What’s the purpose of a landing page? │Ragnarokast #2

Intro

Disclaimer, this podcast is brought to you by two extremely awkward, lifelong friends who started a business together. This is their podcast. 

Steven

I’m Steven. 

Spencer

And I’m Spencer. Welcome to Ragnarokast, your podcast for all things marketing and MarTech. 

Steven

Hello everyone. 

Both

We’re the Co-CEOs of Ragnarok. 

Steven

I’m Steven and I do all things product and services, 

Spencer

and I do all things operational and people-related. This is our only our second episode. So if you’re new to the podcast, you haven’t missed much today with us, we have Cat, our creative director joining us all the way from Florida. 

Cat

Thanks guys. Happy to be on. 

Spencer

For today’s fluffy segue. That’s what my notes say. 

Cat

I wrote that I wrote Fluffy segue because you know—marketing. 

Spencer

Yes, Yes. Fluffy segue. 

Steven

Listen, you gotta add a little bit of marshmallowy around that segue there. You know, just pat it out like I should be able to run straight at that thing and just get absorbed into it. 

Spencer

I mean, I like to think that I’m, you know, I’m camping. I’m, I’m up at Lake Saranac, like I do every year in the summer, and you know, I take a little segue, and I put it with some chocolate and some graham crackers, and I slap that bad boy over a fire on my own little camping island that I’m on, and my dogs are running around. And I, I just segue right into the next segment there. 

Cat

You know, I was a Girl Scout troop leader, and I think I’ve eaten more than my fair share of s’mores that I’ve not eaten once since my daughter quit Scouts. 

Spencer

But how many segues have you eaten? 

Cat

Not a single one. 

Steven

And you don’t call it shmores? 

Cat

No, because it’s some more 

Spencer

There’s no h in s’mores

Cat

Is it like, shmore, like a schmear, like you put it on a bagel?

Steven

You just want schome more. So it’s a shmore. 

Spencer

Well, for the record, there’s no agent s’more bringing us back home away from the fluffiness into the land of concrete topics.  Cat, this first question’s directed towards you and then, you know, Steven, if you have any follow-ups to that, you know, most people in marketing know that landing pages are an essential part of middle funnel marketing, but not a lot of people are using strategy data collection or even form builders effectively Cat from a creative and marketing perspective, where do you think people go wrong? 

Cat

You know, it’s just they get boring. You know, you go and you, they’re driving all the same traffic to the same exact website, so the same exact experience. So all that effort you’ve gone into crafting a specialized campaign, you know, like it’s a promo campaign or it’s a sale on swim trunks or something like that. But then they just go to your main website and you don’t end up on the special like swimsuit page or anything like that. 

You know, that’s where it falls flat and you know, there’s no personalization. You know, once you click through. You wanna see on your website on your landing page what you saw on the ad. 

So it just like brings you back there. So you just know that where your click-through is where it needs to go. You know, overall landing pages can increase the effectiveness of your brand storytelling because it’s all sort of this seamless like, visual process. 

Steven

Yeah. And you know, if you wanna sort of think about the, you know, what is the effectiveness of that, generally speaking, people who sort of go through an experience who, who expect or see what they expect are more likely to convert as opposed to those who are sort of surprised and like, oh, I clicked on swim trunks, and now I’m looking at your winter collection. This is not where I intended to land. So even that can have a real impact on the revenue and, of course, the conversion of that customer experience. 

Spencer

I mean, even that, I think that ties into the theme of trust in order to succeed. Like the cookie-less world that we’ve entered, not lying to your customer is, is the way to go. 

Steven

I don’t like that phrase cookie-less. ’cause I myself am a, am a big cookie monster, you know? 

Spencer

Alright. 

Steven

As you know, you know, a good chocolate chip cookie over a birthday cake any day, you know? 

Cat

Oh yeah. I just went ahead and bought like a big tub of those mini chocolate chip cookies from Costco last night. So they are waiting for me after this recording. 

Spencer

We were actually at a birthday party the other night, and someone had bought cookies for him ’cause he couldn’t eat the cake. We got our gluten-free man over here. I’ll let him proselytize you on that on another, on another episode. But he realized there were cookies and he goes, wait, there’s cookies. His wife was purposely hiding them from him so that he wouldn’t eat too many of them all at once. So he’s not lying. He is a cookie monster. 

Steven

Very smart. But you know, the thing is, is I couldn’t accept the cookies because they were hidden from me. So, you know, it’s all just a big metaphor for our web browsing experience. 

Cat

Yep. 

Spencer

Okay. So when we land on a landing page, when we click through the landing page as a customer, what do we wanna see? 

Cat

I mean, you know, there’s the obvious. Like, oh, I like this shirt, I wanna see this shirt and bonus. I like the color, and there’s now a bunch of suggested items for me. Or there’s some things I could mix and match with the shirt. So, you know, you want your visual experience to be enhanced by what grabbed you, whether you saw it on like Instagram or TikTok or whatever. So that upper funnel, it takes you through and, and you see what you wanna see, or you’re selling an informative program, and there’s an informative video about what that program is. Those are all great. They get to the point. They do what they’re supposed to do, but it doesn’t always capture the leads. 

If my kids bug me and now I have to go ahead and make dinner and I don’t complete my process. But some things that where you get there, like, oh, tell us your style, what’s your fitness goal? Like, those type of questions. It can help collect valuable insights about your customer’s goals, their preferences. And it all just allows brands to target what are some great products that maybe they didn’t know they wanted but are still part of your line. And you know, it’s the added bonus of getting to educate your brand and what happens after that. 

Spencer

You should be sorry Cat, you should be sorry for flubbing your word. 

Cat

I know. You know what? I have so many abandoned cart emails. It works. 

Steven

I think when you’re talking about these kinda landing page experiences, these fun things, these spin the wheels, you know, play a little bit of jeopardy or wheel of fortune, you know, on your way into a page. These sort of, I like to, I like to think of ’em as like kind of interactive experiences or like little games that you’re playing. 

Cat

Yeah. 

Steven

You know, it’s all, to me it’s all about that. Again, if I’m shopping for swim trunks, probably the last thing I want to do is spin a bunch of wheels, find out what my discount is, and finally figure out what, what shorts you got for me there. Or Speedos, you know, I’m, I’m sort of trying out some new stuff. Stuff. 

Spencer

You’re a progressive man. 

Steven

Yeah, I’m progressing. It’s kind of funny, you know because I was thinking about this recently where, you know, you go into the public pool here in New York City, the old YMCA or just The Y you know, if you wanna be cool and you know, the Speedo to trunk ratio, you know, if you were to lay out a graph, right, the sort of top of your graph is, think of that as I, I’m gonna use the word skimps in the, in, in, in the level of, of coverage you have, you know, with  Speedo being at the top and trunks being at the bottom— 

Spencer

You’re talking about like, like like directional top and bottom. 

Steven

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. And then, you know, the leftmost of your graph being, you know, the youngest age that, that you could show up at the Y and the right side being the oldest, you’re gonna find that that graph, you know, just makes a nice diagonal line all the way to the top. Right. The older you get, the skimpier your clothes get at the, at the good old Y.

Spencer

Going by that logic, that means that if a newborn were to go swimming, they would be wearing pants at the pool, you know? 

Cat

Oh, they do. 

Steven

Some of them have those nice onesies? Yeah. 

Cat

You know what, like, I, I’m gonna say this, you know Steven, you’re probably gonna wanna do this to your, to your baby girl is that you’re gonna end up, she’s gonna be in like a whole wetsuit, you know, fully covered on like her arms, her legs full zip up so she just doesn’t get sunburnt. So with that logic, yes, Spencer, the baby will be completely covered head to toe. 

Steven

And meanwhile, I’m in a G-string, you know, because I’m nearing my—

Cat

Or like that Borat onesie. 

Steven

Yeah. With the Oh that’s a good one.

Spencer

And I guess when you die, they just throw you naked into the pool. 

Steven

Yeah. I mean… 

Cat

Yeah. I mean ashes to ashes, right? Yeah. Like… 

Steven

Yeah.

Spencer

Anyway, moving along. 

Cat

Full circle guys. 

Steven

So you know, as I was saying, all these spin the wheel exercises, these kind of, you know, fill in the blanks, these sort of interactive experiences, you know, that reckons me back to, you know, a good friend of mine—

Spencer

Oh, oh, it reckons me back. 

Steven

It reckons back. Reckon. 

Spencer

I’m just a reckoning All the old days when I was a, a wee marketer. 

Cat

You know what’s so funny is that “reckon” is like a word that gets thrown around very casually. Oh, you reckon? In the South and not just by old people. 

Spencer

Well, The reckoning has come.

Steven 

Alright, go ahead. Yeah, you know, I was, as I reckon here, you know, I’m thinking of my good friend here, Rishi, you know, Rishi from Digioh  and a shameless plug here. ’cause I just love Rishi. He is just one of the, the nicest people there ever was just a genuine sweetheart. 

And he has a, a business called Digioh. And when I think about, you know, the work that they’re doing to kind of build these interactive experiences and build landing pages that are, they sort of serve a, a complex, more enterprise customer, but they can also sort of peel it back and be a little bit more simpler. You know, I think the stuff that he’s doing is really, really interesting, right? Which is to say, you know, here’s some templates, here’s some ideas that you can go to kind of make these not boring landing pages. Make ’em really, really easy to spin up, really focus on the data collection piece of that. 

As you were saying, Cat, you know, I’ve got all these abandoned card emails, or I’m, you know, chasing kids. I don’t have the ability to run back and forth and fill out an entire form, but, you know, I’ll spin a wheel, get a discount, throw in an email, maybe I’ll go through the next experience. And having just this really seamless way to kind of daisy chain these landing page experiences without it feeling like it’s a whole big build exercise. So, I think the work that he’s doing, super, super interesting. He showed me some stuff recently about some of the advanced analytics that he is putting behind it. So just to kind of like a well thought out kind of plug and play product there. So I’ll just shamelessly plug our good friend there, Rishi at Digioh. ’cause he’s just doing some great work. 

Spencer

Yeah. Rishi, you don’t have to pay us for that. We’re you, we get, you got the one gratis from us. But yeah, if anybody’s interested: digioh.com. 

Steven 

Yes. That’s D-I-G-I-O-H.com. 

Spencer

Dot com 

Steven 

Dot C-O-M. See there’s an H in Digioh, and there’s one in Shmore. 

Spencer

I always wondered if the company name was based off of Yugioh. Like Rishi’s actually a huge Yugioh fan.

Cat

You know, I thought too. I also thought that too. ’cause I felt like it was like, do you remember there was also Digimon? There was Digimon and Yugioh.

Spencer

Digimon. Digital monsters.

Cat

They all came out after Pokemon. So it was like, is it Yugioh and Digimon like combined? 

Spencer

Yes. Wow. It all makes sense now. 

Steven 

Now I can just picture Rishi going, ha Yugi boy! 

Spencer

Yugi boy. 

Cat

Just like here with the, the whole like the cards are just flicking out. Maybe that’s part of it! The little cards that you have that are like popups, they’re all the, they’re basically Yugioh cards. It all comes full circle. 

Spencer

You got a Blue Eyes White Dragon! 

Steven 

You know, Rishi is gonna now send us a deck of Digimon cards. Yeah, and Yugioh cards after this. And just say like, thanks, guys. Really appreciate the plug. 

Cat

Yeah. 

Spencer

Actually, he’s gonna have no clue what this is and be like, oh God, yeah. What, what are they telling? What did they say? 

Cat

He’s like, what did I do? What did I do? Like I went ahead and named my company after a bunch of nerdy things I don’t know anything about. 

Spencer

So, you know, we’ve been talking about a lot, lot about the lead-up to landing pages, the experience on the landing page. But what are we doing with the, the actual data that we’re collecting on the landing page and you know, what are some cool ways that we can use it? 

Steven 

Yeah. So this kind of goes back to what I like to call the Ragnarok theory of micro-segmentation, which is rag rock theory because I just keep espousing it constantly all the time. Which is you can kind of use this point of collection, you know, and, and a bunch of other stuff to create different sort of behavioral cohorts kind of based on what they’re telling you, right? 

So you’ve got what they filled out in the form, you call that, you know, zero-party data or first-party data. So they, they gave you like, this is explicitly me telling you this. And then you have all the intent data of everything that they did while they were on that landing page. Like did they spin the wheel? Did they refresh the page and spin the wheel again hoping for a bigger discount? Did they do it a third time, a fourth time? Things that kind of give you a little bit more of an insight into the motivation of the person that you’re trying to interact with here. Combine that with things like what they tell us about themselves and you know, what channel did they come from? 

You can combine all this together and sort of create a sort of grouping or a segment or I like to call microsegment ’cause it’s not like a true segment, it’s too narrowly defined to be that. But something like, here are people who are eager for discounts because they spun the wheel more than once. They’ve given us their information fairly quickly hoping to get that discount code. And they immediately went into the shopping experience. They say, okay, well I have a level of intent here combined with information that they gave me. I’m gonna call this the discount-hungry cohort. Then you sort of look at the opposite end of that. 

I have people who this is their third time landing in sort of a landing page experience that I’m hosting. The only reason I know it’s the third time is because I have the same device ID from that person that I would’ve had each time they came back on the third time they finally gave me their email or their, their phone number. And as they go to market them, I sort of see this as like the passive customer that maybe needs a little bit more information to help them along their, their purchasing journey. So I’m gonna treat those as two completely separate different experiences. On the discount one, I might rush forward a little bit on, on serving them the discount and getting them to sort of funnel that savings into an immediate purchase. 

Whereas with my sort of passive customer, I might spend a lot more time educating them and warming them up to the concept of my brand or my product or my experience or my healthcare or whatever I’m providing. Give them some differentiators, kind of help them through the decision-making process, and then see if that yields a bigger conversion than say just serving them with a, a sort of blanket discount that I’ve not seen the intent signal for. 

Cat

And a lot of that stuff that Steven was talking about, like the data is just, what it’s really cool is that we also learn how we move forward with even changing our visuals and our messaging based off of their behaviors, their demographics. So then we adjust how our visual strategy for both the lower funnel, you know, emails, remarketing, but also if we are doing paid media remarketing as well so that we can go ahead and put specialized things that oh wow, we are performing really well with, you know, women over 40 so we’re just gonna go ahead and, and change that. Or we are performing really well with people under 20 and so it gets lighter, maybe it gets a little bit more chaotic. 

I think that that unhinged approach to marketing is working well with the younger demographic. And maybe we’ll try that too. How else we would remarket them to email. It just kind of comes full circle like, so your entire campaign can be far more focused. 

Spencer

So when you say unhinged, do you mean like, like all the drunk bros that come to the city for SantaCon where they fight each other in the street? Like that kind of unhinged or— 

Cat

No, I’m talking about like people using like Shrek in their TikTok. Have you seen Shrek in a latex body suit dancing over the building? 

Spencer

Oh yeah. I know, yeah. 

Cat

Our intern Avery sent it to me, and she asked me to react to it, and I put it on our TikTok, and I’m like, thanks Gen Z, love you guys. 

Spencer

I saw a TikTok the other day where the intern had been asked to create ads for a, I think it was a Honda dealership. And it was like, management said, you know, not to do anything weird and it has to have the dealership in it, it actually has to relate to cars. And they said, fine. And it’s a pan up to the Honda dealership. You’re like, oh, it’s just like a, like an establishing shot and then there’s a giant cat superimposed over the background walking around like Godzilla, and then it ends. 

Cat

Yeah. 

Spencer

And yeah, I was like, wait, what? And I watched it like five times in a row. ’cause it was hilarious. Because It was hilarious. 

Cat

Yeah. So I mean, just to let you know, we — I have let our intern run wild with the TikTok. I’m like, you know, why not? 

Spencer

Well, they technically completed the assignment properly. 

Cat

They—that’s true. 

Spencer

They did show the dealership. They did, they did. Even if there was a giant cat floating around in the background. What were you gonna say? Steven? 

Steven 

A client that we worked with pretty recently and unfortunately I have nothing to say about, you know, dealerships and cats walking around, but it was a, it was a car company that we were working with as a, you know, Steven, it’s gonna come out, you know, essentially Spencer and I were working with this car dealership through another company that we were working with. I think there were the Brandon Honda or something like that. 

Spencer

It was Brandon Honda. It was Brandon Honda. 

Cat

Oh, Brandon. Like so like here in central Florida? 

Steven 

Yeah, in Central Florida. And this was, I don’t know, maybe like four years ago or something like that. We were, we were trying to get them to buy a loyalty program from us. And so we made up this whole story about the founder of Brandon Honda, whose name was Beauregard Brandon Honda the Third. And, and, and Beauregard was, you know, he was an established gentleman in Florida and he does not sell you cars. He sells you the experience in the luxury of a Honda vehicle. And we kind of went through this whole, you know, sort of random exercise. Needless to say, the client did not sign up through us, but we had a great time with it. You know…

Cat

I’m sure that if that client’s 23-year-old son takes over the business, he would reconsider. 

Spencer

So I remember I slacked Steven this whole like, origin story of Beauregard Brandon Honda, Steven just cackles out loud, and he starts going into this whole like out loud without any context to our employees. So it’s just going into this whole like character, and everyone’s looking around like what is happening right now? And this is when we were in a very small barely converted hotel room who are technician, Selin, here silently standing off to the side. She was there as well back in the old New Yorker Hotel days. 

Steven 

I, I feel like Selin at this point has such a strong muscle in being able to just ignore the things that are going on around her because of how much of this randomness we would do. 

Spencer

We’re just talking about Speedos and like her face is just like stoic and like, I, I don’t even know, like— 

Steven 

She’s like these crazy guys. 

Spencer

Anyway, basically Beauregard Brandon Honda was a failure. So I don’t know how that was a good case study, 

Steven

But, well, you know, I mean I, I think you learn a lot from your failures just as much as you learn from your successes, right? Like maybe we don’t have cat Godzilla stomping around in the background of the Honda, but a more recent client that we worked with. When we talk about these sort of landing page experiences, we’re talking about all this data collection, you know, when you’re getting something really specific, really juicy out of a customer. 

Like say if I’m that car dealership and I’m finding out that hey, somebody clicked through, but they actually told me that they’re interested in an electric car or, or they care about, you know, a commuting experience or any of those number of things, that’s a really solid piece of information that I can take and, and do a lot with and sort of create, again, a microsegment that I can drive, you know, to do some interesting experience with. So in this sort of recent customer that I’m thinking of, we were collecting zip code, basic thing, right? Everybody collects zip code. But then what we did is we sort of took that zip code and we created these like MSAs, these like areas about, you know, where you are and, and that affected things like what inventory did you have available and what were people in your area buying that could kind of help us create a more sort of tailored and customized experience. 

This is for a furniture company by the way. That’s just why I’m sort of saying things like inventory availability and things like that. And you know, what we had is we ended up creating these sort of micro segments specifically to sort of a few separate areas. One kind of being Florida where you kind of look at people who are buying from a specific collection that, you know, involves living room furniture. Like these sort of sectional sofas was kind of the big thing. 

Cat

Yeah. Big like bigger scale things that could never fit into a New York City apartment. 

Steven

Exactly. And then as we sort of went further and closer to the northeast, we were looking more at like love seats and things like this that were kind of the hot buys that people were doing around your area. And so we were able to kind of create these personalized experiences without even really doing a huge investment in it, right? It was more like extrapolating a zip code into a potential, you know, size of a home that you may have, layering that in with whatever other information that we have about you to kind of validate that assumption and then going in and creating the actual experience around that. 

So just think it’s, it’s interesting, you know, when we talk about these landing pages and things, all the gimmicks that we do are just mechanisms for us to really co collect a piece of information that we can make a, a better, more personalized experience for you later on. 

Cat

Yeah. And they could always like look good too. You know, you had mentioned creating, you know, using all of this data to create a landing page specific to an experience. I mean that’s one thing I really like about landing pages also is that you just tailor it to that experience. Whether it’s you’re selling just summer furniture, you know, like all your outdoor furniture or you’re promoting a concert or an event. It’s something that lives outside of your main website that has that fully personalized experience and that branding of the experience. 

Spencer

Alright, well people, we have to GTFO from our podcast studios rather soon here. But yeah, is there anything that you want to wanna leave our listeners with? 

Cat

I guess just, you know, when it comes to landing pages, strategy and creative gotta work hand in hand. It can’t just be an art director going off the rails and trying to make something pretty, which I’ve known many of those in my career and just think it through before you execute. 

Steven

And my takeaway for everybody is when you go to see Beauregard Brandon Honda, just remember he has a giant cat to stomp it around his vehicle yard, breathe in fire. 

Spencer

I’m gonna translate that for you. When you build a landing page experience, make sure that the ad or the email that is leading you there matches with what the user will actually experience when they get to the landing page. When you get to the landing page. It doesn’t have to be one size fits all for every customer. You actually have different segments that you wanna pick up. So make sure that you’re not leaving anything on the table there down the line. 

Once you actually have all that data, you can use that in different ways with different people to make sure that, again, that for your passive or more skeptical people, that you’re not scaring them off. And then for your eager beavers, you know, they want to buy right away. Don’t put all these steps in there, just let them go in and get their discount after spinning the wheel. 

All right, well that’s all the time we have for today. Thank you so much for listening. Please subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast network, find us on LinkedIn and also head over to ragnarokmarketing.com. Subscribe to our email newsletter for more marketing and MarTech thought leadership. 

Steven

And thank you Cat for joining us on the show. 

Spencer

Oh yeah, thanks Cat. 

Cat

It was fun. 

Spencer

I’m so thoughtless You’re thoughtful now. 

Steven

You’re thoughtful now. 

Cat

I mean, I’m here. I mean, you can’t really see me. 

Steven

That’s true. Selin can.

Cat

You know, I just, you just see the back of a laptop, and Selin can see me. 

Spencer

You don’t want to see us. We’re we’re weird-looking anyway. 

Steven

Yeah, super weird. 

Cat

That’s Fine. 

Spencer

Alright, thanks, everybody. 

Steven

Yeah, speak for yourself. I think I’m pretty decent-looking. 

Spencer

I mean, I’m looking at you right now and I think you look pretty weird, man. 

Steven

You know what? I agree. I am weird-looking. Thank you, man. 

Spencer

Okay, bye. 

All

Bye.