“Homepages are nightmares!” Jo Wiebe of Copyhackers warned me. Her 10X training soundbite chewed on me. My mental shredder loaded any future web copy sales plans, as I no longer felt ready to pitch. I searched for a way to salvage my strategy.
Say, it ain’t so, Jo. How am I going to make a living off your ‘nightmare’? After all, every website has one. Yet there’s a difference between home pages and landing pages. And as I went through the training, homepages became mirages, elusive pearls beyond my memory bank balance to grasp.
Secrets waited in these page differences.
Landing Pages vs. Home Pages
The words themselves raise questions of confusion levels in marketing students’ minds. Don’t you land of both landing and home pages? It seemed crazy to think of them as different. Why was Jo so freaked out? Definitions. I needed definitions.
What is a landing page?
Landing pages are audience-specific webpages you are sent to by clicking a link. They include thank you pages, links in emails, Facebook ad links, for a limited time sales pages, this list goes on and on.
Ok. I know it’s still a bit fuzzy. But let it sink in. Let’s move on.
What is a home page?
Home pages are on a company’s multi-page website. But they are not specific to a certain audience. Instead, they are written to everyone who visits your site. They seem to be leaning toward the definition of an About page really fast. Jo finally confessed that’s why they are so hard to write.
You would think that having the opportunity to speak to all different kinds of people about your product or service would be desirable. Turns out, the opposite is true.
Homepages are written to tell every type of customer you could have what they need and what you sell before they even know what your business is or your brand.
Need for New Images
When designed and executed as they are intended these analogies show the difference.
Home pages are web traffic airports.
Think of landing strips, runways, air traffic controllers.
Small planes.
Big planes.
Planes from Brazil.
Planes from New Jersey.
Hot, shiny, silver airplanes falling from the sky. Matchbox-sized machines parked on a taupe cement carpet. All of them come from as many directions as the wind of the net blows them. Jumbo jets are most common. They are ready to refuel, reroute, and redirect toward their targeted destinations.
Landing pages I thought of at first like hangars. Yet on second thought, these hangars are more like hotels. The landing page caters to the burning desire or need of their one intended audience.
Landing pages are hotels.
Landing pages are soaked with poolside ideal situations. And they capture the raw, picturesque view of unmasking pesky problems and suggesting solutions.
Landing pages help guests who share interests, anxieties, and motivations move forward in their pursuit. If you can zoom in on this predictable behavior that brings various groups of people together in these areas, you’ve unlocked the mystery of personas.
The Unlocked Mystery of Personas
Spend hours on creating your ideal customers if you want. But if you can predict the behavior of a select group when on your website, there’s no need for that exercise.
Think of the time saved. No energy soaked into naming Judy the Spotify user, with her 2.5 kids, black coffee obsession, loft apartment fixation, and visualizing her 2019 harvest gold Chevy Tahoe.
The things Jo was telling me were slamming hard against what I had been taught since the beginning of this marketing journey almost a year ago.
Sink that energy into watching and listening to them (your target customers) Wiebe advised.
My mind flipped. It emptied out many of my marketing one-liners into my consciousness. My head was a hyperactive, automatic card deck shuffler. I was now questioning everything I had been told about consumer behavior, website copy, and targeting visitors.
Wait?
What?
My marketing crash course was in a four-lane expressway tie-up.
Old Expressways and Accidents
I thought that a homepage’s job was basic. This page brought visitors to my copy and its job was to show each their dream situation. Then, my copy would work each visitor backward to the offer that got them closer to their dreamland outcome.
Now, Wiebe was saying, nope.
Had I’d been taught wrong? I tasted the blood of conflict streaming from her sucker punch to my upper lip. The punch to my marketing belief system had caught me off-guard. Yet I savored her words. Because her ideas had the chance to lead me to a greater freedom. Liberty to conjure new images.
Soon, the analogy appeared again to guide me through my errors in judgment.
Home pages were airports. And I had been treating them like buffet lines. Copyhackers has a training on sales pages. Was I about to see how long I had been in the dark?
Repairable Mistakes
Just look at the mistakes I made below on my own website. It was embarrassing.
This was all before the secrets found in the 10X Landing Pages course.
1.Creating a page to appeal to all (not only my one reader) was a no-no.
There’s only one rule to crafting effective copy for a website or email. It is the one rule. Part of that rule is only addressing your writing to a single reader. Not an audience, just one reader. I saw right away my error. I was writing to businesses, not my one reader. Worse yet I was writing to people in three different sectors of the economy, technology, education, and health.
This was something I could only fix with three landing pages attached to my homepage. I had lots of work to do.
2. There was no voice of a customer in any of my copy. Wiebe had posted an article link to her Twitter account. When I read the post I felt it made a very good point. It argued that writers fall in love with sensual writing especially emotive and visual. This can be a terrible mistake if it doesn’t reflect the likes and dislikes of your one reader.
I had a great visual in my copy of a pace car spinning out of control. But if that image does not echo within it the desires or anxieties of my one reader…that analogy is trash.
3. My homepage ignored the separation of stages in customer’s awareness Today, marketers understand that copy and media coaxes customers into being sold something.
And that something sold isn’t always the product.
Ry Schwartz taught me in 10X Emails that the first thing you sell a prospect is belief. It’s a belief they can become what they picture in their head. Your copy convinces them that this picture is want they want to be.
According to Ry, a landing page is a hidden space where your one reader can have an emotion-based conversation with himself. Every webpage has that potential. Ry explained each is a moment to trigger the conversation that leads to a conversion.
It’s not until the last page of your copy or the last couple paragraphs of a sales page that prospects are most aware at their highest intent ready to press the buy here button.
Marketing experts call each awareness phase a stage. But I like to think of them like a lifecycle. It’s the Hubspot flywheel of engagement. Each turn, each bend of the wheel is charged with fierce amounts of emotion preparing the prospect for conversion.
My copy was too long.
This was because it moved the reader through three stages. It took the reader from problem aware to product aware on one page.
The recommendation is that you market a full stage on a page. And no more. One stage of awareness.
In contrast, my copy took the reader through about three stages of buyer awareness, problem awareness, solution awareness, and product awareness.
Closer Inspection
The best way to see the errors and make note of their fixes is to see them on the site. Here’s what my home page looked like before I unpacked 10X Landing Pages.
Before and After Revisions
Broad Audience Appeal
Attraction of One Reader
Copy that sounds smart
Copy reflects One Reader’s wants
Too Much Copy
Copy that Recognizes One Reader Awareness Stages
Sum Up
I believed that a homepage was a type of landing page. I thought they had to be on every website. That was backward thinking. Instead, landing pages do. Homepages are meant to direct web traffic so they can get to the landing pages that fit their stages of awareness.
If this helped you see the hotel lobby hidden in your website…bravo. Please share it with your crew or tribe. And if you’d like to join me on this marketing journey and get the freebie to create media like a pro with a snazzy cheatsheet of resources too click on the link and join the Top-Shelf You family.
Until next time, bring value, be that Top-Shelf You. https://eternitymarketing.com/blog/the-single-most-important-rule-in-copywriting#:~:text=The%20rule%20of%20one%20is,and%20one%20call%20to%20action