I woke up this morning thinking about In-N-Out Burger and how its menu reflects a key piece of what defines good marketing. It’s simple…one thing. One thing, one focus, one piece of information. If you eat at In-N-Out you know what you are getting. Burger and Fries. Simple, straightforward, a single focus. Your only decision is if you want a single or a double, and if cheese and grilled onions should be involved! While most restaurants go for the broad offering and add new menu items regularly, In-N-Out has chosen a simple, single focus. That might be the single most difficult thing to do in marketing, maybe in communication overall.
The Best Landing Pages – Less is More
The best landing pages are designed to answer the question that your potential customer is asking when it comes to your industry. Yet many of us struggle with the plague of wanting to give more than is being asked for and in doing that, we distract the person from the original question and actually shoot ourselves in the foot.
What do I mean by this?
Let’s take basic conversation. Try to remember a time when you asked your spouse or significant other a question, and the response you got did such a dance around the topic that by the time they stopped talking, you forgot what your question was altogether. Do you have one in mind? Do you remember the frustration as you came to realize that your question was not actually addressed? This type of interaction happens every day in our regular lives, and our internet marketing suffers from the same problem. I know you have been on the receiving end of this experience and have also been guilty of providing such a frustration to someone else!
What it Takes to Be Helpful
It requires focus and dedication to listen to a question and to answer just that question without elaborating ad-nauseam. It takes focus and dedication to be a helpful partner or spouse; and focus and dedication to be a helpful marketer, not a self-serving one. In Chris Brogan’s newsletter over the weekend he said this: “if we intend to be helpful, it has to help the other person more than it helps ourselves.”
That sounds basic, but I think that this rule is broken more than it is kept in the world of marketing. If we are going to grow our online reputation and move people through the sales funnel towards becoming a customer, we have to establish trust and value. The best landing pages work hard to be a streamlined source of ONE THING…the answer to the question that got the person to the page to begin with. This type of design/content focus means that our single focus truly is to be helpful to those who are visiting our sites.
Just Answer the Question
The best landing pages start with trying to answer a question that a human being is asking. Find out what your potential customers need and then develop resources that answer those questions. Then and only then should you design a landing page that restricts the content to answering just that one question. If you follow these steps then you will have a website that leads to the best landing pages and your potential customers will trust you and come back again and again for the advice and information you offer. Enough of those and you will see your leads turn into customers.
Today I am making a concerted effort to listen and to be committed to helping others more than helping myself. Want to join me?
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