Landing Page Academy » Chapter 2: Building a Landing Page » Lesson 2/7
If you've been selling for quite a while, you probably know that there is no such thing as a product for everyone. It may be suitable for most people, but it’s not going to be attractive or buyable enough for every last one of them. Let’s make it clear before we begin:
In order to sell effectively, you need to define the target audience of your ads, as well as the target user of the product (it doesn’t have to be the same person!) or anything else that you sell.
In this lesson, we’re going to break down the matter into the tiniest bits, so you can create the most precise target audience for your products or services. All this to increase effectiveness of your marketing and – in a bit longer run – a significant boost in sales.
Let’s start with the basics.
In short, a target audience is a group of people who you can find on the other end of your marketing communication. Your job is to show your ads, present your landing pages and send your emails only to the people who show potential interest or share the need for your product.
Online marketing gives us powerful tools to focus our efforts on the most promising prospects – it’s so much easier to properly target an ad in Google or Facebook than a TV commercial or an outdoor banner.
The reason for that is simple – with a banner, you can only choose a place to advertise, so it’s a great option for widely-used products, such as food or drinks, cars or for advertising events, like concerts, movie premieres, etc. Online advertising allows you to reach a very specific audience – you can (and you should) target your ads based on demographics, income, interests and so on. This is called an audience segmentation.
Let’s say you want to promote a book. You’ve created a dedicated landing page where people can read the first chapter, see some reviews and order your book. It’s a thriller, filled with mature dialogues, twisted characters and a little bit of bloodshed. It’s obvious, then, that you don’t want to advertise it to children. Also, it’s a book, so the list of potential customers grows thinner every year (better hurry up with your writing).
So you already know that you should target your book to adult readers (these are two separate pieces of information) interested in crime or detective novels. While advertising on Facebook, you can set all these “filters” along with a few others, like age, location or gender – use them to create buyer personas.
A buyer persona is a fictional character that salespeople create to represent a perfect buyer. A persona has to be as detailed as it gets, with name, age, interests, and a little bit of backstory too. Creating buyer personas is essential for the sales process, as it helps create ads while having a specific recipient in mind.
Don’t hesitate to create a few buyer personas for each product you sell. It may be time-consuming at first, but once created, the personas will serve you for a long time and help you create a better experience for future customers.
It’s easy to say “create for your audience”, but if you’re just getting started, you probably have some problems with defining who belongs to your target audience. Here are some tips that might help you out with that:
1. Ask your customers about themselves – find out how old they are, where they live, what they like and how they use your products. How do you ask? Via surveys, of course. You can use Google Forms or some survey tools like Survicate, and distribute the survey via email. Just try not to flood your customers with dozens of questions – keep it short to increase the chance of actually getting some answers.
2. Check on the competition – there’s no harm in signing up to their newsletter or to go through their sales process in order to gather some data for your own advantage. See who’s buying from them and what products or services they offer.
3. Create buyer personas – don’t forget to name them, determine their age, gender, occupation, values they believe in, fears they want to get rid of and needs they want to fulfill.
4. Analyze the data – if you have your own website, a Facebook or Instagram page that people visit, you also have access to invaluable data about the visitors. Use them while creating buyer personas. Also, if you don’t already use Google Analytics, don’t hesitate to try it. It’s a powerful tool, but also suitable for less-knowledgeable users. If you’re eager to learn more, try Google Analytics for Beginners course.
5. Learn more about the market and your industry – with proper market research you just can’t go wrong. It gives you much needed perspective for what customers buy and what else they need. It can also help you choose the direction of your business development.
Building a relevant landing page should be easier with segmented audience and buyer personas. You may ask, though, what about different personas which require at least a slightly different approach? The answer is: landing pages are perfect for such situations! If you plan to target your ads towards various groups, you can personalize not just ads, but also landing pages.
Most landing page builders offer a “duplicate” button, which allows you to clone your newly-built landing page and make it a fully-functional, separate page in a handful of clicks. Connect a few variants of a landing page with a few different ads to create an ultimate landing page experience for your visitors. Make them feel at home with ads and landing pages matched to their interests or demographic information.
Underline benefits that would be the most important for them, include relevant and fitting graphics, write personalized copy, and then duplicate and repeat the process for another persona. Of course, there’s no point in doing this for every persona you’ll ever create, but try to select 2-3 that are the closest to your perfect customer and do whatever it takes to convince them.
Let us know what you think about Landing Page Academy, and we’ll send you a handy Landing Page Checklist in return. The checklist will help you make sure your landing page is ready to rock!
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That's quite a lot of information to process, so before venturing further, take a moment for a quick review of what you've learned during this lesson... and head on to the next one!
1. Find out as much as you can about your customers.
2. Create detailed buyer personas.
3. Write content, create ads and build landing pages for a single customer.
4. Use analytics to check for changes in your buyers preferences.
5. Create various ads and landing pages for different types of customers.
In the next lesson, we'll gather everything you need to start building landing pages. We'll share some advice regarding first steps in any builder to get you up and running (your own landing pages and marketing campaigns) in no time!
