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I've been a senior product marketer at Heroku and Realm (AKA the person responsible for leading the creation of product landing pages), and I gotta counsel y'al
by andkon 9y ago
I've been a senior product marketer at Heroku and Realm (AKA the person responsible for leading the creation of product landing pages), and I gotta counsel y'all: when you're looking at landing pages, what makes them great has a lot less to do with the visual design, and a lot more to do with the story and message they tell.
They're fundamentally narrative media: a landing page proceeds serially from top to bottom. What you see first matters most; like every good story, it also needs to give you a reason to proceed down the page.
It's great when they converge — where the visual design, structure of the page and the copy itself all come together in a beautiful statement of the brand's values and the product's value propositions. But none of that can happen without a story that resonates powerfully with the people who it should matter to. On a cursory examination of landing pages, it's easy to forget that they're speaking directly to a specific group, and miss the real magic simply because you aren't in that group.
edit: apparently HN disagrees
- newman8r 9y agoWhat are your thoughts about showing pricing on the landing page?
- dbg31415 9y agoBe upfront with your price. Price is a data point a customer needs to make the decision. Give them all data points you can.
- a13n 9y agoIt's not that simple. Some businesses would lose a fortune if they started pricing this way. Particularly if you sell to enterprises. Many companies will make more money by sizing them up and giving them an optimal custom price.
- Angostura 9y agoAs long as your explicitly factor in the number of sales being lost in the calculation
- mrhappyunhappy 9y agoBad advice. While this works in some cases, you’d lose a lot of money on some products because the would be customer has not realized the full value of your product. A product generating 500% roi may mean $100 to one business and 1 million to another - should they pay the same price?
- andkon 9y agoI feel like most of the time, pricing decisions involve a lot of information and it feels like a digression to have it all on one page. For simple apps and pricing structures, it's doable — my Rdio-to-Spotify app was $5, and said so up front – but the point of the landing page is to help someone decide if you're useful to them or not. Get them to the "yes, if" stage before showing them pricing, imo.
- notahacker 9y agoDepends on what you're selling, how complicated the pricing structure is and whether price is likely to be a major factor in people saying "yes" to your product. And above all whether the goal is to get people to click the "buy" button, to get people trying the service to see how much they might need it or to get people to contact your enterprise sales team
- 2474 9y agoLike andkon said, convince me that your product is something I need or compel me to need it. I might hit your landing page with little to no prior information. If I can't be convinced your product is worth my time, does price even matter at that point?
- pryelluw 9y agoSpot on. The highest converting landing page I have ever done was downright ugly. However, it made thousands of dollars with just a headline, a paragraph, and a buy now button. People often confuse visually pleasing with financially pleasing.
- moeamaya 9y agoPartially agree. Willing to put a bet down you could 3x traffic/conversion with design improvement.
- pryelluw 9y agoCould you provide some concrete examples? I see you work at a marketing agency in SF. That probably means you could have some good ones to share. Like a/b comparisons of pages that saw such improvements. Not sarcasm or passive agreesivesness. I'm genuinely interested in the data from someone in an agency.
- moeamaya 9y agoNo aggression perceived. The best client example is Groove (https://www.groovehq.com/ https://www.groovehq.com/). In 2014 they hired us to take the existing site (https://web.archive.org/web/20141223145657/https://www.groovehq.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20141223145657/https://www.groov...) and make it attractive to serious customers who can "trust" their company based on the site. Went from 1M ARR to 5M in 18 months. A more concrete personal example is when we ranked "HTML Color Codes" with essentially zero feature improvements beyond nice UI/UX. Now ranked #1 in Google for several queries...making $5k/mo passively. More detailed write up on Indie Hackers (https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/growing-to-1-300-mo-by-finding-solid-distribution-channels-85c0ec6141 https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/growing-to-1-300-mo-b...).
- dorgo 9y agocan you elaborate on colors (Groove)? Why does the landing page has orange, green + two shades of blue? Blue is in their logo, but red is missing. Instead there are orange and green. I have little to no experience in visual design. But intuitivelly I would expect fewer colors and better adjusted to match brand colors.
- Ilikeruby 9y agoWait.. Heroku has a Landing page?
- ommunist 9y agoI marketed premium cottages with sales cycle between half year and a year and a half. Long read approach works well with those. However when you sell courses, headline, short paragraph and large Buy button works well too. It really depends on what are you selling.
- mrhappyunhappy 9y agoJust the other day I threw together a landing page for a whale watch crypto app and posted about it on Facebook. It had a conversation rate of 70%, an oddity I’ve never before accomplished. Point being, it’s all about relevance to a very very specific audience.
- zenmaster408 9y agoI agree that the messaging and story are the most important components. But you still need to have a clean and elegant design to get people to consume the story and message. You can make the content more digestible by making use of white spaces, having adequate line height and line width, including appropriate imageries and graphics, and using lots of bullets. If the page is too ugly or too overwhelming with texts, more readers will bounce.