Full show notes for this episode can be found at https://podcast.jakehower.com/episode/using-landing-pages-to-increase-leads-generate-more-sales-with-clay-collins

this is episode 22.

Okay.

Today's guest is someone that I really admire and someone whose software has

had a huge impact on my own businesses.

That person Leadbrite, one third of the team behind.

Lead pages and lead player.

So we're going to discuss how you can utilize landing pages to convert

traffic onto your site, into leads, and to also customers in your own company.

So it's a fantastic little episode, jam packed full of awesome advice

and things for you to go out and implement in your own businesses.

So let's get stuck straight into that now.

How are you Clay?

Jake, I'm great.

Great to be here.

Fantastic.

It's really great to get you on the show.

Now I'm an avid user of a couple of pieces of your software, Leadpages and also

Leadplayer, and I absolutely love them.

But what I'd love to do today is for all of our show listeners,

I'd love to focus in on.

Landing pages and how you use landing pages to move traffic from site visitors

to subscribers, and then onto sales.

How does that sound?

Sounds great.

Fantastic.

So before we do that though, Clay, I think it'd probably be valuable for

our listeners who don't know about you.

If you could just give us a little brief background about who you are and what

you're doing and why you're doing it.

Sure.

I am a co founder of a software company called lead bright.

We create a lead generation platform called lead pages.

It's landing page software for creating, deploying and publishing landing pages.

We're experiencing explosive growth right now, and it's First and foremost

because we're getting results for people.

It's been a lot of fun and I do nothing but eat, breathe,

sleep and talk landing pages.

So it's I'm glad we're talking about landing pages.

Cause that's what I do.

Yeah, definitely.

So one thing that I do in another universe, I own a travel agency.

So day to day, I guess you could say relatively consumed with running a

business and prior to lead pages, landing pages to me was a little bit.

I knew they were important, but they just took too long for me

to actually go out and implement.

So I think one thing that you've done amazingly well is you've made it so

easy that it's almost impossible for me to now not be utilizing landing pages.

Yeah, I, so I think what most people who don't have landing pages

in their business don't realize is that.

Generally in any business, there are, like with the 80 20 rule, there's

20% of the pages on your website that are generating 80% of the revenue.

In fact, in a lot of places it's more it's 98 two, right?

It's 2% of the pages are creating 98% of the revenue.

Especially if you have a sales page or a lead capture page or a

squeeze page or whatever that you're using to build your email list.

And so the important thing that I think people need to grasp with landing

pages is that if it is true that, and it, is in almost every business.

But if it is true that 5% of the pages are creating 95% of the revenue or

some version of that, then wouldn't it behoove you to spend the majority

of your time and effort on those on those pages that are going to

create the return for your business.

And so that's what landing pages are.

They are the pages that do the heavy lifting on your website for your business.

And there's an entire science surrounding how they're created, how they're

measured, and how they produce results.

The difference between button text saying free instant access versus

download now, for example, just.

The takeaway is the difference between button text can often result

in a two X increase or in results.

So little things that you might not even be thinking about are

creating a drastic difference in the performance of your website.

And it's, that's why landing pages are so important.

Yeah.

Okay.

So where would you typically be using these pages or how would you typically

be using them?

So it really has to do with two things.

First and foremost, any page that is creating a sale in your business,

it might be considered a it's definitely a landing page, right?

So you're measuring what's happening on that page.

Any page that has.

has a conversion point where you want someone to take some sort of action

that is going to further your business.

That's a landing page.

So a sales page would be a landing page because the point of conversion,

this in quotes in conversion, the point of conversion would be

that someone buys your product.

If.

You have a an email newsletter and a lot of companies do now because it's

one of the smartest ways to market.

But if you have an email newsletter and you get a lot of customers from that

newsletter, then one point of conversion.

Another point of conversion might be when someone subscribes.

to that email newsletter.

If you, a lot of companies now, at least companies that do B2B

selling use webinars to do B2B sales because they convert so well.

And so that would be another point of conversion.

If you know that for every 100 people that sign up for a webinar, that you're

going to make 15 sales of a, 5, 000 B2B product, then all things being equal.

If you can double the percentage of people that show up on your webinar registration

page who end up registering, then you can double your revenue as a business.

If webinars are the primary way in which you sell.

So anything where you are measuring or where you at least should be measuring

that folks are taking a specific action that furthers your business.

That is, that's a landing page.

Okay.

Fantastic.

So let's look at a few different types of landing pages.

So let's look at it, in some sort of chronological order, given the

fact that most of our audience are looking at generating leads.

And in most cases, they're looking at using content marketing for that.

Let's look at a typical blog post.

How would you incorporate a landing page for lead capture with a typical blog post?

Yeah I think it's really important to know what the function

of every piece of your marketing is.

And so many people, I think, make the mistake of trying to

get every single piece of their marketing to do everything for them.

So for example, I like to use the analogy of a, of an email.

Okay.

The job.

Of an email subject line isn't to get someone to buy your product.

The job of an email subject line is to get someone to open the email.

And the purpose of the email isn't to sell your product either.

The purpose of the email is to get them to click on the link.

And then if they click on that link, and they end up on a sales page, the job

of that sales page is to make the sale.

Every single piece of content doesn't need to be responsible for generating

every single important outcome.

In your business, what I recommend people do is if they have a blog post and they're

looking to add people to their emailing list, it would behoove them to get

people to click on a link to end up on a page where that page does nothing else.

But Try and get someone to opt in.

So you might have some sort of free report or free video

series that you're giving away.

And a lot of people have a sidebar opt in box, and that's going to convert.

Okay.

It's going to convert from one to two, maybe 3%, maybe 4%.

If you're just knocking it out of the park, that's going to get a 5%

conversion rate on your traffic.

But if you can instead get the people from that blog post to click on a link

to end up on a landing page, Where folks opt in for something that you give away,

they can get up to, a 40, 50, 60% opt in rate when they're at a page whose entire

job it is to get someone to opt in.

If you're on a normal, just blog post page, that post, that page

is supposed to do so many things.

It's supposed to make the article readable, it's supposed

to have a navigation bar to send people to different pages.

Parts of the site, it's going to have like maybe links to

archives and comments, right?

It does so many things landing pages have the sort of the sole

focus on points of conversion.

So the job of a landing page, again, isn't to do everything.

A landing page doesn't need to rank for SEO terms necessarily.

You might have a page that all that page is for rankings for a specific keyword.

And then once the traffic arrives on that page for that specific keyword, it might.

Link to a landing page whose entire job it is to get people to opt in.

So a landing page should not be all things for all people and you shouldn't try and

accomplish everything with a blog post.

Yeah, fantastic.

Now, let's look at a couple of things with that now for myself looking at the total

volume of subscribers to my own website the sidebar email address Accounts for the

most number of subscribers, but it doesn't convert to about two or 3%, whereas I

find that when I've got a specific call to action drive through a landing page

on a particular blog post, it converts at a lot higher rate now, essentially, I've

found that the people convert better.

On the landing pages because the content is a lot more relevant.

So with that in mind, let's look at creating that particular

landing page for a blog post.

We don't have to worry about the design of the landing page because

that's something that you guys have taken care of with lead pages.

Let's look at the actual content that goes on that page and the

offer that you need to be making.

How important is it to have a relevant offer to the blog

post that you're writing?

Yeah, It's it's really relevant.

So I think people opt in to different things for different reasons.

A lot of times people will have opt in boxes on the sidebar of their blog that

says, want free updates, subscribe now.

So why?

It's important to understand the psychology behind why

people opt into various things.

So people will often opt in at, 2% conversion rate.

To the sidebar on your blog first and foremost because of who you are not

because they liked a particular article, not because not because you're giving

something away, but because they consider you to be a relevant person who they

need to keep on their radar, right?

It's almost more because of who we are or what that blog represents that we.

Subscribe on the sidebar opt in.

However, if you have a banner on the side where you're giving things away

it absolutely needs to be relevant because the purpose of that page is

to create desire and to get people to opt in generally because they're.

They want something that you have.

So it's less because of who you represent and more about the value proposition.

So for example, on the sidebar of my blog I have a banner that says download eight

free landing page templates designed for the ground up to grow your audience.

And we have a very high.

Conversion rate on that because people want those landing page templates, right?

It's not because, the marketing show is the most significant blog

in the field of marketing or because I'm some huge thought leader.

It's because first and foremost they want those landing page templates.

So it, it differs in that regard.

It is important that There is continuity.

This is very important in any kind of conversion activity that there is

continuity from the very first thing that someone sees all the way to the end.

For example, if you're doing pay per click marketing and you have a a

headline that is about dog beds then you need to have the text of that.

The text of that ad also be about dog beds and then when they arrive at the landing

page, they need to say you want them to opt in, they need to opt in for something

related to dog beds and then what you sell needs to be a freaking dog bed.

It really does.

But so often, people try and do like this bait and switch.

So for example I had a client once who ranked well for the term I, I

believe it was actually dog beds.

And they were trying to sell a product on dog grooming, and the problem was that

traffic didn't convert, it just didn't convert, they had tons of traffic for

the term dog beds, people arriving at the site that had an offer on on dog grooming

and dog training, I And nobody bought it.

And yes, probably close to, half or more of the people arriving at that

site would at some point in their life be interested in dog training,

but that isn't why they were there.

And it, the same goes for landing pages with opt in bribes or, some sort of

bribe to get people to join a list.

If someone's at your site because of X.

And you try and get them to opt in for why it's generally not going to go over.

There needs to be absolute alignment between the content that you have and

the reason why someone is there in the first place and the value proposition

that's set up to create the opt in.

That's

such a good answer.

It's really amazing.

Now let's look at a different type of landing page.

And this is probably my favorite page you have after someone opts

in of some content on your site.

There are a couple of different pages that are, very important.

The first one is the double opt in confirmation where you're asking someone

to go and opt in with their email address so that they can be on their list.

And you can therefore send content to them.

The next one, once they've done that is the thank you page.

This is probably my favorite page because it drives a secondary action.

So can you explain a little bit about why this page is really

important?

Sure.

In any business, it is much easier to grow the business by getting

current customers to pay more.

Then it is to acquire new customers.

In fact, acquiring new customers is the most difficult

thing to do in any business.

So if you already have people who know and trust you, you're going to make far

more money by creating upsells than by now you're going to make far more money

for far less effort by adding upsells than you are by trying to acquire

new customers for the same product.

And the principle is that if someone's already.

taken some sort of action that they're much more likely to

take another similar action.

So if they've already bought something from you, the likelihood they're

going to buy something else from you is really high compared to someone

who just arrived at your site from some banner that you're running.

So it's good to focus your efforts in that way.

And the same goes for Any call to action.

One of the landing pages that is available inside of Leadpages is a thank you page.

And this is the page that people get after they opt in to your website.

And I think it is a huge tragedy.

It's a huge tragedy that someone will be maybe searching for

something on Google, right?

So the trajectory that someone takes to your site is often pretty miraculous.

They're searching for something at random.

They find some phrase.

Some obscure phrase that they search for.

They, you're the third or fourth option on the page.

They click on that.

They go to your website and it's like lucky you that of all the

billions of pages on the internet, they ended up on your page, right?

Lucky you.

And then and then lucky you, they decide to opt in, right?

So they like your stuff enough, of all the content on the internet, they're, they

like your stuff enough that they opted in.

So they found you, they searched on Google, they went

through a bunch of pages.

They ended up on your stuff and they opt in, you're just going to say, Hey, thanks.

Thanks.

Hope you like the stuff we're going to send you at some point in the future.

And that's a huge mistake.

So on the thank you page, it's available in lead pages.

It basically encourages folks that if they opted in on your

list it encourages them to.

Perform other activities to get closer to you so they can subscribe to your

podcast or they can sign up for a news, a webinar, or they can check

out the product that you sell, right?

You're getting them to take a secondary action because yeah.

Someone is much more likely to take a second action.

Maybe they've subscribed to your newsletter, but now you want them to

subscribe to your podcast, or they subscribe to your newsletter, now

you're asking them to subscribe to your webinar, or to like you on Facebook.

Someone is much more likely to do that, right after they've opted into

your list, than at any other point in the life cycle, because they already

have this behavioral inertia going.

And so that's the principle behind the thank you page is, they're in this

behavioral pattern of compliance and doing what you ask them to do and why not

extend that to get them to do something else that furthers your business.

And so that's the point of the thank you page.

Yeah.

And that particular page I installed, that was probably one

of the first pages I installed.

And the minute I did, people start subscribing to my Facebook

page at a much higher rate than what was previous prior to that.

And then I was able to have them download a video training course as well, which,

which enabled me to essentially tag them as being interested in video.

So it's a fantastic way to segment your list further

quickly.

I agree.

And it's important to know which conversion points

should happen before others.

So for example, a lot of times people will get people to their website and

they'll try and make the sale first.

And that's a huge mistake.

It's like, Meeting someone that you want to date and meeting them

for the first time and asking them to like, marry you, right?

Like first you need to get their phone number and then you need to

go on a date and then you need to go on more dates and then you get

engaged and then like it, it evolves.

And it's the same with marketing.

You don't try and like in quotes, close the deal until like maybe you've

gotten their phone number, right?

So you should ask for their email first, because if you send them to a sales page.

And they don't buy and they leave your website, the chances of them coming

back ever are almost non existent.

But if you can get their email address and you can follow up with them

through email over time, the chances of them buying are much, much higher.

And there's almost nothing more important.

There's nothing more important.

I'll just say there's nothing more important when someone arrives at your

website than getting their email address because if you get them to like you on

Facebook, the chances of you reliably being able to reach them are pretty low.

It's hard to contact people who've liked you on Facebook.

You can take out an ad and, but you can't get in their inbox, right?

Or you can get someone to try and sign up for a webinar.

That's another thing people do.

They're like immediately sign up for my webinar.

But the truth is that it's a much lower.

Barrier to get them to sign up for your email list and then once on their,

they're on your email list, then you can ask them to come to your webinar.

But if you ask them to come to your webinar first, they might be like, Hey,

I'm not, I can't be there at this time or I don't want to be on the webinar.

I'm not the kind of person who shows up on webinars, but if you ask them

for something small first, like opting into your email list then

you can contact them about every webinar you ever do in the future.

But if you try and get them to opt into a webinar and they decide

they can't make it, then you can never really contact them again.

It's good to put things on those thank you pages that express a higher level

of commitment, but first start out with a very low level of commitment

and work your way up over time.

And hopefully at the end of that, they end up buying your stuff.

Yeah, that makes so much sense.

And that to me, it's about creating a long term relationship

with your prospective customers.

So basically eliminating working on that relationship first and then

trying to have them convert into customers is a good way to do it.

We've looked at your own blog, or your own site, how you can

go about converting leads.

How do you try to convert traffic from other sources around the web?

So for instance, Facebook, what's your strategy with Facebook?

How do you move them across to your site from Facebook or to your list?

Yeah, I think that a good way is to spend a good Portion

of your time, building community and interactivity, but, once you've

done that, then you want to send them to landing pages, right?

So you want to drive them to landing pages, or at least your own site

where the likelihood of them.

Taking the desired action is much, much higher.

So you can drive them from Facebook or from YouTube or wherever they're

at, drive them to a landing page.

And that might be at some url.

com, right?

It's hard for someone to remember your website.

com board slash blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

But if you send them to get my free ebook.

com or something like that the likely.

That they're going to remember that and go there is much greater.

So the first thing is that, Facebook and YouTube and amazon.

com and, all these places where things, where people are, is it's a

good place to find people, but your first priority is actually to move

them off those properties onto your site where the likelihood that, that.

You'll persuade them into doing what you want them to do is much greater.

It, those are good ways to get traffic, but those are bad places to

keep traffic, so that's my approach to that, and you can do things like

with lead pages, you can publish.

Facebook landing pages, right?

So Facebook will let you create a tab on your Facebook page and lead pages will

allow you to publish a landing page there.

So you can have a newsletter subscription page added to your to

your Facebook profile or whatever.

But honestly, I like driving them off of Facebook onto my own individual site.

Yeah, that makes sense.

So essentially what you're saying is rather than try to have them convert

on a landing page, send them to your site to, continue building the trust.

And from there they can take further action

if need to.

Yeah or send them to a landing page on your site, but get them off of.

Facebook onto a landing page on your site.

Yep,

definitely.

Okay.

All right.

Then let's look at a couple of other things, which I think you're fantastic at.

One thing that I know is just about every single piece of content that you release

seems to have a purpose and it seems to be for essentially it is just every

piece of content is to drive leads and customers for your different products.

How do you go about creating this

content?

I think the first rule is that you need to create value.

A lot of times, people do see what we're doing and and it does result in sales.

But first and foremost, we're educating, we're informing, we try and make

sure that every piece of content that we put out provides massive

value regardless of whether or not someone ends up buying our stuff.

And that's why so many people link to us.

And so many people subscribe to our blog, if we were just a sales blog

and all we did was pitch, then we wouldn't be very successful at all.

And so the truth is that we almost never pitch, but embedded in our

marketing messages are embedded in the content that we produce.

Is persuasive evidence that our product works.

How do we do this?

It's, it's all really about alignment.

The way we do our blog posts and our videos is, 90% is giving

value and giving things away.

And then at the end, there's just this casual thing about Hey, if

you want this to be easier and more automated, you can use our software.

It's very soft.

We've not had one person complain about it.

People listen to the marketing show.

Without buying, I hope eventually they will, but even if they never do they've

benefited from being from the community.

They've learned a whole lot about marketing in the process.

And obviously it benefits our business that it does generate sales.

Yeah.

Okay.

Let's look a little bit more about the actual product itself.

And one thing that from my perspective really makes it so

attractive is the fact that it's so easy to use and it's so simple.

I wouldn't imagine that creating such a simple, but powerful product is that easy.

So how do you go about doing that and keeping it so simple that

it's easy for anybody to use?

I'm, I don't really know.

You hire amazing developers.

We, I've never made a product specification.

One of the things that most people don't realize is I'm,

this isn't a guru business.

There's three co founders.

We're all amazing at what we do.

And I, I.

Do care very deeply about our product, but I certainly don't architect it.

And generally, whenever I describe a product to my technical co founder,

he'll go to our technical team and he'll build something that is simple.

And I think one of the cool things about Simon, my co founder is that he has a

background in graphic design, so he.

Cares and knows quite a bit about user experience and and he cares quite a

lot about the look and the feel of the product, which a lot of developers don't.

How do you do that?

I have no idea how you do it.

You hire amazing people.

I think one of the things that You know, I think a really important concept for

most business owners to think about is this concept of vision bandwidth, right?

So just like there's a data bandwidth for stuff that goes through any

sort of like data pipeline like your internet or whatever There's

bandwidth around vision, right?

So I know that I want us to have amazing customer support in our

business I know that but I have no Vision for customer support, right?

I don't have a specific vision other than, man, I want it to be awesome.

But luckily my co founder who does among other things, she manages

our our customer support team.

She has a vision for how customer support should be.

I don't I have a vision for a lot of aspects of our products.

But I don't carry the bulk of the vision bandwidth around How the features that

I want are specifically implemented.

So how do you do it?

I don't know you need I recommend most people have a business that

isn't just scaling them, right?

It's not like every employee's job is just to scale them and

their talents and their abilities.

I am just one puzzle piece among many in my company.

And so I honestly, I can't speak to user experience.

I don't know anything about it.

That's really honest, but it's certainly very insightful.

So to me, and I guess it's the same with you right now, after saying

that, it just amazes me because you would be getting request after request

for features and it's still so far into the development of the product.

It's just still so simple and it just works.

And it's just a, it's amazing.

I love it.

Yeah.

That's the key is how do you add features without

making something more complicated?

And I think I think that the way you do that is if you were designing a

house, you wouldn't want everything that you're able to do in that house,

in one room and with everything cluttering each other up, right?

A refrigerator, for example, shouldn't be very complicated.

You open the door, but then once you open the door, there's all kinds

of things available to you there.

And it's nice to section things off into rooms and such.

So we don't generally show people aspects of the product that they don't.

Need access to unless they want to use that specific thing.

So the product can look very simple, but also be very feature rich.

We add, a couple new features every single week.

And most people, unless we make a marketing show episode about it

most people, unless they actually need that feature, won't find it.

Because we don't want to clutter their thoughts and their cognition with With

decisions that they don't want to make yet, it's the Macintosh computer or apple

products I don't know it's things are only available to you when you need them.

And I think that's one of the philosophies that we have.

Yeah, definitely.

Looking back, I guess at your content, all your content is serves

the purpose of driving sales.

What I don't see your content do is it doesn't seem to be necessarily having to.

Continually validate your product.

I guess your product seems to do that itself.

Yeah.

I don't know.

I think it's a self validating product.

I think people listen to the marketing show and watch it

regardless of whether or not they're considering buying our product.

I think that in every episode of the marketing show, generally.

We give away a landing page, and we show people why it converts, and how it

converts, and the theory behind it, and and, if there's split test results or any

data behind it, we'll give that as well.

And people learn about landing page creation, they learn about conversion

design they learn about principles that can get people to take.

Can get people to complete the goals that you have for them on their website.

And then at the end, we show people like how they can make some of this

easier if they had our software.

And that part at the very end is like maybe a a fifth or a

sixth of the marketing show.

We're not, I don't, In terms of validation of the product, if

people end up on our sales page, they're going to see case studies.

They're going to see results.

They're going to see a demonstration of what happens.

But again, the purpose of that blog post is to educate and informed and

offer people at the very end, if they want there's not even a call

to action to go to our sales page.

So it's very soft.

And I the number one thing we want to do is give value, but we don't need to.

Justify whether a product exists it's growing quickly without that.

Yeah.

Fantastic.

All right, Clay, we've covered so much in this interview.

There's so much more I could cover, but we might have to leave it for another time.

Where can our show listeners

find out more about you?

Folks can go to to leadbright.

com or to leadpages.

net.

That's really where I'm at.

They can also go to marketingshow.

com.

That's where that's where I publish the most frequently is at marketingshow.

com.

Clay, thank you

very much for coming on the show today.

I really appreciate it.

And I know our listeners

will too.

Thank you so much, Jake.