Warning: to not use landing pages is costing you money. Unquestionably.
Why use landing pages? 2 main reasons:
- Speed to test headlines / offers / ideas. SwiftCloud can generate landing pages as fast as you can type the headlines. This allows you to more quickly find winning – profitable – campaigns.
- Focus on the outcome (“CTA”, Call To Action), i.e. give up an email and phone to become a lead, or schedule an appointment, or buy a “tripwire offer” low-priced intro-product that starts your indoctrination.
TIP: SwiftCloud’s landing page software is crazy fast, easy to use. It’s very limited on the themes and templates (we’ll add more with time) but it’s an excellent starting place and simpler than competition. It’s also integrated with SwiftCRM, Swift Marketing, etc. – the whole SwiftCloud ecosystem. Start for $1 above.
Reason #1: SPEED
SUMMARY: You need a crazy fast & easy way to setup offer pages as fast as you can type the headlines.
Most people get caught up in execution of ideas. Most small businesses never transcend “founder-itis”, a total dependence on the founder, and their organic book of business primarily based on referrals. These founders cannot scale their business because they never develop a recipe on how to consistently, reliably, scientifically (without guessing) spend money on marketing to grow customers.
In marketing, there are always people selling “magic bullets”. You just need ____ and all your marketing dreams will come true. There’s lots of money to be made selling magic bullets.
All marketing, when you strip away the smoke and mirrors, is 3 core ideas:
- PEOPLE: Delivery of your message to the right eyeballs. People likely to buy from you.
- OFFER: A compelling, irresistible offer anyone from the above group would take action on.
- ACTION: What, precisely do you want them to do? Fill out a form? The more difficult or expensive it is, the greater the trust and motivation is required.
So how does this relate to landing pages?
You need the ability to do a Minimum Viable Offer as fast as possible. A regular webpage usually won’t cut it, because you’ll speed too much time in the weeds working with your web team, or wading through HTML code, even if you’re using WordPress.
There are other competing systems on the market, all of which are much more expensive, many pay out huge affiliate commissions so people will push them hard. Ours is focused on speed and simplicity.
You can create landing pages as fast as you can type the headlines.
This then enables A/B Split testing – a critical tool to find out what performs better. Most campaigns won’t be profitable out of the gate, and this is where most small businesses get stuck.
They throw some money at some marketing idea. It doesn’t work very well, the small business owner gets burned. He / she cancels the idea, feels like it was a waste, and is more budget conscious the next time someone pitches a marketing idea.
They then are so budget-limited next time around, since nothing has ever actually made them any money, they seek low-priced magic bullets. Naturally, the web is full of people ready to take your money.
The magic bullets don’t work, and the cycle continues.
Solution: Focus on the above basics: Compelling offer, delivered to the right people, with a simple and easy “ask”.
And that is why you need landing pages. It has to be super easy, fast, cheap to test offer ideas. Test 20 of them. We won’t mind, you can test 200 of them. Kill the duds quickly. Double down on winners.
Reason #2: FOCUS
This focus refers to the design of a landing page, which is carefully tuned to funnel people through the action you desire – filling out a form to become a sales lead, scheduling a consultation, buying a “tripwire offer” low-priced intro-to-your-world product (often a book, if you’re an info-marketer).
Notice there’s no navigation, no external links to “bleed off traffic”. Usually, the only action a person can take on a landing page is the one you want, or leave.
This is useful for testing, and maximizes the odds. People are busy, have short attention spans, and will sit through 2 minutes of video a lot more readily than they will read and focus on 2 minutes of sales copy.
For that reason, we default to and most recommend video landing pages. Video is passive, information dense, can sell for you 24/7/365, can help referrals i.e. it’s easier for a husband to send a video to a wife rather than re-explain and re-sell an idea, and lets you spend more time closing sales and less time on basic intro questions. Video can also carry tone and meta-info better than text.
The focus of a landing page is on the headline, subheadline, a bit of trust-building additional text that some people will skip or skim, and the action. That’s it.
All landing page generators have this, including ours.
TIP: Videos ideally should be hosted off YouTube unless you want the social network benefits of the community. SwiftCloud has it’s own video hosting.
YouTube will target viewers with competitor’s videos in most cases i.e. via the “recommended videos” at the end + their sessions + ad targeting. YouTube is powerful and a great marketing platform, but for landing pages may not be ideal.
And now to you: Try it. Test some offers. Take a risk-free 14 day test drive of SwiftCloud.