Wait, We've NEVER Done an Episode About the HubSpot Landing Pages Tool?!
Do you live in a world filled with corporate data? Are you plagued by siloed apartments? Are your lackluster growth strategies demolishing your chances for success? Are you held captive by the evil menace, lord lack, lack of time, lack of strategy, and lack of the most important and powerful tool in your superhero tool belt? Knowledge.
George B. Thomas:Never fear hub heroes. Get ready to don your cape and mask, move into action, and become the hub hero your organization needs. Tune in each week to join the league of extraordinary inbound heroes as we help you educate, empower, and execute. Hub Heroes, it's time to unite and activate your powers.
George B. Thomas:By the way, if anybody's wondering, I don't have a bunion, and we are recording today. Although, Liz, it feels like the Internet gremlins do not want this episode to come out, and it's crazy, but let's let's roll with this.
Liz Moorehead:Like, it's actually making me wonder if the reason why we haven't talked about this topic yet is some sort of big sprocket conspiracy, like somebody doesn't want this information to get out.
George B. Thomas:I know. Somebody doesn't want us
Liz Moorehead:to talk about this because we actually have a hilarious problem guys. So last week I was doing a little auditing of our topics, Just taking a look at things we had done, things we hadn't done.
George B. Thomas:We've done a lot by the way.
Liz Moorehead:We have done a lot and we've done so much that sometimes we'll come back and talk about things multiple times from multiple angles. Had multiple HubSpot email tool episodes, multiple HubSpot social media tools, multiple commerce hub.
George B. Thomas:I mean, Jack Cooper Smith has been on the show three times. Let's just throw that out there.
Liz Moorehead:Yes, he has. And guys, do you know what we haven't done?
George B. Thomas:I feel so bad right now. I feel like I'm going get judged by the entire community right now.
Liz Moorehead:We have literally never spoken a single breath of oxygen about landing pages before. Landing pages.
George B. Thomas:I don't understand how this is that we have never I talked
Liz Moorehead:about don't either. We've even talked about the blogging tool twice, guys.
George B. Thomas:No. No. Yes. Yes. We have we went into settings and talked about AI settings.
Liz Moorehead:And an individual episode per setting.
George B. Thomas:And not landing pages.
George B. Thomas:What?
Liz Moorehead:I'm not mad. I'm just disappointed and mad. Do you get what I'm saying?
Chad Hohn:That's before I got here.
Liz Moorehead:Chad, you didn't know you were in
Chad Hohn:the studio audience. Don't to blame.
Liz Moorehead:Nope. You were in the studio audience, and not once did we get a little Chad note that said, hey. Have you guys ever thought about talking about landing pages? Right? Nice try, Kima.
Chad Hohn:Nobody really helped myself. With landing pages was when somebody wants to store a cookie in the browser or do something weird, you know. That's funny. Technical code wise. They don't ask me about that kind of stuff.
Chad Hohn:So wasn't even on my radar,
Liz Moorehead:if I'm
Chad Hohn:gonna be completely honest.
George B. Thomas:If the words hidden field and cookie come up, then Chad gets tagged in.
Chad Hohn:Yeah, exactly.
Liz Moorehead:Fantastic. I'm looking for a dialogue between you and me too, which is gonna be great. Well, I
Chad Hohn:got I got questions.
George B. Thomas:The third party caller that just called in from your desktop.
Liz Moorehead:Spam question mark telemarketer. I'm sure they have a lot to say about landing pages. You know what guys?
George B. Thomas:Doing great today.
Liz Moorehead:We're doing great today, but we are finally bringing oxygen, some light to this very necessary topic. Landing pages are building blocks in the inbound world. They are foundational. They are to the point where I would probably say they are taken for granted, much in the way that we overlooked them. So today that ends, we are diving into the evolution of landing pages.
Liz Moorehead:What's changed, what hasn't, and what sales and marketing teams need to be thinking about when building high performing landing pages in HubSpot. We're ready?
Chad Hohn:Yeah.
Liz Moorehead:Let's do these. All right, so I want to start by looking backward. Landing pages have been around forever, not just in inbound marketing, just in marketing in general. Yeah. From your perspective, and George, I'll start with you.
Liz Moorehead:What has fundamentally remained the same and what has changed the most?
George B. Thomas:Well, I mean, listen, the reason that we might've forgot about these is because most mere mortal humans think of them in simple terms or don't even think of them at all, or definitely don't think of them in a pair of pages because literally we're like, let's talk about landing pages. Well, it has to be landing pages and thank you pages, by the way, but we'll get to that. It's always been about this focused conversion that hasn't changed. Like, there's this thing and we need them to know them about this thing. And it's also always been about capturing attention and then being able to communicate the value of what it is on the page quickly and then drive a specific action.
George B. Thomas:So, if you think about it, how do we have this focused thing that grabs attention, communicates the value, and drives them to the action that we want? Like, and so you'll hear like call to action. When I say call to action on the landing page, though, it's it's somewhat copy, but it's also very much like the the button is the thing that you want them to click. And sometimes I really feel 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.
George B. Thomas:Let's spend three hours and train all the sales reps on how to do. And then it's like we put the landing page out, it's like, blip. So we don't take the time to do it. Right. So that's what it's kind of always been about.
George B. Thomas:Now, we live in a world now where I think we have If you're not thinking about how AI is impacting the creation or the enablement of your landing pages, if you're not thinking about how smart content is actually leveraged for your landing pages, if you're not thinking about the fact that we humans now have zero time for fluff. So think of personalization, dynamic, more of an experience, less of a landing place. I'll stop there. I'll stop there.
Liz Moorehead:Chad.
Chad Hohn:Hi. How's it going?
Liz Moorehead:Well,
Chad Hohn: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, or what are currently because I don't really do a whole lot of content marketing. But I do have a couple, like, I wanna frame and understand where landing pages have belonged in the world, but I wanna do it from the perspective of, like, how you hook up landing pages to HubSpot and stuff. Right? So let's say using HubSpot CMS. Right?
Chad Hohn:Well, you hook up your main domain and then, hey, she found
Liz Moorehead:my mouse.
Chad Hohn:Oh, it's a great day.
Liz Moorehead:Sick. Go.
George B. Thomas:Okay. You know, you're winning when you're happy about finding your mouse in a day. Oh,
Liz Moorehead:we're doing great, guys.
Chad Hohn:Do you have to plug it in on the underneath side real quick to charge it so you still can't use it or is it good? No, we're good. Okay.
Liz Moorehead:We're good. Which one?
George B. Thomas:If we're talking about user experience, can I just because Chad dang gone it, you derailed us? What in what universe
Liz Moorehead:Yeah, Chad, it was definitely not me holding up the mouse. Way to go.
George B. Thomas:In what universe does it make sense to have the plug in to charge your mouse on the bottom of the mouse so you can't use All right, we're here to talk about Lanikaze.
Liz Moorehead: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, and then I don't have to do it again for another four to five months.
George B. Thomas:But what if
Chad Hohn:it actually dies when you're in the middle of something, then you're just
Liz Moorehead:I have multiple meses.
Chad Hohn:That's the Apple joke. Alright. Anyway. So, like, you hook up you see you have HubSpot CMS. Right?
Chad Hohn:Hook up your domain to your website. And then you have landing pages. And there's like some level of like CMS is paid, but you could still kinda use landing pages a little bit, even if you're not on CMS paid, if you have marketing hub. And then like mark landing pages are usually intended to be hooked up to a sub domain. So, like, you know, landing.yourdomain.com or whatever.
Chad Hohn:So, like, aren't landing pages just an extension of your CMS 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:Well, see, and now you're bumping into something that has always confused people historically. By the way, if you have a third party CMS, WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, whatever, you're right. You go into HubSpot, it's a sub domain. I always used to tell people, Listen, it should be something like education. Or academydot.
George B. Thomas:Because let's be honest, usually the folks that are getting HubSpot back in the day, because it's marketing and they want to be able to do landing pages because they want an ebook, a guide to check, some type of conversion point. So, it is-
Liz Moorehead:They want
Chad Hohn:to be able to track it well.
George B. Thomas:Right, and be able to track it well. So, it is a page, but it is also a page that is specially built to have different analytics than your normal average bear, which is again, a piece that historically people didn't realize is that CTAs were built so that you could see they got viewed, they got clicked, and there was a submission on a landing page afterwards. So that was the precursor to get them there and understand the metrics of your call to actions of viewed, clicked, submitted. Then you'd get to the landing page. And again, that's going to pull in the information around the conversion.
George B. Thomas:So viewed, submitted, next steps. So here's the thing. The question that I would always get is like, so where do these live on my website? Like, well, they live in a sub domain, but here's the thing. You could create a page called a resource center and you could have cards on that resource center and it could then go to your landing pages where they could convert because then you're going to bring them back to the website with a thing called a thank you page where you're going to deliver.
George B. Thomas:And so like, it became a
Liz Moorehead:whole- the CTAs your articles and other places that you can-
George B. Thomas:Oh my God. Yes. Yeah. So CTAs are like
Chad Hohn:an entry point that get you out into the landing page, and then the landing page does something or has some sort of value, and then that brings them back to the website.
George B. Thomas:Yeah. And here, I got to hit upon this. By the way, I'll give you a little bit of behind the scenes stuff. We had a guest in the show notes, not here today, but in the show notes. Our boy, Devin, saw the topic and started going ham.
George B. Thomas:And Chad and I were even laughing in the green room before we hit record on one of the things, Liz, historically, was a best practice that irritates the crap out of, I think, most of us at this point. And that is historically landing pages. You would hide the navigation.
Liz Moorehead:Dude, you're skipping ahead. You're
George B. Thomas:skipping ahead. Woah. Woah. Woah. Woah.
George B. Thomas:So, alright. I'm
Chad Hohn:I don't
George B. Thomas:know if
Chad Hohn:I can keep this frustration bottled
George B. Thomas:Like, I hate my answer to the Alright. Go ahead. Liz. Go ahead. Go ahead.
George B. Thomas:Liz. The ants ants ants ants ants and then we'll die for that. Yeah. Bottle it up. Okay.
Liz Moorehead:Got it. Thoughts and feelings about this. So when I think about what's fundamentally stayed the same, the purpose of the landing page. The landing page is to make the pitch on the value of the thing that you have behind the landing page. That has not changed.
Liz Moorehead:What has changed the most is what is considered valuable. And how you tell the story of that value
Chad Hohn:is what is considered a conversion changing.
George B. Thomas:Oh, that's that's that's probably a whole another episode, bro. Like, to be honest with you, I mean, my mind goes in so many different ways because Right. I don't even know where to start with that. I'm gonna shut up. Liz, keep going.
Chad Hohn:No. Sorry.
Liz Moorehead:It's okay. It's totally okay. It's what's fascinating about it is when you think about the landing page, it has existed before there was a HubSpot like landing pages are not, you know, a HubSpot invention. And all it has been is you will give us some information, we'll give you the thing, right? And when I take a look at how landing pages have evolved in terms of best practices and in terms of what we're doing on them and in terms of what we're putting behind them, even what we're putting behind them has changed.
Liz Moorehead:We've had whole conversations at different organizations I've worked at about like, do we even put anything behind a gate anymore? And we still have some people who are like, everything still has to go behind a gate. But consumers are, there's a higher threshold you kind of have to get over with them in order to get that transaction of information. Because we've had too many years of not great stuff behind the wall, or quite frankly bad storytelling at the front that doesn't tell what it is. So those are like my high level thoughts, but George, you did start going into our next question and I'm very excited to talk about this one because I think this is where we're going to have a lot of feelings come up.
Liz Moorehead:And that's the outdated landing page practices that people are still clinging to. And you tapped into the number one. So let's get back to this story here.
George B. Thomas:I'm not going go with that one first though. We'll swing back around with that because I feel like you guys have a bunch to say around it too. So, first of all, one of the things that I have to mention that I still see, if I get to your landing page, and you want my right arm or my firstborn child for the thing that you believe is the most valuable thing on the planet that I can download. Meaning, if you have 10 fields on your form
George B. Thomas:Yeah.
George B. Thomas:I'm I'm I'm no. I have stuff to do today. I know that that will take me too long. You're you're and if especially if you're not using progressive profiling, right? Meaning if it's like, you already know my name.
George B. Thomas:I've been to your website 17 times. Why is my first name not in that field? Why do I have to type it again? Like, you're not making it simple for me. You're making you're creating a hurdle in the way.
George B. Thomas:So, that more fields equals better lead qualification. Can I call bull on that one? I'm just saying more form, more feel.
Liz Moorehead:Where's that? Whoopsie jar.
George B. Thomas:Yeah. The what? Whoops. Whoops. We need we need a sound effect like whoopsie or something like that.
George B. Thomas:Little bit slip or something. Yeah.
George B. Thomas:Ow.
George B. Thomas:So yeah, let's start with that. More fields does not equal better lead qualification, and there are better ways to get those pieces of information over time. Progressive profiling, dependent fields, queued fields. So you don't feel like you have to collect it all at once. You can collect it over time.
George B. Thomas:So I'll start there and then I'll pass the baton to somebody else to complain about outdated landing page practices since I already queued up one and maybe even have more.
Liz Moorehead:Chadwick hit us with it.
Chad Hohn:Sure. I mean, I I was, you know, trying to tap into my inner Devin when I because I was thinking the same thing before he even put it in the notes, right, about, like, when I get to a landing page. And I think this may go back to, like, people are trying to build a path for the specific person that they think is on their landing page. Right? But I'm never that person.
Chad Hohn:Like, you know how, like, in the YouTube app or in different Google things, they have, like, this little button called stats for nerds. And, like, you can watch 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 these things. Like, cause I'm never like the manager or the CEO. I'm just the person who's trying to help that person. And like when I get to a landing page and there's no main nav, it is the most frustrating thing.
Chad Hohn:It's like when like, when a marketer tries to send Devin an SMS text, if you ever heard that episode, and when ballistic talking about like, don't send me a text. Not unless it's like I asked you to tell me when my food's gonna get here. Right? Or whatever. It's like basically the same thing.
Chad Hohn:Like I'm stuck on this page and I can't just go explore your website unless I literally leave and like search your website again. And like, at that point, I'm just gonna click on your Google Ad because I'm frustrated. You know, like, get out of here. You're charge you 5 or $10 for that just for the privilege of making me have to come back a second time.
George B. Thomas:So, so let me talk about this for a second, because I have taught this air quotes best practice. Not recently, but for years. And when we would teach this best practice, it literally would be like, Hey, make sure you've got your logo on the page, but it's not linked to anywhere. You want to get them to the landing page. The only thing you want is to give them the form, make sure there's no links in your footer.
George B. Thomas:Because what we want to do with the stupid humans is treat them like cattle. We're going to actually herd them through the form to get to the green pasture of the thank you page. Now I'm waxing a little bit funny, but not funny of like, that's that's you're basically saying remove all distraction, point them in the only place they go because this is how much faith we believe that they can figure out. What? Wait.
George B. Thomas:Like, first of all, that doesn't come from a place of love. That doesn't come from a place of servanthood. That doesn't come from a place of, like, good, what I would call good marketing. Now, it a tactic and strategy that worked back in the day? Heck to the yes.
George B. Thomas:Is it something that I believe that we should continue to do moving forward? I really don't think so. If they don't want your ish, they don't want your ish. But at least create the ish because if they want it, then they'll convert on it. If you don't have 10 fields in the forum, like this is something I believe that should die.
George B. Thomas:Honestly, my personal opinion, I think you should die.
Liz Moorehead:My personal opinion? Uh-oh. Stop putting crap behind a landing page. Like so often the problem with your landing page has nothing to do with the landing page. It's what you're trying to shove behind it.
Liz Moorehead:It's garbage. If it's flimsy, if it's one dimensional, your landing page will be garbage, flimsy, and one dimensional. It'll look like a used car sale car salesman trying to be like, no. It's totally fine that this Mercedes is $10 Don't worry about it. Like, that's what it's gonna come off like.
George B. Thomas: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 the amount of times I've seen a pillar page convert for somebody to download the PDF version of it and take it with them, Cause it wasn't behind the gate. There was a way to add the service of you can take this thing with you if you want, but you can read the whole thing here. It's kind of crazy like why more people I mean, there are some people that are listening to this that have done that but there are some people listening to this still holding on to the everything has to be gated scenario but like, it can be ungated gated which is fun too.
George B. Thomas:Sorry, go ahead, Liz.
Liz Moorehead: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:used to very, times.
Liz Moorehead:It's like That's
George B. Thomas:funny. It's been a long time. That's how long it's been.
Liz Moorehead:Oopsie jar.
Chad Hohn:Well, sorry. Was saying it was Morse code. Morse code.
Liz Moorehead:You literally have like 12,000 words of whatever topic it is that you're talking about. At the top, you have like your introduction, you explain what it is, then a little tiny box that says hey if you want to download this PDF to read it later, you're good go for it. And my landing pages for that were pillar pages regularly had 30% plus conversion rates, which is 10% over the standard benchmark for B2B regularly. There's that piece of it. The other thing I will say is the inverse of what I just said.
Liz Moorehead:You have something fantastic, fantastic behind your landing page. And you have the flimsiest, saddest landing page I've ever seen. Are you an accountant? You'll really like this ebook. It's about accounting.
Liz Moorehead:In this, will learn about accounting trends. You will learn about accounting dos and don'ts and so much more.
Chad Hohn:That's Do
George B. Thomas:you know
Liz Moorehead: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 to check this off of my to do list. It's there's no, it's thoughtless.
George B. Thomas:It's like you, and this is where I get frustrated because again, and I leaned into this at the beginning of this episode, but you spend so much time creating the awesome thing and then you turd out the piece that is most important. Like you literally turd out the thing that they have to embrace it with. And so there's no storytelling. There's a weak or unclear call to action. And this is the thing that always used to freak me the flip out too, talk about the CTAs on the bottom of the blog that Liz mentioned earlier.
George B. Thomas:People will spend minutes throwing that piece of garbage together thinking that people are just going to automagically click it. No. Like like spend seven hours on your guide and then spend fourteen hours on your call to action and your landing page. Anyway, don't those aren't real numbers. Right.
George B. Thomas:I'm just telling you
Chad Hohn:Just ratios. Yeah. Yeah. But spend a good amount of time on both. You gotta care about both.
Chad Hohn:Right?
Liz Moorehead:Yes. Yes. Now, George, I think this might be a good time to circle back to that story that you wanted to tell us.
George B. Thomas:Oh, I the herding cattle. I did. I did. That is that what you mean?
Liz Moorehead:The navigation.
George B. Thomas:Yeah. Yeah. We talked about the no navigation. Yeah. Yeah.
George B. Thomas:Herding cattle. That was the anyway. Like,
Chad Hohn:people aren't smart enough to figure out how to
George B. Thomas:get the not contract trying to get herd them cattle anymore. I'm I'm just not listen, I'm from Montana. I'll hop on a horse. I'll I'll herd some cattle, just not through my landing pages. I'm done.
Liz Moorehead:Well, the reason why I asked that is because he Devin, our guy mentioned one other thing that I thought was really powerful about like, stop doing this.
George B. Thomas:Yeah.
Liz Moorehead:Which was when you go to convert on a single thing in a landing page, like I am here to convert on this one piece of product, this one content property, whatever it is that you're trying to give me. And one of the things that he mentioned is like, asking for me to sign up for 18,000 other things at the same time. Stop doing that. Stop showing me if I wanna favorite it. Stop trying to get like I think what happens is that marketers are like, well, while we're here, while we have your peepers, right?
Liz Moorehead:Can we get you to do these 18 other things? And it's a bad user experience. I can feel that you're trying to maximize that touch point. And in some cases, simple like, would you also like to subscribe to our newsletter? Fine.
Liz Moorehead:But when we have too many other things going on, I think that gets problematic. Because it's less about the user experience and more about trying to maximize the value you're getting from that touch point.
George B. Thomas:During the conversion point, I totally agree. And I've seen those forums where it's like four other check boxes. I also like to subscribe to these other 17 things. No. Yeah.
George B. Thomas:Now here's what I
Chad Hohn:don't I just want uncheck everything.
George B. Thomas:Oh my God. Yeah, never mind. I said, I don't want any of it. Forget it. I'll go down the road.
George B. Thomas:Thank you. Because by the way, your offer, it does exist down the road. There is a Target or Walmart to your like, whatever you are. I'm just going to throw that out there real quick. So here's the thing.
George B. Thomas:I want to be careful because I don't want anybody to misconstrue something that might be going through their brain right now. During the conversion, yes, I agree with Devin. I agree that there shouldn't be like these other four additional check marks for your other three subscription newsletters and blah, blah, blah. Let's talk about the thing that needs to be there. That is please, by all that is holy, do not just have inline text in that form, but go to a thank you page.
George B. Thomas:And when you go to the thank you page, this is what I want to make sure that we get out here is, yes, the first thing should be like, Hey, thanks for your interest in X, Y, Z. You give them a big button, they can easily download it. And by the way, that's where a lot of people's thank you pages end. And that's not cool. Again, if I come from a place of good marketing, good experience, because of love, because of servanthood, because I'm value first, because I'm, you know, human centric content creation, I want you to continue the journey.
George B. Thomas:And that continuing the journey might look different depending on what the conversion was that they just had. For instance, if I convert on an ebook, a guided checklist, a webinar, whatever, the thank you page might be like, here's the thing, the webinar video, the download button, whatever. But there needs to be a journey of like, by the way, people who are interested in this also like these blog articles, also watch these videos, also download these other things, whatever it is. But think of this page being able to be a bunch of other resources, a bunch of choose your own adventures, if you will, for them to spend more time educating themselves on the thing that they're trying to learn or the brand you that is providing the thing that they're trying to learn. Again, spend more time on the experience of the thank you page maybe than you did on the actual thing or definitely the landing page in CTA.
George B. Thomas:But here's what I want to think in 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?
George B. Thomas:Do I need to bring like, so, like Yeah. Set them up for success, whether it's through educational journey or the next meeting that they're gonna have with.
Chad Hohn:Yeah. You know what's excuse me. What's kind of frustrating about, like, using a embedded HubSpot meeting is because it's kind of like an iframe and it's like embedded. Right? You it's very difficult to pass the chosen meeting time data out to your website to use it as variables in the landing page.
Chad Hohn:So, like or in the thank you page. Like, thanks for booking with Billy at blah blah blah time. Right? That would be amazing to be able to do just to personalize some things or even put conditions, you know, between now and your meeting, check out these articles or whatever. You know?
Chad Hohn:Anyway, just, like or any any specific topics they chose or something like that that they wanted to cover could drive what things you're gonna show them,
George B. Thomas:You for can do some of that from, like, if they do this in the form, then go to this page, which then you
Chad Hohn:could
George B. Thomas:have some of that stuff. But I understand what you're saying. Also, you reminded me of a thing that I haven't talked about forever. It's like, you're using HubSpot for your form conversion, there is also a way that you can embed the meeting widget in the actual inline So, text can, again, if you start to think of user experience, I can have it where they can fill out a form and at the same place where they filled out a form, they can now book that meeting. And once they book that meeting, I can then send them to a thank you page.
George B. Thomas:Like, holy crap, make it easy for me to actually get on your calendar.
Chad Hohn: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 some certain plan, then you can't use that feature.
George B. Thomas:Yeah. As always. Started.
Chad Hohn:So I have one more
George B. Thomas:question too. Plans, I swear.
Chad Hohn:I I have a question.
Liz Moorehead:George is in a mood today.
Chad Hohn:Yeah. Yeah. I love it. About, like okay. So gates.
Chad Hohn:Right? And just going back to, like, gating things, gating everything, not gating everything, or simultaneously gating and not gating. Right? So you put like a conversion to but it's actually technically not gated or whatever. So in a world where, like, a lot of our answers are not just coming from Google search, but they're coming from Google Scraper bot at the top, and people aren't actually going into web pages as much.
Chad Hohn:If your content is behind the gate and Google makes scraper bot isn't gonna fill out your form to get your content to give said answers, then are you shooting yourself in the foot? Because then the AI models that actually scrape public content aren't going to be able to have answers and cite you as a source.
George B. Thomas:So it's it's in well, your question
Chad Hohn:I know that's like evolving right now.
George B. Thomas:Yeah. Your your question leads me into a couple of different places. One, it is definitely another push for the pillar page landing page where they can take the PDF with them, because again, you're putting the content out there. It also is something where I would just fundamentally think about the process in how you're showing up for the world as well. Do I want to talk about this?
George B. Thomas:Do I want to talk about this? Yeah. So listen, one of the things that you can do right now is you can go to georgebthomas.com/helper, and you'll see a page that you can hit a button and it'll take you to another page where you can start to ask any question that you 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've ever created, you start to create content in a different way.
George B. Thomas:When you have a clone that people, after a certain amount of messages for free, they put in their email address so they can continue to get the value out of all the content you've created. You start to think about conversion in a different way and value based on the content you're creating. Because you know that the conversion is taken care of and you're adding value first through the clone that you've created based on the content you've created over the last twelve years, you also realize that you create content different because you're not so much worried about the content or the download, but the use of the content or the download that once was there. And here's the fun part is that inside of this system, can also just fundamentally, if they mention a word, you can give them the guide in there because you already know that they've already converted. So, for instance, you might be able to go over to My Clone and mention something like WordPress versus HubSpot CMS.
George B. Thomas:Guess what we have? We have on the website a gated version and a pillar page gated version of that. But if you're already talking to the clone and you mention it, it'll actually serve you a link just to download the dang PDF. Here's another thing I'll say. This is, and again, I'm going sideways, when you start to think about what's fundamentally changing around this, the fact that you can now have sales sequences that align to campaigns that could use documents that are the marketing PDFs, you start to think about the conversion differently because the reporting actually is swinging back on the hind end of being able to see what so like we live in a world where we need to start just rethinking it all.
Chad Hohn:Yeah. It's not just website into CRM is conversion anymore. It's it's marketing content into customer, ultimately.
George B. Thomas:Yeah. And listen, I've been this isn't the first time I played with this. I literally had a I won't I won't drop their name, but I had a major player in the HubSpot, like in HubSpot, say, I really love your conversion strategy with your community. What do you mean? I'm just building a community.
George B. Thomas:Oh, no, no, no. You're generating emails. Woah, of course I am, But I'm building a community. No, no, no. That's slick how you make it do this.
George B. Thomas:Then they go here. And then I'm like, well, I'm a marketer. Like, you know, but here's the thing. Like, you've got it's evolving. Right?
George B. Thomas:So by the way, I didn't I'm gonna step out on a limb. I know this is about landing pages, but I'm getting to the place where I even am curious about community in the next couple years, to be honest with you. And I'm the community guy. I start to ask myself, do I need to have a community if I have a clone? And did people sign up for the community to get access to me and the education?
George B. Thomas:If that lives somewhere else streamlined and more optimized, would they go there instead of here? Like, anyway, let's get back to landing pages. That was a rant.
Liz Moorehead:No, that was really interesting. But here's the thing. I actually want to You started talking a little bit about AI there, bud. I want to stay on the AI train a second, but more from a tools perspective, right? Because HubSpot has rolled out a lot of new AI driven tools and smart content features, and smart content features have been around for a while.
George B. Thomas:Just one How
Liz Moorehead:can businesses, based on what we're discussing in terms of what value truly looks like today, how can businesses actually leverage these to optimize landing pages in a way that probably wasn't possible five years ago?
George B. Thomas:Well, I mean, listen, not all of us are a Liz or name your favorite writer. So AI is getting really good at creating copy in a way that fundamentally it's better than many mere mortal humans who can't afford to have a content strategist or a writer on staff. It's just going to make it better because you could listen to an episode like this, or you could do a Google search and you could get the information that is landing page copy best practices, storytelling best practices, and then be able to create copy that you look at and go, Wow, that's way better than I would have written it. So, just in that alone. And then also getting it to look at like, Hey, I've created this landing page and this is the call to action.
George B. Thomas:Can you tell me if this is amazing or does it suck kind wind? By the way, doesn't care about hurting your feelings. If you ask it a legit question, it might be like, well, this could probably do some help. Right. And so like doing that, I think is even interesting.
George B. Thomas:By the way, that's
Liz Moorehead:always a humbling experience, even for me as a writer. So I don't use it from a generative perspective, but I do have it take a look at things that I've created. Like, give me the little once the over, right? And there have been moments where it's like, So if you consider it the opposite of everything you've just given me, and that is deeply humbling. Yeah.
George B. Thomas:So here's the thing I'll throw in here too. Because we have talked about brand voice and AI content and AI settings. I don't want to talk a lot about it yet because I haven't started playing with it. But I have had communication as of yesterday with a PM that is unlocking the next version of AI powered content creation in my portal. So they're just like we had wished they're going deeper with what they built, they're going deeper with what they built.
George B. Thomas:So I think this
Chad Hohn:they can watch be her episode? Did they watch her episode? It sounds
George B. Thomas:like it. Maybe. I mean, who knows? But they're going deeper. There's a beta and I'm super excited.
George B. Thomas:And so again, you have to think about how can you use AI to create better copy, better call to actions, better experiences. And you have to fundamentally understand that you can train it on what are all of the best practices. And then you can tweak it as a human to what you believe to be the best practices for your organization. By the way, this whole conversation, we can't do this conversation and be like, By the way, this is a one size fits all landing page episode. Now, these are things that you should think about and then tweak and make it for your organization.
George B. Thomas:You might need to gate everything. You might need to not gate a dang thing. Like, it depends. Hi.
Chad Hohn:Yeah. I love I actually was reading through Devin's, like, little footnotes, and I really like what he was mentioning about, like, you just don't have to be developer or full beans designer anymore. You can get a lot of that context. Like, if I had to, I could probably do fairly decent utilizing either a some of HubSpot's tools or other resources, AI driven resources out there just to give me a leg up and to be able to make an effective marketing campaign. It might take me a while if I wanted to just not put out mediocre dump, you know, onto the Internet because you have to do a lot of follow-up and make sure that, you know, you're you're having it help you consider stuff you just don't know.
Chad Hohn:Because when you're doing something new for the first time, you have all these unknown unknowns in what you're doing. Right? And so I was always asking that second, what am I not thinking about is a really, really key thing when working with, like, those AI kind of tools. It'll really help you consider stuff you never thought of. And being able to do it quickly is also, you know, like I mean, if I had to learn all that, it's literally what Jordan's just talking about.
Chad Hohn:Like, if I had to learn all that on my own and go into a whole new skill set, it would take me forever in a day to really put out something that I was proud of. Right? But anyway, I mean, yeah, I think I think it's just it's such a leg up.
George B. Thomas:And by the way, let's not even talk about because, again, the landing page is about the conversion. We already said that hasn't changed. Think about, like, lead scoring based on that conversion. Also think about HubSpot having the chatbots or or think of, like, a conversational form. Or think about the fact that you probably have landing pages out there right now that have the old HubSpot legacy form.
George B. Thomas:And what would happen if you actually turned that into a multi step form? There's so many different things that you could go and tweak and change, and there's next steps or outcomes workflows based on the conversion. Like, how many people out there right now have a landing page that when they fill out a form, it's in line text to a link to where they can download the freaking guide, versus a landing page that goes to a thank you page that triggers a workflow that sends a three email series that then now you all said you can score on, did they open any of those three emails and they filled out the form and how much time did they spend on the thank you page? And did they go to any other resources off of that thank you page? And how much time did they spend there?
George B. Thomas:And like, now all of a sudden you're starting to pay attention to like the journey of the human and the score of the
Chad Hohn: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 gonna find somebody who's gonna be a project manager for a thing, and they're gonna find my page, and they're gonna go here, and they're gonna see something valuable and great. You know, but, like, actually thinking about their whole experience of going through that, literally, like, we're just talking about of having the form feed a meeting link.
Chad Hohn:And then, like, ultimately, I'd love to have that, you know, meeting data feed the landing page to give a wonderful experience all the way through. Right? And, like, thinking about that perspective, I think, is what what is really changing with landing pages and stuff too. Because actually caring about the person going through the journey helps them feel like they're not just a part of your engine to churn out leads. Right?
George B. Thomas:Yeah. Yeah.
Liz Moorehead:I agree with that.
George B. Thomas:So one of the things I did and same. So one of the things I did before we run out of time, Liz, you got me on this kick of like best practices, frameworks, mindsets. Like, you know, like we talked about this two years ago and I'm just kind of, so I was curious because I had never really heard amazingly, like about HubSpot talk about like a framework for landing pages. And so I was like, hey, let's see if there's a framework out there. And so wider funnel, a Lyft model, you guys can look this up and let me know what you're But at the end of the day, they have six things that you might want to pay attention to.
George B. Thomas:So, value proposition, right? So, is the offer compelling and clearly communicated? This is why I have many conversations with Liz, like, Liz, am I clearly like, do people understand or am I just being Well, stupid the thing.
Liz Moorehead:I love that you brought that up. I just want to add a quick thing in here. We make an assumption that the value will be obvious. We make an assumption that when people show up to evaluate whether or not they want to give us their personal information for something, that the value we are presenting is obvious and our trust has already been earned. No, absolutely not.
George B. Thomas:Yeah. So value proposition is the offer compelling and clearly communicated. Clarity is the message easy to understand and does it quickly explain the benefits, benefit. Love
Liz Moorehead:those Bennies. We love
George B. Thomas:those To the reader, by the way, not to you. The next one is relevance. Does the landing page match expectations of the visitor from the ad, the email, whatever referral sources? Does it make sense? Urgency.
George B. Thomas:Is there a reason to act now? Limited time offer, deadline, scarcity, some type of peace in there. Anxiety. This one is there trust signals, security assurances, and testimonials to reduce hesitation? Then
Liz Moorehead:number Oh, one my six favorite things that I've seen is like when people put landing page videos on their landing pages, and they're literally like, I'm literally just going to use your email for this newsletter, and then I'm never going to use it for anything else. And I'm not going to sell it. And that's it. That's all that's going to happen.
George B. Thomas:Yeah.
Liz Moorehead:The only thing I will say though, about the creating urgency, I somewhat disagree with that. I think if there is no urgency, don't fake it.
George B. Thomas:Oh yeah. Yeah.
Liz Moorehead:But I also think sometimes instead of creating urge, I think sometimes when we think of the idea of creating urgency, we think around it from the perspective of, well, it's a limited time or it's a thing or it's this. Actually think about the urgency that's happening in their world. Right? Create urgency around their pain point. Again, not scare tactics.
Liz Moorehead:Yeah. But like, If you have XYZ questions, these questions, XYZ, the answers are right here. Yeah. This is what you need. Is going to take this exponential pain and make it bitty, right?
Liz Moorehead:Like just speak to the truth. And I think that's where the urgency comes from.
George B. Thomas:I totally agree. I love that. And so number six is distraction. So up here as listeners, what I would want you to do is grab your notepad, a document, and go to your landing pages later today and look value proposition, clarity, relevance, urgency, anxiety, distraction. Okay, let me put it up against this framework and see where they stand and what do I need to tweak or change and and how will that impact, you know, next quarter, next year, all of that, these changes that you might make.
George B. Thomas:Good. Good.
Liz Moorehead:So, guys, here's what we're going to do. We made a joke about it earlier, about how we've done multiple episodes about multiple things. Guess what we're going to be talking about next week, guys? Landing pages. Because we only got through half of our questions today.
George B. Thomas:Half.
Liz Moorehead:And quite frankly, this conversation we've had has led me to other questions I want to ask you. We haven't talked about landing pages in the shortened attention span era. We haven't even gotten to AB testing. I have a whole monologue about smart content that we're not going get into today. Guys, I'm really excited we started this I want you both to think about you guys have homework for this week, and so do I.
Liz Moorehead:Uh-oh. Find great landing pages. Wow. And find not so great landing pages. We're not in the business of naming names and calling people out, but come with some examples.
Liz Moorehead:That's what we're looking for next week. I know. Look at you, George.
Chad Hohn:I mean, there's
George B. Thomas:a chance You're
Liz Moorehead:dealing with landing pages every day.
George B. Thomas:There's a plethora of ways that I could probably get us canceled just That's
Liz Moorehead:why we don't name names. We don't name names. We're here to encourage growth and learning opportunities. And I say this as a woman who got yelled at by AI once about her own writing capabilities. We're fine.
Liz Moorehead:But with that George, as we end part one of our landing pages journey, what do you want people to be walking away with today? Whether that's one thing or five things, I'm feeling generous.
George B. Thomas:Oh, wow. That's nice of you. Because I had multiple. One of the things is definitely use that framework that we talked about, But I want you, when you're using that framework, I want you to think about your landing page in this way too. Is it focused on one single goal?
George B. Thomas:We kind of jokingly talked about how it's like, and these three other subscriptions in this thing. What is the one thing? What's its job to do, right? And then, is it doing that, first of all? Yes, no.
George B. Thomas:Okay, well, we need to fix that. Now, let's use the framework to go ahead and hone in on the other pieces. My second one that I just can't let go is use thank you pages, and thank you pages should continue the journey, not end it. So many thank you pages I get to feel like it's just like the destination, the parking lot for the conversation, thank you pages have to continue the journey. Go look at all your thank you pages.
George B. Thomas:If you're not saying things like, Here's additional webinars, here's additional podcasts, here's additional videos, here's additional blog articles, then you need to be doing that. By the way, by the way, you have to create that to be able to send them to it. I'm just saying. Start creating that now
Liz Moorehead:so that you can
George B. Thomas:act anyway.
Liz Moorehead:You know this mean no. You know that this means we need an episode about thank you pages. Right? Just throw that out there.
George B. Thomas:Well, we need a we need an episode to get these people generate anyway, never mind.
Liz Moorehead:I have We need an episode. I I have like what?
George B. Thomas:Have such an interesting conversation. Want to have around sitting at a table and somebody seeing my clone being created based on twelve years of historical content creation to which they immediately said, I need to start creating content yesterday. And since the meeting that we had, have been aggressively creating content because it was an unlock for them. Like so many organizations I bump into that are using HubSpot and they don't have the inbound engine. They don't have human centric value first content creation like soul.
George B. Thomas:Not why we're here. Anyway, go check out your landing pages. Make sure your thank you pages continue on the journey and let us know if you found a thank you page that you just want us or landing page that you want us to rip 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 of another episode.
George B. Thomas:Will Lord Lack continue to loom over the community or will we be able to defeat him in the next episode of the hub heroes podcast? Make sure you tune in and find out in the next episode. Make sure you head over to the hubheroes.com to get the latest episodes and become part of the league of heroes. FYI, if you're part of the league of heroes, you'll get the show notes right in your inbox and they come with some hidden power up potential as well. Make sure you share this podcast with a friend.
George B. Thomas:Leave a review if you like what you're listening to and use the hashtag hashtag hub heroes podcast on any of the socials and let us know what strategy conversation you'd like to listen into next. Until next time, when we meet and combine our forces, remember to be a happy, helpful, humble human, and of course, be looking for a way to be someone's hero.
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