#218: Website Teardown | How to Build B2B Landing Pages That Actually Convert with Tas Bober, Founder of The Scroll Lab, Gabi Sellam, Conversion Specialist at Fiverr, and Will Hoekenga, Founder of Six Words Studio

You work hard to drive traffic to your landing pages – they’re the backbone of lead generation and conversion.

In this session from our Ultimate Roast of B2B Websites, Tas Bober, Founder of The Scroll Lab, Gabi Sellam, Conversion Specialist at Fiverr, and Will Hoekenga, Founder of Six Words Studio and expert copywriter, sit down to discuss how to nail your B2B landing pages. The panel breaks down real B2B landing pages, highlighting common mistakes, best practices, and live optimizations that can increase conversions and improve user experience.

Danielle, Gabi, Tas, and Will cover:

1. Why clarity, user intent, and strong CTAs are crucial for high-converting landing pages.
2. The biggest design and messaging mistakes B2B marketers make.
3. How to structure a landing page that captures attention and drives action.

Timestamps

• (00:00) - - Introduction to Tas, Gabi, and Will
  
• (03:29) - - What makes a landing page high-converting?
  
• (05:17) - - The difference between landing pages, homepages, and blog posts
  
• (07:00) - - Why user intent matters in landing page optimization
  
• (08:37) - - Why you need clear headlines and strong CTAs
  
• (11:04) - - Common mistakes that kill landing page conversions
  
• (13:31) - - Why mobile optimization is critical for discovery and first impressions
  
• (16:01) - - The role of trust elements: testimonials, reviews, and credibility badges
  
• (18:36) - - Live landing page roast: VC3
  
• (31:27) - - Live landing page roast: Mira
  
• (48:13) - - Live landing page roast: Metal 3D Printing Forming Page
  
• (50:27) - - Why B2B landing pages must prioritize clarity over creativity
  
• (53:19) - - How accessibility and contrast impact user engagement
  
• (55:30) - - Final takeaways on what makes a great B2B landing page

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***

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***

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Former startup CMO Dave Gerhardt and guests share their marketing knowledge to help drive revenue at your company and grow your career in marketing. The podcast mostly covers B2B SaaS, but there's something applicable for anyone working in marketing today.Dave Gerhardt [00:00:00]:

You're listening to B2B marketing with me, Dave Gerhardt.

Danielle Messler [00:00:17]:

So welcome to the ultimate roast of landing pages. I'm very excited. All right, so we have three awesome speakers. We have Gabby Sellam. She is a conversion specialist at Fiverr. And we have Tas Bober, who, if you are anywhere near the Exit Five community, you know. And then we also have Will Hoekenga, who is the founder of Six Words Studio and an awesome copywriter. So I'm just going to bring them on stage without any further ado.

Danielle Messler [00:00:42]:

Welcome, Landing page team.

Will Hoekenga [00:00:44]:

Hi, we're here.

Danielle Messler [00:00:46]:

How are we feeling?

Tas Bober [00:00:47]:

Amazing. Gabby, congratulations on your promotion, CEO. I guess Dan's rowdy behavior and the previous roast kind of got him kicked out. Real.

Danielle Messler [00:00:57]:

Yeah. He's fired. And we automatically have Gabby. Awesome. Well, super excited to have all of you guys here. Here's how it's going to run. Today we're going to do a brief presentation. We are going to learn from Gabby about her experience with landing pages at Fiverr.

Danielle Messler [00:01:14]:

It's a great presentation, full of data and little tips. Tas and Will are also going to add their own lessons there. And then we're going to get into what you're here for the roast. I will share my screen. I will drive Tas for fire emojis is what we got here. So we're going to have fun. All right, who's ready? You guys ready?

Gabby Sellam [00:01:32]:

Okay. Thank you, Danielle, for this great intro. Hi, everybody. I'm very excited to kicking this session on landing page. And basically I prepared those slides based on my experience at Fiverr. So let's move on to the next slide, the agenda. So we'll start with a baseline and go over best practices in creating high converting landing page. I brought examples of examples from Fiverr and we'll wrap up this presentation with do's and don'ts on the landing page optimization.

Gabby Sellam [00:02:05]:

So let's start the first thing that I want to go over. Okay, let's start with the definition. Basically, a landing page. It is the destination a visitor is going to reach after clicking on an ad, an email, or any other link. And it's conversion based. You have one goal. It's either direct purchase or lead generation. But you need to be focused on this main goal, what a landing page is not.

Gabby Sellam [00:02:31]:

First of all, it's not a homepage. They have a lot of similarities because of course, a homepage also is conversion based. But homepage is mainly the main entry point of a website. So it's going to gather a lot of intents and redirect to many other places in your website. And also it's not a blog post because you know, the primary goal of a blog post is information. So let's talk about intent. This is very dear to my heart. It's basically the starting point of any campaign.

Gabby Sellam [00:03:01]:

I want to separate what is high intent and low intent. So high intent is basically when someone, a user is actively searching for something so you can think of a brand and then it's going to be direct channel, you are searching for it, or it's going to be on Google. Of course, if you're clicking on an ad or an organic result, you're typing a keyword, your intent is very hot. On the other side of the umbrella, we have what we call low intent. And this is basically when you're exposed to a content and you decide to check it out. So typically on social media, of course, when you're scrolling down and you see that you're targeted on ads, but it can also be done on partnerships or influencers. And keep this in mind because when we'll go over the examples, this going to come back. Okay, so I have five important points that I would like to go over.

Gabby Sellam [00:03:53]:

And the first one is the header, because this is the first thing that you're supposed to see when you land on the page. So of course you want to have something that is very, in my opinion, simple and straightforward, but also conveying a value proposition. And for me, one thing that is very important when I'm working with my copywriter, it's always, you know, explaining that the users didn't land a per magic on this page. He came from somewhere, there's an entry point and there's a copy in this entry point. So you want to ensure that there's continuity in the copy that you're creating and you'll find some connection between the entry point copy and the main header. Then moving on to design. So some basic UX design principle is that bigger, larger elements capture more attention. And that's why in general, your header on the thoughtful is bigger.

Gabby Sellam [00:04:46]:

So you want to work on your hierarchy between, you know, headlines, subheadings, paragraphs, and having different sizing. When you have images, it's important that it will be supporting your text and not overshadowing it. And I'm stressing this especially for B2B businesses because you can face something that is a bit complex. So you don't want to overwhelm the visitor with something that is too big and really getting over your content. And overall, like you want something that is scannable and Will look at a landing page that show how you can have something organized with bullet points and that will be readable. Of course CTA is super important, having something that is clear and persuasive. Also this slide is okay, was a bit different, but all good. So I won't go over everything.

Gabby Sellam [00:05:36]:

What I want you to take is that have only one primary CTA in the top fold. I know that in the past when we used to talk about landing page, it was really having something simple, a header, no navigation, one cta. I think that now we learned that we can have something a bit more complex. But if you decide to have several two CTAs on your top fold, make sure that the primary one is more visible. And one thing that I want to add is that a CTA can be a button. But for example, in Fiverr we also use search bar because we have so many services. So we understood that for some campaigns it's better to go for that. And of course for lead generation it can be a form trust element.

Gabby Sellam [00:06:18]:

Of course, super important, especially if your brand is not that known. So we work with product, we work with customer success, we look at reviews and every time that we can add testimonials, reviews, badges on award, we do so. And last but not least, mobile, not only for SEO purpose. I think that in my perspective mobile is so important because it's a discovery platform. Now so many brands get to be known through social media, email campaigns and it's basically the platform for first impression. And first impression always influence the next step in the user funnel. So even if your product is not made to be converted on mobile, it's still important to have a good mobile web version. Okay, so we're going to talk about example and it's a high intent landing page.

Gabby Sellam [00:07:13]:

This is a campaign that we did for a website creation. So a little bit about some context about Fiverr. Fiverr is created on E commerce standard. We sell thousands of services and the way to organize it is through listing pages so you can see it on the image on your right. This is a listing page for website development services and we use to use those listings as a lending experience for paid acquisition. After doing some research, we understood that it's not the optimal landing experience because it was very overwhelming for users. So we decided to test something new to create a landing page and to showcase the story of website creation on Fiverr. Because we not only offer website development services, but also website design.

Gabby Sellam [00:08:06]:

And if I ask you what is the difference, you won't know how to explain It So we have the page and unfortunately because it's not the updated version, I don't have a link to the landing page that I wanted to show you. So you can see on the screenshot here what we created. So the header is down to top freelancers to create the perfect site. So we switch it. We used to have a copy that is very service oriented and hiring and here we understood that the goal is more important and here the user goal is to create a website. So let's talk about it and make sure that they're in the right place. And of course the value proposition from Fiverr is to hire top freelancer. So it's also there and I'm very sorry that I can't show you what comes after because we basically created a structure that is scannable where we explain all the diversity of services with the deliveries.

Gabby Sellam [00:09:03]:

Whether you're looking to get a website on Wix, so you should be hiring this expert or you're looking to get a JavaScript file and you should get this. This was the idea and we got great results from it. Conversion rate improved by 15% and the campaign ROI increased by 5.7%. So we started implementing this strategy for other campaigns. And something that I want to point out also is that this is not the final version we constantly optimizing. So even if we want with this one, we know that we can still improve it.

Danielle Messler [00:09:37]:

How often would you say you make updates?

Gabby Sellam [00:09:40]:

It really depends on the campaign. We do let it run sometimes, but every couple of months we check in again and say okay, let's try a different cta, let's change the hero, let's adapt this. We don't do it on a weekly basis, but yeah, every couple of months we check in again. Okay, moving on to another example. This is a campaign that we created for Fiverr Pro. So we were targeting here we are targeting E commerce professionals that are building or scaling their businesses and the goal for them was to basically fill in a form and right away after they were able to schedule a meeting with the sales team. So few things about it again here on the top fold, we made sure that E commerce professional could understand that this is really for them. So your E Commerce project plan executed, delivered and we have a clear CTA that is to book a call.

Gabby Sellam [00:10:37]:

And for this landing page we can see the form that we use. But it went through some iteration and what we learned from here we had some back and forth to whether the calendar should be open or not. And the sales team was basically at the beginning Overflowed with requests and not relevant. Let's so pay request from the sales team. We decided to close it and after during a month we saw that we only got eight meetings, which is not enough and not what we were expecting. So we opened again the calendar and it jumped back to 200 meeting books booked. So we were like, okay, it is more relevant for us to have more meetings, but how can we help the sales team filter in and exclude leads that are not relevant? So we decided to add an entry that is project description with a limitation in characters. So they would have to be very straightforward with their demand.

Gabby Sellam [00:11:31]:

And this was a win because it helped the sales team. We got feedback from them that it was helping them really select and before jumping in onto a call, identify better the needs. So this was a great example of how we collaborated with other stakeholders and how we were able to better the funnel, the sales funnel. And the last example, that is also a low intent landing page. It's the content hub. It's fresh out of the oven. We launched it in September now and the target audience is for B2B marketers. So guys, this is for you.

Gabby Sellam [00:12:07]:

Basically here we created a landing page to provide to showcase marketers all the resources that we can offer and how they can integrate freelancers into their marketing operations. And what is great about here? I think our focus was how can we build trust through content. So we, we have our annual report on marketing where we extracted data on marketing world and their needs in top freelancers and how we can help filling the gap so we have actual real data. And then we have also here that you can check out on the link we at Fiverr, Fiverr Pro. So we're like, okay, let's talk to our marketing leaders and ask them who are their favorite freelancers to work with. So we have for example our CMO Mati that shared his top five freelancers to work with on Fiverr Pro on the landing page. And this is a great example on how you can leverage first of all content creating something unique to build trust with your users. So we're promoting it through influencers, partnerships and also a post event email.

Gabby Sellam [00:13:19]:

So make sure to check it out once you'll receive it. So let's wrap it up with a list of do's and don'ts. So let's start with the do's first. Align content with user intent. This is super important. It's you know, the starting point of your campaign, whether it's high intent and very ready to purchase or lower intent and still syncing information. Do a B test regularly. We always optimizing and even if you don't have enough traffic to test, learn and create new iteration, do prioritize a clear and compelling header.

Gabby Sellam [00:13:54]:

It's very important to have something that is, you know, conveying your value proposition. Work on your visual hierarchy and ensure that you have something that is professionally built. And of course optimize for mobile because again, this is a discovery channel so you want to make the best first impression and the don't, don't overload with information. This is something that we learn. We don't want the users to feel overwhelmed and the first seconds really matter. Don't neglect page load speed. I didn't touch all the technical part of the landing page creation, but it's also super important and a page that is not loading quickly enough is going to affect your bounce rate. Don't forget to use white space effectively.

Gabby Sellam [00:14:41]:

So of course you don't want it to be too overwhelming. But on the other side you don't want also to feel empty. Don't rely only on one form of engagement. You have several intents. So of course you have the main one that you want to push for on your top four. But then, you know, think about, you know, education, learning more. And last but not least, don't forget to follow up. I've talked about landing page.

Gabby Sellam [00:15:02]:

I've talked about the step before, but the step after is as important. So make sure you know that you have a good onboarding, that you have a thank you email, that you have a sales funnel that is built and that's it for me on this path.

Danielle Messler [00:15:15]:

Gabby, really Tass and Will, what would you add here for your do's and don'ts for landing pages?

Will Hoekenga [00:15:21]:

I could just something that really resonated with me that you brought up, Gabrielle, was connecting the context of where the user came from to the first message they're seeing on the site. Like as a copywriter that's something that's always my first question is like how did people get here? What did they see before? And I think that's something that often gets lost in the chain of a landing page being created because there's usually multiple people, you know, working on it and there's sometimes in silos. So that's just something I always try to remind people to like really dial this in the experience of what they clicked on, where they came from and the first thing they're seeing and how aligned are those messages.

Tas Bober [00:15:59]:

And then people are probably sick of me saying this because I talk about it so Much. But I also had it in a promo video, which is web accessibility guidelines. Just so you know, they're not guidelines, they're rules. Because I got fined for that. And so it was something simple like having red or having black text on a red background. And so I didn't think it was a big deal. Obviously at the time I'm like, hashtag marketing. ADA doesn't care.

Tas Bober [00:16:25]:

So if you're always confused or overwhelmed with design choices, always go for the simplest one. Because the point of the page is to enable people to consume it and they can't consume it if it's jarring to look at. So don't over design. Just make sure that it's minimalistic and you're getting the information across.

Danielle Messler [00:16:45]:

Yeah, that's a good point. I think we all want to avoid getting fined here. We had a couple of questions just before we get into the roast. I think Sarah had one about your first slide, Gabby, about like high intent versus low intent. She said, would ABM with demand based, for example, be a combo of those? Because it serves ads to people based on their high intent. But we also show display ads. What do you guys think about that?

Gabby Sellam [00:17:12]:

I think it really depends on the campaign. I mean, I would assume that it's towards lower intent, but it really depends on the context.

Tas Bober [00:17:21]:

Okay, I'm going to go on just the tiniest rant, which is abm, what they're here for. Can I roast ABM platform? Okay, ABM platforms, I've used many and like, what is high intent? I guess that's like the biggest question because the same account, varying stages, the larger the account, varying stages, it's hard to be like, this account has high intent. So I don't know what that is. But like, I don't know if like intent can necessarily be matched in an ABM campaign. So you kind of have to look at it almost as like relevancy for that specific company. But they're essentially, you have to think about the information that they're collecting because obviously you're talking about it from a B2B context, which I have. Gabby was talking about E commerce stuff. Like, I don't know anything about E commerce.

Tas Bober [00:18:08]:

Don't ask me. But I can't talk about B2B landing pages, which is like they're collecting a specific set of information and your job is to provide that information at varying stages. Right. They're going to get there whenever they're going to get there. And I think worrying too much about what their next move is like, oh my gosh okay, they go, they visited this page. What's the page they're going to do next? Like, there's a set of activities that they're going to go through. So they want to understand the product, how it helps their specific company, they want to understand pricing, they want to understand what the sales process is like. So you just create these pages that kind of gather all that information up for them and then you can make it ABM friendly by ensuring that there's stuff that's relevant to them.

Tas Bober [00:18:48]:

But, like, I think it's hard when it's like, well, abm, it could be top of funnel, it could be bottom. But I'm like, they would much rather have a page that isn't necessarily like, welcome, Wells Fargo. Thank you, thank you for visiting our page. Rather than that it's like. And also, marketers, like, don't have time to create a landing page for, like, every single company there is on the face of the earth that's on their, like, ABM list, which happens to be 200 companies or whatever. So my suggestion is to create like five or six core landing pages that you can send any varying number of companies to. They choose the intent, you don't have to worry about it because you have information to supply that matches that intent. That was my rant.

Tas Bober [00:19:28]:

But anyway, I don't know if that answered the question, but I think intent varies by company as well. And the larger the company, the worse it is. So instead of trying to create pages for each part of that company specific journey, just create the pages for the journey. And no matter who the companies are, they can go and visit and gather that information in order to make the business case to consider you.

Danielle Messler [00:19:50]:

I like that. Create for the journey, not the company going on the journey.

Tas Bober [00:19:54]:

Yeah.

Danielle Messler [00:19:55]:

One more question and then I promise we're going to get into the roast. So Anna had a question. Dynamic content campaign landing pages, are they worth it? Using tags for personalization. What do you guys think?

Gabby Sellam [00:20:07]:

We do use dynamic content, but again, it's because of. It's our business. We offer so many services and we have freelancers and every freelancer have a different skill set. So we do use, you know, content, you know, like dynamic content showcasing our supply the freelancers, also the skill set. So it depends, I think it depends first of all of the scale and how much you're targeting. There's some things to take into account for our businesses. It matches because we have so many things to take into account, so many targeting, so many services that we had to implement dynamic content. So it depends on your business and how big the need is.

Gabby Sellam [00:20:50]:

Would say.

Danielle Messler [00:20:52]:

All right, should we roast some pages? What do you guys think?

Will Hoekenga [00:20:54]:

Let's roast some pages.

Danielle Messler [00:20:55]:

I'm very excited about this. So we pulled up a couple of pages. I'm going to share my screen. All right, there we go. We can see it. So first up, this was submitted by Eden Reed Co. Is VC3, and they sell managed IT services to municipal and business leaders. So this is the landing page that we have.

Danielle Messler [00:21:16]:

Again, we don't have the intent. We don't have the keywords or search pages or anything like that. So, yeah, I'll just do about. I'll just do, like a quick scan, you guys make some. Some quick notes, and then we'll go back up for the roast. Seeing a lot of words.

Will Hoekenga [00:21:31]:

The text is standing out to everybody.

Danielle Messler [00:21:34]:

Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of it. A bunch of different CTAs. All right, initial reactions, guys. And then just tell me to drive where you want me to go. If there's another section, let me know.

Will Hoekenga [00:21:45]:

Danielle, can you read what the little live chat message says in the bottom?

Danielle Messler [00:21:49]:

Right. It says, I'm here to make it easier for you to find what you're looking for.

Will Hoekenga [00:21:54]:

Okay. Yeah. I mean, I think someone pointed out in the comments, but multiple competing CTAs right off the top stood out to me, especially when, like, sometimes you can see that someone has a good reason for doing a secondary CTA. But the why VC3? When I see that, I'm kind of like, isn't that what the page is going to tell me? Like, like, you brought them here. Why do you want them to go to another page? And then the live chat message, like, do you need help Finding anything? Is almost like a signal of. It's going to be really hard for you to find what you're looking for on this page. So there's just, like, a lot of distractions I'm feeling right away.

Tas Bober [00:22:31]:

Yeah. So the first thing is, Yeah, I don't know what the source is. Right. So it could be something else. I will say if this is coming from, like, a specific campaign, like a paid campaign or even an email campaign, it would be better not to take them to the main website. And I will beat this drum until the day I die. Because I'm dramatic, but I will not die for landing pages. But you know what I mean.

Tas Bober [00:22:55]:

So I think the biggest thing is, and the reason why I always suggest create another page, and everyone's gonna be like, yeah, okay, Chaz, with what resources we'll get to that. But like you wanna create a specific page because the problem is the data becomes muddled, right? Everyone and their brother can access the specific page on the Internet. So if someone's coming here and it could be like some internal stakeholder, it could be a customer, right? Someone who's already a customer, it could be a prospective client. Even if you have a ton of traffic here, coming from the campaign, coming from organic, coming from direct. The problem is that you're going to make decisions based on the wrong information because your data is going to be kind of skewed. So that's the first thing is if you want to truly test how a landing page is performing, just make it an isolated experience and don't give them too many distractions or exit points. To Will's point about the chat, I used to use drift at my last couple of companies and what we would do is either put a drift, a specific playbook on these like high intent pages that was very specific and relevant to the content on there. We would also either like just exclude the script from these pages if we didn't want it to be a distraction or that specific content and we would only allow it to trigger after they were on the page for a certain amount of time or perhaps hit a certain amount of scroll depth on the page as well.

Tas Bober [00:24:21]:

So that's something to consider because what happens is I'm in the middle of reading your headline and this pop up happens on the side and we are in the dory generation or whatever where it's like, oh, what's that? Where are my parents? Everyone's just so distracted that you just don't want to do that. So I have a lot more tips but that's where I'm going to start.

Danielle Messler [00:24:42]:

One quick piece of context I will add from the submission. So I said this is a key vertical focus and primary service offered with Google and display ads driving to this page. Just so you guys know, I think.

Gabby Sellam [00:24:56]:

For me on the top fold. I mean overall like the chat said, it, it's content fold. There's a lot of content. When I'm looking at it, I feel like the header, it's an addition of words but it's not actually conveying the value of the service. And when I'm looking at the subheading, be ready to pass your CMMC audit. Feel like it explained much better what I landed on. So I would have something much simpler as a header and switch it. Also it's on four lines, the header, I would always limit it to three lines because it's taking too much space.

Gabby Sellam [00:25:43]:

So it's even a bit overwhelming like this addition of word. So, yeah, I think I would. I mean, again, like, it is high intent from what I understand. Like, they're saying that it's high demand. So I would simplify the landing by reducing the header to three lines and having something that is much more straightforward and focusing on one of the service. If it's CMC compliance, just focusing on this and not adding all the other services, you can explain it later on your page, but it doesn't have to be like everything doesn't have to be on the main header.

Danielle Messler [00:26:21]:

Yeah. All right, so here's what we'll do. Let's do one thing, one quick thing that you would change about this to help it be better and then rate on a scale of 1 to 10. And I want you guys to do it in the chat. Reminder. 10 is gold standard. We love it. Amazing.

Danielle Messler [00:26:35]:

Don't change it. One is please take this off the Internet right now and. Yeah, let's go. All right. Will you first?

Will Hoekenga [00:26:44]:

Yeah, I think there was like a three step process section and I saw a lot of comments about that in the chat. It stood out to me too. And they're trying to show how they make this like getting certified for compliance with the DoD so you can keep getting contracts, how they make the process simple, but instead they're making it seem like working with them is going to be hell because there's just so much here. And so I think instead they should focus the feeling of problem on the actual compliance and how difficult it is, but show how you simplify it and make it easier. And I feel like it's doing the opposite right now. So that would be one of the first key things I'd work on. But yeah, scale of one to ten, I'm going to say like three and a half.

Danielle Messler [00:27:28]:

All right, three and a half. Tats you next?

Tas Bober [00:27:32]:

Yeah, I was gonna say three and I'll tell you why. One, I don't consider this a landing page. So, like, that's number one. But number two, yes, there is a lot of content on the page, which isn't always the worst problem to have because there are some companies who struggle to even have a little bit of content. So I'll give you a little bit of that. So your biggest issue is gonna be like killing your darlings, right? You want to say so much because you think that everything's important. This is going to be a prioritization exercise for you more than a, like CRO Type exercise, you are going to have to pare this down quite significantly because if it's someone who's overwhelmed with this problem, you're overwhelming them a little bit more. Now the other thing is, which I'll give you brownie points for, is that I didn't have to travel to many other pages to understand what you were offering and what you were giving them.

Tas Bober [00:28:23]:

So that's the part that's going to give me a three, where I understand it's a service based company. You're going to do a gap analysis and you're going to do, you're going to help me pass this audit and get more contracts. Right? So I'll give you some points there. I don't want it to be like, super, it's four flame emojis, not five, but, you know, so just making sure, like, okay, you have some of the right components, there are some missing. Like, okay, if this is high demand and you do have high demand, there's no like social proof on the page anywhere that says that you've helped someone do it in X, y, Z time. Your simple steps can be much smaller for sure. But I think some of those components are missing. And so I think that that's kind of where you need to focus, is just cutting a lot of that copy down and landing page.

Tas Bober [00:29:09]:

I say no nav or anchored nav. So a nav, if you have a lot of information to give, have it to where they can jump down to varying spots on the page. It will also give you heat map data on what they care about the most. And that is actually how I discover that FAQ blocks were the most interactive with blocks on the page is because we launched FAQs on a page and it got like 15% of the clicks, which was insane. I'd never seen that. So that's always something to do. Even if you're reiterating some of the stuff earlier in the page, they don't want to dig. They think they're going to get more direct information about your copy and about what you do in your FAQs.

Tas Bober [00:29:51]:

So yeah, that's mine right there.

Danielle Messler [00:29:54]:

Awesome. All right, Gabby, over to you.

Gabby Sellam [00:29:57]:

I think I will give it a four. I think that the content is there. I'm going to repeat what Taz said, but I think we need to simplify it, to reduce, to organize it. And I think I would focus me on the top fold and reorganize it having a header that is much more straightforward. Remove the secondary cta. Because I think that if we want to promote the company. It can be also a section that is below that explain, you know, in a few sentences why they're the good fit but it doesn't have to be there.

Danielle Messler [00:30:30]:

Awesome. All right, well, what is this? VC3 has been roasted and now we will move on to the next one we have. Mira, I'm going to pop this link in the chat so you guys can follow along as well. Let's see, they are. This was submitted by Hannah Schultz. They sell to utility companies and this is a new landing page design. They're sending traffic from paid LinkedIn and Google Ads. They are targeting US utilities to drive from awareness and retargeting ads here.

Danielle Messler [00:31:03]:

So there we go. I'll just scroll down, give you guys a basic view, let us know what you think in the chat. All right, initial takes. Gabby, what do you think?

Gabby Sellam [00:31:12]:

So we're targeting utilities. I think that I struggle to understand the target audience to get identified. Maybe it's because I don't know the topic enough, but there is something about here. Like the header is very short, supposed to be, I think, inspirational. So not concrete. And then there's a lot of content that I need to read. So I think I have some confusion about the target audience. But overall I'm seeing the form and this is simple.

Gabby Sellam [00:31:43]:

I'm seeing the companies, the trusted companies and I'm seeing education and a clear CTA case studies. Yeah, I would say overall it's looking professional. There is a trust element and a education on the top part. Maybe it's because I don't know the topic enough. I think there is something about the targeting and how I can identify the audience.

Danielle Messler [00:32:07]:

Will, what about you?

Will Hoekenga [00:32:09]:

Yeah, I think this page, it was kind of a struggle to quickly see what the thing is, which I believe it's some sort of predictive modeling software for global utilities that's just kind of like buried within that large paragraph immediately under the headline. And I also just think this, having this very large form right in the hero section, kind of taking up that prime real estate. Especially because when you were scrolling through, I kind of felt like some of the product screenshots and stuff they had are things that might be interesting to their icp given that it's like, you know, you can see interesting little data about the utility poles and stuff like that. So maybe that's something that would be engaging to someone who works in the field and be like, oh, like I would love to be able to see, you know, this kind of information. So I think having something like that up above the fold and maybe having a. A button that goes to the form instead of like slapping those really long fields up there would be a better way to go above the fold and kind of a. A high impact test to run on the page.

Danielle Messler [00:33:11]:

Yeah. All right. Over to you, Tas. Four flame emoji.

Tas Bober [00:33:14]:

I'm laughing because. Well, Fawn, the comments is hilarious. Zach's like, me roasting this page when my landing page is on life support, so. Great.

Will Hoekenga [00:33:26]:

Also, can I say shout out to Adam Bloom for recognizing fewer versus less and getting that right. Just the grammar pedant in me. Wanted to point that out. Sorry, Tas.

Tas Bober [00:33:39]:

No, no, no, it's all good. You know what's so interesting to me is that there's literally software for everything. I'm like, reading this page. I'm like, what? Okay, it took me a little reading. I do this thing called a three page test, which is how many pages does it take me on average to figure out what a company does? And the average is three. So if you're anywhere under three, congratulations. It took me two in this case. I will say again, I don't know.

Tas Bober [00:34:05]:

You said retargeting and awareness, Danielle, the campaign.

Danielle Messler [00:34:08]:

Yeah, here's what they said. A new landing page with new design, sending Traffic from paid LinkedIn and Google Ads campaign is running to target US utilities and driving from awareness and retargeting ads.

Tas Bober [00:34:20]:

Okay, weird, because awareness and retargeting should be like almost two different components. Like what you would send someone from a retargeting campaign versus what you would send them from. Like a first touch point awareness campaign are different things. Someone who's in an awareness stage is not going to come here and then fill out this form based on just this information. And the hero, when they're like, oh, I don't even know where I am. That's like those guys on Tinder who are like, hey, how are you? Hey, sweetie, want to get married? And you're like, what? You know, and it's like, yeah, you're there for the same goal. Like, eventually you'd like to meet someone get married. I mean, I did.

Tas Bober [00:34:55]:

I met my husband on Tinder. We got married 10 years ago, or we met 10 years ago. But if you'd straight up said that, I would be like, this is a creep ghost block report. Right? So it's the same concept here where it's like, if it's your first touch point, like, you can ask them for their most precious leverage in the situation, which is their information. So I much like, actually, unlike much other landing page, people will Tell you to always put the form in the bottom unless it is a super, super high intent page where they're saying, I literally want a demo of this product. So I would put that down below and next to that one I would lay out the expectations. Someone did call that out. What am I going to get if I fill out this form? Yeah, what's going to happen? And you don't have to give them the whole sales process, but you can say, you know, one to two steps ahead.

Tas Bober [00:35:45]:

Like, someone will contact you within 24 hours. We'll have a discovery call, and then we'll give you a custom demo. Because I worked at one SaaS company and they were pissed because they thought they were getting a demo from the first call and they felt like people were wasting their time. So if you set the expectations, it also eliminates some of that friction and objection. It's not super clear who you are. It might be like you don't talk about the product until the third line on the subhead. And I don't know if people are actually going to read a paragraph that's literally sitting in like a square box like that. So you got to make it a little more succinct.

Tas Bober [00:36:19]:

And then it says, global Utilities trust Niara to keep their network safe from fires, floods and more. That actually says a lot more. And then I would say global utility companies because I was like, global utilities. It sounds like someone's saying, like, enterprises trust. So when I first read it, I was like, wait, are these utility companies or they're utilities? So just something like that. And then there's a lot of like these, like the. No nav. You're like, great, I'm not going to do a nav because I don't want to distract them, but I'm just going to put a hundred links on the page instead.

Tas Bober [00:36:50]:

And so I think that's part where, like, you have the logos, but I don't see anything else. At least I didn't. When I scroll down, do you see anything, Danielle, on quotes from any of these?

Tas Bober [00:37:02]:

No. They link to case studies. So I'll give you a hot tip, which I do for my clients. I go through all their case studies. I pull out the quotes and I use the quotes because volume always has a larger impact than density. So if you have one case study, you're trying to choose between, like having one deep case study on a page or having multiple quotes. Do the multiple quotes, people skim before they invest. They need to see, like, from someone else's mouth what you help them with and that you helped more than one person. And in this case, it looks like zero people, outsiders taking them.

Danielle Messler [00:37:38]:

Someone just said they're editing live.

Will Hoekenga [00:37:40]:

Oh.

Tas Bober [00:37:41]:

Oh, snap. Yes. I. We need this kind of speed. We need this kind of speed in SaaS. This is great.

Danielle Messler [00:37:49]:

This is awesome. I love that.

Tas Bober [00:37:50]:

So excited.

Will Hoekenga [00:37:51]:

On that note about testimonials, I was clicking around on the site just now a little bit and like, Nira has great quotes that they could be featuring. There was one that I saw that said we eliminated 300 hours of inspection time. Like, this seems like a very high impact product that's getting great results. So, yeah, don't hide them beneath case studies. Pull some of those interesting nuggets out and sprinkle them throughout the page.

Tas Bober [00:38:15]:

Love that. Such a good call out. Totally agree. That needs to be there. Like, I feel like the elements are somewhat there. Like if you scroll down, Danielle, you know, like this block. I got excited initially because I'm like, wow, okay, we're going to talk about the problem. I mean, which I guess we kind of are.

Tas Bober [00:38:33]:

But then they're like linking to these other places and then I get disappointed because I'm like, I don't really want to go somewhere else and read about this. Like, just talk to me about how you're solving this. So I wonder if the question format is great. Can you also kind of give more context to the problem? So then in their minds they're going, check, check, check, that's me. And then going into this, I have a wide monitor and that graphic sits on like, is it the same for you, Will? You're nodding.

Will Hoekenga [00:38:57]:

It's huge. It's huge.

Tas Bober [00:38:59]:

It's like I'm like looking over here and then I'm going over here and then my memory is so poor post children that I'm like, I've forgotten what I read over here by the time I go over here, right? Like that one quick thing which you won't be able to fix live, but I'm going to tell you is I really doubt that this website actually did run it through compliance checker. The background imagery and text on it. I bet you 25% of the Internet can't read that because of the contrast, the number of images and then the responsiveness, the pieces even move. So even if they could read it in one specific portion, they're not on another specific portion. So you're going to, I think like the design thing, it's like, it's nice in terms of like, okay, yeah, this is very relevant to us. But Putting any kind of text on imagery. Guys like, you gotta be so careful about that, especially if it's a busy image on the background. I use accessibe, but you can literally look up Alison, you can look up any web accessibility checker.

Tas Bober [00:39:59]:

I just like accessibe because they list. They do like a list format and in categories of like web accessibility checkers. So run through that. Not everything is important important. But go against the readability, color contrast. Those are the things you'll actually like. They pick up on first to get fined for.

Gabby Sellam [00:40:16]:

Awesome.

Will Hoekenga [00:40:17]:

Danielle, can. Can you scroll down to that second section? The question one real quick, because I liked this too, but one quick thing and then we can move on. Or Gabrielle, if you have thoughts to add as well. But pages have this habit of using what I call placeholder headlines where there'll be a headline and you could kind of imagine it on almost in any industry. And like your answer. Any question is just so broad and generic. It's a good opportunity to rephrase this, but act as if you're talking directly to the people at utility companies. So it's not like I typed out.

Will Hoekenga [00:40:51]:

Rather than that you could say, like, assess any risk. No field visit required. And then they see what those risks. Risks are that they can assess. But I really liked these actual examples in here. So I do think this is a nice section. Just with some massaging, it could be a lot better.

Danielle Messler [00:41:07]:

All right, cool. We gotta keep it moving. So we're gonna wrap up. One thing you would change to help them. I think we've been through a couple of good suggestions, but if you had to sum it up and then rapid fire, let us rate on a scale of one to ten. All right, Gabby, you go first.

Gabby Sellam [00:41:22]:

I'm always focused on the top fold because I think most of the magic in general happens there. So I see that we already reduced the subheading. I would make sure that they're explaining better the product again, I think the header can be much more simple and straightforward. And I agree with what Will and Taz said about the form, that it doesn't have to be there and it's a waste of space. So just having a direct cta. The page does look professional. I do think there is nice section, so I would give it a seven.

Danielle Messler [00:41:56]:

Nice. I love it. All right, people in the chat, give us your intake. We want. We want what? Want to know what you think. All right, Will, let's get your rating.

Will Hoekenga [00:42:05]:

I'll put it at a six. I think it's probably like a five and a half, but Extra half credit for literally making changes in real time. That's amazing. That has to be a roast first, I would imagine. But yeah, just reiterating the things. Focus on above the fold. And also, like, don't be afraid to flex a little bit, because it sounds like y'all are getting great results for customers and, you know, make that impact known fewer outages. Feels like you're underselling yourselves.

Tas Bober [00:42:31]:

Okay, I'm gonna go on five, but I was gonna do six because of the live changes. That was so baller. You know how long I've worked? I worked in house at companies for 14 years, and I still remember this GR ticket where we started this project, and then we launched the campaign literally a year later. It was, like, on the anniversary of the deal creation of that ticket. So just because of that, you get a whole point. Because that was, like, so good. So good. I'll remember the so forever.

Tas Bober [00:43:01]:

Or at least for the next hour.

Danielle Messler [00:43:03]:

I think we all need to give a round of applause for Hannah taking this advice, making life changes. Hannah, you are awesome. You have what, how many people are here right now? We've got about 350 marketers live cheering you on.

Tas Bober [00:43:17]:

Yeah. So good. I think that I commend you for, like, it being a landing page. I think that you could use this if you have the autonomy to make those decisions very quickly. Use this page as, like, your testing ground to be extremely clear about what you do and what you're offering, especially if it's a first touch point landing page, you want someone to come here and understand immediately what it is you do. So if you want to call out what your product is, do some little research to see, because sometimes what we call it internally does not match what we call what people are actually searching for and coming to you with. Move that form down, be clear about the problems that you're solving. Showcase the product.

Tas Bober [00:43:55]:

You have blocks on there that don't have that background imagery. I would make this whole page just like your brand colors, but not that background imagery, because I think that you'll actually distract and lose some people on there. And then definitely brevity and specificity are going to be your friends on any landing page where you can take some of those bullet points down quite significantly in the solutions area and then that social point proof what they can expect after. So, yeah, there's like. You're like, yeah, 50% there. That's how I look at it. So you got 50% to go with some of those tweaks, but it could be overall, like, Simplified. And take off all these extra links.

Tas Bober [00:44:32]:

You don't need that.

Danielle Messler [00:44:33]:

Awesome. All right, we're going to speed. Do one more. I'm going to give some more context here. This is what I got in the submission. All right, we got B2B capital equipment sales, advanced technology space, think metal 3D printing. Long sales cycle, one to two years, large buying committee. After listening to your podcast with tas, I reworked the forming page.

Danielle Messler [00:44:58]:

No form at the top. Very informational, educational. This is being used for an ABM campaign targeting mid to low funnel accounts in the medical industry through display ads, demand base. I will judge success by time on page links to other pages on our website and progression of open opportunities with these accounts.

Tas Bober [00:45:15]:

Girl. Oh, my gosh. This is amazing.

Danielle Messler [00:45:19]:

Not because her whole team is watching. So maybe dial it down to, like, three honest flame emojis.

Tas Bober [00:45:25]:

Oh, well, listen, she followed my suggestions, so it's more like. It's more like five heart emojis. How about that?

Danielle Messler [00:45:35]:

All right, I'm gonna do a quick scan of the page, and then we'll go up for quick reactions. One thing you would change and rating all at once, because you know, we are. We got a couple of minutes. We got to squeeze this in because we got to announce those Fiverr pro credits at the end of this session as well.

Will Hoekenga [00:45:49]:

So also, as you're scrolling, just shout out to Sarah for being willing to do this with the whole team watching. I would be terrified. So that's amazing.

Danielle Messler [00:45:58]:

We've got some badasses in this.

Tas Bober [00:46:01]:

Yeah, I know.

Danielle Messler [00:46:04]:

Also, machine look really cool.

Tas Bober [00:46:07]:

I'm gonna go last spine implants.

Danielle Messler [00:46:10]:

Sorry, I'm just. I think this is cool. Oh, there's a video down here. All right, cool. I'm going up to the top. All right, Gabby, I want your take. What do you think? What's something you would advise them to do? And then let's rate on a scale of 1 to 10.

Gabby Sellam [00:46:24]:

Okay. So, first of all, I mean, I understand that the conversion window is very long, so there's not a direct conversion goal from there. But still, I struggled with the CTA that is on the bottom, because, first of all, it's violet on violet. And for me, it wasn't clear that this was a primary cta. So as a structure, like, I would make sure that still, you know, you have a real placeholder. I think overall, design wise, it's very dark and it's violet on violet, so I feel like it. Some of the content is getting lost, and I mean, in terms of structure, it's looking good. But.

Gabby Sellam [00:47:05]:

But I think it's missing exit point to overpowered because we're trying to drive more links and having people go going over on the website and I feel like it went. I mean this is the first one that we're seeing. We don't have a lot of engagement. I mean place for engagement on the top of the page. So I would have some work toward having something that is more engaging. Does look good, but it's very dark. We're rating it already.

Danielle Messler [00:47:31]:

Yeah, gotta go put the ones in the comments. Put. What would you guys rate this?

Gabby Sellam [00:47:36]:

I mean I would give it a. I would give it a six.

Danielle Messler [00:47:39]:

I like it. All right, what do you guys think in the chat? And then let's go will and then we'll wrap up the test.

Will Hoekenga [00:47:45]:

Okay. Yeah, just off the cuff, I'm gonna give it a 4. I strong agree Gabrielle on the colors. The. The purple on like the very dark. It's almost like black background. Just. Just very hard to read.

Will Hoekenga [00:47:56]:

I also just think this is not a scanning friendly page. Just in terms of. If you look at the headlines, many of them are just like. Can you scroll to the second section, Danielle? Right below the fold. This one like need a solution that delivers maximum efficiency and lower cost. It's just like the most generic benefits that you could apply to any industry out there. And this is a very specific device that serves a very specific set of people. Like this makes medical implants and it looks like it does a great job from the photos down below renderings or whatever they were.

Will Hoekenga [00:48:31]:

So I almost just think like you do a lot of assuming a lot of times when people get to a page like, oh, they're on the page. They. They know who we are by now. They know what this is about. Like they really don't a lot of the time. Like so any, any word like industry related words that you can get into the headlines will go a long way. And then it also takes a long time to figure out on the page what the page is talking about. There were references above to a machine, but it wasn't talking about what the machine was.

Will Hoekenga [00:48:59]:

And then you finally get to what the machine is. The big reveal. And so I was kind of caught between is this like a problem aware landing page where people have no concept of the thing and you're just focusing on the pain points and then introducing the machine as the hero? If so like you can do that, but I think you need to lean into more of what those actual problems are beyond just the generic throughput efficiency stuff like that. So I know we're coming up on time. I will shut up now and let.

Danielle Messler [00:49:29]:

Let Tas go. All right, Tas, rapid fire.

Tas Bober [00:49:33]:

Okay, Rapid fire. But first I have a lot of thoughts, Sarah, just like, message me on LinkedIn after and I'll do a free audit for you. Okay. Like a full audit. Anyway, so my first thing is I did run it through the accessibility scan and you are not compliant in terms of the font size and the color contrast, which they kind of alluded to. But just like, officially it does not meet those requirements or something to just consider. Definitely two colors that are the same on top of each other aren't going to pass that. So just something to consider there.

Tas Bober [00:50:04]:

I do agree on the efficiency and lower cost thing. I actually wrote a post like a couple days ago and it was kind of mean, but I just said if every SaaS platform form company. Well, I said SaaS, but obviously I don't know if you're SaaS or not, which was another question. I was like, wait, it's a machine or is it a platform? Is it a solution? Like, I don't know what's going on. But I said if every one of them delivered on their promise, I'd be the fastest and richest person on earth. And so I just don't think that that's your value prop that you need to lead with or your benefit. I know eventually it does, but that's not what it is. So I think once you come up to the actual product that's down here, that's when it starts to become a little clearer about what you do.

Tas Bober [00:50:42]:

In fact, uh, Danielle, if you can scroll down to the part that says find feature detail and superior finish, that was the point where it clicked for me. I was like, oh, I kind of get what this does. Right? And it's halfway down the page. Only 30% of people make it to the bottom of the page on the average B2B landing page. Right. Other than that, too. This still has the full navigation, which can then just like if they can't understand what you're doing on this page, they are a hundred percent going to other pages. And most people would misconstrue that as, oh, well, I'm giving them access to all the pages.

Tas Bober [00:51:16]:

Well, they wouldn't need to access as many if they didn't know the depth over breadth thing or breadth over depth thing. I thought about, you have the quotes down below. I would swap these. I would just move that up and leave these here. And then, yeah, some stuff about yourself. There's some kind of proposal happening over here. And then are you ready to break free? What am I breaking free from? What are the steps? What's the process? That's my high level thoughts. I would probably give this like a four or five.

Tas Bober [00:51:45]:

Probably a four because I'm still unclear on what you did. I went to your main website to kind of look and I'm like, okay, actually, if we hover over your homepage, the meta tag says metal 3D printers. That tells me more than this entire landing page told me. So if that's accurate, then there you go. But seriously, send me a message. I'm happy to do a free audit for you like I did for the Exit Five community some time ago. And I'll send you a loom with some other tips.

Danielle Messler [00:52:15]:

That was amazing. Thank you guys so much for joining to roast. That was awesome. It's the only session that went a little over too, which I think just speaks to how awesome you guys are. So we have something very exciting, which, you know, you've been waiting for. So we are giving away in this session $5,000 in credits to Fiverr Pro. And we have our winner, who is Dan Roche. He is the CMO at Workbook.

Danielle Messler [00:52:39]:

So we will hook you up via email with the Fiverr team and then you will get your 5k credit. And for the rest of you, if you didn't win but you still want to check out Fiverr, we have a fun link to give you. And if you use the code Exit15 and I'll pop that in there too. So that link and then the code, I'll just type it instead of copying Exit15. You'll get 15% off your first project with Fiverr. So now we're going to head into the pricing section of the roast and that's our last session of the day. But thank you, Tas, Will, and Gabby for that awesome session. And please go follow them on LinkedIn.

Danielle Messler [00:53:20]:

You're going to learn a ton. Thanks everybody, so much.

Dave Gerhardt [00:53:27]:

Hey, thanks for listening to this podcast. If you like this episode. You know what? I'm not even going to ask you to subscribe and leave a review, because I don't really care about that. I have something better for you. So we've built the number one private community for B2B marketers at Exit Five. And you can go and check that out. Instead of leaving a rating or review, go check it out right now on our website, exitfive.com our mission at Exit Five is to help you grow your career in B2B marketing. And there's no better place to do that than with us at Exit Five.

Dave Gerhardt [00:53:56]:

There's nearly 5,000 members now in our community. People are in there posting every day, asking questions about things like marketing, planning, ideas, inspiration, asking questions and getting feedback from your peers. Building your own network of marketers who are doing the same thing you are so you can have a peer group or maybe just venting about your boss when you need to get in there and get something off your chest. It's 100% free to join for seven days, so you can go and check it out risk free, and then there's a small annual fee to pay if you want to become a member for the year. Go check it out. Learn more exitfive.com and I will see you over there in the community.

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