Out of the blue I learned that HubSpot recognized a landing page I made as one of “12 Great Landing Page Examples You’ll Want to Copy”. I did it back in 2014; Edupath was a client of mine.
My Damning Admission
It’s always nice to be recognized for your work, especially when it’s by the acknowledged expert in the field: HubSpot went public with a hefty valuation because they’re the best at this stuff.
But it should be no surprise that they liked what I did: all that I know about landing pages I learned from the HubSpot blog. I just followed their directions, step by step. Everything you see was done intentionally, from the lack of navigation and the way the woman is looking at the fields to be completed, to the use of ‘unlock’ in the messaging and the color of the call-to-action.
Here’s the funny part: this was literally the first landing page I ever made.
You Don’t Need to be a Landing Page Savant
Entrepreneurs often wonder what they should do themselves, and when they should get help. Things like landing pages are the execution of your marketing strategy. The decision on whether to outsource tasks like this should be based on your bandwidth, not because you think making one is difficult. This is something you can do yourself. Or at least it is if you can answer ‘yes’ to these questions:
- Can you follow simple directions?
- Do you know who your target users are? Can you clearly express the benefits for them? (Is your strategy dialed in?)
You Need a Strategy
Moving from 96% to 97% of your maximum conversion rate will require a specialist—you’ve already done the easy optimizations—but moving from 20% to 80% is should be something you can do internally. As long as you’re heading in the right direction because you have the right strategy, it’s not so hard to make big gains in the beginning.
Statups should have an explicit strategy that drives everything in their business: it should inform their decisions in product, marketing, customer service, operations, engineering, and so on down the line. Developing that strategy is hard, but it makes other things much easier. If you need help with something, get help with that.