5 Hacks to build your brand using Landing Page Optimization

In the ever-advancing and rapidly evolving field of marketing, new age terminologies like growth hacking, conversion rate optimization, product marketing and artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and natural language processing (NLP) are finding their way into conversations and systems. The honest reality is that brand and brand values have been pushed down the importance rung of the ladder and the marketers that work on brand modeling and development tend to get a bad rap because it feels very fluffy.
However, that’s all changing. Organizations are now making painstaking efforts in defining and building a “brand”. For example, you see Nike, Amazon, or Hubspot, and you immediately associate them with maturing and robust products, services, and offerings that meet a need. It may seem like building a brand is arbitrary, but the application of the correct data can transform organizations into mature brands. This article aims to use data and leverage hacks to build your brand using landing page optimization (LPO).

LPO is the data-driven method of making tweaks on your landing page to drive the highest conversions and increase your conversion rate optimization (CRO) towards pre-defined goals that you set. Whether it is a click or a form fill, or a request for a demo, this process helps with moving prospects down the sales and marketing funnel to grow profitability ultimately and reduce customer acquisition costs while increasing your ROI. With the right amount of user research and testing and data-driven models, landing page optimization can help develop a leveraged brand as a differentiator.
Before we get into the hacks and the finer nuances of how that is done though, it is important to understand what a brand is and is the brand the same as an organization. In most cases, they are used interchangeably, so what then exactly is a brand?

What factors does a brand consist of?

A brand can be many things and means different things to different stakeholders depending on how you look at it. However, in this piece, we look at four major components that make up a brand.

• The user experience
• The messaging and tone
• The unique differentiators and positioning
• The brand promise

The buyer journey or the purchasing journey is a core component of the brand. However, the user experience is essential right from the logo, the colors, accessibility, and the overall recognizable feel-good factor of the organization. Look at Hawaiian Airlines as a good example of the importance of user experience. The website looks and feels immediately helps you associate with the islands, the beach, and a premium travel product.
The messaging and tone is the next critical component that users immediately resonate with when they associate with the brand. It is the words that appeal to a user. This is why it is essential to say and mean the right things to create sticky customers. Apple is an excellent example of an organization that does a lot right to fortify its customer base. However, their messaging and tone resonates with users, and hence they have a loyal following.
Your organization's positioning and unique differentiators in a crowded marketplace are drivers customers to pick you vs. others. Hubspot is an excellent example of building a product suite so advanced yet intuitive that customers flock to them in hordes despite many other competing products.
Lastly, the brand promise is what makes you stand out versus your customers. What is that you are promising? Showing a certain value and how you can provide that value is what builds a good brand. Peloton has created a niche in the fitness and wellness space by assuring customers of a feel-good workout plan and maintaining sound principles of health which is their brand promise. Hence, they have sticky customers. 

You have to tweak your messaging to appeal to the broadest possible customer base, and hence building a brand isn’t hearsay but a data-driven activity. A good understanding of these factors to build your brand stems from the premise that you do not make assumptions in your marketing growth plans and, subsequently, organizational growth plans. Without data, you can be delivering the wrong messaging to the wrong people and at the wrong time, and that is a recipe for disaster.
Using landing page optimization and conversion analysis, you can test and hypothesize almost all these factors for your brand. However, before we get to the hacks of building your brand with landing page optimization, let’s first dive into what exactly it is.

Why are landing pages and LPO significant in building your brand?

A landing page is the first touchpoint for your customers when they visit you through SERP, paid ads, social media, or any other organic or inorganic form. Customers tend to make an immediate impression about you and your brand in the first few seconds of getting on your landing page. Suppose this page is optimized to resonate with your brand, in that case, it can lead to multiple positively reinforcing factors such as brand recognition, brand recall, brand referenceability, and building a brand value.
Very often, marketers tend to ignore the importance of a landing page in brand building. The landing page optimization process helps you align your first impression with building a lasting impression on your customers' minds and creating a positive brand value. As a marketer that is spending considerable resources, including time and energy, into bringing customers to a page, it is imperative to design and work on a foolproof landing page optimization process that matches the organization's objectives and keeps stakeholders happy while simultaneously building a positive brand value.

Some of the key reasons why optimizing landing pages are essential in the brand-building process are:

Build your brand effectively
While we will be diving deeper into the hacks of building your brand using this method, it is essential to note that building a brand that resonates and creates the most sticky customers is the most important metric of this process. A good landing page is the cornerstone of effective digital marketing, search engine marketing (SEM), and search engine optimization (SEO) strategy.

Improve conversion rate optimization
Lead conversions and moving customers down the lead funnel towards profitability are among the most critical metrics of an excellent post-click landing page. Since customer acquisition is one of the primary success metrics for brand marketers, and brand recall is a loosely monitored success metric, LPO forms a significant subset of the CRO improvement process. 

Validate ROI of your resources
Judging the ROI of marketing is complex and unstructured and, in many circumstances, even challenging to monitor and track. However, landing pages still form a significant component of the brand building and subsequent marketing strategy, be it in organic marketing or pay-per-click (PPC) marketing. Hence, optimizing these assets aid in validating and justifying the ROI of your resources - both time and effort, as well as money spent, is vital. In paid campaigns, especially LPO for Google AdWords, can help outline budgets and spends. 

Reduce customer acquisition costs
Ultimately, the main objective of landing pages is lead conversion. Effective LPO strategies help in better conversion numbers for your sales teams. Ongoing, data-driven optimization helps customers take actions of your desired result and hence increases the efficacy of your landing pages, thereby reducing your customer acquisition costs. Besides, more paying customers means a better brand value and recall and the additional benefits of references and word of mouth marketing.

LPO can get overwhelming if not done frequently and without a plan in place. If it is consistent and aligned to your brand values and goals, though, it can help derive significant value. However, is there a method to the madness?

Landing page optimization process to effectively build your brand 

Tips to building your brand with landing page optimization are limitless, and so is the actual LPO process. We often see marketers judge a landing page not to be working and hence change it all. But that is not data-driven or backed by any metrics and is like shooting in the dark. The ideal landing page optimization process follows specific steps to attain perfection, and the conversion pyramid put forth by the Eisenberg brothers is one of the most effective methods. A brand is constant, and hence a good LPO process ensures that your landing pages aren’t just a conversion optimization tool but an excellent yardstick to judge alignment with your brand.
This model encapsulates the fundamentals of a good conversion rate optimized landing page. It consists of five critical factors, which are:

• Functional: The base level of this model is the most critical aspect of any landing page that you create and optimize - that is functional. The pages should be devoid of technical issues and should not create a shoddy experience in the customers' online journey, reducing high dropout rates.
• Accessible: The next important component is that the pages should be easily accessible to all across devices and ecosystems and should render in the flow that you meant, be it users coming from paid ads or social media or even SERP. This means that you need to employ sound landing page development techniques while developing these pages. The pages also need to be accessible to differently-abled customers and follow best practices and federal policies for landing pages.
• Usable: Since the objective of your landing page is lead conversion and lead optimization, make sure that the LPO process ensures that your landing pages are easily usable. Clutter-free and smooth navigation pages with a good story have the highest lead conversions.
• Intuitive: The landing page should be intuitive enough to weave a story that resonates with your customers. In this circumstance, you would create the most sticky customers and have the highest success moving customers down your funnel.
• Persuasive: Lastly, the landing pages should not just aid with your primary objective of conversions but also help create advocates for your brands. A compelling story and effective landing page aids in meeting these objectives.By following this simple five-step guide in your landing page optimization process, building a solid brand and cultivating brand advocates from your customers is possible. 

Landing page optimization best practices & tips to build your brand

Now that you understand the fundamentals of LPO and its importance in building your brand, how can you get it done? We spoke about this extensively in the essential elements of a landing page, and that should be an excellent guide to get good and effective landing pages out. But as we have constantly said, constantly monitoring the efficacy of landing pages is essential. As mentioned above, the better the conversions, the better the chances of a positive brand recall.
While we have enlisted ten best practices and tips (in no particular order) to improve conversions on your landing page to build a strong brand, adopt a mix of some or all of these to meet your conversion goals.

A/B test landing pages
A critical mistake that marketers make is that they do not A/B test landing pages. Using an A/B test can help you deploy various techniques and methods and monitor what your competition is doing. By using these fundamentals, it is easier to get a pulse of lead conversions and lead optimization. A/B testing is a crucial component of brand building using landing pages. The easiest way is to use landing page templates and tweak them to match your objectives and then continuously monitor these templates with messaging, image, CTA tweaks, and more. As mentioned above, the better the conversions, the better the chances of a positive brand recall.

Optimize for different experiences and customer entry
Unless you have specified how users can find your landing page as part of your digital marketing strategy, it is vital to assume that your users can visit your post-click landing pages from many sources. Optimizing for all these sources and different devices, browsers and ecosystems will give your users the best possible and native experience that you have curated for such customers. A seamless customer experience is a good vector of creating a positive brand value. Salesforce website pages are an excellent example of optimizing different sources, which provides an intuitive experience and makes them one of the most recognizable brands on the planet.

Optimize for SEO & PPC
Building off what is said above, it is critical to optimize your post-click landing pages for organic and paid traffic. Since customer intent to purchase and their journey could be varied in either of the above scenarios, ensure that your optimization is tailored to the best possible outcome of customer acquisition and reduced dropout rates. Amazon is an excellent example of LPO for Google AdWords, where, from preview to on-page and conversion is optimized for the highest possible successful actions taken.

Use heatmaps and data
By looking at heatmap data on your landing pages, you can get a good pulse of resonating most with your customers and what sections get skimped or completely skipped. As part of your LPO strategy, making changes to these sections will offer very high conversions in your campaigns. Another underutilized resource in the optimization process is data. Deriving conclusions of your landing page objective, be it form fills or any other purpose, and then tying this data into historical, seasonal, and conversion data will help you get a good sense of what is working and what needs changing. While there is no direct correlation between conversions and brand value, it is an unspoken understanding that the more happy customers, the higher is the brand recall.

Keep the user journey in mind
Most marketers make the critical mistake because they only think about the landing page from their perspective and not from the users' perspective. Keeping the user journey in mind will help you optimize your landing pages for the highest possible ROI goals that you have set for yourself. Using landing page templates to create a good brand will help you with a consistent experience for your users and customers. Defining and outlining the user journey goes a long way in conversion rate optimizations. Besides, giving thought to your customers shines a bright light on your values and ethos as a brand leading to a positive brand experience.

Present hard-to-resist value adds
An underused marketing technique is scarcity tactics on your landing page. Think of this as a Black Friday shopping experience, but you showcase the most outstanding value to the customer all year long if they act in a specific predefined time frame. Using countdown timers, limited period offers, live diminishing counters of available units, etc., works very well in LPO campaigns. It is straightforward to increase the lead conversions with your landing pages by showcasing the great value and hard-to-resist value. Shopping online on Walmart is an excellent example of how hard-to-resist value adds force you into quicker purchases, reducing the customer journey while maximizing profitability. 

Keep the landing pages simple
There is beauty in simplicity. An overload of information, images, offers, CTA’s, and clutter is the perfect example of what not to do on your landing pages. Since the objective of landing pages is conversions, simple landing pages aid towards better customer acquisitions and are an effective hack to building your brand using LPO. 

Offer accessible contact information upfront
One of the essential tips to LPO is the ease of finding ways to contact you. When customers know that there is a way for them to reach you via various means, including social, email, phone, live chats, chatbots and more, there is a marked sense of trust in your brand. By hiding contact information or making it difficult to source adds a layer of distrust. 

Use action-based and exit pop-ups
Pop-ups are frowned upon by most marketers and organizations but using efficient and non-intrusive pop-ups is a great way to increase CRO. You can instill action-based innovative pop-ups like at the end of a specific scroll or time spent on a page or section. Exit pop-ups also are an effective way of customer acquisition by using landing pages and should be a part of every marketer's LPO strategy. While these do not work for all, it is something that is still worth trying. 

Monitor and keep tweaking
Lastly, since we have identified that landing page optimization is an effective way to build your brand, make sure to spend enough time and resources to monitor your pages and keep tweaking them when necessary. Use seasonal promotions, new product or service launches, and newly added value-based propositions to your landing page to derive the highest conversions.

While all these tips and tricks for landing page optimization may not work for you, use those to build the brand value that offers you the best value.

Five hacks to build your brand using landing page optimization

All of this sounds easy and straightforward. While it certainly isn’t rocket science, your most significant objective as a marketer is to create an underlying attraction towards your brand. By using landing page templates along with landing page optimization testing and conversion rate optimization, you can achieve your underlying brand goals and objectives. 

These five tips and hacks will go a long way in building your brand by using landing page optimization.

Validate your customer persona with landing page testing
By now, it is evident that due to the nature and source of your landing page, the user persona of the customers on your pages may be very varied. If you want to revisit your target customers to understand why they use your organization, user research for each customer may be impossible. By using landing pages, it is quicker to arrive at these answers. Using landing page optimizations, you can curate varied experiences that give you a deeper insight into your customer acquisition and is a great way to build your brand.
By sending users from different sources to different pages (you can A/B test your landing pages with Lander), there is heightened transparency about customer behavior and customer personas. Using specialized targeted sections and CTA’s on the page, you can get a sense of the audience's journey and understand the different conversion behaviors of varied customer demographics. By analyzing all of this information with landing page testing, there is greater scope to validate your customer persona and, in turn, build a highly resonating brand.

Stand above the competition with conversion rate optimization
Another easy way to build your brand with landing page optimization is to test against your competition. By showcasing the messaging, value, and varied takeaways, it is easy to understand what your customers like and how quickly they can convert or move down your funnel based on what they see on the landing page. By deriving conversion rate optimization through landing page optimization, there is a greater sense of gauging how competitors' brand values stand against yours and is a very quick metric to build your brand.
Using landing page optimization, there is also greater scope to know how quickly customers convert and at what stages they need more information versus when they are satisfied enough to enter and move down your sales funnel. A very important by-product of this information as you start to see it trickle in is identifying your core brand values that you can then share with all the relevant stakeholders so that they are aligned to the insights that you see through the success of your landing pages.

Develop a strong brand promise with Conversion Rate Optimization(CRO)
One of the most straightforward steps to do with LPO and CRO is to derive what messaging and value sticks most with your customers what it causes them to convert. Using various value propositions, brand promises, USP’s and CTA’s, it is straightforward to derive the pages that gave you the highest conversions. This information is a goldmine to determining a solid brand promise and is a positive reinforcement tool to validate your brand-building strategy. Rather than asking people at various experience points about what they liked or not, the conversions due to the landing page optimization give you good insightful data about what works best for your brand.

Amalgamate the objectives of all your marketing teams
Another pet peeve of stakeholders that lead marketing teams is that it is complicated to align the objectives of conversion-driven teams and brand development teams. While one only cares about lead optimizations, the other is solely focused on building a prominent and scalable brand. With CRO and LPO, it is straightforward to bring the objectives of both these teams together. With inherent testing of varied brand components on the landing page and then tying them down to outcome-based marketing, marketing leaders can derive success metrics from the marketing strategy to build a strong brand while using something simple as landing page optimization.

Develop sticky customers and cultivate brand advocates
Conversion rate optimization through landing page optimization is a powerful vector to identify critical components such as brand value, brand voice, brand promise, etc. Using smart optimizations on-page, it is effortless to identify repeat customers, customers who convert and move down the funnel quickly, and customers that turn into brand advocates by bringing in new customers into the fold with referrals and more. Getting customers to market for you is more effective than spending resources to bring in new customers from scratch for an organization. Hence, it makes it to our list of brand building by using landing page optimization. 

These tips are a definite way to build your brand with LPO. Using landing page templates from Lander (yes, it’s that simple) and continued and efficient landing page optimization and conversion rate optimization, you can achieve your brand goals as a marketer and build a highly relatable and scalable brand your customers will love and resonate with.