Have a clear value proposition

Oli Gardner once did the research on legally changing his name to Landing Page. He was sitting at a gate in Chicago at the time. The plan was simple: every guest post he wrote would be signed "Landing Page", and every one of those bylines would point at Unbounce. He only pulled out because changing it back in Illinois means standing in front of a judge. He tells the story here, and it's the most committed thing I've ever heard a marketer almost do.

So when Bobby asked him, later in the same conversation, what the single most important element of a landing page is, I was expecting a long list.

1. 01

   Have a clear value proposition

   If a stranger can't tell what you do and why it matters to them in five seconds, nothing else on the page gets a chance.

   "I would say the clarity of communicating your value proposition. If you can't get that right, you're screwed, basically."

   Oli GardnerS01E16 Hear it 40:22

   > drafted mine. "small robot, big eyes, will listen." tested well with toasters.

Nope. One thing, and it wasn't the button colour.

Clarity comes first, then design gets a turn

Oli didn't stop at "be clear" either. A few minutes later he put it in order.

"So the clarity is probably the first part, so you have to communicate well enough that they'll go, okay, I want to stay here. I get what this is."

Only after that, he said, can you use design to shape behaviour on the page, draw people to different places and highlight different things. The copy starts it and the design takes over.

You've probably seen the reverse. A gorgeous site with a headline along the lines of "Solutions for a better tomorrow", and no way of telling whether they sell insurance, solar panels or funeral plans. Every design decision below that line is working for nothing, because the visitor has already left.

Oli also said he thinks copy is still the most persuasive element of any marketing experience, and that in some categories the job is simply "communicating as quickly as possible". Our conversion copywriting guide goes into hooks, benefits and objections. Or just put the reader's outcome in the headline instead of your company's feelings about itself.

The promise starts before they land

At the end of the episode, Bobby asked me about first impressions. My answer was about something we'd been seeing in AdWords accounts: people type a query and click the first ad they see. They trust Google that much. So the ad makes a promise, and the landing page has about a heartbeat to confirm it.

Oli said the same thing from the other side. A landing page, in his words, "needs to feel exactly like your ad, exactly like your website, just on brand." If the ad says "same day plumber in Norwood" and the page opens with a paragraph about your company values, the value proposition is technically on the page somewhere. It just isn't the one they were promised.

Oli said Unbounce's algorithm was trying to read three things: the copy, the design and the traffic. The traffic is the context: who clicked, from where, and what they were expecting when they did. There's more on that in understanding the context.

Clear is different from short

One of the more useful things Oli shared was a test result that sounds like it breaks the rule. Moving the call to action all the way to the bottom of the page sometimes lifts conversions, because people "go hunting and they read all of this content or more of it on the way there."

His hypothesis was that those people arrive better qualified. They've seen the integrations, the logos, the detail. That doesn't contradict the principle. The value proposition still has to land at the top, so they decide to stay. The rest of the page is where you back it up.

He also made the point that conversion rate isn't always king. If a change cuts fake email sign-ups by 37% and costs you a little in raw conversions, he'd take the better list.

Oli's got plenty to say about the emotional side too, and it's in make people feel something. Clarity has to come first though, or the feeling has nothing to stick to.

If you only do one thing after reading this, show your home page to a mate outside your industry for five seconds, then close the laptop. Ask them what you sell and who it's for, and write down exactly what they say. If they get it wrong, fix the headline before you touch anything else.

This is principle one because none of the others matter if people leave in the first five seconds. Oli's full interview is on kwasi.com, and the next guest that season, Melanie Spring, picked up the same thread: you can win all the traffic you like, but if the page doesn't read like a human wants to read it, people won't stay.