The landing page test that takes ten minutes
You have looked at your landing page four hundred times. You can no longer tell whether it makes sense, because you are supplying the missing context from memory every time you read it.
Here is the cheapest way to find out what is actually there.
The five second version
Find someone who does not know what you do. Show them the top of the page for five seconds, then take it away and ask three questions:
- What does this company do?
- Who is it for?
- What would happen if you clicked the button?
Do it with five people. It takes ten minutes total and it is brutal.
What the answers mean
- They cannot say what you do, because the headline describes a benefit rather than a thing. A line like "Marketing that gets done" sounds good and names no product.
- They cannot say who it is for. Most pages never name an audience, and this is the most common gap of the three.
- They do not know what the button does, because the call to action is a category word. "Get started" is a category word.
Fix the top first
Everything below the fold is rearranging furniture if the top three lines are wrong. In order:
- What it is, in plain words that a competitor could also truthfully say. That is fine at this stage.
- Who it is for, specifically enough to exclude people.
- What happens next, stated as the action, not the aspiration. "Create a free account" rather than "Get started".
The second test
Once the top works, test the next question: why this and not the obvious alternative? The obvious alternative is usually a spreadsheet, an agency, or doing nothing.
If your page never mentions the alternative, the reader supplies their own and it is always more flattering to them than to you.
Who to test with
Not your team. Not your investors. Ideally not your friends, who will be kind. Anyone who has the problem and no context is worth ten people who know you.
If you genuinely cannot find five, one stranger is still infinitely more than zero, and zero is what most pages get before they ship.