their landing page conversion rates. Now when I discovered how April approaches landing pages and convert. CEO of Conversion SG and a coach to many startup founders. April has used her background in psychology, NLP marketing and her experience from a diverse range of leadership roles to help countless brands drastically improve their landing page conversion rates. Now when I discovered how April approaches landing pages and conversion strategy, I knew I had to bring her on and grill her all about cracking conversion codes for landing pages in 2025 and beyond. This is the lead capture podcast. Let's dive into it. In my experience, like a lot of conversion and stuff like that, it's all about finding things to fix and continuing to fix those things. And when we first met, correct me if I'm wrong, you had mentioned that you're a fixer and that's one of the things you do best. So I think I would just like to start with your background and how you found your way to conversion strategy and conversion strategy group.

Yeah, yeah. So thanks. My background is in software and technology. I ran three product lines at Sage, but prior to that I kind of worked every position that I ended up managing and leading kind of stuff, sales, team, marketing, that side until I then was running full three product lines. But as a fixer I got deployed in lots of different areas. So I was managing all the North American NPS for Sage, a partner education track where we educated partners on how to sell better, service their customers better, all of that sort of stuff. Went out into the channel, worked for the largest partner who tried to hire me, I think six times and I finally said yes. So and ran sales marketing, customer success there and then I wanted to leave the industry, get out of erp, learn something new, learn about AI. And so that's when I went to Bloomreach, which was kind of like the last corporate stop. Learned a ton there. Worked with the largest retail brands in the world, but became really fascinated with conversion strategy and what caused folks to convert. So that kind of like started my love, but went out on the journey to do things different. Got a coaching certification, NLP certification for neuro linguistics programming, hypnotist certification as well. But all of that to along with the psychology degree to come back and really understand what makes people convert. And that really led me to kind of, you know, my agency that I have today, yes, we do work on conversion strategy. We, we also, you know, can be fractionally supportive of organizations for different roles and different things that they might need. But our passion is really around understanding conversion.

I'm curious about the neuro linguistic programming part. How much does that help conversion strategy and landing pages specifically?

Yeah, I mean, nlp, the biggest users of nlp, right, Would be like a Tony Robbins. And they definitely utilize a lot of it in their conversion strategy and how they get folks to convert both in their programs and on websites. So it does make a difference. It helps you understand where somebody's coming from and what emotion you need to transition them to in order to get them to convert, which is primarily a big focus that we have in my agency. You know, we're always diving into really understanding the Persona of that individual and the state of mind that they're in so that we can understand how we can convert that person.

Yeah, I love what you said about state of mind. I always try to think of that, but I find it's hard to put yourself in someone's shoes in someone's state of mind, despite, you know, you need to do that. But I do find it's hard to help with that. Like, how do you get yourself into someone's state of mind?

Gosh, like, how do I do that? You know, there's a great book that Brene Brown has. I think I have it here, actually, in the Atlas of the Heart.

You have a lot of books.

Since you have a lot of books, Atlas of the Heart I think is helpful because what Brene Brown talks about is like, when we're in this state, here's the places that we go, and she kind of defines it chapter by chapter. So for instance, I'll give you an example. We had a debt consolidation client where they're running debt consolidation ads. If you think about the state of mind of somebody who's looking at debt consolidation, you know, at our first couple of tries, we weren't getting great conversions. And to bring in a little bit of like, Rory Sutherland and alchemy, started thinking like, well, maybe we're thinking about this in a rational way and we should be thinking about it for someone who's irrational. And how does somebody who's irrational, you know, think about debt consolidation and what kind of state of mind are they in? Kind of went and did some homework in our Brene Brown and said, okay, if I'm in a frustrated state of mind, what are the types of things that I'm going to need in order to feel comfortable? So we went to video, we went to someone kind of explaining the process, making them feel a little more handheld, making them feel like, hey, even if it hasn't worked before, it can work for you now. It changed the proof points and how we talked about things on that page, maybe made the page a little bit longer, but you know, we went from kind of no conversions to like a 9.6% conversion.

Wow, that's fascinating.

That's like how it can work in the real world. I like a real world example.

Yeah. There's so much you said there that I want to circle back to, but you touched on a really important thing and it's you. You were at a state where you were not getting conversion. So clearly in your line of work you deal with failure. How do you deal with failure?

Well, you know, when we are looking at pages that are failing, it allows us to kind of say, what? What are we learning here? What is this audience telling us about this failure? And so it's either that could be color scheme, could be placement of a button, could be lack of trust, could be, you know, all of these things, they're giving you a clue of what you need to do. You watch recordings, you see how they're interacting with the page and you take your lessons in the failure. Right. For instance, we just had, you know, and by the way, on page is no different than email campaign failures and or LinkedIn campaign failures. It's kind of like all the same. Recently was just meeting right before this with someone we're running a LinkedIn campaign for and two of his other colleagues having success and his campaign not. So again, what's the failure? What's the failure teaching us? It's either that the Persona that we're going after, which was a relatively new one, is not active on that platform and they're not going to have these types of conversations. So what are we doing? We changed it up. We're running a side by side comparison campaign and seeing if we can get different results to again get the lessons back so that we can eventually get it successful. I think the hardest part about marketing is when maybe you're working with someone who's not used to going through that process and their thought process is, oh, I spend money here. And then it produces this lead. And it's not always a linear line. It doesn't just go sometimes from spending and especially when you're running pay per click ads and you're dealing with meta and you're dealing with audiences and especially if you don't have any history and you're doing it for the first time. So you kind of have to tune your audience. Another example in the loan consolidation we were having issues with the audience. That's actually what we narrowed down to. And how we figured that out is we went and let some other folks who were producing leads on other websites dump to our page and it started converting at a super high rate, which is what told us, okay, our problem isn't our landing page. Our problem is the audience that we are going after. And we just don't have our audience tuned properly. But this is a company that's done zero ads prior. And so we're tuning Facebook for the very first time. And every single time you change a dynamic on there, you're starting that tuning process over. So you know, these are failures, but within that failure, you're learning something every single time. And it's about how can you gather data so that you can improve it. The toughest thing is when someone's like, oh, well then pay per click ads don't work for us. Or you know, landing page strategy doesn't work for us. Or email campaigns don't work for you. It's not that they don't work for you, it's just that you haven't figured out the mechanisms that make it work. And you're, you know, there's so many pieces. I recently shared with someone who wanted to do a quick pay per click campaign and we talked him out of it because I said there's five things that we have to figure out in order for a pay per click campaign to work. We have to have the audience right, we have to have the messaging right, we have to have the offer right, we have to have the landing page right. You know, there's so many things that are factors that when you're starting for the first time, quick is not what you should be expecting to do. You should be expecting a three month journey, maybe even a six month journey because if you get it wrong a few times, then it's going to be again every time. You're fine tuning the audience now. It takes more time and depending on the budget, it could take longer.

Yeah, makes me think of like startups, it's all about quick, getting things done quick. I've been in that position so many times. So how do you go about communicating failure and these expectations back to the client? Because I think like on the one hand you have to deal with the failure internally and mentally and the team does, but then there's communicating those expectations to clients. How do you go about that?

Yeah, what we do is like, we're very upfront, we're very honest with anybody that we work with. So we kind of have, like, timelines associated with all of the different types of communication platforms and kind of like average time to not only see success, but to maybe expectations for getting your first lead. So that we're kind of setting that up front, which sometimes is hard because you got a lot of people advertising now. It's like, oh, in the first 30 days are going to deliver you 45. And it's like, no, they're not going to. You know, there's a lot of that because it's appealing. And the reason why is that works at getting somebody hooked and in the door, but in reality, they don't actually deliver those. You know, I've even tested and tried some of those myself. Right. To see, like, do they know something that I don't know? Turns out. Turns out. But ultimately, you know, it. It is just about being really honest about being honest and transparent about what those timelines are looking like. So that if you do hit something early on, then it's a gift. Right. It's really a gift. And then you're surprising and delighting a customer versus explaining why something's not working yet. And then it's also about just being really transparent about the data and having the data to back up, like, what we're seeing and what we're doing about that and agreeing to those next steps.

Yeah. So while we're on the topic of failure, I want to get to the point where we talked about, like, what's working right now in 2024. Seem to be 2025 with landing pages.

Yeah. Yeah.

What would you say are some of the biggest landing page failures that you've seen? Because I think there's a lot to learn by what doesn't work and what's not working.

Yeah. So. Well, I think first thing that I will say is, like, if it's B2C, the biggest failure that we see is that it's a product page versus a landing page. And we will. We know through all of the tests that we've run, and we've run simultaneous tests on some pretty large brands that a landing page will always convert better than a product page. So that's one big failure. If you're in the B2B, we see a lot of communicating about the. What this is, what our product does. And you might be really excited about what your product does. It might have lots of features and functionality or your service might have lots of features and, you know, functionality of what you do for somebody, but nobody buys by what or what you do. So we need to convert that into the benefit and the emotion and improving trust on the page. And those three things are usually left out. I go to a ton of startup pages where I'm looking at them and they're like, here's what, here's what our great product does in the market. And I think almost, you know, going after investment in the investment community tunes them to communicating that way. And if they come from a product kind of, you know, more engineering background, I think they're really excited about communicating the, what their product does, but the what just doesn't convert. And those are the biggest things that, you know, I see as challenges. And then, you know, low on testimonials, low on social proof, you know, and those might be lower on the page. Those need to be like right up in people's faces. And so those are some of the things that we constantly see that are just easy things to fix on a page that can help improve conversion.

What's the best type of social proof to use on a landing page?

On a landing page, if you can on the right hand side have an image of a person with a quote that's from them that's talking about the benefits, that's going to help even better if their eyesight is somewhat geared towards the button, it's going to be the best conversion, you know, that you're going to be putting forward the best opportunity for conversion. You know that. And then of course, on the left hand side, what you can really do to describe what the product is going to do, the benefit, the outcome that it is going to drive and who it's for. Because I also go to a lot of pages where I don't know who this audience is for and I don't know how someone would assume that they're in the audience.

Yeah. So what I'm hearing is you're focused a ton on like the foundational stuff, like the bigger things at like social proof Personas and even the page type. Can, can you just talk through the difference between a product page and a landing page?

Yeah. So a product page would be, you know, you're coming to a page, it's got a description, it's got an add to cart there and it's, you know, usually that blocked description and it's really focused on converting to cart. Right. And we, we think that that's going to convert. But a, a landing page does something different. A landing page says here's who this product is for and why you want to use the product. Here's all the benefits of this product. Here's you know, what other people, here's what people are saying about this product, here's how happy people are about it. They're putting all of those elements just like a normal landing page of anything else on a page. And we're converting the emotion and we're making some assumptions about our Persona and what state of mind they might be in when they're coming to this page, where they might be coming from and you know, is it Pinterest? And they were browsing and this is a surprise thing that might be different than, hey, I clicked on an ad and now I'm coming and I have an expectation of this thing. My other pet peeve, even though, you know, bloomreach did do a good job of doing this for people, is, you know, you've got either an ad campaign running or a Pinterest, you know, campaign running and someone clicks on a very specific item and it takes them to a search or a homepage and you are just wasting that click. You're just absolutely wasting that click.

Like a search button, like a website with like a product search in the product search. Interesting.

Great. Yeah. Like why, why would you make, you know, it is about reducing friction in the process and reducing friction as much as you possibly can. And that's why we like landing pages because it gives someone all of the information necessary on one page in order to convert so they don't have to go somewhere else. I think the other mistake that we see an awful lot is like keeping the navigation on those pages and that really just allows somebody to bounce around and start doing research. And then people get into analysis paralysis. They have short term, especially right now, very, very short term, you know, in terms of attention span. So you take them off page and you've, you've lost them, you're losing that sale. You're not converting. They might come back. You might, you know, be able to recharge them, but then you're, you're paying for that time to bring them back and extending your cycle.

On that sale you mentioned right now they have a short attention span. Is that in relation to like the time we're in?

Yes, I think we are seeing that. You know, we really need to make that impact in the hero section more so people aren't scrolling as much. You lose relatively like 80% of your traffic to the rest of the page. And that's consistent over all different kinds of industries, all different kinds of brands. It doesn't make a difference. So if you think about that, like, how impactful does that hero have to be and what punch does it have to pack? The other thing is I see like some brands just really, really going like straight from ad to conversion and expecting a relationship with this person expect. And I think this is a huge mistake. We're kind of like falling into the pit of short attention spanned. But what that's giving us is on the other side, especially for B2B is you're getting higher Churn rate because you're going for the quick conversion. So there's no emotion involved in that. It's like, oh sure, I'll try it out, it's free for this many days or whatever. But it's just as easy for them to turn it off. There's, there's no tie to the, to the brand whatsoever. And we're finding that if we can get them to convert on other types of topics, maybe it's white papers, maybe it's a webinar, maybe it's something like that where they're now a part of your community and they're starting to kind of like buy into what you're talking about. Then they want to identify as being a part of with that brand and it makes the buying process different and you don't get as high of Churn. So brands that are able to do that better in their conversion process and have other things for folks to convert on besides just buying the product, I think can form a better relationship. But back to our earlier point, that takes patience and time. I think just as equally a lot of founders don't have the patience, you know, to develop content. Develop content and get it to rank develop that content into that storyline that is then going to give you by the way, years of conversion traffic. It's kind of like you're building a foundation of a house and if you build it really strong, you're not going to have issues later on. Two years from now you're going to have issues with conversion.

I like how you tie all this stuff to Churn and tie and like show how it impacts the funnel because I truly believe that is the case. And Churn is the worst thing ever. I can't stand it. That's the one thing that stresses me out.

And it's going, and the numbers are going up, they're not going down. And I see it with a numerous amount of the brands that we work with. But if you can get them to identify and want to be a part of your brand because it says something about them, then you've, you've made that relationship jump and then they're, they're not going to just churn really quickly. They might even just have a conversation with you first. And that's, that's where you need them to be.

And on the topic of the hero section, so something that drives me absolutely crazy is I'll do a lot of work on a landing page and this happens. So consistent, right? I'll set a pot jar, I'll go back in and look. And like you said, no one scrolls down. And I've debated back and forth with so many people about what that means and what to do about the content below the fold. How much do you focus on that content? I feel like it has a purpose, especially if someone goes in. I would think they would have more intent if they're reading that. But just kind of curious about your thoughts on that.

Well, what it tells you is it tells you about their personality. So it tells you that they're more of a skeptic. So the folks that scroll down longer on the page are like CFOs, they're COOs, they're folks that want to know the details about everything. Might be lawyer. So there's certain Personas that we realize we'll scroll down more accountants. And so that's where your FAQ sections are really important on a page. And really helping them understand how easy it's going to be or maybe not easy, or what the process is going to look like, what a relationship looks like. Giving them all of those details, if it's a product, all the ingredients that are in that product. You know, these are your skeptics that are like, I want to know every single thing about what's in this product, you know, before I click on it. But that skeptic personality is maybe somebody who maybe has an allergy. Maybe they have certain concerns and you need to address those before they are identifying with your affinity. You know, Liquid IV would be a great, you know, study being of that we tested landing pages versus product pages and their audience primarily really, really wanted to understand all of the different ingredients they wanted to understand, you know, for a new flavor launch. What did that flavor taste like? What are people saying about it? Those types of things before they would convert. We were able to convert like pretty darn certainty once we're giving that skeptic all of those details on a page.

And it's interesting, I'm seeing how you are able to put yourself in the mind of the person on the page, is hearing the way that you're talking about this. So it's really fascinating just to hear you talk about this and connect the dots. You touched on some successes and you also mentioned that, you mentioned Tony Robbins. And I got really into Tony Robbins years ago. One thing that Tony Robbins said that really kind of stuck with me is that the key to success is finding someone or something that works and model through that. So thinking about successful landing pages, I think you touched on this a whole ton. But just to kind of summarize, like, what do you see is the most successful right now in an age where robots are going to be taking control possibly of marching themes like what are you seeing working right now?

Well, by the way, just if I can kind of take. We use AI, but we use very well trained AIs that we personally train. And we still have to have have a conversation, we'll say in order to get it to the right types of things. So what are we feeding into AI that's going to help us build good content? It's going to be highly focused on the Persona and the needs of the Persona and the product details. It is going to be heavily geared towards what customers are saying about the product. So review pages, all of that sort of stuff. And then of course any branding guidelines and like how we talk about a product, all of that sort of stuff. If you go with more of kind of like the generic, you're going to get, you're going to get what everyone else is getting. And most content out there, most landing pages are not converting at high rates. The mass majority will say 80% of what's out there is not converting well. So if you're asking, you know, a chat to kind of like for my industry, give me a great landing page, you're going to get a landing page is probably going to convert maybe at the average 1, 2%, 3% if you're lucky. What we do is convert at maybe three or four times that. Again, there's nuances. It depends on maybe sometimes the Persona in the industry. It also depends on the pricing of the product. Higher pricing means harder to convert. Lower pricing is easy. So like for a really high priced item, you know, we might be getting like a 4.6 or a 5% in what we do for a lower cost product. You know, for instance, for a bank that we served, Our highest was 36% on a landing page. And we had several of them that were in the 16 to 26% range to a point where they were putting all traffic through our pages because they were converting so well. So what does that require? It does require deep understanding of your Persona so that the language that you are going to use. Again, back to that state of mind. Getting in the state of mind. How are you going to really convey to them what they need to hear in order to convert? Having an offer that is appropriate for where they are and who they are as a Persona is key. And then elements on the page that hear a section is super important. I know a lot of people are loving this middle justification. I don't really love it. I don't think it converts as well. I like imagery on the right hand side. Potentially a quote from a customer if we can get it. Some sort of trust pilot, some sort of rating system. You know, very, very close to the call to action button. Color scheme makes a difference. You know, there's some colors that will convert better. I'm a big fan of cranberry. Cranberry converts really well. Interesting. Cranberry is a great color. It's like not red, but it's not pink. It's kind of like this very neutral. Everybody feels good about a cranberry. But yes, there's some audiences, you know, a green or a yellow or you know, white if you're on a darker background could convert really well. We play around with color a lot. We play around with dark background, white background so that we're finding out these different elements. Maybe I should tell you, like we have a four step process that we take pages through. What's that look like? Yeah, our first stage would be these broad strokes. These like, we're. I call it, we're going to throw the kitchen sink at it. We're going to give you everything that we see, converting across everything that we've ever run before. So all of the things that have converted really well, we're going to throw that into our best guess of layout and of course getting our Persona right. So that's kind of like we'll call phase one. Once we kind of settle on phase one, we then move into phase two, which phase two is moving the blocks around. So maybe we've got our hero image. We've got it pretty well. But we're trying to see what goes in position two. That's going to help with conversion. And so we move those blocks around, we're not really changing much on those blocks, we're just moving them around to understand the different positioning of the different sections for that Persona into that kind of like our phase two. And once we kind of nail that and get it right, then we go to phase three, which is once we're in phase three, we only test one element at a Time. So we'll only change a color. Maybe we'll only change the call to action, you know, language. Maybe we'll just change the language on the page. Maybe we'll just change an image. And we're ab testing, splitting traffic, understanding. What are we learning from this? Which one's the winner, which one's the loser? Which one do we now take? And what did we learn from that? And what I find is that a lot of landing page companies start at stage three and then stage four. Once a page goes into stage four for us, we're only changing things that we learn on other pages that we think, oh, if we go back and apply this, we think we can jump the conversion rate on this page. Let's go back and try it on this one. So that would be kind of like you think stage four is like, it's pretty much locked and loaded and performing well at that point. But we've found something new out in another test that we want to go back and apply.

I love that. Do you have a name for the four step process? You just call it the four step process.

It's just four steps. Yes, we now have a slide. Yeah, it needs like a conversion, you know, I don't know, some sort of fancy conversion process. But.

So that actually leads me to a question too. I've seen a lot of people approach it where they'll just send people to like a homepage or in the example that you talked about, to a search bar. Like a page with a search bar just to by data. Do you start with the landing page 100% of the time or do you always. Or do you find yourself sometimes just buying data and sending it to the consumer page?

No, because you don't know. So like, not all conversions are created equal. So just because somebody clicked on an ad and came to the page does not mean that they are conversion worthy. And I think that's the challenge is like you don't know if you are actually going to close. I talked to a lead yesterday and is working with an offshore team and he says, yeah, we're. They started running ads and we're getting conversions right away. We just have to figure out if we can sell those. And I was like, what do you mean? I'm just figuring out if you're not selling them already and you're getting conversions, there's probably something wrong. They're probably not good. They're probably not good. Unless your sales process is like six months or something like that, you're an ERP product or a CRM you know, which is going to take that long if you're a million dollar deal. So, you know, I have this theory just like my theory on SEO which is not all traffic is created equal. So there are some keywords that are going to give you bogus traffic. I think there's also some pay per click ads that will give you bogus traffic. Back to another example of one we have, we have some ads that were getting a lot of attention. They were performing really well, but they weren't converting really well. And they mostly had women in them. And one of the tests that we ran is like, okay, well we get the same conversion if we have a man talking about the same thing and it wasn't the same. We've also run tests for the bank example where we were able to increase clicks but we lowered quality. And so working with the other side, which our agency really, really cares about the outcome, we care about it converting into revenue and being not high churn. Right. And staying with the client for longer term. So we watch all of those things because we can inadvertently change something either about an ad or landing pages that increases the amount of conversions that you get. But it's bogus. It's not anything that's gonna convert. And so when we see that we're increasing calls, but then the sales team is having to go through a bunch in order to get to the actual reel. Now we're, now we're actually impeding success at that organization because now we're making it harder for the sales team to find the deals. So we also play with that in sometimes what can we do to decrease conversion but increase the quality of that. And that might be what you're buying in terms of keywords, but it also might be some of the language that you're using on the landing page.

I love that. I think from my perspective, I would rather have less leads that are higher quality than more leads because it just weights my cloud.

Exactly. And not everybody. And I think that's the other thing is that some agencies are focused on delivering the quantity, not the quality. Right. And I think tying yourself more to like, have we gotten the mechanics right from a quality perspective that we're actually helping the business move forward. I think that's why we work well with startups, because we're able to do rapid experimentation and change things. Not necessarily having to use super high budgets to do those tests, but to figure out the sales and the successes relatively, you know, within a reasonable amount of time so that we can prove to future investors or current Investors, if you're going to put this budget towards it, this is what it's going to produce. And this is like what we figured out is like maybe the best that we can do for now until we step it up to like another stage.

So I wanted to touch on Personas, but you just said something that I've been thinking about a ton. Think a lot of people are probably thinking about this. It deals with, you just mentioned low budgets. So let's say someone's watching this and they don't have a ton of traffic and they don't have a big budget. How do you think about a B testing and just testing and conversion optimization in general, especially if you can't get to statistical significance?

Yep. So we've, we've run into that scenario a bunch and that's where like our kitchen sync approach works really well. Because we're not using the assumptions from their specific audience because we don't have it. We have to use assumptions and basically throw the kitchen sink at what the best of what we can do. And then we watch, we, we watch very carefully. Kind of like what we're doing. If it's a low budget from an ad perspective, we're really careful on those. And we usually try to test messaging. My recommendation is you can test with a limited budget, let's say a thousand dollars, ten different types of language and see what people click on. Which means you now know how your Persona likes you to talk about this. Which gives you then an indicator of how you might want to position it on a landing page. So you know, with a relatively, you could do that over two weeks with a thousand dollars, test different messaging, see what folks attract, are attracted to. That is like a limited test that can help you then take it to the next stage of testing which then would be like, you know, maybe making some changes to the language on your landing page or the offer, things like that. Because you're right, you're not going to get enough traffic that's going to pull into statistical validation. So you know, it might take you six months or a year with something like that. The other thing that we would then look like is like can we generate it from some other sort of low cost way or do we go with like an account based marketing strategy, for instance, where we're going after a very specific group of customers where we can, you know, use LinkedIn to potentially connect or you know, maybe some other, maybe it's Facebook, depending on the audience, whatever it might be, that that is where their Persona is. That's kind of like more of a direct message type of campaign where we're trying to get at these or maybe we're trying to get introductions. We look for low cost strategies to figuring out the Persona that's going to give us the indicators of then what we could do on a more massive scale.

I love it makes sense. And you just said pursuing it. Targets come up like seven times. We know they're huge and a big part of the process. How do you actually dig in and understand a Persona, especially in an industry where you might seem new to or in like a segment where you just don't know a lot about your pursuit. Like what does that process look like?

Yeah, we go through a Persona like discovery mapping process and there's six levers that we look at which is also like I think different. So yes, like the audience, like what are their likes, their priorities, their dreams, like all of that stuff. And then feature set. What does the product service do that matches, you know, how does it work and the what's, what's new or different about it than maybe their competitors. And I find most people do audience, they do the feature section, they'll do aim. Like what do we want to achieve with this messaging? So where we're different, we take it to another level is then we focus on the benefits. Like how do these specific features benefit that audience in particular? And it might be different for different Personas because they might have different levers. You know, somebody who's appealing to a mom, it's going to be different than how they would appeal to a dad. The benefits would be different that you would be highlighting to either one of those. And then we look at the strategy which is like how are we going to use and message each one of these separate benefits and which one can we rank them in some sort of order in terms of hierarchy and then how do we bring that into the messaging to make sure that that's really front center. And then the last piece would be the emotion piece, my best example of emotion. So accounting manufacturer, they had never done a head to head comparison against their competitor before. And we encouraged them to do instead of a general landing page for all competitors, we said let's go head to head with your top competitor. And in doing so we really got into the Persona of the person which we already knew because we were already doing other landing pages that worked really well. But here we really focused on well, why is someone searching an alternative to this particular product? And through our research we found that it was likely because of a support incident and a support incident that probably didn't end very well because that was like the highest complaints about this product. And so we just kind of figured, well that's why they're then turning right away and give me alternatives to this. So you think about the state of mind that somebody in who's frustrated, who's angry, who has low trust. So what did we do on that page? The first thing is you got is a testimonial about how great their support is. The next section was here's how easy it is to convert from this product to this product. Here's the raving fans that are talking about how much they enjoy the support of this product. And then here's the feature set comparison. And here's how you're going to get started. 14.67% conversion rate off of like a previous 3 off their general. So it just tells you like really diving into like, well then why, why were they typing that in? And then of course the ad was popping and then we're taking them and you know, I find a lot of times that people aren't buying competitor words or they aren't buying like alternative. To me, it's a huge opportunity to do a head to head comparison. If you're confident about your head to head comparison and to use your testimonials, especially if you've converted somebody from that brand to really do a great landing page that can convert that traffic.

Yeah. It makes me think back to when I was competing against SemGrid at a previous company. I was buying traffic. I even started to buy sendgrid login and I would go in with many pages like that and we would convert traffic at like that rate.

Yeah.

What are your thoughts on competitor pages? If you are the category leader, do you think it's still worth doing that and like creating them for your lesser competitors?

I do, I do. Even if you're a category leader, I think you know what you're trying to do is you're trying to become the authority and what the industry is putting out. And so you should have head to head comparisons. Even if it's blog articles, you should have head to head comparisons. Plus it's really great from an SEO perspective. It's great SEO content, which is why I also like it. So it's like a triple purpose kind of page, especially if you're adding like an FAQ down to the bottom, which works great from an SEO perspective. And so you're giving not only a great landing page, but great SEO page. Um, works for you all around.

You're inspiring me to launch some competitor campaigns. Gonna have to do that when I relaunch all my paid search.

For sure. For sure. It is, it is definitely. It's an easy way. In fact, with one brand that we're launching for the first time running pay per click ads, that's where we're going first because it's low hanging fruit that we know that we can grab. And also, you know, when you're doing your SEO analysis, you can kind of see which ones of those are the cheapest of the of the words and also which are the easiest from an SEO perspective to grab. So it gives you kind of like a green field to kind of go and pick off the ones that are going to be a little bit easier versus the ones that are harder.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Do you have any thoughts or opinions on branded campaigns?

Meaning like your own brand? Yeah, like your own CRM. Do you know which is going to take that long if you're a million dollar deal? So, you know, I have this theory, just like my theory on SEO which is not all traffic is created equal. So there are some keywords that are going to give you bogus traffic. I think there's also some pay per click ads that will give you bogus traffic. Back to another example of one we have, we have some ads that were getting a lot of attention. They were performing really well, but they weren't converting really well and they mostly had women in them. And one of the tests that we ran is like, okay, well we get the same conversion. If we have a man talking about the same thing and it wasn't the same. We've also run tests for the bank example where we were able to increase clicks but we lowered quality. And so working with the other side, which our agency really, really cares, I think there's also some pay per click ads that will give you bogus traffic. Back to another example about the outcome. We care about it converting into revenue and being not high churn. Right. And staying with the client for longer term. So we watch all of those things because we can inadvertently change something either about an ad or landing pages that increases the amount of conversions that you get. But it's bogus. It's not anything that's going to convert. And so when we see that we're increasing calls, but then the sales team is having to go through a bunch in order to get to the actual reel. Now we're, now we're actually impeding success at that organization because now we're making it harder for the sales team to find the deals. So we also play with that in sometimes. What can we do to decrease conversion but increase the quality of that? And that might be what you're buying in terms of keywords, but it also might be some of the language that you're using on the landing page.

I love that. I think from my perspective, I would rather have less leads that are higher quality than more leads because it just weights my cloud.

Exactly. And not everybody. And I think that's the other thing is that some agencies are focused on delivering the quantity, not the quality. Right. And I think tying yourself more to like, have we gotten the mechanics right from a quality perspective that we're actually helping the business move forward. I think that's why we work well with startups, because we're able to do rapid experimentation and change things. Not necessarily having to use super high budgets to do those tests, but to figure out the sales and the successes relatively, you know, within a reasonable amount of time so that we can prove to future investors or current investors, if you're going to put this budget towards it, this is what it's going to produce. And this is like what we figured out is like, maybe the best that we can do for now until we step it up to like another stage.

So I wanted to touch on Personas, but you just said something that I've been thinking about a ton. I think a lot of people are probably thinking about this. It deals with. You just mentioned low budgets. So let's say someone's watching this and they don't have a ton of traffic and they don't have a big budget. How do you think about a B testing and just testing and conversion optimization in general?

Yeah.

Especially if you can't get to statistical significance.

Yep. So we've, we've run into that scenario a bunch. And that's where like, our kitchen sync approach works really well because we're not using the assumptions from their specific audience because we don't have it. We have to use assumptions and basically throw the kitchen sink at the best of what we can do. And then we watch. We watch very carefully. Kind of like what we're doing. If it's a low budget from an ad perspective, we're really careful on those. And we usually try to test messaging. My recommendation is you can test with a limited budget, let's say $1,000, 10 different things, types of language, and see what people click on. Which means you now know how your Persona likes you to talk about this, which gives you then an indicator of how you Might want to position it on a landing page. So you know, with a relatively. You could do that over two weeks with a thousand dollars test, different messaging, see what folks attract, are attracted to. That is like a limited test that can help you then take it to the next stage of testing which then would be like, you know, maybe making some changes to the language on your landing page or the offer, things like that. Because you're right, you're not going to get enough traffic that's going to pull into statistical validation. So you know, it might take you six months or a year with something like that. The other thing that we would then look like is like can we generate it from some other sort of low cost, you know, way or do we go with like an account based marketing strategy, for instance, where we're going after a very specific group of customers where we can use LinkedIn to potentially connect or maybe some other, maybe it's Facebook depending on the audience, whatever it might be, that is where their Persona is. That's more of a direct message type of campaign where we're trying to get at these or maybe we're trying to get introductions. We look for low cost strategies to figuring out the Persona that's going to give us the indicators of then what we could do on a more massive scale.

I love it. Makes sense. And you just said Persona. This term has come up like seven times. We know they're huge and a big part of the process. How do you actually dig in and understand a Persona? Especially in an industry where you might seem new to or in like a segment where you just don't know a lot about your Persona. Like what does that process look like?

Yeah, we go through a Persona like discovery mapping process and there's six levers that we look at which is also like I think different. So yes, like the audience, like what are their likes, their priorities, their dreams, like all of that stuff. And then feature set, what does the product service do that matches, you know, how does it work and the what's what's new or different about it than maybe their competitors. And I find most people do audience, they do the feature section, they'll do aim like what do we want to achieve with this messaging? So where we're different, we take it to another level is then we focus on the benefits. Like how did these specific features benefit that audience in particular? And it might be different for different Personas because they might have different lovers, you know, somebody who's appealing to a mom. It's going to be different than how they would appeal to a dad, the benefits would be different that you would be highlighting to either one of those. And then we look at the strategy which is like how are we going to use and message each one of these separate benefits and which one can we rank them in some sort of order in terms of hierarchy? And then how do we bring that into the messaging to make sure that that's really front and center. And then the last piece would be the emotion piece. My best example of emotion. So accounting manufacturer, they had never done a head to head comparison against their competitor before. And we encouraged them to do instead of a general landing page for all competitors, we said let's go head to head with your top competitor. And in doing so we really got into the Persona of the person which we already knew because we were already doing other landing pages that worked really well. But here we really focused on well, why is someone searching an alternative to this particular product? And through our research we found that it was likely because of a support incident and a support incident that probably didn't end very well because that was like the highest complaints about this product. And so we just kind of figured, well that's why they're then turning right away and getting give me alternatives to this. So you think about the state of mind that somebody in who's frustrated, who's angry, who has low trust. So what did we do on that page? The first thing is you got is a testimonial about how great their support is. The next section was here's how easy it is to convert from this product to this product. Here's the raving fans that are talking about how much they enjoy the support of this product. And then here's the feature set comparison and here's how you're going to get started. 14.67% conversion rate off of like a previous 3 off their general. So it just tells you like really diving into like well then why, why were they typing that in? And then of course the ad was popping and then we're, we're taking them. And you know, I find a lot of times that people aren't buying competitor words or they aren't buying like alternative to zigbee. It's a huge opportunity to do a head to head comparison. If you're confident about your head to head comparison and to use your testimonials, especially if you've converted somebody from that brand to really do a great landing page that can convert that traffic.

Yeah, it makes me think back to when I was competing against Sendgrid at a Previous company, I was having traffic. I even started to buy sendgrid login and I would go in with many pages like that and we would convert traffic at like that rate.

Yeah.

What are your thoughts on competitor pages? If you are the category leader, do you think it's still worth doing that and like creating them for your lesser competitors?

I do, I do. Even if you're a category leader, I think you know what you're trying to do is you're trying to become the authority in what the industry is putting out. And so you should have head to head comparisons. Even if it's blog articles, you should have head to head comparisons. Plus it's really great from an SEO perspective. It's great SEO content, which is why I also like it. So it's like a triple purpose kind of page, especially if you're adding like an FAQ down to the bottom, which works great from an SEO perspective. And so you're giving not only a great landing page, but great SEO page works for you all around.

You're inspiring me to launch some competitor campaigns. Going to have to do that when I relaunch all my paid search.

For sure, for sure. It is definitely it's an easy way. In fact, with one brand that we're launching for the first time running pay per click ads, that's where we're going first because it's low hanging fruit that we know that we can grab. And also, you know, when you're doing your SEO analysis, you can kind of see which ones of those are the cheapest of the, of the words and also which are the easiest from an SEO perspective to grab. So it gives you kind of like a green field to kind of go and pick off the ones that are going to be a little bit easier versus the ones that are harder.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Do you have any thoughts or opinions on branded campaigns?

Meaning like your own brand?

Yeah, like your own brand. That debate comes at every company I've been at.

Well, if you have the best SEO. When I was at Blythego, I worked with one of the best, probably SEO, and he's retired now. I wish he wasn't. I'd love to pull him out of retirement. One of the best, best SEO. Gary Dahl, if you're listening to this out there, I give you props all the time because if you're confident that you're going to show up in every single search term, which is what we were then we didn't need to do any, we didn't need to do any Branded. You know, we're getting 50 to 100,000, you know, searches a month on our name where we're showing up every single time. It didn't make a difference. Plus, we had so much content and other categories. We were whipping out content like crazy and really had probably a fabulous backlink strategy, which is what Gary's Secret Sauce was. And so, you know, there's nuances to those things, and you have to have someone who really knows what they're doing. I think in that space, it's a specialty. So if you don't have to. Now, if you aren't showing up because your SEO isn't working and people are buying your keyword, then, yeah, you have to. So I think it's situational. You know, it also depends on how expensive it is. I see, you know, large brands doing it all the time regardless, and I don't know that that's the best management of spend for them. It's better to try and show up organically and just own that keyword like crazy. But it depends on how. How the category is that you're in and how competitive it is.

Speaking of people bidding on your brand name, I tend to take a different approach. Once where I contacted the competitor and I said, hey, please don't do this, I wasn't so nice about it. I think it backfired and they started bidding more on my brand name. So it makes sense to protect your own position when they're doing that.

I think you got to watch it. You know, you put it on a watch list to make sure you kind of are aware of who might be buying those keywords.

Yeah, definitely.

Your competitor could also do it to drive your price up.

Yeah, yeah, I've seen that happen. The stuff's landing page is a talent, obviously, because that's the person when it comes to building landing pages. What do you recommend? I'm sure that you're building tons and tons of landing pages at Conversion Strategy Group. Would you recommend landing page builders or doing it all by hand coded?

What landing page builders give you is speed to do a lot ease in terms of splitting, traffic reporting, usually heat mapping, kind of like all included in those tools. So those are kind of like the benefits of going with them. We find when you're, like, hand coding, especially if you're in something like Shopify and you're a brand with the templates, we just have learned that depending on how your site was set up, there might be booby traps, and those might make it complicated to do that sort of work, which Means like every time you're in there and touching something, you have risk of breaking something else. And then you might have to like do regression testing on the entire site. Especially if you had the ecom in there to make sure that you haven't ruined any codes or, you know, stuff like that. So with E Comm I definitely think, you know, landing pages are a lot easier. Or landing page builder, we work with a lot of the different tools. You know, we've been a partner of instapage. We like Unbounced. Unbounce seems to be a little bit more reasonably priced right now than instapage so but maybe less features. But if you're a small brand that needs something that's that works really well, that's where we have a lot of our startups on Unbounce, HubSpot, you can do landing pages obviously on HubSpot Ltd. In terms of layout there, so there is some limited functionality but you get all of the same A B testing. So if you're using HubSpot you could certainly use their landing page builder. And if that's included in, you know.

What you have, a lot of people are doing their own CRO or they might be looking for help. What should someone look for when they're looking to work with someone like you or another contractor? I don't think there's a lot of great information out there about what to look for.

Yeah, I mean, I think the important things are, well, do they have a history in conversion? Can they show you some case studies? Sometimes that's difficult because in our industry, like not a lot of people want their data shared. So, you know, anecdotally we'll share some, you know, brand non branded information, especially with those that, you know, want that protected. But if we can tell, we will. So I think sometimes that's a difficulty. But do they have stories that they can share? You know, do you feel that you're confident? The other thing is like, do you feel like you can have a good conversation with that person? Like what if it was a difficult conversation? Would you feel nervous kind of approaching that person with like, hey, I don't think this is going so well. How do we, how do we fix it? Those are kind of like some of the softer things I think then it's about like, okay, well what's their tool set? What does their team, you know, look like? How quickly are they able to turn around things for you? Do you need things quickly turned around? Are you okay with maybe, you know, a more laid back approach and they'll fit you in with their other clients. You know, what's the team going to be like that's going to be assembled and working for you and what's your access to that team? Or do you just have an account manager? Or are you going to be able to have a conversation with the CRO who's going to tell you the why behind certain things? I think those, those things are all, like, important, but in an agency in general, like working with any agency, you know, I do think it is. There's some element of compatibility. There is an element of like, do you agree with their strategy that they're kind of putting forth and they should talk to you about the strategy in advance. Then does it fit within your, within your budget, or can you make something work? You know, we do an advisory option for smaller brands, for instance, that maybe want to do the work themselves, but they want advice from us. And so we'll just advise them and then like, hey, you take the work on, but we'll have meetings with you while we're talking about strategy. We're looking at the data together and we'll tell you where we would go next. So, you know, do they have options that fit in every single kind of like a budget realm? Um, and will they work with a blended team or are they like, no, you gotta use our entire team. And if you don't, then, you know, that's it. So I think it just depends on what exactly you're looking for, what the results are that you're looking for. Um, but also approach it with like an open mind. Like, it's really hard when you go to an agency and you're like, hey, month one, what. What can you deliver in terms of results? You're basically gonna get a lie. Because it's really, really tough to say like, month one, unless you've been running ads and landing pages before and you have a history. I can then confidently come in and say, like, in two or three turns, we'll have you at 3x usually. But that's if you've got a machine and I can look at your data. If you're going from barely anything with no statistical validation, then know that we're going to have to, we're gonna have to build that story, that data story that's gonna tell us what's gonna convert.

Yes. I think you just gave a lot of really good tips and also some red flags to kind of pay attention to when you're going to work with somebody. That's awesome. Last question. I'd like to end with a hot take on land just to use imagery of people.

People want to buy from people, even.

If it's staff food.

Yes, you can pay someone to Dr. Uppa, you know, a stock photo to make it look not so stocky and to integrate it in better. But yeah, product photos don't convert as much, but a person wearing a product does, you know, or a person using a product does. So people want to buy from people that look like them.

So in SaaS, a person using a product, like sitting at a computer using.

It, or just an image of a person that looks like your top demographic for that page. It'll convert better to all of our tests. Product photos versus human photos. Human converts better every time. I'll say. I won't say every time. I'll say 99.5% of the time.

I love it. Thank you very much. This was a great conversation. I learned a lot. I have so many notes. I appreciate.

Awesome. This was a wonderful enjoy, you know, working with you and your product and, you know, really appreciate the time and opportunity.