53 Focus Group Questions for Any Purpose

Whether your focus group is there to give feedback on a product or service or help you assess how your brand stands out in your competitive landscape, thought-provoking, open-ended questions are essential to a productive discussion.

However, it's easier said than done. What can you ask beyond "What do you think of our product?" that can provoke the most useful answers?

Here, we've pulled together 53 questions you can ask in your next focus group to pull the most interesting and useful insights you can out of your participants.

Simply copy-and-paste the questions you like below into the notetaking template for a ready-to-go, printable document you can bring to the session.

Featured Resource: Market Research Focus Group Template

Download the Template

For a free template for notetaking during focus groups, a guide on conducting market research, and several other templates, download our Market Research Kit.

Questions for Building Trust Among Focus Group Members

Before diving into deeper questions, it's best to warm up the group with a couple of open-ended questions that allow participants to get to know each other a little bit. Participants should be able to decide how much they want to share with the group -- don't force anyone to share something they may not feel comfortable sharing.

By including a question that allows people to talk about something tangential to the topic of the focus group, your participants will begin to build empathy for each other. That empathy can grow into trust, which is key for eliciting honest insights out of your group.

Here are a few questions you might ask to build trust:

• Share an aspect of your work or life experience that's brought you here today.
• Why did you decide to join our focus group today?
• When and how did you first come across our brand/product/service?

Questions to Encourage Follow-up and Continuation of Ideas

The most helpful insights that come out of focus groups are often the most specific points. Challenge your participants to reflect more on the points they've made if you hear something that you're curious about. For instance:

• That's a fascinating point that [name] just said -- what do you all think of that?
• Do you agree or disagree with [name]'s statement, and why?
• [Name], you've been a bit quiet recently. Did you have any thoughts on this topic that you wanted to share?

Questions for Understanding Customer Perception of Your Product or Service

These questions will help you understand how people truly feel about your brand, product, or service. The focus here is on your company -- not the larger industry landscape or your competitors.

Avoid stopping conversation here unless the group gets completely sidetracked. Open-ended questions can be daunting at first. Participants may not know where to start. However, hearing from the other participants will spark reflection on various aspects of your product or service. Be sure to allow each group member who has something to say to speak up before moving on to the next question.

• How would you describe our company to other people?
• How would you describe our product/service to other people?
• What words or feelings come to mind when you think about our company?
• How likely are you to recommend our product/service to a friend?
• How well do you feel we incorporate feedback from you, our customers, into our service/product?
• What ultimately pushed you to purchase this product/service?
• Where would you buy this product/service?
• What do you like about this product that you may not find in a similar one?
• When you think about our industry, which brands come to mind first?
• Which other brands in our industry did you consider when you were shopping around?
• Why didn't you go with one of our competitors?
• What other products/services come to mind when you look at this one?

Questions to Learn What Your Leads and Customers Want to See From You

Listening to your customers' feedback and suggestions for improvement is crucial to retaining customers and turning them into promoters of your brand. It may be difficult to hear the answers to these questions, but turning customer pain points around will elevate your product or service to the next level.

Avoid defending your product or service or setting any limitations on these questions. Instead, frame them in a way that allows anyone to voice anything at all that they're feeling. Recognize that it can be daunting for anyone (especially people with whom you've built relationships) to share negative feedback, so thank them for their candor.

• If you could wave a magic wand and change one thing about our product/service, what would it be?
• What would you most like to add to or improve about this product?
• What do you envision is the lifespan of this product/service before you upgrade or replace it?
• Is there anything we haven't touched on today that you'd like us to know?

Questions for Understanding Your Buyer Personas

The following eight questions will help you understand what motivates your target buyer persona, their habits, their responsibilities and decision-making power, and their preferences.

These questions are written to spark discussion about topics other than your company, product or service, and the competitive landscape.

Don't worry if the conversation seems to stray far from your brand, as the insights that people end up sharing will likely reveal what's significant to them in their life and work. However, it's important you keep the group focused on the specific question you've asked.

• Describe your job title and your day-to-day responsibilities.
• What's one task on which you feel you spend way too much time?
• How do you define success in your role/your life?
• What is the biggest challenge you face in your role/when it comes to the problem to which this product is a solution?
• When you're browsing online, on which websites do you spend most of your time?
• What are the first three apps you open on your phone in the morning?
• How do you prefer to receive communications from our company? (Specify what type of communication here -- product updates, renewal notices, product/service coaching, meeting reminders, urgent alerts, etc.)
• Would you be the one using this product/service most in your household/job? If not, who would be?

Questions for Getting a Better Sense of the Competitive Landscape

These questions are intended to spark discussion about the brands in your industry that are top-of-mind for consumers. These are helpful in removing any biases that you and your team might have as people who work in the industry and know various players very well.

To encourage honesty, avoid agreeing with any disparaging comments that your participants make about your competitors. Instead, use the opportunity to ask follow-up questions about exactly what the participants don't like about a specific product or brand.

If you're looking to do a complementary research-based analysis of your competitors, download our Market Research Kit to gain access to a S.W.O.T. analysis template.

Download the Template

Questions for Generating Content on Your Industry

You might be looking to develop a content strategy for your brand, branch out into a new content medium, or simply generate new content ideas. Any successful content strategy prioritizes what's most engaging and interesting for your target buyer persona, so a focus group can be an effective way to be sure that you're producing material on the right topics and in the medium that your audience wants to consume.

• What is one recent trend you've noticed in our industry?
• What's one strategy or tactic you think is underrated in our industry?
• Where do you go to get a pulse on the things going on in our industry?
• Who are the people in our industry who you look to as experts?
• What format of content do you consume to keep up with our industry? Social media posts? Blogs/long-form posts? Podcasts? News outlets?
• Which specific sources do you go to for information on our industry?
• What gaps do you see in the content about our industry online? What are the topics on which you'd like to see more education?

Questions for Understanding Product Demand for Something You Haven't Yet Put Out in the Market

These eleven questions are intended to help you understand the demand for a new product or service. These questions will uncover buying habits for a product like the one you're envisioning and whether there's true product-market fit.

• What is/was your first reaction to the product?
• How often do you/would you use this type of product?
• Would you be the one deciding to purchase this product/service? If not, who would be?
• When and where do you use our product?
• When you think about the product, do you think of it as something you absolutely need, something you could do without, or something that's somewhere in the middle?
• How much would you be willing to pay for a product like this?
• How would you ideally like to buy this product? Would you talk to a sales rep, or would you rather purchase it on your own?
• What do you think this product is missing?
• How would you describe someone who you think would use this product/service?
• If you ended up liking your experience with this product, could you see yourself repurchasing it? If so, how often?
• If you could either have this product/service or the equivalent dollar value for you/your business, which would you choose? Why? (Specify the dollar value of your product/service when asking this question.)

Questions for Establishing (or Re-establishing) Your Name and Branding

The following questions are helpful for running word association brainstorms and generating potential names or parts of names for a new product or company.

• What words come to mind when you think of our product category? (Example: "What words come to mind when you think of food delivery?")
• What words come to mind when you think of [insert a word that symbolizes the main value prop of your product/service here - for example, 'efficiency,' 'speed,' 'health']?
• If you have candidate names already:
• What is your initial reaction to this name?
• What words come to mind when you hear this name?
• How would you pronounce this? (Spell out the name on a piece of paper or whiteboard.)

And there you have it! 53 questions you can ask in your next focus group. If you're unsure how to conduct a successful focus group, take a look at How to Run a Focus Group for Your Business.

53 Focus Group Questions for Any Purpose was originally posted by Local Sign Company Irvine, Ca. https://goo.gl/4NmUQV https://goo.gl/bQ1zHR http://www.pearltrees.com/anaheimsigns

The Ultimate Guide to Marketing Interview Questions From HubSpot's CMO

Alright, everyone: I'm about to let you in on a few of my best-kept interviewing secrets.

In this post, I'll uncover real questions I use when interviewing candidates for inbound marketing positions and the answers I'm looking for.

These questions are meant to assess candidates not only for their marketing talent, but also for who they are as people.

Keep in mind that the best candidates aren't just qualified to do the job you're trying to hire them for. You want to look for people who are also passionate about marketing, fit with your culture, and show potential for growth at your company.

Here's a quick look into my interview approach, followed by 14 excellent interview questions I recommend adapting for your industry and hiring needs.

My Interview Approach

During interviews, I put a lot of stake into each candidate as an individual. My goal is always to find someone amazing who also has great long-term potential, no matter where they are in their career.

To uncover this, I like to ask questions that get at the core of who they are, how they think about things specifically, and how they've gotten things done in the real world. I then balance these questions with case-style questions, which usually involve a hypothetical business situation, because they give the candidate an opportunity to show how they think about and work on problems.

Below is a list of 14 questions that make for an effective marketing job interview, the majority of which I've asked candidates with whom I've personally gotten to meet.

Keep in mind that I don’t ask all of these questions during a single interview. In fact, one case-style question can evolve into a discussion lasting anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes, so I often only have time to cover two or three questions during one session.

I also don't limit these questions to the position levels you'll see in each section below. This list is just one reasonable way to organize your job interviews based on the average experience of an intern, coordinator, manager, and director. Depending on the candidate and the needs of the role, a question to a marketing manager candidate might be a good question to ask a marketing coordinator candidate as well.

Before the interview starts, carefully choose the questions you want to use based on the person's role and background. For an inbound marketing generalist, you could ask any or all of these questions. For someone with a more specific role on a larger inbound marketing team, like a blogger, you could focus only on the questions about blogging and content creation.

Learn more in the following video, and check out some of my favorite interview questions below.

14 Interview Questions to Ask Marketing Job Candidates

Case-Style Interview Questions

1. "Draw a funnel on the whiteboard showing 10,000 visitors, 500 leads, 50 opportunities, and 10 new customers (or any other numbers you think are interesting). Now, pretend you're the CMO for the company, and you have to decide what your marketing team should do to improve on these metrics. Which areas of the funnel would you focus on, and what would you do differently to change these results?"

The Follow-Up: The follow-up here is simply pushing on the candidate's answers. Typically, they'll pick one part of the funnel to focus on. (And if they don't, I like to push them to do just that.)

Once they pick one area, I ask them follow-up questions like: "Which tactics would you think about changing?," "What have you done in your past role that's worked?," "Do you think our company has any unique advantages to get some leverage out of that stage of the funnel?" I don’t just want them to tell me to "improve the visitor to lead conversion rate" -- they need to tell me how.

If I have time, I'll tell them to pretend they've implemented their ideas, and I'll ask them to go back through the whole funnel and explain how they think each of those initial metrics have changed.

What to Look For: Everyone on the marketing team needs to be able to understand how to think about and optimize the funnel. Here's where you assess their thought process, whether they have an intuitive sense of what good and bad conversion rates are, and whether they understand how the funnel steps are connected.

You'll also gain some insight into whether they understand which different tactics you can use at each step to improve that particular step. (For example, if they say the lead-to-opportunity conversion rate is bad, the right answer is not to write more blog articles.)

2. "We have two potential designs for the homepage of our website, but we don’t know which one to use. The CEO likes one, and the COO likes another. Half the company likes one, and the other half of the company likes the other. Which one should we use?"

The Follow-Up: This type of question should elicit a ton of questions from the candidate, like who the target audience for the homepage is. If it doesn't, then they're either making up their answer or don't have enough knowledge to address the situation. Follow up by answering their questions with hypotheticals and seeing how they work through the problem.

If they do pick one side or the other and give you a reason, ask them what the goals are for the homepage. Then, ask them how they'd determine which homepage meets those goals best. From there, tell them that Homepage A performed well based on one of the criteria, and Homepage B performed well based on another one of the criteria. This way, you can assess how they make choices when it's not possible to get data that's 100% conclusive, and they have to choose between two, imperfect variations.

What to Look For: While it might seem like this question is all about design, what you're really doing is understanding how candidates approach a conflict of interest. Do they care what each of these people think, or do they go to the data for their answers, such as through A/B testing, user testing, and customer interviews. The best candidates introduce logic and marketing methodology into their answers, while removing opinions. I also like when candidates say you should be constantly tweaking and improving the homepage, rather than always doing a complete redesign every nine or 18 months.

3. "Let's say you have an Excel spreadsheet with 10,000 leads from a few months back -- long enough that those leads' sales cycle has passed. The file contains information about each lead, like their industry, title, company size, and what they did to become a lead (like downloading an ebook). Also in the file is whether they closed as a customer and how much their order was for. Can you use this information to create a lead score? How would you do it?"

Note: I often start this question by simply asking, “How should you create a lead score?” This is how I sort out the people who don't take a data-driven approach. Folks who answer, “You create a lead score by talking to the sales team and then assigning five or ten points to each of the criteria they say they want” are actually wrong. That is not a data-driven approach to lead scoring, and it is way too simplistic to work effectively in most cases.

The Follow-Up: Most people will answer by talking about "looking at the data" and "sorting the data." Push them to tell you how they'd do that in Excel (or another program if they prefer something else). It's not practical to just "look" at the data when you have 10,000 rows -- you need to use statistical analysis.

They also might zone in on one factor, perhaps industry, all alone. If they do that, you should ask them what they would say if the small companies in one industry are good leads, but the big companies in another industry are also good leads? Basically, just keep pushing them until they're at a loss for what to do next.

What to Look For: This case-style question is meant to test a candidate's quantitative abilities, and I'd only ask it for people applying for certain marketing roles (like operations). Here, I'm trying to figure out how the candidate thinks about analyzing data and what their sophistication level is around data.

Most people don't get very far and are either unwilling or unable to look at more than one variable at a time, or understand how to analyze a lot of data in a simple way. At a minimum, you want to find candidates who:

• Look at the leads who closed in one group and compare them to the leads who did not close
• Look at multiple variables at a time
• Use statistical functions in Excel or another program to do that, like summary tables, pivot tables, and so on

If you find someone who starts making a coherent argument about why you might want to use logistic regression, factor or cluster analysis, actuarial science, or stochastic modeling to figure this out ... refer them to me.

Marketing Internship Interview Questions

4. "What is one of your hobbies? How do you do it?"

This question will help you assess a candidate's ability to explain a concept they know intimately to someone who isn't as familiar with it. If their hobby is training for a marathon, ask them what advice they'd give you if you woke up one day deciding you wanted to train for a marathon. Are they able to communicate it clearly?

One candidate taught me how to make tagliatelle, which is hand-cut Italian pasta. She gave me the full run-down on how you make the noodles, how you form them and cut them, and which ingredients go into the sauce. She relayed the step-by-step process to me in a way that was very clear and understandable. I felt like I could've gone home and made tagliatelle myself. Not only did this tell me she knows how to convey information clearly, but it also gave me insight into her personality and interests.

5. "What brands do you like or follow on social media and why?"

This is another casual but useful question, as it can tell you both about a candidate's personal interests and how they perceive marketing content on social media. The best answers go further than which companies a candidate likes buying from -- they indicate why he or she trusts certain companies, what about their content strategy appeals to the candidate, and what specifically about those companies the candidate looks up to (and maybe wants to emulate in their own work).

If you need a candidate to elaborate, follow up by asking them to describe a post from a brand they like or follow, and what made that post so memorable to them.

Marketing Coordinator Interview Questions

6. "What do you read, and how do you consume information?"

Marketing is changing constantly at a rapid pace -- so anyone in a marketing role needs to know how to stay on top of and adapt to these changes. Do they know where to look for industry news? Are they familiar with and subscribed to top marketing blogs? What do they do when they see a change has taken place, like when Google updates their algorithm?

7. "What's an example of a lead-generating campaign you'd be excited to work on here?"

Not every marketing campaign you run generates the same type or quality of leads. This is what makes this question so interesting. It's a chance for you to see how a marketing candidate thinks about the buyer's journey and what that journey should look like in your company.

If you do pose this question to a candidate, don't expect him or her to know exactly how your business generates its leads. The ideal answer simply demonstrates an awareness of your customer and perhaps some on-the-spot brainstorming the candidate might be asked to participate in while on the job.

Expect follow-up questions from the interviewee, too, especially if you pose this question to a more experienced candidate. For example, they might ask how qualified the leads should be, or how leads are scored as a result of this hypothetical campaign. The specific parameters matter less than the follow-up question itself -- a positive sign of an analytical marketer.

8. "What are three components of a successful inbound or digital marketing strategy?"

There's no "right" answer to this question -- a digital marketing strategy thrives on more than three things -- but certain answers show the candidate is up to date on how businesses attract and delight their customers today.

"A Facebook page," for instance, isn't a wrong answer, but it doesn't give you context around how a business would use this page in their marketing strategy. Here are a few sample answers to this interview question that are on the right track:

• A blog with calls to action (CTAs), landing pages for website visitors to download more content, and a defined social media strategy.
• An SEO strategy, website chat, and an analytics tool to track campaign performance.
•  Buyer personas, a Marketing and Sales Service Level Agreement, and a customer success strategy.

You won't learn everything about a candidate from just these terms and phrases. But you should listen for them as the candidate responds -- and expect more sophisticated answers if you pose this question to managers or directors.

Ultimately, the value you place on each of these inbound marketing components will depend on how important they are to your business and what the candidate would focus on as your employee. Before asking this question to anyone you interview, talk to your team and define your marketing strategy. Otherwise, you won't have an accurate measure on which to evaluate a candidate's answer.

Interview Questions for Marketing Manager

9. "Why do you love marketing?"

Or, "Which aspects of our business are you passionate about?" You want to hire someone who's both qualified and has the desire to do the work. Otherwise, why would they work for you instead of the company next door?

Part of their answer will lie in their body language and enthusiasm. The other part will lie in how concrete their answer is. Get at the details by asking a follow-up question, like: "Let's say you're at home, kicking around, and doing something related to marketing. What is it that you're doing?" Perhaps they're reading their five favorite marketing sites, or analyzing traffic patterns of websites for fun, or writing in their personal blog, or optimizing their LinkedIn profile. Whatever it is, you want to be sure they're deeply passionate about the subject matter you'd hire them for.

10. "Between videos, ebooks, blog articles, photos, podcasts, webinars, SlideShare, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest ... there's a lot of potential content our team should produce for inbound marketing. How do we do it all?"

The wisest candidates know you should not do it all, but rather, you should start with the content that's most important to your prospects and customers. They should also have a plan for talking to customers and prospects by way of interviews or surveys to figure out which social networks they use and which types of content they prefer.

11. "Let’s pretend we have very convincing data that shows none of our potential customers use social media. Should we still do it? Why?"

Look for candidates who understand that being successful in social media is important even if your customers aren't there today. Here are a few reasons qualified candidates might cite:

• Your customers will be there in the future, so you should get started now.
• You'll gain industry clout. After all, journalists and influencers in your industry are probably using social media -- and it's important for them to follow you even if they don't ever become customers.
• Social media activity impacts your organic search presence, helping your content rank higher in search engines.
• You'll have more control over your online presence.
• Your competitors are likely using social media.
• It may cost less to generate customers via social media.

Marketing Director Interview Questions

12. "We have a new product coming out in three months. What would you do to launch it?"

This'll show you how well a candidate understands all the different tactics of inbound marketing and how to tie them together into a holistic plan. It'll also give you insight into how creative they are and whether they can come up with new and interesting ways to do marketing.

13. "Our CEO wants you to evaluate our blog. What would you say?"

Before giving you an answer, the best candidates will come back and ask you about the blog's metrics, how many leads and customers it generates, what the goals are for it, how much you're investing in it, and so on. This is also a great way to test whether they actually prepared for the interview by reading your blog.

14. "What's the main relationship between marketing and sales?"

The relationship between Marketing and Sales is known for its unrest (Sales wants better leads from Marketing, and Marketing wants Sales to close more, faster). 

Similar to question #8, there's no right answer here, but there are answers you should listen for. "Marketers are the lead generators and salespeople are the lead closers" isn't necessarily wrong, but the candidate who ends his/her answer here might not be someone who can align both departments around a single, unified approach.

The best answers describe the responsibilities that Sales and Marketing have to each other, and the duties each commits to as part of this partnership. They have a plan for forging consensus on what makes leads marketing-qualified versus sales-qualified, creating a shared Service Level Agreement with agreed-upon metrics, and using content at different points in the marketing and sales funnel to turn strangers into customers.

The Candidate's Follow-Up

Most candidates know to follow up with each of their interviewers in the form of a thank-you note or email. But part of my assessment is the depth at which candidates follow up with me.

The most impressive follow-ups are the thoughtful ones, where candidates call upon details of our discussion to show they're really engaged in the interview process. Perhaps they did more concrete thinking about a specific question I asked, and they send a long email including research on a question they don't think they nailed. Many times, they'll send me a light strategy document with ideas and/or research on something we talked about. These candidates tend to stand out.

Well, the cat's out of the bag. You'll have to use these marketing interview questions as a basis to create your own, similar questions that are relevant to your industry and hiring needs. Good luck, and happy hiring!

Want more interview tips? Learn about some of the questions candidates should ask hiring managers.

The Ultimate Guide to Marketing Interview Questions From HubSpot's CMO was originally posted by Local Sign Company Irvine, Ca. https://goo.gl/4NmUQV https://goo.gl/bQ1zHR http://www.pearltrees.com/anaheimsigns

What Is the 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint?

Despite how many PowerPoint presentations I’ve given in my life, I’ve always struggled with understanding the best practices for creating them. I know they need to look nice, but figuring out how to make them aesthetically pleasing and informative is tough. 

I’m sure my experience isn’t unique, as finding the correct balance between content, design, and timing can be difficult. Marketers know this more than anyone, as success in the role is often marked by being able to create engaging campaigns that tell a story and inspire audiences to take a specific action, like purchasing a product. 

However, PowerPoint presentations are different from advertisements. Understanding how to leverage your marketing knowledge when creating PowerPoints can be tricky. Still, there are various resources for marketers to use when creating presentations, one of which is the 10/20/30 rule. 

Coined by Guy Kawasaki, the rule is a tool for marketers to create excellent PowerPoint presentations. Each element of the formula helps marketers find a balance between design and conceptual explanations, so you can capture audience attention, emphasize your points, and enhance readability. 

Guy Kawasaki PowerPoint

Guy Kawasaki, one of the early Apple employees, championed the concept of a ‘brand evangelist’ to describe his position. He spent most of his time working to generate a follower base for Macintosh, the family of Apple computers. Today he works as a brand evangelist for Canva, an online graphic design tool. 

Given that he’s had significant experience giving presentations to captivate audiences, he’s figured out that the 10/20/30 is a successful formula to follow. Kawasaki’s book, Art of The Start, is where he first introduced the concept and described how it works.

Let’s cover each part of the rule in more detail. 

10 Slides

Kawasaki believes that it’s challenging for audiences to comprehend more than ten concepts during a presentation. Given this, marketers should aim to create PowerPoints with no more than ten slides, i.e., ten ideas you’ll explain. Using fewer slides and focusing on the critical elements helps your audience grasp the concepts you’re sharing with them. 

In practice, this means creating slides that are specific and straight to the point. For example, say you’re presenting on the success of your recent campaign. Your marketing strategy was likely extensive, and you took a series of different actions to obtain your end result. Instead of outlining every aspect of your campaign, you would use your slides to outline its main elements of your strategy. This could look like individual slides for summarizing the problem you hoped to solve, your goals, the steps you took to reach your goals, and post-campaign analytics data that summarizes your accomplishments. 

It’s important to note that there shouldn’t be overwhelming amounts of text on your slides. You want them to be concise. Your audience should get most of the information from the words you’re speaking; your slides should be more supplemental than explanatory. 

20 Minutes

After you’ve spent time coming up with your ten key points, you’ll need to present them in 20 minutes. Knowing that you’ll only have 20 minutes also makes it easier to plan and structure your talk, as you’ll know how much time to dedicate to each slide, so you address all relevant points.

Kawasaki acknowledges that presentation time slots can often be longer, but finishing at the 20-minute mark leaves time for valuable discussion and Q&A. Saving time in your presentation also leaves space for technical difficulties. 

30 Point Font

If you’ve been in the audience during a presentation, you probably know that slides with small font can be challenging to read and take your attention away from the speaker. 

Kawasaki’s final rule is that no font within your presentation should be smaller than 30 point size. If you’ve already followed the previous rules, then you should be able to display your key points on your slides in a large enough font that users can read. Since your key points are short and focused, there won’t be a lot of text for your audience to read, and they’ll spend more time listening to you speak. 

Given that the average recommended font size for accessibility is 16, using a 30-point font ensures that all members of your audience can read and interact with your slides. 

Make Your Presentations More Engaging

The 10/20/30 rule of PowerPoint is meant to help marketers create powerful presentations. 

Each element of the rule works in tandem with the other: limiting yourself to 10 slides requires you to select the most salient points to present to your audience. A 20-minute timeline helps you ensure that you’re contextualizing those slides as you speak, without delving into unnecessary information. Using a 30-point font can act as a final check for your presentation, as it emphasizes the importance of only displaying key points on your slides, rather than huge blocks of text. Font size then circles back around to the ten slides, as you’ll craft sentences from your key points that will fit on your slides in 30-point font. 

Being mindful of slide count, text size, and presentation length ensures that your audiences are captivated by your words as you explain the value behind your work. 

What Is the 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint? was originally posted by Local Sign Company Irvine, Ca. https://goo.gl/4NmUQV https://goo.gl/bQ1zHR http://www.pearltrees.com/anaheimsigns

15 Amazing Blogging Insights Your Analytics Can Tell You

A blog is a critical component of your inbound marketing strategy — it's the vehicle for driving traffic, generating leads, and establishing authority and trust... All in the early or middle stages of the buyer's journey.

But how do you know if it's working?

With all that content, traffic, and leads you're generating, are you aware that you're sitting on a gold mine of valuable data? Enter... Blog analytics.

In this post, we'll cover:

• What blog analytics are
• Why they matter
• What metrics to measure
• How to measure them (Hint: With tools!) 

By measuring performance based on data, you can identify what's working, what's not working, and why. 

Why Blog Analytics Matters

Let's say a key stakeholder in your company comes to you with this question: "How is the blog contributing to our goals?'' They want to craft the marketing budget and put their dollars toward the activities that make the most difference to the bottom line.

Responding to their question with "Trust me" will not sway that individual to continue celebrating and investing in content marketing. By gathering and analyzing blog data, you can get a pulse on your blog's:

• Search presence (such as impressions, clicks, and click-through rate)
• Traffic performance (based on total views and visits, individual post performance, and by referral source)
• Authority in your online niche (based on number of inbound links)
• Readership engagement (by measuring time on page, bounce rate, social shares and comments, and subscriber count)
• Lead generation (by measuring CTA click-through rate, goal conversion rate, number of leads, and lead-to-customer conversion rate)

All of this data is leverage as you prove the ROI of the blog and improve the performance of your blog content. You just have to know how to use it!

Let's dive deeper on this...

Blog Analytics Metrics and Insights

Let's break down the individual blog metrics you should be tracking so you can start making incremental improvements and generate even more traffic and leads... based on data that's right under your nose.

1. Organic Search Impressions

An "impression" is the number of times your post or page has been seen in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). The higher your blog posts rank in the SERPs, the more visibility (and, as a result, traffic) your blog can earn through organic search. 

If you have a low number of impressions, your search presence may not be strong enough to get the organic traffic numbers you're after, and it's your job to then implement SEO best practices and create content around queries that people are searching for. 

2. Organic Clicks

It's not enough to simply be present on the SERPs, which is what impression data measures. Your content must be compelling enough to compel the searcher to click. The more organic clicks your content earns, the more traffic your blog receives. 

If you're finding that your clicks are low, first check your impressions. If impressions are low too, you must work on increasing your impressions.

On the other hand, your impressions could be lower if your content is targeting a low-volume query (i.e. you can't change search behavior and make people search for something more).

However, if you're finding that your SERP positions and impressions are high and your clicks are low, you may have to work on your title (blog headline) and meta-description to gain attention and earn more clicks. 

3. Organic Click-Through Rate

Comparing organic impressions to clicks can be hard, but that's where organic click-through rate comes in. This metric is the percentage of impressions that resulted in a click. 

The higher the percentage, the more bang you get for your impressions buck. You can even have posts that get little traffic (because of low keyword volume) that rank highly, get a lot of impressions, and earn a high share of clicks from those impressions. 

At the same time, you could rank lower for a high volume query yet still drive a lot of traffic with a low click-through rate. 

4. Total Views and Visits

A visit measures the number of times your website was seen by a user. Page views refer to the number of times a page was seen by a user. It's important to keep in mind that there can be multiple page views for every visit since users can browse multiple pages in a single session. 

These overall metrics can tell you: 

• Whether blog traffic is trending up or down
• Average number of page views per visit (i.e. whether a user is engaging with multiple pieces of your content when they do visit)
• Average views per post (how far your content goes on average) 

(And more...)

5. Individual Post Performance

The number of views for individual blog posts can give you more granular data about how your audience responds to the different topics you're blogging about.

Do you notice that posts about certain topics aren't doing as well as others? This is likely an indication that those topics aren't as important to your audience. If this is the case, you might want to publish fewer posts on those topics and more on topics that truly resonate with your target audience.

Blog post views can also help you identify other patterns and cues in your blog content. Does a certain title structure work better than others? Do posts that are more pontificating generate a better reaction than how-to type posts? Use all of these insights to inform your future posts to increase the value of your blog and generate better results.

6. Traffic Referral Source

Your blog's referral sources will tell you where (which sites) users are coming from and give you a sense of how people are finding your blog. Use this information to identify deficiencies in your blog's visibility and to help diagnose why you may have low traffic to your blog.

Is the bulk of your traffic coming from social media sites per your heavy social media promotion but few visitors are coming in from organic search -- or vice versa?

Make sure you're optimizing your blog content with the keywords your target audience is searching for so it gets found in search engines, and allocate some resources to promoting your blog on the sites your audience tends to populate.

Continue to track your referral sources as you ramp up promotion in certain channels so you can determine the ROI of leveraging one channel over another. A lot of focus on social media promo that yields few visitors might not be the best use of your time when another channel is a better driver of blog traffic, for example.

7.  Number of Inbound Links

"Inbound links" refer to the links that your blog earns from other sites. Inbound links, or links from other websites and blogs pointing to your blog content, can indicate how authoritative your blog is.

Think of inbound links as votes of confidence. If someone thought your blog content was worth linking to within their own content, it's a good indicator that content is an authoritative resource on the subject.

Inbound links can also show you how effectively your blog is contributing to your website's overall SEO, since inbound links are one of the most powerful factors impacting search engine optimization. They can even help you generate blog traffic from the referring website and expose you to brand new audiences.

Individual inbound links will also help you identify some of your blog's top content that you might consider using as fodder in social media updates, new blog posts, or ebooks.

8. Time on Page

"Time on page" measures how long a user stayed to engage with the content once arriving on the page. It can* be a good indicator of how engaging the content is to your blog visitors. The idea is that the longer they stay, the more time they took to read the information rather than skim and bounce away (more on that later). 

*However, take this metric with a grain of salt. Shorter posts take less time to read and, as a result, have shorter time on page averages. Also, if you take time in making your posts easy for the user to navigate and find what they're looking for, you may get shorter times for this reason (and that's okay!).

9. Bounce Rate

Bounce rate will tell you how frequently visitors leave your blog without visiting other pages on your blog. While this is a great indicator of the quality of your content and the stickiness of your blog overall, don't be fooled by some implications of bounce rate. While you'd probably want visitors to stick around and read other articles on your blog, you probably wouldn't consider it a bad thing if a visitor clicked on a CTA at the end of your post and headed over to one of your landing pages to fill out a lead-capture form, right?

That being said, if people are quickly leaving your blog for a completely different website, you'll want to take some measures to increase the quality of your content.

To help decrease bounce rate, consider adding a sidebar widget to your blog that features your blog's best-performing posts and switching up the homepage of your blog to show a preview of your 5 most recent posts rather than a full view of your most recent post. This will give visitors the ability to choose to read more posts that cater to their individual needs, enticing them to stick around.

10. Social Shares and Comments

Comments and social shares are good supplementary metrics to indicate the likeability of your content and the sentiment of your audience's perception of it. In addition, comments and social shares can be a great way to identify strengths and weaknesses in your content and help you generate ideas for new content.

If you're noticing few social shares of your content, make sure you have social sharing buttons installed on every blog article you publish. Be sure that you're also spending time promoting on social media.

11. Subscriber Count

Your blog's RSS subscriber and email subscriber count can indicate how much your blog's stable community of readers is growing over time.

Visitors who subscribe will likely make up your blog's solid readership, and it usually indicates your content's true fan base. These readers are most likely to share your content with their own networks, expanding your blog's reach, so you'll want to do some work to build up your subscriber count and track its growth over time.

Make sure you display email and RSS subscribe buttons prominently near the top of your blog's sidebar to encourage new visitors to subscribe to your content.

12. CTA Click-Through Rate

A view on your blog post or a social share is not the end-all be-all. You actually want your blog to make a meaningful impact on revenue... and traffic is only part of that equation.

With that in mind, if no one is clicking through from your blog to your landing pages, you'll never generate any leads. That's where CTA click-through rate comes in.

CTA click-through rate measures the percentage of visitors who clicked on your blog's CTA. 

The higher the CTR, the more effective your CTA is for the traffic your blog is currently generating.

But a low CTR could mean a few things:

• The offer in your call-to-action isn't compelling or relevant enough (blog readers are there for a reason, and the offer doesn't meet their needs or excite them)
• The CTA has not been placed in a prominent enough location for visibility
• The CTA design just isn't attractive or prominent enough to warrant a click (whether it be because of the aesthetic design, or ineffective button copy)

To improve your blog's click-through rate, make sure the offer you're presenting aligns with the content of your posts as closely as possible, uses compelling button copy that clearly demonstrates the value of the offer, creates a sense of urgency, and that the button utilizes an attention-grabbing design. Conducting some A/B tests is a great way to optimize for the best calls-to-action for your blog to improve click-through rate.

13. Number of Leads

Obviously, the number of leads generated will tell you how effectively your blog is supporting lead generation. Is it trending up or down? Are they the right kind of leads?

To make sure you have your bases covered here, tell your readers what action you want them to take. Make sure that:

• Every post you publish includes a call-to-action for a relevant offer
• The homepage of your blog itself features your best-performing CTAs in its sidebar/top bar
• You include anchor text links to landing pages within the text of your blog posts

Knowing the number of leads attributed to your blog can also help you diagnose other deficiencies in your blog's performance.

14. Goal Conversion Rate

The goal conversion rate measures whether your blog readers completed the action you wanted them to (the goal) to convert from a visit to a lead. As opposed to the number of leads metric which tells you how much you're generating leads for your business, conversion rate tells you how effectively you're doing it.

Keep in mind that conversion rate is highly dependent on your existing traffic. So if you have low traffic but an amazing conversion rate, you might generate leads at the same rate as you would with high traffic but a low conversion rate. Coupled with the knowledge of your blog's CTA click-through rate, you can gather some pretty awesome insights.

For example, if you have a high click-through rate but a low conversion rate, this means that while you're getting visitors to click on your CTAs, they're abandoning your landing pages before completing the form to convert into a lead. If this is the case, you likely have a conversion problem that can be due to a number of things: the messaging in your CTAs don't align with the messaging on their landing pages or you could have a number of very landing page-specific problems. Start first with testing better alignment between your CTAs and their landing pages, and if that doesn't do the trick, dive into landing page optimization testing.

15. Lead-to-Customer Conversion Rate

Your blog's lead-to-customer conversion rate will tell you how effectively the leads you generated from your blog turned into customers. This insight becomes valuable when you're examining and comparing the effectiveness of your multiple marketing channels against each other. If your blog is one of your top customer-producing channels, it might make sense to allocate more time and human resources to it. If it's not, the opposite might be a better approach.

Now, all of the above are fantastic metrics to measure the performance of your blog. But how do you get the data? Below are blog analytics tools that can help you gather and analyze blog data. 

1. Google Search Console

Google Search Console is a free tool that helps website owners measure and analyze their presence on Google. Based on the data that is provided by Google themselves, you'll be able to track: 

• Organic impressions from Google
• Number of clicks from Google
• Click-through rate
• Positioning (the ranking position on Google SERPs)

Google Search Console also provides the ability to segment based on individual pages, individual queries, countries, and devices. You're also able to compare date ranges to show change over time.

The only thing you need to do to get access to this data is enable it is sign up and verify ownership of your site. 

2. SEMrush

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SEMrush is a third-party tool for measuring search presence and rankings. You can use it to track positioning changes over time, monitor your inbound link profile, and optimize content for SEO. 

What makes it different is that SEMrush goes beyond providing the data and into helping you uncover actionable insights. You'll be able to do keyword research and uncover strategies to help your blog perform better, and you can also do competitive analysis to understand what your competitors' search presence is like.

3. Arel="noopener" target="_blank" hrefs

Arel="noopener" target="_blank" hrefs is a similar tool to SEMrush for tracking search performance and performing keyword research and competitive analysis. With this all-in-one SEO tool, you'll have access to keyword data, site auditing, and rank tracking. What makes Arel="noopener" target="_blank" hrefs special is its SERP feature tracking, helping you understand exactly what your users are seeing when they perform a particular query.

4. Google Analytics

Whereas Google Search Console helps you understand and measure your positioning and performance on the SERPs, before users get to your site, Google Analytics helps you understand what happens after they get to your site.

It's a free tool. In order to implement Google Analytics, you must set up an account and implement the Tracking ID with a JavaScript tag. Once this tag is in your site's code and functioning properly, it can then gather data about your site's users from that point forward (i.e. no back data is available previous to the script being installed).

Google Analytics can help you understand: 

• Audience - Who came to your site? Where are they located? What are their demographics? What device did they use?
• Acquisition - Where did they come from? What referring sites sent them?
• Behavior - Where did they land (which page or post)? What did they do once they got here? How long did they stay? How did they navigate the site? What page did they exit from?
• Conversions - Did they do what you wanted them to? 

There are many metrics to look at within these larger buckets, and Google Analytics also provides ways to filter, segment, and compare various metrics. This can help you determine if you're getting the right traffic, if that traffic is trending up or down, and if they're navigating and converting how you want them to.

5. HubSpot

HubSpot is a CRM platform that also has marketing, CMS, sales, and service tools to help your business grow better. The advantage of using HubSpot for blogging is that you can monitor the performance of your posts and tie that data into CRM records, helping your team see all of their marketing interactions. This helps you be able to track the complete customer lifecycle from initial blog view to becoming a customer and beyond.

6. StoryChief

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StoryChief is a tool for centralized content management ranging from publishing to blog analytics and content insights. Its analytics, reporting, and data management features help you analyze your data, track trends on top-performing content, and guide you to insights for creating buzz-worthy content. The edge it has over something like Google Analytics is its intuitive interface. (Fun fact: It also integrates with HubSpot.)

7. Tableau

Tableau is a data management software that can help you create data visualizations that can lead you to valuable insights. It works by integrating multiple sources of data and allowing you to drill-down, filter, and build graphs and dashboards to spot trends and forecast opportunities.

Whatever tools you decide to use as you focus on the metrics that matter to your blogging efforts, keep in mind that data alone is not enough to create an actionable strategy. It's important to understand the context of the data and be able to interpret insights into the inbound marketing activities that will generate ROI.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in January 2012 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

15 Amazing Blogging Insights Your Analytics Can Tell You was originally posted by Local Sign Company Irvine, Ca. https://goo.gl/4NmUQV https://goo.gl/bQ1zHR http://www.pearltrees.com/anaheimsigns

The Ultimate Guide to Landing Pages

As you browse and maneuver around the internet, you visit landing pages all the time.

A landing page can be the designated page you’re taken to when you click on an ad. It can also be the page that follows a call-to-action button or serve as the homepage of a website.

Regardless of how you "land" on a landing page, its purpose is to encourage you to convert to a lead or customer. For that reason, landing pages are uniquely powerful components of a business's digital marketing strategy.

What is a landing page?

A landing page is a website page with a specific purpose — the objective of a landing page is to convert visitors into leads. While there are many types of landing pages the intent the same — get more leads.

Landing pages contain lead forms that ask visitors for their contact information in exchange for something of value, otherwise known as an offer.

The video below will help drive that definition home.

Now, think about how protective you are of your personal information. What would make a person want to give up their contact information over the internet?

Well, that’s where landing page best practices come in. A targeted, well-crafted landing page with a solid format and sound copy will get almost anyone to submit their information.

First, why do you need a landing page?

Why would you create a special page just for people to fill out a form? Why not just use your homepage or about page? Great questions.

After reading this article, you’ll likely be able to answer those questions yourself, but the short answer is this: A landing page eliminates distractions by removing navigation, competing links, and alternate options so you capture your visitor’s undivided attention. And complete attention means you can guide your visitor where you’d like them to go, i.e., to your lead form. In sum, landing pages are specifically designed to create conversions.

Now that you understand their importance, let’s cover landing page best practices to make sure your pages are set up to convert.

Was that a lot? We’ll break down these landing page best practices below.

1. Craft a benefit-focused headline.

For every 10 people that visit your landing page, at least seven of them will bounce off the page. To keep that number low, your visitors need to know (and understand) what’s in it for them within seconds of arriving. Your headline is the first thing they’ll read, and it should clearly and concisely communicate the value of your landing page and offer.

2. Choose an image that illustrates the offer.

Yes, an image is mandatory, and it should represent your target audience. The purpose of your image is to convey a feeling — it should illustrate how your visitor will feel once they receive your offer. Certain images may work better than others, so you should always split test your options (which we’ll cover below).

3. Write compelling copy.

Don’t spend all that time crafting the perfect headline and finding your ideal image to fall flat when it comes to the words that will actually sell your call-to-action. Your copy needs to be clear, concise and should guide your visitor to the action you want them to complete. Compelling copy also speaks directly to the visitor by using “you” and “your” to make them feel engaged. We’ll go more in-depth on copy tips below.

4. Include the lead form above the fold.

Your lead form needs to be readily accessible should your prospect want to convert right away — you definitely don’t want them searching and scanning your landing page to find your offer. “Above the fold” just means that visitors don’t have to scroll to get to the form — that it’s in view as soon as someone hits the page. This could be a form or an anchor link to the form. Even better: Design your form to scroll with the user as they move down the page.

5. Add a clear and standout call-to-action.

The call-to-action (CTA) is arguably the most important element on your landing page — it’s one of many elements that encourage conversion. The CTA button needs to stand out, meaning you should use a color that contrasts with other elements on the page. Be clear about what you want visitors to do, that is, use an action verb that spells it out for them, like “submit”, “download”, or “get it now”. More on CTA best practices below.

6. Give away a relevant offer.

Think of your landing page as a part of your lead’s journey to your ultimate offer — your product or service, that is. Your offer is the thing you give in exchange for your lead’s personal information. Not only should it be compelling enough for your visitor to provide their contact info, but it should also be relevant to your business. Say you sell horseshoes.

Your offer might be something like “10 Simple Ways to Size Your Horse’s Hooves,” because, ultimately, you’re going to ask that lead to buy your horseshoes. You wouldn’t hook them with an offer about organic farming because that puts them on a completely different path. We’ll talk more about how compelling offers below.

7. Only ask for what you need.

You want to gather as much information as possible about your lead, but how much you ask for depends on several factors: how well acquainted they are with you, where they are in their buyer’s journey, and how much they trust you. Ask for as little info as you need in your lead form to create a low barrier to entry. A name and an email are more than sufficient to nurture a new lead.

8. Remove all navigation.

Your landing page has one objective and one objective only: to convert visitors into leads. Any competing links — including internal links to other pages on your website — will distract from that goal. Remove any other links on your page to draw all of your visitors’ attention to your call-to-action.

9. Make your page responsive.

Just like every other page on your website, your landing pages need to be responsive to accommodate every viewing experience. The last thing you need is for your form to fall out of view on mobile devices. Give your visitors every possible opportunity to convert, no matter how they’re viewing your page.

You can use tools to help accomplish this. For example, HubSpot's drag-and-drop landing page editor, available in Marketing Hub Starter, makes it easy for you to create mobile optimized landing pages and forms effortlessly.

10. Optimize for search.

Sure, you’ll be driving visitors to your landing page through email blasts, social posts and other marketing methods, but your page should also be optimized with target keywords for your paid campaigns and organic search. When someone searches for your key phrase, they should find your landing page. Similarly, when you target a keyword with paid ads, those words should exist on your landing page.

11. Remember to use a thank you page.

A thank you page is where you send leads once they’ve completed your form. Now, you could just show a thank you message on the same page or ditch the thank you altogether, but there are many reasons why that’s not the best option.

A thank you page serves three important purposes:

• It delivers the offer that you promised (usually in the form of an instant download)
• It gives you an opportunity to interest your new lead in additional relevant content
• It serves as a chance to thank them for their interest, which goes a long way in promoting them to a customer down the line.

How to Design Your Landing Page

Often times, design means creativity, colors, and pretty pictures. For the purpose of a landing page, we take design a step further to mean functional, direction-oriented, and effective. So, to craft a well-designed landing page, you’ll have to tap into both your right and left brain. But don’t get me wrong — you still need great imagery and attractive colors to convert your visitors. We’ll touch on how to incorporate all of this below.

Landing Page Structure

The good news is you don’t need to get too creative here. Most landing pages follow a very similar structure because it’s been proven to work. You can infuse your creativity through branded elements and images, but stick to a landing page format that people are used to seeing.

A good landing page has five elements (check out the landing page example below to see these elements in practice):

1. Headline that grabs the visitors attention
2. Relevant image that is relevant to your audience
3. Lead form that sits above the fold to capture visitors’ information
4. CTA that is action-oriented and compelling
5. Copy and description that informs and entices your visitor to complete your form

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Can your landing page include more than this? Absolutely. (Think social share buttons that visitors can use to spread the word about your offer). This is simply the bare minimum. You need to know your audience, where they are coming from and where they are in their buyer’s journey to know how much you need to include. The rule of thumb is to include as much information as you need to get people to convert.

Landing Page Layout

This may come as a surprise, but most people don’t read every word of your cleverly-crafted copy. Instead, they skim through and pull out the most important tidbits. Your job is to make those tidbits stand out so your visitor doesn’t miss anything important.

That means a few things …

• Keep the most important information above the fold so your visitor doesn’t need to scroll to get to it.
• Perform a blink test on your page, meaning a visitor should be able to gather the main message in less time than it takes them to blink, i.e., less than five seconds.
• Use white (or negative) space to keep your visitor engaged, focused, and to help them comprehend your message.
• Write with bullets and short paragraphs to make your copy easy to digest.
• Try to work the important copy into an F-pattern, which is the direction that most people scan a page online. Work with the flow of visual patterns to drive people to the key points that will get them to convert.

Landing Page Colors

The design of your landing page — including the colors you use — should reflect that of your website. You’re aiming to form a long-term relationship with the people who visit your landing page, and that means they need to become familiar with your branding colors and unique style. The more they recognize your brand, the more they trust you (and the more they trust you, the easier it is to get them to do what you want them to do).

The areas where you should consider using alternate colors are on the elements of your page that need to stand out — ahem, your CTA button. Contrast is the name of the game here. Say your branded colors are mostly green … you’ll want to choose a color that can draw users attention, say purple.

Wondering what colors perform well? We did a little research for you to determine which colors convert best.

Landing Page Images

The image on your landing page is one the first things people see, and since people process visuals far quicker than they do text, it sets the tone for their entire experience. But how can you possibly choose between millions of stock photos and that company photo shoot that’s taking up all the space on your computer?

Let’s narrow down the selection with a few important questions:

Who is my target audience?

What does your persona look like? How old are they? How do they dress? What are they interested in? The answers to these questions are important in determining what image you’re going to place front and center on your landing page. If it’s going to appeal to your audience, then it needs to represent them in some way.

Where on my landing page do I want them to look?

This might seem like an odd question, but really it’s based on the idea that people follow directional cues, like where someone is looking or pointing. If you want visitors to fill out a form, consider an image that drives their attention toward that form.

Will this image reinforce my message?

Every element on your landing page serves an important purpose. Since your image is one of the first things that people see, it should help clarify what the visitor can expect from your page. Make sure that your image adds value.

Here are some other important things to consider when creating great landing page images.

Call-to-Action (CTA)

We’ve discussed your CTA a few times so far, but since it’s the most important part of your landing page, it’s worth mentioning again. When it comes to the design of your CTA, there are a few tricks will make it so alluring that visitors feel compelled to click. To clarify, your CTA includes the button and the copy you use to draw attention to it; these tips cover both.

• Give your CTA a vibrant and contrasting color
• Focus your CTA copy on the benefit to your visitor
• Get to the point — try using no more than five words
• Tell your visitor what you want them to do using action verbs, e.g. Get, Download, Click
• Make your button large enough to stand out on the page
• Give it some negative space — don’t crowd the area around your CTA
• Follow the flow of the page and place your CTA where your readers’ eyes will go, such as to the right of or below the copy
• Test your button shape, test your copy … as a matter of fact test everything (we’ll cover how to do this below)

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Mobile Landing Page

More than half of website traffic comes from mobile devices, therefore, the user experience should be the same no matter the device visitors are using. By making your landing page responsive, you give them every opportunity to view and convert, whether they’re on a desktop, phone, tablet, or otherwise.

Landing Page Copywriting Tips

After design comes great copy. Your objective is to be compelling, instructive, likable, concise, effective, trustworthy and informative all at once. How? Keep reading.

1. Cover the main points.

No matter how you position it, there are a few main points that you need to hit with your copy. Those main points are your persona’s pain point, the solution to that pain point, how your solution works (features), how your solution will improve their situation (benefits), and verification that it works (social proof).

The majority of what you write needs to address how you can help your prospect, not how awesome you are (because that’s implied). Let’s go more in-depth on these points.

The Pain Point

The pain point that you focus on should be the one that your offer solves. Not to sound negative, but it’s important to touch on the problem your persona is facing so they know you understand what they’re going through. Empathy is an effective way to build trust. And if they know you get their problem, then they’re more likely to trust your solution.

Your Solution

The solution to their pain point is what you’re offering in exchange for their information. Illustrate a clear path between their problem and how your solution is the remedy they need.

Features

Just knowing what your solution is may not be enough to convert leads, so you need to mention what’s included in that solution. If it’s an ebook, what are the subjects your cover? If you’re promoting a webinar, how will it work and what will you teach? If it’s a service, what can they expect? Give your potential lead all the information they need to make a decision.

Benefits

Your copy should be heavy with benefits to the user because that’s what they really care about — what’s in it for them. While features list what your offer has, benefits tell visitors how their situation will be improved as a result. It paints a vivid picture of how much better their life could be by using your solution.

Social Proof

Studies show that social proof is effective for persuading people to take a desired action. Social proof comes in the form of logos of brands you’ve worked with, testimonials from previous clients, reviews of your product, or confirmation that others have purchased your service. In essence, people want to know that others are have used and benefited from your solution, too. By including social proof on your landing page, you're validating your offer without even saying anything.

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Touching on each of these points will provide you with well-rounded copy that answers all of your visitors’ questions … which brings me to my next point.

2. Preemptively respond to objections.

A key part of writing persuasive copy (copy that gets people to convert) is dismantling objections before they even come up. Now, this takes some skill … or at least some help from a friend.

Once you’ve laid your foundation by addressing all the main points, put yourself in the mind of your prospect and think about where they might protest or challenge you as they read. For instance, if you say “We’ve helped Fortune 500 companies bring in customers,” your reader might scoff or doubt it unless you follow up that statement with social proof.

Do this exercise for every section of your page (or ask an unbiased friend to help) until you’ve covered every possible objection you can think of. When you get questions from people who’ve visited your landing page, use that as feedback to sharpen your copy even further. Better yet, seek out constructive criticism from your first few converted leads to ensure your landing page is meeting every need.

3. Build trust with your prospect.

Say you were reading a sales page and the company wrote, “Our product has helped 100 people and it might work for you, too!” Meh. I’d probably pass and find a company that has a solution that can definitely work for me. Your goal is to build trust with your visitor and the way to do that is to come across as an authority.

Besides using social proof, some other ways to build trust are:

• Write in the way that you speak and address your prospects as you would a live customer.
• Cite statistics that support your message.
• Use case studies that highlight customers similar to your target.
• Be relatable. Show your audience that you’re human by admitting failures, opening up about doubts you’ve had, and being honest. The caveat is you should only share what is relevant to their struggle; don’t just divulge anything.

4. Use click triggers.

Click triggers are designed to eliminate that last bit of doubt before a visitor converts. You can think of them as lick Probability Enhancers (... yes, I made up that term). They are essentially copy positioned next to your CTA that pushes your prospect over the edge by easing their mind and mitigating the risk of converting.

Below are some effective ways to employ click triggers:

• Money-back guarantee
• Easy unsubscribe
• Quote from a successful or happy customer
• Blurb on “what to expect”
• Price slashing
• Privacy policy
• Some other creative method

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Whatever you choose, click triggers will give your conversions the boost they need.

A/B Testing Your Landing Page

Everything we’ve discussed until this point is great … in theory. But your business is different from others, and your target audience is unique. How do you know if the copy you chose is working? Or if your CTA placement is right? Or what colors perform best? Or which image to choose?

You test it. That’s how. Split testing (or A/B testing) is probably nothing new to you as a marketer, and split testing your landing page is just one more experiment to add to your list.

Let’s briefly go over how to best A/B test your landing pages.

What is A/B testing?

A/B testing is simply splitting your traffic to two (or more) variations of a page to see which performs better. While you could do this manually by launching one variation for a period of time, then another for the same amount of time, it’s far more efficient to use a software that allows you to split test and can track your results.

The main components of an A/B test are variants, or the two versions of the page, the champion, or the original page, and the challenger, or the page that you modified to test against the original.

How to A/B Test

The most important trick to split testing is to make very small tweaks with each experiment. For instance, you don’t want to split test your headline and your image at the same time because you won’t know which element garnered the results. For this reason, stick to testing one element at a time. The “winner” becomes your champion, then you can create a new challenger to test the next element. You repeat this cycle until you reach a conversion rate that you’re happy with (and that falls within realistic expectations, which we’ll cover below).

What should you test?

You can test virtually anything on your landing page. But while that’s possible, you may want to limit your test to a few of the most impactful elements of your page, like:

• Headline copy
• Image
• CTA color
• Click triggers
• Copy on the page
• Lead form length and fields

These tests will have the biggest impact on your conversion rates. Try starting with the simplest change first, like a headline or CTA color, then work your way to the larger undertakings, like your page copy.

Landing Page Metrics to Track

Metrics will tell you everything you need to know about how well your landing page is performing as well as give you some insight on how to improve it. It’s hard to know exactly what will work when you launch a page. Measure and track meticulously in the beginning until you reach a relatively good conversion rate, then you can track your metrics less frequently.

Page Visits

How many visits are you getting on your landing page? The more visits, the more you increase your probability of conversions. Try adjusting your paid strategy or redefining your keywords to drive more traffic to your page. You can also let your current followers know about your offer through emails, social media, and on your website.

Traffic Source

Knowing where your traffic is coming from will let you know where you should double down on or ditch your efforts.

Submission Rate

This is the number of people that complete your lead form and land on your thank you page. There are many tweaks you can make to your page to increase this number, but make sure to A/B test so you know what’s working.

Contacts

Contacts refer to the number of leads that you generated from your form. The reason this is different from submissions is because duplicate contacts are only counted once, meaning if a current lead fills out your form to get your offer, they don’t affect the count.

Heat Mapping

This is more of an observation of how people interact with your page as opposed to a metric. Heat mapping can show you where people scroll, what they read, and how they engage with your page. This is all useful data when thinking about your page layout and structure.

Bounce Rate

If visitors are coming to your page and immediately leaving, then you need to examine whether the content is aligned with the offer. Does your copy capture visitors’ attention and do visitors automatically know what to do when they land on your page? Is your page a reflection of the copy you used to get people to visit it?

Form Abandonment

This metric tells you how many people start filling out your form but don’t complete it. If this number is particularly high, some adjustments to consider are introducing new click triggers, shortening your form, or making it more clear what you want your visitor to do.

Benchmarks

You need to judge your landing page against industry norms and across a similar audience to know if it’s performing as expected. Check out some industry benchmarks to set as your baseline, but don’t be discouraged by other company’s results.

No matter what’s going on, it’s possible to diagnose and heal your landing pages if you pay attention to the metrics.

How to Make Your Landing Pages More Effective

There are always tweaks you can make to boost landing page performance. Below are a few great tips (if I do say so myself) to get your landing pages leveled up.

Optimize your landing page.

Optimize is such a confusing word, isn’t it? I mean, are we talking about imagery, copy, keywords, or UI? The answer is yes — we’re talking about all of it. Optimize just means to make your landing page the best it can be, and that can include a myriad of modifications. If you want to know everything you could do to optimize your landing page, you’ll need a pretty expansive guide. And, guess what, we have one here.

Present a really good offer.

You could argue that anything free qualifies as “good,” but that isn’t exactly true. Not only should your offer be free (we’re not talking sales pages here) but it also has to be good enough to warrant a stranger giving you their personal information. Let’s face it — there are a lot of companies competing for your audience’s attention, asking for their information and soliciting them via email. So, what’s going to make you stand out from the pack? An outstanding offer, that’s what.

Here are a few questions to determine if you have a compelling offer or not:

• Does my offer solve a pain point for my target audience?
• Is there a clear benefit that a lead can gain from this offer?
• Can my offer rival the competition?

Decrease page load time.

A single second delay in page load time means 7% fewer conversions and 11% fewer page views. Slow page load times can also result in customer dissatisfaction and frustration.

Needless to say, landing page load time is a metric to take seriously. If you need some tips, check out this resource on decreasing page load time.

Keep the buyer’s journey in mind.

Since you’re driving traffic to your landing page, you should have a clear idea of where your visitors are in their buyer’s journey. That means you’ll know if they’re trying to diagnose a problem (awareness), looking for a solution to their problem (consideration), or are ready to close (decision). Your copy and offer should reflect this if you want to convert. It’s no different from any other marketing materials — meet your visitors where they are.

Create a seamless experience.

No one should be surprised when they arrive on your landing page. It should be exactly as advertised, meaning be consistent with your copy. Use the same words on your landing page that you used to get people to arrive there, whether it was a paid ad, social post, blog CTA, or email. You need to avoid the bait and switch at all costs if you want people to stick around.

Create a clear path to conversion.

There should be no guesswork involved in navigating your landing page. Once someone arrives on your page, it should be clear what you want them to do — submit their info to your lead form. Your goal is to guide visitors to your form using creative directional cues.

Here are some ways to point your visitor to a conversion:

• Choose an image of a person that is either gazing in the direction of or pointing to your form
• Make your CTA a contrasting color to draw attention to it
• Use arrows that point to your lead form
• Insert anchor text that brings people back to the form when clicked
• Give your CTA some negative space on the page
• Frame your lead form with a bold color or outline

Add scarcity to your offer.

Few emotional marketing tactics work as well as fear … and the fear of missing out (more formally known as FOMO). Consumers don’t like to lose their ability to choose, and once you make it clear that your offer is in high demand and/or short supply, they’re going to clamber to get it. (Here’s a cool study on cookie jars if you want to geek out on the psychology of scarcity marketing.)

The other reason why this technique works is because people want things that are hard to obtain — that signifies value and exclusivity.

To show scarcity, mention how little of your offer is left, include a countdown timer, use words like “ends soon” or “last chance”. Obviously, we want you to be genuine, so only employ tactics that are true for your business. Bottom line: there are many ways to use and benefit from this technique.

Use video.

Video marketing is becoming increasingly popular for good reason. Not only do customers prefer to see video from companies, but 88% of video marketers say that video gives them positive ROI. The key is to create an effective video that doesn’t distract visitors from your ultimate goal: the call-to-action.

If you’re on the fence about using video, here are some reasons that might push you over the ledge.

Video ...

• Increases conversion rates
• Is a more personable way to share a message and connect with prospects
• Can be more engaging than an image and will get visitors in the habit of clicking (and converting)
• Can reduce the number of support calls or tickets you receive
• Is processed 60,000 times faster than text

If you do plan to employ this tactic, VidYard has some helpful landing page video guidelines to follow.

Are you excited yet about all the ways you can improve your landing pages? Sure, there are quite a few but that just means that a poor-performing landing page doesn’t have to stay that way. Take it one tactic at a time and build as needed.

What to Do Post-Conversion: Lead Nurturing

So, you have an optimized landing page that converts like a charm. Now what? You don’t want to leave those leads hanging. Instead, you want to nurture them into becoming customers, then nurture them some more. Here’s how.

Optimize your thank you page.

I hope you’re not tired of optimizing yet. Your thank you page is the first thing someone sees after they convert, so it serves as a great opportunity to delight your new lead even more than you already have. Your objective is twofold: deliver your promised offer and get them interested in something else on your site.

Your thank you page should:

• Thank your new lead (go figure)
• Provide links to relevant content on your site
• Invite your lead to follow you on social media
• Ask your lead to subscribe to your blog
• Automate a follow-up email with the offer

Guide them along their buyer's journey.

Your new lead is going to make their way to the decision stage with or without you. You want to be the one to help them get there. You’ve gathered some valuable information about your lead, which means you can anticipate what they need next. Provide content or resources to bring them to the subsequent stage of their journey, and you just might be their option for the decision stage. After all, we know that prospects buy from companies that they know, like, and trust.

Form a relationship.

Once someone signs up to receive information from you, they become a potential customer with whom you should work hard to build a relationship and connection. The good thing is you already know what they’re interested in and what their pain points are, so you can target them with additional, helpful content and personalized marketing.

If you’re still stuck, get some inspiration from some of the best landing pages we could find.

Grow Better with Landing Pages

Landing pages will account for a majority of your new leads, so they demand your attention. With the vast number of tweaks, additions, and variations you can implement, there’s no reason why you can’t have a landing page that converts well.

As long as you’re following the best practices we covered above, you’ll be on your way to a high-performing landing page ... and if you need some additional guidance, we’re always here as a resource.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in August 2019 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

The Ultimate Guide to Landing Pages was originally posted by Local Sign Company Irvine, Ca. https://goo.gl/4NmUQV https://goo.gl/bQ1zHR http://www.pearltrees.com/anaheimsigns