Episode Transcript
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George B. Thomas (00:01):
Do you live in a world filled with corporate
data? Are you plagued by siloedapartments? Are your lackluster
growth strategies demolishingyour chances for success? Are
you held captive by the evilmenace, lord lack, lack of time,
lack of strategy, and lack ofthe most important and powerful
(00:22):
tool in your superhero toolbelt? Knowledge.
Never fear hub heroes. Get readyto don your cape and mask, move
into action, and become the hubhero your organization needs.
Tune in each week to join theleague of extraordinary inbound
heroes as we help you educate,empower, and execute. Hub
(00:46):
Heroes, it's time to unite andactivate your powers.
By the way, if anybody's wondering, I don't
have a bunion, and we arerecording today. Although, Liz,
it feels like the Internetgremlins do not want this
episode to come out, and it'scrazy, but let's let's roll with
this.
Liz Moorehead (01:05):
Like, it's actually making me wonder if the
reason why we haven't talkedabout this topic yet is some
sort of big sprocket conspiracy,like somebody doesn't want this
information to get out.
George B. Thomas (01:17):
I know. Somebody doesn't want us
Liz Moorehead (01:19):
to talk about this because we actually have a
hilarious problem guys. So lastweek I was doing a little
auditing of our topics, Justtaking a look at things we had
done, things we hadn't done.
George B. Thomas (01:30):
We've done a lot by the way.
Liz Moorehead (01:32):
We have done a lot and we've done so much that
sometimes we'll come back andtalk about things multiple times
from multiple angles. Hadmultiple HubSpot email tool
episodes, multiple HubSpotsocial media tools, multiple
commerce hub.
George B. Thomas (01:47):
I mean, Jack Cooper Smith has been on the
show three times. Let's justthrow that out there.
Liz Moorehead (01:52):
Yes, he has. And guys, do you know what we
haven't done?
George B. Thomas (01:57):
I feel so bad right now. I feel like I'm going
get judged by the entirecommunity right now.
Liz Moorehead (02:02):
We have literally never spoken a single breath of
oxygen about landing pagesbefore. Landing pages.
George B. Thomas (02:11):
I don't understand how this is that we
have never I talked
Liz Moorehead (02:15):
about don't either. We've even talked about
the blogging tool twice, guys.
George B. Thomas (02:20):
No. No. Yes. Yes. We have we went into
settings and talked about AIsettings.
Liz Moorehead (02:28):
And an individual episode per setting.
George B. Thomas (02:33):
And not landing pages.
What?
Liz Moorehead (02:39):
I'm not mad. I'm just disappointed and mad. Do
you get what I'm saying?
Chad Hohn (02:44):
That's before I got here.
Liz Moorehead (02:47):
Chad, you didn't know you were in
Chad Hohn (02:48):
the studio audience. Don't to blame.
Liz Moorehead (02:50):
Nope. You were in the studio audience, and not
once did we get a little Chadnote that said, hey. Have you
guys ever thought about talkingabout landing pages? Right? Nice
try, Kima.
Chad Hohn (02:59):
Nobody really helped myself. With landing pages was
when somebody wants to store acookie in the browser or do
something weird, you know.That's funny. Technical code
wise. They don't ask me aboutthat kind of stuff.
So wasn't even on my radar,
Liz Moorehead (03:13):
if I'm
Chad Hohn (03:13):
gonna be completely honest.
George B. Thomas (03:14):
If the words hidden field and cookie come up,
then Chad gets tagged in.
Chad Hohn (03:19):
Yeah, exactly.
Liz Moorehead (03:20):
Fantastic. I'm looking for a dialogue between
you and me too, which is gonnabe great. Well, I
Chad Hohn (03:26):
got I got questions.
George B. Thomas (03:27):
The third party caller that just called in
from your desktop.
Liz Moorehead (03:31):
Spam question mark telemarketer. I'm sure they
have a lot to say about landingpages. You know what guys?
George B. Thomas (03:37):
Doing great today.
Liz Moorehead (03:38):
We're doing great today, but we are finally
bringing oxygen, some light tothis very necessary topic.
Landing pages are buildingblocks in the inbound world.
They are foundational. They areto the point where I would
probably say they are taken forgranted, much in the way that we
overlooked them. So today thatends, we are diving into the
(04:00):
evolution of landing pages.
What's changed, what hasn't, andwhat sales and marketing teams
need to be thinking about whenbuilding high performing landing
pages in HubSpot. We're ready?
Chad Hohn (04:11):
Yeah.
Liz Moorehead (04:12):
Let's do these. All right, so I want to start by
looking backward. Landing pageshave been around forever, not
just in inbound marketing, justin marketing in general. Yeah.
From your perspective, andGeorge, I'll start with you.
What has fundamentally remainedthe same and what has changed
the most?
George B. Thomas (04:31):
Well, I mean, listen, the reason that we
might've forgot about these isbecause most mere mortal humans
think of them in simple terms ordon't even think of them at all,
or definitely don't think ofthem in a pair of pages because
literally we're like, let's talkabout landing pages. Well, it
has to be landing pages andthank you pages, by the way, but
(04:53):
we'll get to that. It's alwaysbeen about this focused
conversion that hasn't changed.Like, there's this thing and we
need them to know them aboutthis thing. And it's also always
been about capturing attentionand then being able to
communicate the value of what itis on the page quickly and then
(05:17):
drive a specific action.
So, if you think about it, howdo we have this focused thing
that grabs attention,communicates the value, and
drives them to the action thatwe want? Like, and so you'll
hear like call to action. When Isay call to action on the
landing page, though, it's it'ssomewhat copy, but it's also
very much like the the button isthe thing that you want them to
(05:41):
click. And sometimes I reallyfeel like people will just like
throw these together real quick.Like we'll spend weeks, months
on ebook, a guide, a checklist,demo process, training.
Let's spend three hours andtrain all the sales reps on how
(06:02):
to do. And then it's like we putthe landing page out, it's like,
blip. So we don't take the timeto do it. Right. So that's what
it's kind of always been about.
Now, we live in a world nowwhere I think we have If you're
not thinking about how AI isimpacting the creation or the
enablement of your landingpages, if you're not thinking
(06:23):
about how smart content isactually leveraged for your
landing pages, if you're notthinking about the fact that we
humans now have zero time forfluff. So think of
personalization, dynamic, moreof an experience, less of a
landing place. I'll stop there.I'll stop there.
Liz Moorehead (06:46):
Chad.
Chad Hohn (06:47):
Hi. How's it going?
Liz Moorehead (06:48):
Well,
Chad Hohn (06:51):
I, you know, I don't traditionally know if I have the
context to say, like,historically what things have
been and what are, right, orwhat are currently because I
don't really do a whole lot ofcontent marketing. But I do have
a couple, like, I wanna frameand understand where landing
pages have belonged in theworld, but I wanna do it from
(07:11):
the perspective of, like, howyou hook up landing pages to
HubSpot and stuff. Right? Solet's say using HubSpot CMS.
Right?
Well, you hook up your maindomain and then, hey, she found
Liz Moorehead (07:24):
my mouse.
Chad Hohn (07:25):
Oh, it's a great day.
Liz Moorehead (07:27):
Sick. Go.
George B. Thomas (07:31):
Okay. You know, you're winning when you're
happy about finding your mousein a day. Oh,
Liz Moorehead (07:35):
we're doing great, guys.
Chad Hohn (07:37):
Do you have to plug it in on the underneath side
real quick to charge it so youstill can't use it or is it
good? No, we're good. Okay.
Liz Moorehead (07:44):
We're good. Which one?
George B. Thomas (07:46):
If we're talking about user experience,
can I just because Chad danggone it, you derailed us? What
in what universe
Liz Moorehead (07:55):
Yeah, Chad, it was definitely not me holding up
the mouse. Way to go.
George B. Thomas (07:59):
In what universe does it make sense to
have the plug in to charge yourmouse on the bottom of the mouse
so you can't use All right,we're here to talk about
Lanikaze.
Liz Moorehead (08:10):
So I'll be perfectly honest. My mouse only
needs to be charged once every,like, four or five months, and I
just plug it in overnight, andthen I don't have to do it again
for another four to five months.
George B. Thomas (08:21):
But what if
Chad Hohn (08:21):
it actually dies when you're in the middle of
something, then you're just
Liz Moorehead (08:24):
I have multiple meses.
Chad Hohn (08:39):
That's the Apple joke. Alright. Anyway. So, like,
you hook up you see you haveHubSpot CMS. Right?
Hook up your domain to yourwebsite. And then you have
landing pages. And there's likesome level of like CMS is paid,
but you could still kinda uselanding pages a little bit, even
(09:00):
if you're not on CMS paid, ifyou have marketing hub. And then
like mark landing pages areusually intended to be hooked up
to a sub domain. So, like, youknow, landing.yourdomain.com or
whatever.
So, like, aren't landing pagesjust an extension of your CMS
(09:22):
web site in general? Really,it's just a website page. It's
just how the formatting is.That's really the only
difference, right?
George B. Thomas (09:29):
Well, see, and now you're bumping into
something that has alwaysconfused people historically. By
the way, if you have a thirdparty CMS, WordPress, Drupal,
Joomla, whatever, you're right.You go into HubSpot, it's a sub
domain. I always used to tellpeople, Listen, it should be
(09:49):
something like education. Oracademydot.
Because let's be honest, usuallythe folks that are getting
HubSpot back in the day, becauseit's marketing and they want to
be able to do landing pagesbecause they want an ebook, a
guide to check, some type ofconversion point. So, it is-
Liz Moorehead (10:10):
They want
Chad Hohn (10:10):
to be able to track it well.
George B. Thomas (10:12):
Right, and be able to track it well. So, it is
a page, but it is also a pagethat is specially built to have
different analytics than yournormal average bear, which is
again, a piece that historicallypeople didn't realize is that
CTAs were built so that youcould see they got viewed, they
got clicked, and there was asubmission on a landing page
(10:36):
afterwards. So that was theprecursor to get them there and
understand the metrics of yourcall to actions of viewed,
clicked, submitted. Then you'dget to the landing page. And
again, that's going to pull inthe information around the
conversion.
So viewed, submitted, nextsteps. So here's the thing. The
(10:59):
question that I would always getis like, so where do these live
on my website? Like, well, theylive in a sub domain, but here's
the thing. You could create apage called a resource center
and you could have cards on thatresource center and it could
then go to your landing pageswhere they could convert because
then you're going to bring themback to the website with a thing
(11:20):
called a thank you page whereyou're going to deliver.
And so like, it became a
Liz Moorehead (11:24):
whole- the CTAs your articles and other places
that you can-
George B. Thomas (11:28):
Oh my God. Yes. Yeah. So CTAs are like
Chad Hohn (11:31):
an entry point that get you out into the landing
page, and then the landing pagedoes something or has some sort
of value, and then that bringsthem back to the website.
George B. Thomas (11:42):
Yeah. And here, I got to hit upon this. By
the way, I'll give you a littlebit of behind the scenes stuff.
We had a guest in the shownotes, not here today, but in
the show notes. Our boy, Devin,saw the topic and started going
ham.
And Chad and I were evenlaughing in the green room
(12:03):
before we hit record on one ofthe things, Liz, historically,
was a best practice thatirritates the crap out of, I
think, most of us at this point.And that is historically landing
pages. You would hide thenavigation.
Liz Moorehead (12:18):
Dude, you're skipping ahead. You're
George B. Thomas (12:20):
skipping ahead. Woah. Woah. Woah. Woah.
So, alright. I'm
Chad Hohn (12:23):
I don't
George B. Thomas (12:25):
know if
Chad Hohn (12:25):
I can keep this frustration bottled
George B. Thomas (12:28):
Like, I hate my answer to the Alright. Go
ahead. Liz. Go ahead. Go ahead.
Liz. The ants ants ants antsants and then we'll die for
that. Yeah. Bottle it up. Okay.
Liz Moorehead (12:36):
Got it. Thoughts and feelings about this. So when
I think about what'sfundamentally stayed the same,
the purpose of the landing page.The landing page is to make the
pitch on the value of the thingthat you have behind the landing
page. That has not changed.
What has changed the most iswhat is considered valuable. And
(13:01):
how you tell the story of thatvalue
Chad Hohn (13:04):
is what is considered a conversion changing.
George B. Thomas (13:07):
Oh, that's that's that's probably a whole
another episode, bro. Like, tobe honest with you, I mean, my
mind goes in so many differentways because Right. I don't even
know where to start with that.I'm gonna shut up. Liz, keep
going.
Chad Hohn (13:21):
No. Sorry.
Liz Moorehead (13:22):
It's okay. It's totally okay. It's what's
fascinating about it is when youthink about the landing page, it
has existed before there was aHubSpot like landing pages are
not, you know, a HubSpotinvention. And all it has been
is you will give us someinformation, we'll give you the
thing, right? And when I take alook at how landing pages have
(13:44):
evolved in terms of bestpractices and in terms of what
we're doing on them and in termsof what we're putting behind
them, even what we're puttingbehind them has changed.
We've had whole conversations atdifferent organizations I've
worked at about like, do we evenput anything behind a gate
anymore? And we still have somepeople who are like, everything
still has to go behind a gate.But consumers are, there's a
(14:07):
higher threshold you kind ofhave to get over with them in
order to get that transaction ofinformation. Because we've had
too many years of not greatstuff behind the wall, or quite
frankly bad storytelling at thefront that doesn't tell what it
is. So those are like my highlevel thoughts, but George, you
did start going into our nextquestion and I'm very excited to
(14:31):
talk about this one because Ithink this is where we're going
to have a lot of feelings comeup.
And that's the outdated landingpage practices that people are
still clinging to. And youtapped into the number one. So
let's get back to this storyhere.
George B. Thomas (14:46):
I'm not going go with that one first though.
We'll swing back around withthat because I feel like you
guys have a bunch to say aroundit too. So, first of all, one of
the things that I have tomention that I still see, if I
get to your landing page, andyou want my right arm or my
firstborn child for the thingthat you believe is the most
valuable thing on the planetthat I can download. Meaning, if
(15:09):
you have 10 fields on your form
Yeah.
I'm I'm I'm no. I have stuff to do today. I
know that that will take me toolong. You're you're and if
especially if you're not usingprogressive profiling, right?
Meaning if it's like, youalready know my name.
I've been to your website 17times. Why is my first name not
(15:32):
in that field? Why do I have totype it again? Like, you're not
making it simple for me. You'remaking you're creating a hurdle
in the way.
So, that more fields equalsbetter lead qualification. Can I
call bull on that one? I'm justsaying more form, more feel.
Liz Moorehead (15:55):
Where's that? Whoopsie jar.
George B. Thomas (15:57):
Yeah. The what? Whoops. Whoops. We need we
need a sound effect likewhoopsie or something like that.
Little bit slip or something.Yeah.
Ow.
So yeah, let's start with that. More fields
does not equal better leadqualification, and there are
better ways to get those piecesof information over time.
(16:18):
Progressive profiling, dependentfields, queued fields. So you
don't feel like you have tocollect it all at once. You can
collect it over time.
So I'll start there and thenI'll pass the baton to somebody
else to complain about outdatedlanding page practices since I
already queued up one and maybeeven have more.
Liz Moorehead (16:37):
Chadwick hit us with it.
Chad Hohn (16:40):
Sure. I mean, I I was, you know, trying to tap
into my inner Devin when Ibecause I was thinking the same
thing before he even put it inthe notes, right, about, like,
when I get to a landing page.And I think this may go back to,
like, people are trying to builda path for the specific person
(17:01):
that they think is on theirlanding page. Right? But I'm
never that person.
Like, you know how, like, in theYouTube app or in different
Google things, they have, like,this little button called stats
for nerds. And, like, you canwatch and it shows you, like,
the real time bit rate and,like, the throughput of the
video and, like, all this, like,nerd stuff and a graph and all
(17:24):
these things. Like, cause I'mnever like the manager or the
CEO. I'm just the person who'strying to help that person. And
like when I get to a landingpage and there's no main nav, it
is the most frustrating thing.
It's like when like, when amarketer tries to send Devin an
SMS text, if you ever heard thatepisode, and when ballistic
(17:48):
talking about like, don't sendme a text. Not unless it's like
I asked you to tell me when myfood's gonna get here. Right? Or
whatever. It's like basicallythe same thing.
Like I'm stuck on this page andI can't just go explore your
website unless I literally leaveand like search your website
again. And like, at that point,I'm just gonna click on your
(18:11):
Google Ad because I'mfrustrated. You know, like, get
out of here. You're charge you 5or $10 for that just for the
privilege of making me have tocome back a second time.
George B. Thomas (18:21):
So, so let me talk about this for a second,
because I have taught this airquotes best practice. Not
recently, but for years. Andwhen we would teach this best
practice, it literally would belike, Hey, make sure you've got
your logo on the page, but it'snot linked to anywhere. You want
(18:43):
to get them to the landing page.The only thing you want is to
give them the form, make surethere's no links in your footer.
Because what we want to do withthe stupid humans is treat them
like cattle. We're going toactually herd them through the
form to get to the green pastureof the thank you page. Now I'm
(19:04):
waxing a little bit funny, butnot funny of like, that's that's
you're basically saying removeall distraction, point them in
the only place they go becausethis is how much faith we
believe that they can figureout. What? Wait.
Like, first of all, that doesn'tcome from a place of love. That
(19:25):
doesn't come from a place ofservanthood. That doesn't come
from a place of, like, good,what I would call good
marketing. Now, it a tactic andstrategy that worked back in the
day? Heck to the yes.
Is it something that I believethat we should continue to do
moving forward? I really don'tthink so. If they don't want
your ish, they don't want yourish. But at least create the ish
(19:47):
because if they want it, thenthey'll convert on it. If you
don't have 10 fields in theforum, like this is something I
believe that should die.
Honestly, my personal opinion, Ithink you should die.
Liz Moorehead (19:58):
My personal opinion? Uh-oh. Stop putting
crap behind a landing page. Likeso often the problem with your
landing page has nothing to dowith the landing page. It's what
you're trying to shove behindit.
It's garbage. If it's flimsy, ifit's one dimensional, your
landing page will be garbage,flimsy, and one dimensional.
(20:18):
It'll look like a used car salecar salesman trying to be like,
no. It's totally fine that thisMercedes is $10 Don't worry
about it. Like, that's what it'sgonna come off like.
George B. Thomas (20:26):
Never been wrecked. So, it's funny that
you're Okay, bringing that up,go ahead. It's funny that you're
bringing that up because theamount of times I've seen a
pillar page convert for somebodyto download the PDF version of
it and take it with them, Causeit wasn't behind the gate. There
was a way to add the service ofyou can take this thing with you
(20:47):
if you want, but you can readthe whole thing here. It's kind
of crazy like why more people Imean, there are some people that
are listening to this that havedone that but there are some
people listening to this stillholding on to the everything has
to be gated scenario but like,it can be ungated gated which is
fun too.
Sorry, go ahead, Liz.
Liz Moorehead (21:08):
No. That's how I've always done it. I love that
you brought up pillar pages. So,like, I've been doing pillar
pages now, jeez, for a very,very long time back when they
Chad Hohn (21:18):
used to very, times.
Liz Moorehead (21:21):
It's like That's
George B. Thomas (21:22):
funny. It's been a long time. That's how
long it's been.
Liz Moorehead (21:27):
Oopsie jar.
Chad Hohn (21:29):
Well, sorry. Was saying it was Morse code. Morse
code.
Liz Moorehead (21:32):
You literally have like 12,000 words of
whatever topic it is that you'retalking about. At the top, you
have like your introduction, youexplain what it is, then a
little tiny box that says hey ifyou want to download this PDF to
read it later, you're good gofor it. And my landing pages for
that were pillar pages regularlyhad 30% plus conversion rates,
(21:53):
which is 10% over the standardbenchmark for B2B regularly.
There's that piece of it. Theother thing I will say is the
inverse of what I just said.
You have something fantastic,fantastic behind your landing
page. And you have theflimsiest, saddest landing page
(22:15):
I've ever seen. Are you anaccountant? You'll really like
this ebook. It's aboutaccounting.
In this, will learn aboutaccounting trends. You will
learn about accounting dos anddon'ts and so much more.
Chad Hohn (22:30):
That's Do
George B. Thomas (22:32):
you know
Liz Moorehead (22:32):
what I'm saying? And they all look the same. It's
like headline, little subheader,three or four bullets. Somebody
who's like, I'm just trying tocheck this off of my to do list.
It's there's no, it'sthoughtless.
George B. Thomas (22:43):
It's like you, and this is where I get
frustrated because again, and Ileaned into this at the
beginning of this episode, butyou spend so much time creating
the awesome thing and then youturd out the piece that is most
important. Like you literallyturd out the thing that they
have to embrace it with. And sothere's no storytelling. There's
(23:04):
a weak or unclear call toaction. And this is the thing
that always used to freak me theflip out too, talk about the
CTAs on the bottom of the blogthat Liz mentioned earlier.
People will spend minutesthrowing that piece of garbage
together thinking that peopleare just going to automagically
click it. No. Like like spendseven hours on your guide and
(23:27):
then spend fourteen hours onyour call to action and your
landing page. Anyway, don'tthose aren't real numbers.
Right.
I'm just telling you
Chad Hohn (23:36):
Just ratios. Yeah. Yeah. But spend a good amount of
time on both. You gotta careabout both.
Right?
Liz Moorehead (23:41):
Yes. Yes. Now, George, I think this might be a
good time to circle back to thatstory that you wanted to tell
us.
George B. Thomas (23:47):
Oh, I the herding cattle. I did. I did.
That is that what you mean?
Liz Moorehead (23:53):
The navigation.
George B. Thomas (23:54):
Yeah. Yeah. We talked about the no navigation.
Yeah. Yeah.
Herding cattle. That was theanyway. Like,
Chad Hohn (24:00):
people aren't smart enough to figure out how to
George B. Thomas (24:02):
get the not contract trying to get herd them
cattle anymore. I'm I'm just notlisten, I'm from Montana. I'll
hop on a horse. I'll I'll herdsome cattle, just not through my
landing pages. I'm done.
Liz Moorehead (24:11):
Well, the reason why I asked that is because he
Devin, our guy mentioned oneother thing that I thought was
really powerful about like, stopdoing this.
George B. Thomas (24:21):
Yeah.
Liz Moorehead (24:21):
Which was when you go to convert on a single
thing in a landing page, like Iam here to convert on this one
piece of product, this onecontent property, whatever it is
that you're trying to give me.And one of the things that he
mentioned is like, asking for meto sign up for 18,000 other
things at the same time. Stopdoing that. Stop showing me if I
(24:42):
wanna favorite it. Stop tryingto get like I think what happens
is that marketers are like,well, while we're here, while we
have your peepers, right?
Can we get you to do these 18other things? And it's a bad
user experience. I can feel thatyou're trying to maximize that
touch point. And in some cases,simple like, would you also like
to subscribe to our newsletter?Fine.
But when we have too many otherthings going on, I think that
(25:05):
gets problematic. Because it'sless about the user experience
and more about trying tomaximize the value you're
getting from that touch point.
George B. Thomas (25:11):
During the conversion point, I totally
agree. And I've seen thoseforums where it's like four
other check boxes. I also liketo subscribe to these other 17
things. No. Yeah.
Now here's what I
Chad Hohn (25:23):
don't I just want uncheck everything.
George B. Thomas (25:24):
Oh my God. Yeah, never mind. I said, I
don't want any of it. Forget it.I'll go down the road.
Thank you. Because by the way,your offer, it does exist down
the road. There is a Target orWalmart to your like, whatever
you are. I'm just going to throwthat out there real quick. So
here's the thing.
I want to be careful because Idon't want anybody to
misconstrue something that mightbe going through their brain
(25:45):
right now. During theconversion, yes, I agree with
Devin. I agree that thereshouldn't be like these other
four additional check marks foryour other three subscription
newsletters and blah, blah,blah. Let's talk about the thing
that needs to be there. That isplease, by all that is holy, do
not just have inline text inthat form, but go to a thank you
page.
(26:06):
And when you go to the thank youpage, this is what I want to
make sure that we get out hereis, yes, the first thing should
be like, Hey, thanks for yourinterest in X, Y, Z. You give
them a big button, they caneasily download it. And by the
way, that's where a lot ofpeople's thank you pages end.
And that's not cool. Again, if Icome from a place of good
marketing, good experience,because of love, because of
(26:28):
servanthood, because I'm valuefirst, because I'm, you know,
human centric content creation,I want you to continue the
journey.
And that continuing the journeymight look different depending
on what the conversion was thatthey just had. For instance, if
I convert on an ebook, a guidedchecklist, a webinar, whatever,
the thank you page might belike, here's the thing, the
(26:49):
webinar video, the downloadbutton, whatever. But there
needs to be a journey of like,by the way, people who are
interested in this also likethese blog articles, also watch
these videos, also downloadthese other things, whatever it
is. But think of this page beingable to be a bunch of other
resources, a bunch of chooseyour own adventures, if you
(27:10):
will, for them to spend moretime educating themselves on the
thing that they're trying tolearn or the brand you that is
providing the thing that they'retrying to learn. Again, spend
more time on the experience ofthe thank you page maybe than
you did on the actual thing ordefinitely the landing page in
(27:31):
CTA.
But here's what I want to thinkin your brain is the
expectations. If this is a demo,well then what are the next
actions? What's the time frame?What's the expectations? Is
there anything I need to gather?
Do I need to bring like, so,like Yeah. Set them up for
success, whether it's througheducational journey or the next
meeting that they're gonna havewith.
Chad Hohn (27:52):
Yeah. You know what's excuse me. What's kind of
frustrating about, like, using aembedded HubSpot meeting is
because it's kind of like aniframe and it's like embedded.
Right? You it's very difficultto pass the chosen meeting time
data out to your website to useit as variables in the landing
(28:17):
page.
So, like or in the thank youpage. Like, thanks for booking
with Billy at blah blah blahtime. Right? That would be
amazing to be able to do just topersonalize some things or even
put conditions, you know,between now and your meeting,
check out these articles orwhatever. You know?
Anyway, just, like or any anyspecific topics they chose or
(28:40):
something like that that theywanted to cover could drive what
things you're gonna show them,
George B. Thomas (28:45):
You for can do some of that from, like, if they
do this in the form, then go tothis page, which then you
Chad Hohn (28:51):
could
George B. Thomas (28:51):
have some of that stuff. But I understand
what you're saying. Also, youreminded me of a thing that I
haven't talked about forever.It's like, you're using HubSpot
for your form conversion, thereis also a way that you can embed
the meeting widget in the actualinline So, text can, again, if
(29:14):
you start to think of userexperience, I can have it where
they can fill out a form and atthe same place where they filled
out a form, they can now bookthat meeting. And once they book
that meeting, I can then sendthem to a thank you page.
Like, holy crap, make it easyfor me to actually get on your
calendar.
Chad Hohn (29:30):
Without them having to fill in the data and the
meeting link again. HubSpot,like, natively added a thing
that's supposed to do that too,but you have to be on certain
plans. If you don't have somecertain plan, then you can't use
that feature.
George B. Thomas (29:41):
Yeah. As always. Started.
Chad Hohn (29:44):
So I have one more
George B. Thomas (29:45):
question too. Plans, I swear.
Chad Hohn (29:47):
I I have a question.
Liz Moorehead (29:48):
George is in a mood today.
Chad Hohn (29:49):
Yeah. Yeah. I love it. About, like okay. So gates.
Right? And just going back to,like, gating things, gating
everything, not gatingeverything, or simultaneously
gating and not gating. Right? Soyou put like a conversion to but
it's actually technically notgated or whatever. So in a world
where, like, a lot of ouranswers are not just coming from
(30:14):
Google search, but they'recoming from Google Scraper bot
at the top, and people aren'tactually going into web pages as
much.
If your content is behind thegate and Google makes scraper
bot isn't gonna fill out yourform to get your content to give
said answers, then are youshooting yourself in the foot?
(30:37):
Because then the AI models thatactually scrape public content
aren't going to be able to haveanswers and cite you as a
source.
George B. Thomas (30:46):
So it's it's in well, your question
Chad Hohn (30:50):
I know that's like evolving right now.
George B. Thomas (30:51):
Yeah. Your your question leads me into a
couple of different places. One,it is definitely another push
for the pillar page landing pagewhere they can take the PDF with
them, because again, you'reputting the content out there.
It also is something where Iwould just fundamentally think
about the process in how you'reshowing up for the world as
(31:12):
well. Do I want to talk aboutthis?
Do I want to talk about this?Yeah. So listen, one of the
things that you can do right nowis you can go to
georgebthomas.com/helper, andyou'll see a page that you can
hit a button and it'll take youto another page where you can
(31:38):
start to ask any question thatyou want to my clone. Now, why
am I bringing up my clone? One,when you have a clone that holds
all of the content that you'veever created, you start to
create content in a differentway.
When you have a clone thatpeople, after a certain amount
of messages for free, they putin their email address so they
(32:01):
can continue to get the valueout of all the content you've
created. You start to thinkabout conversion in a different
way and value based on thecontent you're creating. Because
you know that the conversion istaken care of and you're adding
value first through the clonethat you've created based on the
content you've created over thelast twelve years, you also
realize that you create contentdifferent because you're not so
(32:24):
much worried about the contentor the download, but the use of
the content or the download thatonce was there. And here's the
fun part is that inside of thissystem, can also just
fundamentally, if they mention aword, you can give them the
guide in there because youalready know that they've
(32:47):
already converted. So, forinstance, you might be able to
go over to My Clone and mentionsomething like WordPress versus
HubSpot CMS.
Guess what we have? We have onthe website a gated version and
a pillar page gated version ofthat. But if you're already
talking to the clone and youmention it, it'll actually serve
(33:08):
you a link just to download thedang PDF. Here's another thing
I'll say. This is, and again,I'm going sideways, when you
start to think about what'sfundamentally changing around
this, the fact that you can nowhave sales sequences that align
to campaigns that could usedocuments that are the marketing
PDFs, you start to think aboutthe conversion differently
(33:31):
because the reporting actuallyis swinging back on the hind end
of being able to see what solike we live in a world where we
need to start just rethinking itall.
Chad Hohn (33:40):
Yeah. It's not just website into CRM is conversion
anymore. It's it's marketingcontent into customer,
ultimately.
George B. Thomas (33:49):
Yeah. And listen, I've been this isn't the
first time I played with this. Iliterally had a I won't I won't
drop their name, but I had amajor player in the HubSpot,
like in HubSpot, say, I reallylove your conversion strategy
with your community. What do youmean? I'm just building a
community.
(34:09):
Oh, no, no, no. You'regenerating emails. Woah, of
course I am, But I'm building acommunity. No, no, no. That's
slick how you make it do this.
Then they go here. And then I'mlike, well, I'm a marketer.
Like, you know, but here's thething. Like, you've got it's
evolving. Right?
(34:29):
So by the way, I didn't I'mgonna step out on a limb. I know
this is about landing pages, butI'm getting to the place where I
even am curious about communityin the next couple years, to be
honest with you. And I'm thecommunity guy. I start to ask
myself, do I need to have acommunity if I have a clone? And
(34:52):
did people sign up for thecommunity to get access to me
and the education?
If that lives somewhere elsestreamlined and more optimized,
would they go there instead ofhere? Like, anyway, let's get
back to landing pages. That wasa rant.
Liz Moorehead (35:07):
No, that was really interesting. But here's
the thing. I actually want toYou started talking a little bit
about AI there, bud. I want tostay on the AI train a second,
but more from a toolsperspective, right? Because
HubSpot has rolled out a lot ofnew AI driven tools and smart
content features, and smartcontent features have been
(35:28):
around for a while.
George B. Thomas (35:28):
Just one How
Liz Moorehead (35:29):
can businesses, based on what we're discussing
in terms of what value trulylooks like today, how can
businesses actually leveragethese to optimize landing pages
in a way that probably wasn'tpossible five years ago?
George B. Thomas (35:42):
Well, I mean, listen, not all of us are a Liz
or name your favorite writer. SoAI is getting really good at
creating copy in a way thatfundamentally it's better than
many mere mortal humans whocan't afford to have a content
(36:02):
strategist or a writer on staff.It's just going to make it
better because you could listento an episode like this, or you
could do a Google search and youcould get the information that
is landing page copy bestpractices, storytelling best
practices, and then be able tocreate copy that you look at and
(36:23):
go, Wow, that's way better thanI would have written it. So,
just in that alone. And thenalso getting it to look at like,
Hey, I've created this landingpage and this is the call to
action.
Can you tell me if this isamazing or does it suck kind
wind? By the way, doesn't careabout hurting your feelings. If
(36:46):
you ask it a legit question, itmight be like, well, this could
probably do some help. Right.And so like doing that, I think
is even interesting.
By the way, that's
Liz Moorehead (36:57):
always a humbling experience, even for me as a
writer. So I don't use it from agenerative perspective, but I do
have it take a look at thingsthat I've created. Like, give me
the little once the over, right?And there have been moments
where it's like, So if youconsider it the opposite of
everything you've just given me,and that is deeply humbling.
Yeah.
George B. Thomas (37:16):
So here's the thing I'll throw in here too.
Because we have talked aboutbrand voice and AI content and
AI settings. I don't want totalk a lot about it yet because
I haven't started playing withit. But I have had communication
as of yesterday with a PM thatis unlocking the next version of
(37:41):
AI powered content creation inmy portal. So they're just like
we had wished they're goingdeeper with what they built,
they're going deeper with whatthey built.
So I think this
Chad Hohn (37:54):
they can watch be her episode? Did they watch her
episode? It sounds
George B. Thomas (37:58):
like it. Maybe. I mean, who knows? But
they're going deeper. There's abeta and I'm super excited.
And so again, you have to thinkabout how can you use AI to
create better copy, better callto actions, better experiences.
And you have to fundamentallyunderstand that you can train it
(38:21):
on what are all of the bestpractices. And then you can
tweak it as a human to what youbelieve to be the best practices
for your organization. By theway, this whole conversation, we
can't do this conversation andbe like, By the way, this is a
one size fits all landing pageepisode. Now, these are things
that you should think about andthen tweak and make it for your
(38:43):
organization.
You might need to gateeverything. You might need to
not gate a dang thing. Like, itdepends. Hi.
Chad Hohn (38:53):
Yeah. I love I actually was reading through
Devin's, like, little footnotes,and I really like what he was
mentioning about, like, you justdon't have to be developer or
full beans designer anymore. Youcan get a lot of that context.
Like, if I had to, I couldprobably do fairly decent
utilizing either a some ofHubSpot's tools or other
(39:14):
resources, AI driven resourcesout there just to give me a leg
up and to be able to make aneffective marketing campaign. It
might take me a while if Iwanted to just not put out
mediocre dump, you know, ontothe Internet because you have to
do a lot of follow-up and makesure that, you know, you're
you're having it help youconsider stuff you just don't
(39:35):
know.
Because when you're doingsomething new for the first
time, you have all these unknownunknowns in what you're doing.
Right? And so I was alwaysasking that second, what am I
not thinking about is a really,really key thing when working
with, like, those AI kind oftools. It'll really help you
consider stuff you never thoughtof. And being able to do it
(39:55):
quickly is also, you know, likeI mean, if I had to learn all
that, it's literally whatJordan's just talking about.
Like, if I had to learn all thaton my own and go into a whole
new skill set, it would take meforever in a day to really put
out something that I was proudof. Right? But anyway, I mean,
yeah, I think I think it's justit's such a leg up.
George B. Thomas (40:15):
And by the way, let's not even talk about
because, again, the landing pageis about the conversion. We
already said that hasn'tchanged. Think about, like, lead
scoring based on thatconversion. Also think about
HubSpot having the chatbots oror think of, like, a
conversational form. Or thinkabout the fact that you probably
have landing pages out thereright now that have the old
HubSpot legacy form.
And what would happen if youactually turned that into a
(40:37):
multi step form? There's so manydifferent things that you could
go and tweak and change, andthere's next steps or outcomes
workflows based on theconversion. Like, how many
people out there right now havea landing page that when they
fill out a form, it's in linetext to a link to where they can
(40:58):
download the freaking guide,versus a landing page that goes
to a thank you page thattriggers a workflow that sends a
three email series that then nowyou all said you can score on,
did they open any of those threeemails and they filled out the
form and how much time did theyspend on the thank you page? And
did they go to any otherresources off of that thank you
(41:21):
page? And how much time did theyspend there?
And like, now all of a suddenyou're starting to pay attention
to like the journey of the humanand the score of the
Chad Hohn (41:31):
Yeah. Like, I like thinking about the journey of
what the person's going through.Because, like, a lot of times
we're just like, okay. I'm gonnafind somebody who's gonna be a
project manager for a thing, andthey're gonna find my page, and
they're gonna go here, andthey're gonna see something
valuable and great. You know,but, like, actually thinking
about their whole experience ofgoing through that, literally,
like, we're just talking aboutof having the form feed a
(41:54):
meeting link.
And then, like, ultimately, I'dlove to have that, you know,
meeting data feed the landingpage to give a wonderful
experience all the way through.Right? And, like, thinking about
that perspective, I think, iswhat what is really changing
with landing pages and stufftoo. Because actually caring
(42:16):
about the person going throughthe journey helps them feel like
they're not just a part of yourengine to churn out leads.
Right?
George B. Thomas (42:26):
Yeah. Yeah.
Liz Moorehead (42:27):
I agree with that.
George B. Thomas (42:28):
So one of the things I did and same. So one of
the things I did before we runout of time, Liz, you got me on
this kick of like bestpractices, frameworks, mindsets.
Like, you know, like we talkedabout this two years ago and I'm
just kind of, so I was curiousbecause I had never really heard
(42:50):
amazingly, like about HubSpottalk about like a framework for
landing pages. And so I waslike, hey, let's see if there's
a framework out there. And sowider funnel, a Lyft model, you
guys can look this up and let meknow what you're But at the end
of the day, they have six thingsthat you might want to pay
(43:14):
attention to.
So, value proposition, right?So, is the offer compelling and
clearly communicated? This iswhy I have many conversations
with Liz, like, Liz, am Iclearly like, do people
understand or am I just beingWell, stupid the thing.
Liz Moorehead (43:32):
I love that you brought that up. I just want to
add a quick thing in here. Wemake an assumption that the
value will be obvious. We makean assumption that when people
show up to evaluate whether ornot they want to give us their
personal information forsomething, that the value we are
presenting is obvious and ourtrust has already been earned.
(43:53):
No, absolutely not.
George B. Thomas (43:55):
Yeah. So value proposition is the offer
compelling and clearlycommunicated. Clarity is the
message easy to understand anddoes it quickly explain the
benefits, benefit. Love
Liz Moorehead (44:08):
those Bennies. We love
George B. Thomas (44:09):
those To the reader, by the way, not to you.
The next one is relevance. Doesthe landing page match
expectations of the visitor fromthe ad, the email, whatever
referral sources? Does it makesense? Urgency.
Is there a reason to act now?Limited time offer, deadline,
scarcity, some type of peace inthere. Anxiety. This one is
(44:35):
there trust signals, securityassurances, and testimonials to
reduce hesitation? Then
Liz Moorehead (44:40):
number Oh, one my six favorite things that I've
seen is like when people putlanding page videos on their
landing pages, and they'reliterally like, I'm literally
just going to use your email forthis newsletter, and then I'm
never going to use it foranything else. And I'm not going
to sell it. And that's it.That's all that's going to
happen.
George B. Thomas (44:56):
Yeah.
Liz Moorehead (44:56):
The only thing I will say though, about the
creating urgency, I somewhatdisagree with that. I think if
there is no urgency, don't fakeit.
George B. Thomas (45:04):
Oh yeah. Yeah.
Liz Moorehead (45:06):
But I also think sometimes instead of creating
urge, I think sometimes when wethink of the idea of creating
urgency, we think around it fromthe perspective of, well, it's a
limited time or it's a thing orit's this. Actually think about
the urgency that's happening intheir world. Right? Create
urgency around their pain point.Again, not scare tactics.
Yeah. But like, If you have XYZquestions, these questions, XYZ,
(45:31):
the answers are right here.Yeah. This is what you need. Is
going to take this exponentialpain and make it bitty, right?
Like just speak to the truth.And I think that's where the
urgency comes from.
George B. Thomas (45:43):
I totally agree. I love that. And so
number six is distraction. So uphere as listeners, what I would
want you to do is grab yournotepad, a document, and go to
your landing pages later todayand look value proposition,
clarity, relevance, urgency,anxiety, distraction. Okay, let
(46:03):
me put it up against thisframework and see where they
stand and what do I need totweak or change and and how will
that impact, you know, nextquarter, next year, all of that,
these changes that you mightmake.
Good. Good.
Liz Moorehead (46:16):
So, guys, here's what we're going to do. We made
a joke about it earlier, abouthow we've done multiple episodes
about multiple things. Guesswhat we're going to be talking
about next week, guys? Landingpages. Because we only got
through half of our questionstoday.
George B. Thomas (46:30):
Half.
Liz Moorehead (46:31):
And quite frankly, this conversation we've
had has led me to otherquestions I want to ask you. We
haven't talked about landingpages in the shortened attention
span era. We haven't even gottento AB testing. I have a whole
monologue about smart contentthat we're not going get into
today. Guys, I'm really excitedwe started this I want you both
(46:53):
to think about you guys havehomework for this week, and so
do I.
Uh-oh. Find great landing pages.Wow. And find not so great
landing pages. We're not in thebusiness of naming names and
calling people out, but comewith some examples.
That's what we're looking fornext week. I know. Look at you,
George.
Chad Hohn (47:13):
I mean, there's
George B. Thomas (47:15):
a chance You're
Liz Moorehead (47:15):
dealing with landing pages every day.
George B. Thomas (47:17):
There's a plethora of ways that I could
probably get us canceled justThat's
Liz Moorehead (47:22):
why we don't name names. We don't name names.
We're here to encourage growthand learning opportunities. And
I say this as a woman who gotyelled at by AI once about her
own writing capabilities. We'refine.
But with that George, as we endpart one of our landing pages
journey, what do you want peopleto be walking away with today?
Whether that's one thing or fivethings, I'm feeling generous.
George B. Thomas (47:43):
Oh, wow. That's nice of you. Because I
had multiple. One of the thingsis definitely use that framework
that we talked about, But I wantyou, when you're using that
framework, I want you to thinkabout your landing page in this
way too. Is it focused on onesingle goal?
(48:04):
We kind of jokingly talked abouthow it's like, and these three
other subscriptions in thisthing. What is the one thing?
What's its job to do, right? Andthen, is it doing that, first of
all? Yes, no.
Okay, well, we need to fix that.Now, let's use the framework to
go ahead and hone in on theother pieces. My second one that
(48:24):
I just can't let go is use thankyou pages, and thank you pages
should continue the journey, notend it. So many thank you pages
I get to feel like it's justlike the destination, the
parking lot for theconversation, thank you pages
have to continue the journey. Golook at all your thank you
(48:47):
pages.
If you're not saying thingslike, Here's additional
webinars, here's additionalpodcasts, here's additional
videos, here's additional blogarticles, then you need to be
doing that. By the way, by theway, you have to create that to
be able to send them to it. I'mjust saying. Start creating that
now
Liz Moorehead (49:07):
so that you can
George B. Thomas (49:08):
act anyway.
Liz Moorehead (49:10):
You know this mean no. You know that this
means we need an episode aboutthank you pages. Right? Just
throw that out there.
George B. Thomas (49:15):
Well, we need a we need an episode to get
these people generate anyway,never mind.
Liz Moorehead (49:19):
I have We need an episode. I I have like what?
George B. Thomas (49:24):
Have such an interesting conversation. Want
to have around sitting at atable and somebody seeing my
clone being created based ontwelve years of historical
content creation to which theyimmediately said, I need to
(49:46):
start creating contentyesterday. And since the meeting
that we had, have beenaggressively creating content
because it was an unlock forthem. Like so many organizations
I bump into that are usingHubSpot and they don't have the
inbound engine. They don't havehuman centric value first
content creation like soul.
(50:09):
Not why we're here. Anyway, gocheck out your landing pages.
Make sure your thank you pagescontinue on the journey and let
us know if you found a thank youpage that you just want us or
landing page that you want us torip apart in front of everybody
because I doubt if you want it,but but we'll do it. Okay, hub
heroes. We've reached the end ofanother episode.
(50:31):
Will Lord Lack continue to loomover the community or will we be
able to defeat him in the nextepisode of the hub heroes
podcast? Make sure you tune inand find out in the next
episode. Make sure you head overto the hubheroes.com to get the
latest episodes and become partof the league of heroes. FYI, if
(50:52):
you're part of the league ofheroes, you'll get the show
notes right in your inbox andthey come with some hidden power
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Leave a review if you like whatyou're listening to and use the
hashtag hashtag hub heroespodcast on any of the socials
and let us know what strategyconversation you'd like to
(51:13):
listen into next. Until nexttime, when we meet and combine
our forces, remember to be ahappy, helpful, humble human,
and of course, be looking for away to be someone's hero.
Do you live in a world filled with corporate
data? Are you plagued by siloedapartments? Are your lackluster
growth strategies demolishingyour chances for success? Are
you held captive by the evilmenace, lord lack, lack of time,
lack of strategy, and lack ofthe most important and powerful
(00:22):
tool in your superhero toolbelt? Knowledge.
Never fear hub heroes. Get readyto don your cape and mask, move
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Tune in each week to join theleague of extraordinary inbound
heroes as we help you educate,empower, and execute. Hub
(00:46):
Heroes, it's time to unite andactivate your powers.
By the way, if anybody's wondering, I don't
have a bunion, and we arerecording today. Although, Liz,
it feels like the Internetgremlins do not want this
episode to come out, and it'scrazy, but let's let's roll with
this.
Liz Moorehead (01:05):
Like, it's actually making me wonder if the
reason why we haven't talkedabout this topic yet is some
sort of big sprocket conspiracy,like somebody doesn't want this
information to get out.
George B. Thomas (01:17):
I know. Somebody doesn't want us
Liz Moorehead (01:19):
to talk about this because we actually have a
hilarious problem guys. So lastweek I was doing a little
auditing of our topics, Justtaking a look at things we had
done, things we hadn't done.
George B. Thomas (01:30):
We've done a lot by the way.
Liz Moorehead (01:32):
We have done a lot and we've done so much that
sometimes we'll come back andtalk about things multiple times
from multiple angles. Hadmultiple HubSpot email tool
episodes, multiple HubSpotsocial media tools, multiple
commerce hub.
George B. Thomas (01:47):
I mean, Jack Cooper Smith has been on the
show three times. Let's justthrow that out there.
Liz Moorehead (01:52):
Yes, he has. And guys, do you know what we
haven't done?
George B. Thomas (01:57):
I feel so bad right now. I feel like I'm going
get judged by the entirecommunity right now.
Liz Moorehead (02:02):
We have literally never spoken a single breath of
oxygen about landing pagesbefore. Landing pages.
George B. Thomas (02:11):
I don't understand how this is that we
have never I talked
Liz Moorehead (02:15):
about don't either. We've even talked about
the blogging tool twice, guys.
George B. Thomas (02:20):
No. No. Yes. Yes. We have we went into
settings and talked about AIsettings.
Liz Moorehead (02:28):
And an individual episode per setting.
George B. Thomas (02:33):
And not landing pages.
What?
Liz Moorehead (02:39):
I'm not mad. I'm just disappointed and mad. Do
you get what I'm saying?
Chad Hohn (02:44):
That's before I got here.
Liz Moorehead (02:47):
Chad, you didn't know you were in
Chad Hohn (02:48):
the studio audience. Don't to blame.
Liz Moorehead (02:50):
Nope. You were in the studio audience, and not
once did we get a little Chadnote that said, hey. Have you
guys ever thought about talkingabout landing pages? Right? Nice
try, Kima.
Chad Hohn (02:59):
Nobody really helped myself. With landing pages was
when somebody wants to store acookie in the browser or do
something weird, you know.That's funny. Technical code
wise. They don't ask me aboutthat kind of stuff.
So wasn't even on my radar,
Liz Moorehead (03:13):
if I'm
Chad Hohn (03:13):
gonna be completely honest.
George B. Thomas (03:14):
If the words hidden field and cookie come up,
then Chad gets tagged in.
Chad Hohn (03:19):
Yeah, exactly.
Liz Moorehead (03:20):
Fantastic. I'm looking for a dialogue between
you and me too, which is gonnabe great. Well, I
Chad Hohn (03:26):
got I got questions.
George B. Thomas (03:27):
The third party caller that just called in
from your desktop.
Liz Moorehead (03:31):
Spam question mark telemarketer. I'm sure they
have a lot to say about landingpages. You know what guys?
George B. Thomas (03:37):
Doing great today.
Liz Moorehead (03:38):
We're doing great today, but we are finally
bringing oxygen, some light tothis very necessary topic.
Landing pages are buildingblocks in the inbound world.
They are foundational. They areto the point where I would
probably say they are taken forgranted, much in the way that we
overlooked them. So today thatends, we are diving into the
(04:00):
evolution of landing pages.
What's changed, what hasn't, andwhat sales and marketing teams
need to be thinking about whenbuilding high performing landing
pages in HubSpot. We're ready?
Chad Hohn (04:11):
Yeah.
Liz Moorehead (04:12):
Let's do these. All right, so I want to start by
looking backward. Landing pageshave been around forever, not
just in inbound marketing, justin marketing in general. Yeah.
From your perspective, andGeorge, I'll start with you.
What has fundamentally remainedthe same and what has changed
the most?
George B. Thomas (04:31):
Well, I mean, listen, the reason that we
might've forgot about these isbecause most mere mortal humans
think of them in simple terms ordon't even think of them at all,
or definitely don't think ofthem in a pair of pages because
literally we're like, let's talkabout landing pages. Well, it
has to be landing pages andthank you pages, by the way, but
(04:53):
we'll get to that. It's alwaysbeen about this focused
conversion that hasn't changed.Like, there's this thing and we
need them to know them aboutthis thing. And it's also always
been about capturing attentionand then being able to
communicate the value of what itis on the page quickly and then
(05:17):
drive a specific action.
So, if you think about it, howdo we have this focused thing
that grabs attention,communicates the value, and
drives them to the action thatwe want? Like, and so you'll
hear like call to action. When Isay call to action on the
landing page, though, it's it'ssomewhat copy, but it's also
very much like the the button isthe thing that you want them to
(05:41):
click. And sometimes I reallyfeel like people will just like
throw these together real quick.Like we'll spend weeks, months
on ebook, a guide, a checklist,demo process, training.
Let's spend three hours andtrain all the sales reps on how
(06:02):
to do. And then it's like we putthe landing page out, it's like,
blip. So we don't take the timeto do it. Right. So that's what
it's kind of always been about.
Now, we live in a world nowwhere I think we have If you're
not thinking about how AI isimpacting the creation or the
enablement of your landingpages, if you're not thinking
(06:23):
about how smart content isactually leveraged for your
landing pages, if you're notthinking about the fact that we
humans now have zero time forfluff. So think of
personalization, dynamic, moreof an experience, less of a
landing place. I'll stop there.I'll stop there.
Liz Moorehead (06:46):
Chad.
Chad Hohn (06:47):
Hi. How's it going?
Liz Moorehead (06:48):
Well,
Chad Hohn (06:51):
I, you know, I don't traditionally know if I have the
context to say, like,historically what things have
been and what are, right, orwhat are currently because I
don't really do a whole lot ofcontent marketing. But I do have
a couple, like, I wanna frameand understand where landing
pages have belonged in theworld, but I wanna do it from
(07:11):
the perspective of, like, howyou hook up landing pages to
HubSpot and stuff. Right? Solet's say using HubSpot CMS.
Right?
Well, you hook up your maindomain and then, hey, she found
Liz Moorehead (07:24):
my mouse.
Chad Hohn (07:25):
Oh, it's a great day.
Liz Moorehead (07:27):
Sick. Go.
George B. Thomas (07:31):
Okay. You know, you're winning when you're
happy about finding your mousein a day. Oh,
Liz Moorehead (07:35):
we're doing great, guys.
Chad Hohn (07:37):
Do you have to plug it in on the underneath side
real quick to charge it so youstill can't use it or is it
good? No, we're good. Okay.
Liz Moorehead (07:44):
We're good. Which one?
George B. Thomas (07:46):
If we're talking about user experience,
can I just because Chad danggone it, you derailed us? What
in what universe
Liz Moorehead (07:55):
Yeah, Chad, it was definitely not me holding up
the mouse. Way to go.
George B. Thomas (07:59):
In what universe does it make sense to
have the plug in to charge yourmouse on the bottom of the mouse
so you can't use All right,we're here to talk about
Lanikaze.
Liz Moorehead (08:10):
So I'll be perfectly honest. My mouse only
needs to be charged once every,like, four or five months, and I
just plug it in overnight, andthen I don't have to do it again
for another four to five months.
George B. Thomas (08:21):
But what if
Chad Hohn (08:21):
it actually dies when you're in the middle of
something, then you're just
Liz Moorehead (08:24):
I have multiple meses.
Chad Hohn (08:39):
That's the Apple joke. Alright. Anyway. So, like,
you hook up you see you haveHubSpot CMS. Right?
Hook up your domain to yourwebsite. And then you have
landing pages. And there's likesome level of like CMS is paid,
but you could still kinda uselanding pages a little bit, even
(09:00):
if you're not on CMS paid, ifyou have marketing hub. And then
like mark landing pages areusually intended to be hooked up
to a sub domain. So, like, youknow, landing.yourdomain.com or
whatever.
So, like, aren't landing pagesjust an extension of your CMS
(09:22):
web site in general? Really,it's just a website page. It's
just how the formatting is.That's really the only
difference, right?
George B. Thomas (09:29):
Well, see, and now you're bumping into
something that has alwaysconfused people historically. By
the way, if you have a thirdparty CMS, WordPress, Drupal,
Joomla, whatever, you're right.You go into HubSpot, it's a sub
domain. I always used to tellpeople, Listen, it should be
(09:49):
something like education. Oracademydot.
Because let's be honest, usuallythe folks that are getting
HubSpot back in the day, becauseit's marketing and they want to
be able to do landing pagesbecause they want an ebook, a
guide to check, some type ofconversion point. So, it is-
Liz Moorehead (10:10):
They want
Chad Hohn (10:10):
to be able to track it well.
George B. Thomas (10:12):
Right, and be able to track it well. So, it is
a page, but it is also a pagethat is specially built to have
different analytics than yournormal average bear, which is
again, a piece that historicallypeople didn't realize is that
CTAs were built so that youcould see they got viewed, they
got clicked, and there was asubmission on a landing page
(10:36):
afterwards. So that was theprecursor to get them there and
understand the metrics of yourcall to actions of viewed,
clicked, submitted. Then you'dget to the landing page. And
again, that's going to pull inthe information around the
conversion.
So viewed, submitted, nextsteps. So here's the thing. The
(10:59):
question that I would always getis like, so where do these live
on my website? Like, well, theylive in a sub domain, but here's
the thing. You could create apage called a resource center
and you could have cards on thatresource center and it could
then go to your landing pageswhere they could convert because
then you're going to bring themback to the website with a thing
(11:20):
called a thank you page whereyou're going to deliver.
And so like, it became a
Liz Moorehead (11:24):
whole- the CTAs your articles and other places
that you can-
George B. Thomas (11:28):
Oh my God. Yes. Yeah. So CTAs are like
Chad Hohn (11:31):
an entry point that get you out into the landing
page, and then the landing pagedoes something or has some sort
of value, and then that bringsthem back to the website.
George B. Thomas (11:42):
Yeah. And here, I got to hit upon this. By
the way, I'll give you a littlebit of behind the scenes stuff.
We had a guest in the shownotes, not here today, but in
the show notes. Our boy, Devin,saw the topic and started going
ham.
And Chad and I were evenlaughing in the green room
(12:03):
before we hit record on one ofthe things, Liz, historically,
was a best practice thatirritates the crap out of, I
think, most of us at this point.And that is historically landing
pages. You would hide thenavigation.
Liz Moorehead (12:18):
Dude, you're skipping ahead. You're
George B. Thomas (12:20):
skipping ahead. Woah. Woah. Woah. Woah.
So, alright. I'm
Chad Hohn (12:23):
I don't
George B. Thomas (12:25):
know if
Chad Hohn (12:25):
I can keep this frustration bottled
George B. Thomas (12:28):
Like, I hate my answer to the Alright. Go
ahead. Liz. Go ahead. Go ahead.
Liz. The ants ants ants antsants and then we'll die for
that. Yeah. Bottle it up. Okay.
Liz Moorehead (12:36):
Got it. Thoughts and feelings about this. So when
I think about what'sfundamentally stayed the same,
the purpose of the landing page.The landing page is to make the
pitch on the value of the thingthat you have behind the landing
page. That has not changed.
What has changed the most iswhat is considered valuable. And
(13:01):
how you tell the story of thatvalue
Chad Hohn (13:04):
is what is considered a conversion changing.
George B. Thomas (13:07):
Oh, that's that's that's probably a whole
another episode, bro. Like, tobe honest with you, I mean, my
mind goes in so many differentways because Right. I don't even
know where to start with that.I'm gonna shut up. Liz, keep
going.
Chad Hohn (13:21):
No. Sorry.
Liz Moorehead (13:22):
It's okay. It's totally okay. It's what's
fascinating about it is when youthink about the landing page, it
has existed before there was aHubSpot like landing pages are
not, you know, a HubSpotinvention. And all it has been
is you will give us someinformation, we'll give you the
thing, right? And when I take alook at how landing pages have
(13:44):
evolved in terms of bestpractices and in terms of what
we're doing on them and in termsof what we're putting behind
them, even what we're puttingbehind them has changed.
We've had whole conversations atdifferent organizations I've
worked at about like, do we evenput anything behind a gate
anymore? And we still have somepeople who are like, everything
still has to go behind a gate.But consumers are, there's a
(14:07):
higher threshold you kind ofhave to get over with them in
order to get that transaction ofinformation. Because we've had
too many years of not greatstuff behind the wall, or quite
frankly bad storytelling at thefront that doesn't tell what it
is. So those are like my highlevel thoughts, but George, you
did start going into our nextquestion and I'm very excited to
(14:31):
talk about this one because Ithink this is where we're going
to have a lot of feelings comeup.
And that's the outdated landingpage practices that people are
still clinging to. And youtapped into the number one. So
let's get back to this storyhere.
George B. Thomas (14:46):
I'm not going go with that one first though.
We'll swing back around withthat because I feel like you
guys have a bunch to say aroundit too. So, first of all, one of
the things that I have tomention that I still see, if I
get to your landing page, andyou want my right arm or my
firstborn child for the thingthat you believe is the most
valuable thing on the planetthat I can download. Meaning, if
(15:09):
you have 10 fields on your form
Yeah.
I'm I'm I'm no. I have stuff to do today. I
know that that will take me toolong. You're you're and if
especially if you're not usingprogressive profiling, right?
Meaning if it's like, youalready know my name.
I've been to your website 17times. Why is my first name not
(15:32):
in that field? Why do I have totype it again? Like, you're not
making it simple for me. You'remaking you're creating a hurdle
in the way.
So, that more fields equalsbetter lead qualification. Can I
call bull on that one? I'm justsaying more form, more feel.
Liz Moorehead (15:55):
Where's that? Whoopsie jar.
George B. Thomas (15:57):
Yeah. The what? Whoops. Whoops. We need we
need a sound effect likewhoopsie or something like that.
Little bit slip or something.Yeah.
Ow.
So yeah, let's start with that. More fields
does not equal better leadqualification, and there are
better ways to get those piecesof information over time.
(16:18):
Progressive profiling, dependentfields, queued fields. So you
don't feel like you have tocollect it all at once. You can
collect it over time.
So I'll start there and thenI'll pass the baton to somebody
else to complain about outdatedlanding page practices since I
already queued up one and maybeeven have more.
Liz Moorehead (16:37):
Chadwick hit us with it.
Chad Hohn (16:40):
Sure. I mean, I I was, you know, trying to tap
into my inner Devin when Ibecause I was thinking the same
thing before he even put it inthe notes, right, about, like,
when I get to a landing page.And I think this may go back to,
like, people are trying to builda path for the specific person
(17:01):
that they think is on theirlanding page. Right? But I'm
never that person.
Like, you know how, like, in theYouTube app or in different
Google things, they have, like,this little button called stats
for nerds. And, like, you canwatch and it shows you, like,
the real time bit rate and,like, the throughput of the
video and, like, all this, like,nerd stuff and a graph and all
(17:24):
these things. Like, cause I'mnever like the manager or the
CEO. I'm just the person who'strying to help that person. And
like when I get to a landingpage and there's no main nav, it
is the most frustrating thing.
It's like when like, when amarketer tries to send Devin an
SMS text, if you ever heard thatepisode, and when ballistic
(17:48):
talking about like, don't sendme a text. Not unless it's like
I asked you to tell me when myfood's gonna get here. Right? Or
whatever. It's like basicallythe same thing.
Like I'm stuck on this page andI can't just go explore your
website unless I literally leaveand like search your website
again. And like, at that point,I'm just gonna click on your
(18:11):
Google Ad because I'mfrustrated. You know, like, get
out of here. You're charge you 5or $10 for that just for the
privilege of making me have tocome back a second time.
George B. Thomas (18:21):
So, so let me talk about this for a second,
because I have taught this airquotes best practice. Not
recently, but for years. Andwhen we would teach this best
practice, it literally would belike, Hey, make sure you've got
your logo on the page, but it'snot linked to anywhere. You want
(18:43):
to get them to the landing page.The only thing you want is to
give them the form, make surethere's no links in your footer.
Because what we want to do withthe stupid humans is treat them
like cattle. We're going toactually herd them through the
form to get to the green pastureof the thank you page. Now I'm
(19:04):
waxing a little bit funny, butnot funny of like, that's that's
you're basically saying removeall distraction, point them in
the only place they go becausethis is how much faith we
believe that they can figureout. What? Wait.
Like, first of all, that doesn'tcome from a place of love. That
(19:25):
doesn't come from a place ofservanthood. That doesn't come
from a place of, like, good,what I would call good
marketing. Now, it a tactic andstrategy that worked back in the
day? Heck to the yes.
Is it something that I believethat we should continue to do
moving forward? I really don'tthink so. If they don't want
your ish, they don't want yourish. But at least create the ish
(19:47):
because if they want it, thenthey'll convert on it. If you
don't have 10 fields in theforum, like this is something I
believe that should die.
Honestly, my personal opinion, Ithink you should die.
Liz Moorehead (19:58):
My personal opinion? Uh-oh. Stop putting
crap behind a landing page. Likeso often the problem with your
landing page has nothing to dowith the landing page. It's what
you're trying to shove behindit.
It's garbage. If it's flimsy, ifit's one dimensional, your
landing page will be garbage,flimsy, and one dimensional.
(20:18):
It'll look like a used car salecar salesman trying to be like,
no. It's totally fine that thisMercedes is $10 Don't worry
about it. Like, that's what it'sgonna come off like.
George B. Thomas (20:26):
Never been wrecked. So, it's funny that
you're Okay, bringing that up,go ahead. It's funny that you're
bringing that up because theamount of times I've seen a
pillar page convert for somebodyto download the PDF version of
it and take it with them, Causeit wasn't behind the gate. There
was a way to add the service ofyou can take this thing with you
(20:47):
if you want, but you can readthe whole thing here. It's kind
of crazy like why more people Imean, there are some people that
are listening to this that havedone that but there are some
people listening to this stillholding on to the everything has
to be gated scenario but like,it can be ungated gated which is
fun too.
Sorry, go ahead, Liz.
Liz Moorehead (21:08):
No. That's how I've always done it. I love that
you brought up pillar pages. So,like, I've been doing pillar
pages now, jeez, for a very,very long time back when they
Chad Hohn (21:18):
used to very, times.
Liz Moorehead (21:21):
It's like That's
George B. Thomas (21:22):
funny. It's been a long time. That's how
long it's been.
Liz Moorehead (21:27):
Oopsie jar.
Chad Hohn (21:29):
Well, sorry. Was saying it was Morse code. Morse
code.
Liz Moorehead (21:32):
You literally have like 12,000 words of
whatever topic it is that you'retalking about. At the top, you
have like your introduction, youexplain what it is, then a
little tiny box that says hey ifyou want to download this PDF to
read it later, you're good gofor it. And my landing pages for
that were pillar pages regularlyhad 30% plus conversion rates,
(21:53):
which is 10% over the standardbenchmark for B2B regularly.
There's that piece of it. Theother thing I will say is the
inverse of what I just said.
You have something fantastic,fantastic behind your landing
page. And you have theflimsiest, saddest landing page
(22:15):
I've ever seen. Are you anaccountant? You'll really like
this ebook. It's aboutaccounting.
In this, will learn aboutaccounting trends. You will
learn about accounting dos anddon'ts and so much more.
Chad Hohn (22:30):
That's Do
George B. Thomas (22:32):
you know
Liz Moorehead (22:32):
what I'm saying? And they all look the same. It's
like headline, little subheader,three or four bullets. Somebody
who's like, I'm just trying tocheck this off of my to do list.
It's there's no, it'sthoughtless.
George B. Thomas (22:43):
It's like you, and this is where I get
frustrated because again, and Ileaned into this at the
beginning of this episode, butyou spend so much time creating
the awesome thing and then youturd out the piece that is most
important. Like you literallyturd out the thing that they
have to embrace it with. And sothere's no storytelling. There's
(23:04):
a weak or unclear call toaction. And this is the thing
that always used to freak me theflip out too, talk about the
CTAs on the bottom of the blogthat Liz mentioned earlier.
People will spend minutesthrowing that piece of garbage
together thinking that peopleare just going to automagically
click it. No. Like like spendseven hours on your guide and
(23:27):
then spend fourteen hours onyour call to action and your
landing page. Anyway, don'tthose aren't real numbers.
Right.
I'm just telling you
Chad Hohn (23:36):
Just ratios. Yeah. Yeah. But spend a good amount of
time on both. You gotta careabout both.
Right?
Liz Moorehead (23:41):
Yes. Yes. Now, George, I think this might be a
good time to circle back to thatstory that you wanted to tell
us.
George B. Thomas (23:47):
Oh, I the herding cattle. I did. I did.
That is that what you mean?
Liz Moorehead (23:53):
The navigation.
George B. Thomas (23:54):
Yeah. Yeah. We talked about the no navigation.
Yeah. Yeah.
Herding cattle. That was theanyway. Like,
Chad Hohn (24:00):
people aren't smart enough to figure out how to
George B. Thomas (24:02):
get the not contract trying to get herd them
cattle anymore. I'm I'm just notlisten, I'm from Montana. I'll
hop on a horse. I'll I'll herdsome cattle, just not through my
landing pages. I'm done.
Liz Moorehead (24:11):
Well, the reason why I asked that is because he
Devin, our guy mentioned oneother thing that I thought was
really powerful about like, stopdoing this.
George B. Thomas (24:21):
Yeah.
Liz Moorehead (24:21):
Which was when you go to convert on a single
thing in a landing page, like Iam here to convert on this one
piece of product, this onecontent property, whatever it is
that you're trying to give me.And one of the things that he
mentioned is like, asking for meto sign up for 18,000 other
things at the same time. Stopdoing that. Stop showing me if I
(24:42):
wanna favorite it. Stop tryingto get like I think what happens
is that marketers are like,well, while we're here, while we
have your peepers, right?
Can we get you to do these 18other things? And it's a bad
user experience. I can feel thatyou're trying to maximize that
touch point. And in some cases,simple like, would you also like
to subscribe to our newsletter?Fine.
But when we have too many otherthings going on, I think that
(25:05):
gets problematic. Because it'sless about the user experience
and more about trying tomaximize the value you're
getting from that touch point.
George B. Thomas (25:11):
During the conversion point, I totally
agree. And I've seen thoseforums where it's like four
other check boxes. I also liketo subscribe to these other 17
things. No. Yeah.
Now here's what I
Chad Hohn (25:23):
don't I just want uncheck everything.
George B. Thomas (25:24):
Oh my God. Yeah, never mind. I said, I
don't want any of it. Forget it.I'll go down the road.
Thank you. Because by the way,your offer, it does exist down
the road. There is a Target orWalmart to your like, whatever
you are. I'm just going to throwthat out there real quick. So
here's the thing.
I want to be careful because Idon't want anybody to
misconstrue something that mightbe going through their brain
(25:45):
right now. During theconversion, yes, I agree with
Devin. I agree that thereshouldn't be like these other
four additional check marks foryour other three subscription
newsletters and blah, blah,blah. Let's talk about the thing
that needs to be there. That isplease, by all that is holy, do
not just have inline text inthat form, but go to a thank you
page.
(26:06):
And when you go to the thank youpage, this is what I want to
make sure that we get out hereis, yes, the first thing should
be like, Hey, thanks for yourinterest in X, Y, Z. You give
them a big button, they caneasily download it. And by the
way, that's where a lot ofpeople's thank you pages end.
And that's not cool. Again, if Icome from a place of good
marketing, good experience,because of love, because of
(26:28):
servanthood, because I'm valuefirst, because I'm, you know,
human centric content creation,I want you to continue the
journey.
And that continuing the journeymight look different depending
on what the conversion was thatthey just had. For instance, if
I convert on an ebook, a guidedchecklist, a webinar, whatever,
the thank you page might belike, here's the thing, the
(26:49):
webinar video, the downloadbutton, whatever. But there
needs to be a journey of like,by the way, people who are
interested in this also likethese blog articles, also watch
these videos, also downloadthese other things, whatever it
is. But think of this page beingable to be a bunch of other
resources, a bunch of chooseyour own adventures, if you
(27:10):
will, for them to spend moretime educating themselves on the
thing that they're trying tolearn or the brand you that is
providing the thing that they'retrying to learn. Again, spend
more time on the experience ofthe thank you page maybe than
you did on the actual thing ordefinitely the landing page in
(27:31):
CTA.
But here's what I want to thinkin your brain is the
expectations. If this is a demo,well then what are the next
actions? What's the time frame?What's the expectations? Is
there anything I need to gather?
Do I need to bring like, so,like Yeah. Set them up for
success, whether it's througheducational journey or the next
meeting that they're gonna havewith.
Chad Hohn (27:52):
Yeah. You know what's excuse me. What's kind of
frustrating about, like, using aembedded HubSpot meeting is
because it's kind of like aniframe and it's like embedded.
Right? You it's very difficultto pass the chosen meeting time
data out to your website to useit as variables in the landing
(28:17):
page.
So, like or in the thank youpage. Like, thanks for booking
with Billy at blah blah blahtime. Right? That would be
amazing to be able to do just topersonalize some things or even
put conditions, you know,between now and your meeting,
check out these articles orwhatever. You know?
Anyway, just, like or any anyspecific topics they chose or
(28:40):
something like that that theywanted to cover could drive what
things you're gonna show them,
George B. Thomas (28:45):
You for can do some of that from, like, if they
do this in the form, then go tothis page, which then you
Chad Hohn (28:51):
could
George B. Thomas (28:51):
have some of that stuff. But I understand
what you're saying. Also, youreminded me of a thing that I
haven't talked about forever.It's like, you're using HubSpot
for your form conversion, thereis also a way that you can embed
the meeting widget in the actualinline So, text can, again, if
(29:14):
you start to think of userexperience, I can have it where
they can fill out a form and atthe same place where they filled
out a form, they can now bookthat meeting. And once they book
that meeting, I can then sendthem to a thank you page.
Like, holy crap, make it easyfor me to actually get on your
calendar.
Chad Hohn (29:30):
Without them having to fill in the data and the
meeting link again. HubSpot,like, natively added a thing
that's supposed to do that too,but you have to be on certain
plans. If you don't have somecertain plan, then you can't use
that feature.
George B. Thomas (29:41):
Yeah. As always. Started.
Chad Hohn (29:44):
So I have one more
George B. Thomas (29:45):
question too. Plans, I swear.
Chad Hohn (29:47):
I I have a question.
Liz Moorehead (29:48):
George is in a mood today.
Chad Hohn (29:49):
Yeah. Yeah. I love it. About, like okay. So gates.
Right? And just going back to,like, gating things, gating
everything, not gatingeverything, or simultaneously
gating and not gating. Right? Soyou put like a conversion to but
it's actually technically notgated or whatever. So in a world
where, like, a lot of ouranswers are not just coming from
(30:14):
Google search, but they'recoming from Google Scraper bot
at the top, and people aren'tactually going into web pages as
much.
If your content is behind thegate and Google makes scraper
bot isn't gonna fill out yourform to get your content to give
said answers, then are youshooting yourself in the foot?
(30:37):
Because then the AI models thatactually scrape public content
aren't going to be able to haveanswers and cite you as a
source.
George B. Thomas (30:46):
So it's it's in well, your question
Chad Hohn (30:50):
I know that's like evolving right now.
George B. Thomas (30:51):
Yeah. Your your question leads me into a
couple of different places. One,it is definitely another push
for the pillar page landing pagewhere they can take the PDF with
them, because again, you'reputting the content out there.
It also is something where Iwould just fundamentally think
about the process in how you'reshowing up for the world as
(31:12):
well. Do I want to talk aboutthis?
Do I want to talk about this?Yeah. So listen, one of the
things that you can do right nowis you can go to
georgebthomas.com/helper, andyou'll see a page that you can
hit a button and it'll take youto another page where you can
(31:38):
start to ask any question thatyou want to my clone. Now, why
am I bringing up my clone? One,when you have a clone that holds
all of the content that you'veever created, you start to
create content in a differentway.
When you have a clone thatpeople, after a certain amount
of messages for free, they putin their email address so they
(32:01):
can continue to get the valueout of all the content you've
created. You start to thinkabout conversion in a different
way and value based on thecontent you're creating. Because
you know that the conversion istaken care of and you're adding
value first through the clonethat you've created based on the
content you've created over thelast twelve years, you also
realize that you create contentdifferent because you're not so
(32:24):
much worried about the contentor the download, but the use of
the content or the download thatonce was there. And here's the
fun part is that inside of thissystem, can also just
fundamentally, if they mention aword, you can give them the
guide in there because youalready know that they've
(32:47):
already converted. So, forinstance, you might be able to
go over to My Clone and mentionsomething like WordPress versus
HubSpot CMS.
Guess what we have? We have onthe website a gated version and
a pillar page gated version ofthat. But if you're already
talking to the clone and youmention it, it'll actually serve
(33:08):
you a link just to download thedang PDF. Here's another thing
I'll say. This is, and again,I'm going sideways, when you
start to think about what'sfundamentally changing around
this, the fact that you can nowhave sales sequences that align
to campaigns that could usedocuments that are the marketing
PDFs, you start to think aboutthe conversion differently
(33:31):
because the reporting actuallyis swinging back on the hind end
of being able to see what solike we live in a world where we
need to start just rethinking itall.
Chad Hohn (33:40):
Yeah. It's not just website into CRM is conversion
anymore. It's it's marketingcontent into customer,
ultimately.
George B. Thomas (33:49):
Yeah. And listen, I've been this isn't the
first time I played with this. Iliterally had a I won't I won't
drop their name, but I had amajor player in the HubSpot,
like in HubSpot, say, I reallylove your conversion strategy
with your community. What do youmean? I'm just building a
community.
(34:09):
Oh, no, no, no. You'regenerating emails. Woah, of
course I am, But I'm building acommunity. No, no, no. That's
slick how you make it do this.
Then they go here. And then I'mlike, well, I'm a marketer.
Like, you know, but here's thething. Like, you've got it's
evolving. Right?
(34:29):
So by the way, I didn't I'mgonna step out on a limb. I know
this is about landing pages, butI'm getting to the place where I
even am curious about communityin the next couple years, to be
honest with you. And I'm thecommunity guy. I start to ask
myself, do I need to have acommunity if I have a clone? And
(34:52):
did people sign up for thecommunity to get access to me
and the education?
If that lives somewhere elsestreamlined and more optimized,
would they go there instead ofhere? Like, anyway, let's get
back to landing pages. That wasa rant.
Liz Moorehead (35:07):
No, that was really interesting. But here's
the thing. I actually want toYou started talking a little bit
about AI there, bud. I want tostay on the AI train a second,
but more from a toolsperspective, right? Because
HubSpot has rolled out a lot ofnew AI driven tools and smart
content features, and smartcontent features have been
(35:28):
around for a while.
George B. Thomas (35:28):
Just one How
Liz Moorehead (35:29):
can businesses, based on what we're discussing
in terms of what value trulylooks like today, how can
businesses actually leveragethese to optimize landing pages
in a way that probably wasn'tpossible five years ago?
George B. Thomas (35:42):
Well, I mean, listen, not all of us are a Liz
or name your favorite writer. SoAI is getting really good at
creating copy in a way thatfundamentally it's better than
many mere mortal humans whocan't afford to have a content
(36:02):
strategist or a writer on staff.It's just going to make it
better because you could listento an episode like this, or you
could do a Google search and youcould get the information that
is landing page copy bestpractices, storytelling best
practices, and then be able tocreate copy that you look at and
(36:23):
go, Wow, that's way better thanI would have written it. So,
just in that alone. And thenalso getting it to look at like,
Hey, I've created this landingpage and this is the call to
action.
Can you tell me if this isamazing or does it suck kind
wind? By the way, doesn't careabout hurting your feelings. If
(36:46):
you ask it a legit question, itmight be like, well, this could
probably do some help. Right.And so like doing that, I think
is even interesting.
By the way, that's
Liz Moorehead (36:57):
always a humbling experience, even for me as a
writer. So I don't use it from agenerative perspective, but I do
have it take a look at thingsthat I've created. Like, give me
the little once the over, right?And there have been moments
where it's like, So if youconsider it the opposite of
everything you've just given me,and that is deeply humbling.
Yeah.
George B. Thomas (37:16):
So here's the thing I'll throw in here too.
Because we have talked aboutbrand voice and AI content and
AI settings. I don't want totalk a lot about it yet because
I haven't started playing withit. But I have had communication
as of yesterday with a PM thatis unlocking the next version of
(37:41):
AI powered content creation inmy portal. So they're just like
we had wished they're goingdeeper with what they built,
they're going deeper with whatthey built.
So I think this
Chad Hohn (37:54):
they can watch be her episode? Did they watch her
episode? It sounds
George B. Thomas (37:58):
like it. Maybe. I mean, who knows? But
they're going deeper. There's abeta and I'm super excited.
And so again, you have to thinkabout how can you use AI to
create better copy, better callto actions, better experiences.
And you have to fundamentallyunderstand that you can train it
(38:21):
on what are all of the bestpractices. And then you can
tweak it as a human to what youbelieve to be the best practices
for your organization. By theway, this whole conversation, we
can't do this conversation andbe like, By the way, this is a
one size fits all landing pageepisode. Now, these are things
that you should think about andthen tweak and make it for your
(38:43):
organization.
You might need to gateeverything. You might need to
not gate a dang thing. Like, itdepends. Hi.
Chad Hohn (38:53):
Yeah. I love I actually was reading through
Devin's, like, little footnotes,and I really like what he was
mentioning about, like, you justdon't have to be developer or
full beans designer anymore. Youcan get a lot of that context.
Like, if I had to, I couldprobably do fairly decent
utilizing either a some ofHubSpot's tools or other
(39:14):
resources, AI driven resourcesout there just to give me a leg
up and to be able to make aneffective marketing campaign. It
might take me a while if Iwanted to just not put out
mediocre dump, you know, ontothe Internet because you have to
do a lot of follow-up and makesure that, you know, you're
you're having it help youconsider stuff you just don't
(39:35):
know.
Because when you're doingsomething new for the first
time, you have all these unknownunknowns in what you're doing.
Right? And so I was alwaysasking that second, what am I
not thinking about is a really,really key thing when working
with, like, those AI kind oftools. It'll really help you
consider stuff you never thoughtof. And being able to do it
(39:55):
quickly is also, you know, likeI mean, if I had to learn all
that, it's literally whatJordan's just talking about.
Like, if I had to learn all thaton my own and go into a whole
new skill set, it would take meforever in a day to really put
out something that I was proudof. Right? But anyway, I mean,
yeah, I think I think it's justit's such a leg up.
George B. Thomas (40:15):
And by the way, let's not even talk about
because, again, the landing pageis about the conversion. We
already said that hasn'tchanged. Think about, like, lead
scoring based on thatconversion. Also think about
HubSpot having the chatbots oror think of, like, a
conversational form. Or thinkabout the fact that you probably
have landing pages out thereright now that have the old
HubSpot legacy form.
And what would happen if youactually turned that into a
(40:37):
multi step form? There's so manydifferent things that you could
go and tweak and change, andthere's next steps or outcomes
workflows based on theconversion. Like, how many
people out there right now havea landing page that when they
fill out a form, it's in linetext to a link to where they can
(40:58):
download the freaking guide,versus a landing page that goes
to a thank you page thattriggers a workflow that sends a
three email series that then nowyou all said you can score on,
did they open any of those threeemails and they filled out the
form and how much time did theyspend on the thank you page? And
did they go to any otherresources off of that thank you
(41:21):
page? And how much time did theyspend there?
And like, now all of a suddenyou're starting to pay attention
to like the journey of the humanand the score of the
Chad Hohn (41:31):
Yeah. Like, I like thinking about the journey of
what the person's going through.Because, like, a lot of times
we're just like, okay. I'm gonnafind somebody who's gonna be a
project manager for a thing, andthey're gonna find my page, and
they're gonna go here, andthey're gonna see something
valuable and great. You know,but, like, actually thinking
about their whole experience ofgoing through that, literally,
like, we're just talking aboutof having the form feed a
(41:54):
meeting link.
And then, like, ultimately, I'dlove to have that, you know,
meeting data feed the landingpage to give a wonderful
experience all the way through.Right? And, like, thinking about
that perspective, I think, iswhat what is really changing
with landing pages and stufftoo. Because actually caring
(42:16):
about the person going throughthe journey helps them feel like
they're not just a part of yourengine to churn out leads.
Right?
George B. Thomas (42:26):
Yeah. Yeah.
Liz Moorehead (42:27):
I agree with that.
George B. Thomas (42:28):
So one of the things I did and same. So one of
the things I did before we runout of time, Liz, you got me on
this kick of like bestpractices, frameworks, mindsets.
Like, you know, like we talkedabout this two years ago and I'm
just kind of, so I was curiousbecause I had never really heard
(42:50):
amazingly, like about HubSpottalk about like a framework for
landing pages. And so I waslike, hey, let's see if there's
a framework out there. And sowider funnel, a Lyft model, you
guys can look this up and let meknow what you're But at the end
of the day, they have six thingsthat you might want to pay
(43:14):
attention to.
So, value proposition, right?So, is the offer compelling and
clearly communicated? This iswhy I have many conversations
with Liz, like, Liz, am Iclearly like, do people
understand or am I just beingWell, stupid the thing.
Liz Moorehead (43:32):
I love that you brought that up. I just want to
add a quick thing in here. Wemake an assumption that the
value will be obvious. We makean assumption that when people
show up to evaluate whether ornot they want to give us their
personal information forsomething, that the value we are
presenting is obvious and ourtrust has already been earned.
(43:53):
No, absolutely not.
George B. Thomas (43:55):
Yeah. So value proposition is the offer
compelling and clearlycommunicated. Clarity is the
message easy to understand anddoes it quickly explain the
benefits, benefit. Love
Liz Moorehead (44:08):
those Bennies. We love
George B. Thomas (44:09):
those To the reader, by the way, not to you.
The next one is relevance. Doesthe landing page match
expectations of the visitor fromthe ad, the email, whatever
referral sources? Does it makesense? Urgency.
Is there a reason to act now?Limited time offer, deadline,
scarcity, some type of peace inthere. Anxiety. This one is
(44:35):
there trust signals, securityassurances, and testimonials to
reduce hesitation? Then
Liz Moorehead (44:40):
number Oh, one my six favorite things that I've
seen is like when people putlanding page videos on their
landing pages, and they'reliterally like, I'm literally
just going to use your email forthis newsletter, and then I'm
never going to use it foranything else. And I'm not going
to sell it. And that's it.That's all that's going to
happen.
George B. Thomas (44:56):
Yeah.
Liz Moorehead (44:56):
The only thing I will say though, about the
creating urgency, I somewhatdisagree with that. I think if
there is no urgency, don't fakeit.
George B. Thomas (45:04):
Oh yeah. Yeah.
Liz Moorehead (45:06):
But I also think sometimes instead of creating
urge, I think sometimes when wethink of the idea of creating
urgency, we think around it fromthe perspective of, well, it's a
limited time or it's a thing orit's this. Actually think about
the urgency that's happening intheir world. Right? Create
urgency around their pain point.Again, not scare tactics.
Yeah. But like, If you have XYZquestions, these questions, XYZ,
(45:31):
the answers are right here.Yeah. This is what you need. Is
going to take this exponentialpain and make it bitty, right?
Like just speak to the truth.And I think that's where the
urgency comes from.
George B. Thomas (45:43):
I totally agree. I love that. And so
number six is distraction. So uphere as listeners, what I would
want you to do is grab yournotepad, a document, and go to
your landing pages later todayand look value proposition,
clarity, relevance, urgency,anxiety, distraction. Okay, let
(46:03):
me put it up against thisframework and see where they
stand and what do I need totweak or change and and how will
that impact, you know, nextquarter, next year, all of that,
these changes that you mightmake.
Good. Good.
Liz Moorehead (46:16):
So, guys, here's what we're going to do. We made
a joke about it earlier, abouthow we've done multiple episodes
about multiple things. Guesswhat we're going to be talking
about next week, guys? Landingpages. Because we only got
through half of our questionstoday.
George B. Thomas (46:30):
Half.
Liz Moorehead (46:31):
And quite frankly, this conversation we've
had has led me to otherquestions I want to ask you. We
haven't talked about landingpages in the shortened attention
span era. We haven't even gottento AB testing. I have a whole
monologue about smart contentthat we're not going get into
today. Guys, I'm really excitedwe started this I want you both
(46:53):
to think about you guys havehomework for this week, and so
do I.
Uh-oh. Find great landing pages.Wow. And find not so great
landing pages. We're not in thebusiness of naming names and
calling people out, but comewith some examples.
That's what we're looking fornext week. I know. Look at you,
George.
Chad Hohn (47:13):
I mean, there's
George B. Thomas (47:15):
a chance You're
Liz Moorehead (47:15):
dealing with landing pages every day.
George B. Thomas (47:17):
There's a plethora of ways that I could
probably get us canceled justThat's
Liz Moorehead (47:22):
why we don't name names. We don't name names.
We're here to encourage growthand learning opportunities. And
I say this as a woman who gotyelled at by AI once about her
own writing capabilities. We'refine.
But with that George, as we endpart one of our landing pages
journey, what do you want peopleto be walking away with today?
Whether that's one thing or fivethings, I'm feeling generous.
George B. Thomas (47:43):
Oh, wow. That's nice of you. Because I
had multiple. One of the thingsis definitely use that framework
that we talked about, But I wantyou, when you're using that
framework, I want you to thinkabout your landing page in this
way too. Is it focused on onesingle goal?
(48:04):
We kind of jokingly talked abouthow it's like, and these three
other subscriptions in thisthing. What is the one thing?
What's its job to do, right? Andthen, is it doing that, first of
all? Yes, no.
Okay, well, we need to fix that.Now, let's use the framework to
go ahead and hone in on theother pieces. My second one that
(48:24):
I just can't let go is use thankyou pages, and thank you pages
should continue the journey, notend it. So many thank you pages
I get to feel like it's justlike the destination, the
parking lot for theconversation, thank you pages
have to continue the journey. Golook at all your thank you
(48:47):
pages.
If you're not saying thingslike, Here's additional
webinars, here's additionalpodcasts, here's additional
videos, here's additional blogarticles, then you need to be
doing that. By the way, by theway, you have to create that to
be able to send them to it. I'mjust saying. Start creating that
now
Liz Moorehead (49:07):
so that you can
George B. Thomas (49:08):
act anyway.
Liz Moorehead (49:10):
You know this mean no. You know that this
means we need an episode aboutthank you pages. Right? Just
throw that out there.
George B. Thomas (49:15):
Well, we need a we need an episode to get
these people generate anyway,never mind.
Liz Moorehead (49:19):
I have We need an episode. I I have like what?
George B. Thomas (49:24):
Have such an interesting conversation. Want
to have around sitting at atable and somebody seeing my
clone being created based ontwelve years of historical
content creation to which theyimmediately said, I need to
(49:46):
start creating contentyesterday. And since the meeting
that we had, have beenaggressively creating content
because it was an unlock forthem. Like so many organizations
I bump into that are usingHubSpot and they don't have the
inbound engine. They don't havehuman centric value first
content creation like soul.
(50:09):
Not why we're here. Anyway, gocheck out your landing pages.
Make sure your thank you pagescontinue on the journey and let
us know if you found a thank youpage that you just want us or
landing page that you want us torip apart in front of everybody
because I doubt if you want it,but but we'll do it. Okay, hub
heroes. We've reached the end ofanother episode.
(50:31):
Will Lord Lack continue to loomover the community or will we be
able to defeat him in the nextepisode of the hub heroes
podcast? Make sure you tune inand find out in the next
episode. Make sure you head overto the hubheroes.com to get the
latest episodes and become partof the league of heroes. FYI, if
(50:52):
you're part of the league ofheroes, you'll get the show
notes right in your inbox andthey come with some hidden power
up potential as well. Make sureyou share this podcast with a
friend.
Leave a review if you like whatyou're listening to and use the
hashtag hashtag hub heroespodcast on any of the socials
and let us know what strategyconversation you'd like to
(51:13):
listen into next. Until nexttime, when we meet and combine
our forces, remember to be ahappy, helpful, humble human,
and of course, be looking for away to be someone's hero.
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