What if You have 2 Minutes to Convert a Visitor?
How would you do it? The more specified approach you have, the clear you're able to deliver the message and shorten the customer acquisition process.
Hi 👋, Welcome to the 46th newsletter post.
I won’t sugarcoat it: attracting customers to a product-led model is hard. And then making them love the product is another thing. Also, making the customers interested and attracted by keeping the acquisition cost as low as $0 (CAC) and closing the deal fast, is challenging yet fun to do 😅.
Whatever opportunity you create to attract users, you need to understand their buying process or, what I like to call, a customer lifecycle framework. By keeping the product transparent it becomes more sellable - its features, performance and use cases. The more you display this side, the easier it gets to guide them before you demand payment.
How do they find you?
How do you educate them?
How much time do you significantly give to build a company-customer relationship before they even land on your landing page?
How much effective is your landing page in converting a user?
All these questions will make you think hard.
The product-led model has the most value in time, before a potential customer even lands on your website, they’ll be aware of what you offer and who you are, which makes their buying process fast and short.
“From a marketing and sales perspective, product-led growth is a game-changer. It means you can deliver on your promise to prospects. It also means the product sells itself if you get in front of people at the right stage of the buying process.” - Juliana Casale, Head of marketing, CrazyEgg
That being said the initial interaction of your users with your product is everything - whether it’s in form of marketing or in-product experience. Here I want to talk about a few areas you can catch your user’s attention, considering they only have two minutes to do so.
Landing page is like a pitch deck for visitors
No matter what marketing channel you use, you’ll have to divert the audience to your landing page (most of the time). Considering your landing page as your ultimate pitch deck for your customer. It enables a quick product experience without any assistance and if they require extensive hand, they won’t return. And it’s just not me who thinks this way, but Intercom claims 40-60% of new users never come back.
The main reason can be that you’re not communicating the message effectively or correctly. Another can be if there is any leakage in the customer journey. Transiting from point “A” (awareness) to point “B” (end goal) has several steps within and a lot of churns happen in between the passing.
Here’s a quick tip, use a web analytics tool such as Howuku to identify the hot spots and how a user behaves on the website.
This section of the post is brought to you by… Howuku
Having insights into how the users act, interact and walk through your landing page is the biggest level-up on the marketing and user experience you can give.
Howuku is a powerful growth analytics tool that helps convert, engage and retain more information about the users. It lets you:
Track where visitors click, when they scroll and understand what works through their robust heatmaps.
A/B testing helps you make data-driven decisions about the design and context.
It has some additional amazing features such as session recording your website visitors, gathering direct feedback from the users on what they like or dislike and has 100+ third-party integrations.
It is a great hands-on tool for product managers and marketers to understand user behaviour on websites, you can try Howuku free for 14 days.
Now, one thing that I’ve learned, if your product has a lot of features used by different segments you wouldn’t want to target everything on one landing page. In fact, your main page needs to be centric towards the core product and users.
Create multiple templates to attract diverse sets of users which will have their own messaging and copy. This makes them feel like your product was purposely built for them. A great example is Notion. They target two segments - one using it as a workplace and the other by creating and selling templates.
Show them, don’t tell
That's what product-led growth is.
If your users are like me, who don’t want any assistance while trying out the product and it’s way more easier to understand the product this way, then you would want to reduce the onboarding time and shorten the customer lifecycle.
There are really several ways to do this:
Expose your product without any expectation of upfront payments such as free trials, Freemium or hybrid - you can layer on free-trial upgrades within the freemium product.
But the thing is users need to get the value as early as possible. As there will be no human interaction you’d want to make the process and adoption seamless for them.
Keep everything transparent from pricing to demo accounts to features.
Marketing messaging can happen inside the product.
Showing the product first brings you an excellent insight into how they use the product or make decisions to upgrade. Think of Grammarly, anyone can go to their website, sign up and start editing the content for free, in fact, you can also download the extension for free. It’s free for basic use which provides immense value, and you can always upgrade the plan with higher features.
Marketing with the right messaging & positioning
Positioning and messaging come first then the rest of product building, marketing, content creation or campaigns. If you don’t set it right either you’ll create the wrong copy for the landing page or you’ll create the wrong product expectations.
The way you position your company and product will help you create content strategy: what topics to write about, what voice to use, and what point of view to set. Next, once you’re clear about how you’ll position the product in the market and what message you’ll communicate before you start creating content work on customer profiles or personas. Know and be clear whom you’re targeting.
Create educational and awareness content which will bring a balanced approach between greater demand and shorter sales cycle.
Your strategy will involve:
Educating customers on more effective and efficient ways of doing daily business.
Enlighten customers about industry trends and highlight important issues that have a daily impact.
Educating them about your product and how they can use it for the problem.
Because you aren’t demonstrating the value, every lead will be generated through messaging. Your marketing should feed them a self-service impulse and every content you create or copy you write should lure them to try out the product.
Lastly,
This approach isn’t for every product. There’s a bit of an art to figuring it out, with the balance of knowing your product value, adaptation, time and market. The tactics to attract users are vast but the foundation is simple and clear.
In this approach, you’ll be targeting a wide range of potential users, lowering the entry barrier as you narrow down you’ll become more specific till a point your product becomes very transparent with a faster acquisition process.
Thanks!
See you next time.
Ritika
👋 PS: I’m Ritika founder, product marketer and advisor for early-stage startups, find more here or connect with her here. If you’re a first-time founder looking for curated resources, download here. You can also promote your product in this newsletter. Also, you can share your feedback or questions here.
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