Site Optimization For Maximum Lead Flow

Site Optimization for
Maximum Lead Flow
This transcript is based on the webinar, “Optimizating Your Site for Maximum
Lead Flow” presented by Tim Ash, President and CEO of SiteTuners.com,
and Mike Volpe, VP of Marketing at HubSpot.

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Mike Volpe: I'm going to talk first for a little while and talk about how to sort of
optimize your website to get more people to find your site. Then,
Tim is going to share a lot of his expertise about landing pages
and how you get that conversion and all his expertise about that.
And then, we'll have – we're definitely going to save a good
amount of time for questions at the end.

I think it's really important to set the stage for this and talk about
how marketing is changing. I've got a couple stats here. Eighty-six
percent of people skip television ads. 44 percent of direct mail is
never even looked at. It's discarded without even people really
even casting an eye upon it.

Those stats really get to the point that marketing is starting to
change and a lot of those older marketing tactics, those outbound
marketing tactics, are becoming less and less effective. I think
that that's a real problem today as marketers, and I think that a lot
of us have an addiction, and I think we've got a really, really big
addiction, and I think the addiction we have is to advertising.

The problem with advertising – there's some good benefits to it,
but the problem with it to me is that every time you want to get
more people to find your website, every time you want to get more
exposure to folks, you have to pay more and more money for that.
You're not really building up anything that's a long-term asset
within your company. That addiction is built from a disease, and
the disease is Lazy Marketer Syndrome, because I really believe
that if you're over-relying on advertising and it's the vast majority
of how you're attracting people to your business, that could be a
mistake. To some degree, it's being a little bit lazy.

I think the key reason why is that when you're advertising, you're
renting the capability of building an audience and attracting
people. You're renting that capability from someone else. And so,
certainly, it could be a component of what you do, but I don't think
it should be the only thing that you do, and I even would say it
actually should be a minority of what you do.

And so that renting that capability, whether it's paying for Google
Adwords or doing other things, I think if you want to have a long-
term sustainable business, you should think about it from a
different perspective. So, rather than renting that capability, I

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would argue that markets today should be building assets. The
reason you should be building assets is that just like a factory and
the machinery in a factory, you have the capability of building up
those assets. If you have machinery, there's something that would
actually be providing ongoing value to your company.

I think as a marketer you can build assets as well. If you build up
a website that has a lot of links and some good SEO authority and
you're getting SEO traffic, I think that could be an asset. If you
build up a blog that has a lot of folks that are subscribed to that
blog and visit and read that blog on a regular basis, to me, that's
also an asset. If you build up a big presence within social media
and lots of people are following you and becoming fans and
friends, I think that's an asset as well. Building up an e-mail list is
an asset, too.

And to me as a marketer those are the types of things that you
should think about doing. You should think about, "How am I
building those assets to continue to add value to my company so I
can minimize the amount of cash that I'm spending each and
every month that isn't helping me build an asset?" Because the
second that your credit card is over the limit, most of those
advertising services immediately cut of your traffic.

There's one thing to be careful about here—your competition isn't
necessarily who you think. It's not necessarily the person who
sells the exact some product that you sell. Your competition to
some degree is people that are trying to attract that same
audience even if they sell something different. So, if you sell
products to – I don't know – women, for instance, then in some
ways, even though Oprah probably doesn't sell anything that you
sell, her media presence and her company and her television
station and things like that are competition for the attention of your
customers.

In some ways, you need to think about that as you build up your
marketing and do more of this inbound marketing. That's
something to think about in terms of who your competition is and
what you're really up against.

Now, taking that idea and marketing methodology and bringing all
the different pieces together, we talk about inbound marketing. It's
a combination of search engine marketing, content marketing,
social media marketing, conversion, lead nurturing, supporting
your sales team, things like that all in one place.

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Let's talk about some more specific tips about what you can
actually do, because I'm very much a kind of roll-up-your-sleeves
kind of marketer, and I really believe in doing things – not just
talking about them. Now, these tips that I'm going to talk about
are based on a lot of our experience from all sorts of our own
experience working with our 4,000 customers and also all the
data we have from over 3 million websites that have been graded
in Website Grader. If you haven't used Website Grader yet, you
should definitely put your website in there at websitegrader.com.
It gives you a free report. It's a really cool tool, and again, a lot of
the things I'm going to talk about are sort of lessons gleaned from
looking at that data and also the rest of our experience.

Identifying Buyer Personas
I've got three tips here, and I know that this one is actually going
to be interesting, because I know that Tim has a different opinion
on this, so you will get to hear both sides. But, I really feel like that
your buyer persona is what should drive the content that you're
creating. Think about that example and don't forget that maybe
Oprah or maybe some other folks are actually your competition.
It's not just the people who are selling the same products as you.
It's people that are competing for those peoples' time and
attention on the Web.

Really what you want to do is think about who your buyer persona
is. Now, at HubSpot, we've actually taken this almost to the
extreme. We've created a couple buyer personas with a lot of
detail there, and one of the personas that we sell to is Marketing
Mary. We've gone as far as building that up into our CRM system
when we track those different personas with our sales team.

What's important is not necessarily that you get the persona 100
percent right, but if you can get it kind of 90 percent right. To me,
having that ability, having that understanding of who that person
is, will help you decide what content you should be producing,
what content those people are more likely to share in social
media, what content they're more likely to subscribe to, what
things they're probably searching. Having a deeper understanding
of who that person can be really, really helpful.

Companies do this in all different ways. This is actually a photo
from a company called Cadence, a software company in
Massachusetts. It looks like there are four people there, but the
two middle figures are actually cardboard cutouts, and they've
gone as far as embracing those personas as cardboard cutouts.

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That's an interesting way to go to really bring those personas to
life.

And I will tell you that all the content that we create here at
HubSpot, we're constantly thinking about our sort of two most
important personas and asking ourselves, "Would this persona
like this content?" We call them by name. We say things like,
"Well, would Mary really like this webinar? Is that the thing Mary
would be interested in? Why would Mary share that with her
friends?"

If you can have that mindset, you're going to start to think a little
bit more like a media company and having that capability, again,
to maybe compete more with the media moguls like Oprah and
have a better shot of attracting your audience.

First, use data, but don't be a slave to it. Have some surveys,
have some interviews and have some data of what your persona
is doing. But again, it's really more to gain an understanding of
who this person is and what their personality is like and what
types of things they're interested in than to nail exactly sort of the
very data driven things on this one.

I think it's really important to get personal and specific. You
shouldn't have just a general idea. It's more important to actually
get specific and narrow, and have a firm understanding of who
these people are rather than just saying the high-level audience
of, "Oh, well, our customer is a woman between 45 and 60," or
something like that. I would actually get really specific even if that
excludes some portions of the audience.

The perfect is the enemy of the good. Don't over-engineer this too
much. It's more important to have something that you can work
with and call by name to have those internal conversations about
what would our persona like. From there, you can evolve and
make your personas more focused and viable, more specific and
better over time.

We use our personas throughout the entire company here, and I
think that's really important. So, it's not just about marketing. It's
about sales. It's about product development. It's about customer
support. It's about finance. It is the thing that we rally around in
terms of how we understand our customers. We use them not
only for creating content in the marketing side of things, but also
other things outside of that as well.

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Publish, Don’t Advertise
All right, my second tip is to publish, don't advertise. If you're
advertising on this site – for most display ads on the Web, you're
getting kind of a 0.2 percent or even lower than that click-through
rate – 0.1 percent click-through rate. Most people ignore
advertisement, right? To me that says I don't want to be the
advertiser as much as I want to be the content. So, what I want to
think about is how do I build up that presence? What do I do?

Here at HubSpot we publish as much as we can. We've got a
blog that we publish to 40,000 subscribers and tons of readers.
We do a podcast, so we actually stream this live every Friday at
4pm ET– this is HubSpot TV. We put that into iTunes as well, and
we get thousands of people who watch those archives episodes
there.

We do lots of videos. We've got a couple hundred videos on
YouTube. We got hundreds of thousands of people that have
viewed those. We upload photos. We do presentations on
SlideShare. We publish eBooks, news releases—all these
different things, and the reason we do all of that is because we
want to have content in all these different forms of consumption
including this content we're creating right now, the webinar, in
order to give as many types of content to those personas that we
think that they would be interested in.

We've got data that sort of backs up this thesis that if you're
publishing, you can attract a lot of people to your site and into
your business as leads and sales at a low cost.

We've looked at over 1,500 small-medium sized business and
companies that had a blog, on average, had 55 percent more
website traffic. Certainly, there are probably some other things
that go along with that, because companies that have a blog are
maybe a little bit more sophisticated, etc., but if you want to act
like those companies that are getting more traffic, one of the key
things you can do is start to blog. It gives you more pages.

Not only do you get more traffic if you start to blog and start to
create content, but you also get more success in social media.
The data that we looked at (from over 2,000 businesses) shows
that if you have a blog, you get 79 percent more followers on
Twitter. Basically, if you're creating more content, it's making you
more interesting.

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Content is what makes you interesting in social media, so the
things that people like to share within social media, maybe a
comedian or maybe someone like that, could be funny in a short
status update or interesting. To me, most businesses need a little
bit more than 140 characters, and that's why all these services
allow you to have links in those status updates. And to me, that's
the content that makes us interesting.

So, the reason HubSpot has more than 80,000 followers on
Twitter is because of the content that we created. It's not because
our tweets individually without those links are that interesting. The
foundation of a good social media strategy is to be publishing and
creating some great content.

Blogging Tips

So, let's talk about some of these tips for blogging. The first one is
that the title should be keyword rich. You want to use good
keywords – keywords that your personas would be searching for
– in your titles.

Most of the things I've seen show that having an image in every
article is good. It makes it more visually appealing. It gives people
something to gravitate towards rather than just a whole bunch of
text on the page.

I would use both e-mail and RSS subscription. Certainly, most
blogging services include RSS. There are ways to do email
subscription as well. When you publish a new blog article, it can
automatically go to the people subscribing to the blog by e-mail.
For us, about a third of our blog subscribers are by e-mail. Other
folks have 70 or 80 percent of their blog readers subscribe by
email. Some personas use RSS, some use email more, and you
should have both of those available to make sure that you're
making it as easy as possible for people to get your blog content if
they're interested in it.

The other thing that's really important is leveraging calls to action
in order to drive more traffic to your landing pages. It's important
to have a call to action in every article, and that's basically a link
to something where people can register, opt-in, start a trial, buy a
product, something like that to get them moving down the sales
and marketing process. I can tell you that by adding calls to action

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to our blog, we almost tripled the number of leads we were getting
from our blog.

People often ask me, ―How do I get more comments?‖ Some of
the great ways to do that: ask a question at the end of the article
or be controversial. The more controversial you are, the more
comments you will get. I know that from experience. Also, leave
part of the issue untouched. If you completely cover a topic,
you're not really leaving room for people to add something to it.

If you need article ideas, check your sent items in your email.
Most people, businesses and marketers are getting questions all
day long from customers and potential customers about all sorts
of things. Checking and seeing how you've answered those
questions can be a great way to cover popular topics. You can
also look at FAQs from your sales people.

I also think it's important engage the whole company and not
dump all the blogging and content-creation responsibility on one
person. How do you engage the whole company? We've tried a
bunch of things here at HubSpot and have 80 different people
who have written for our blog. We do contests. We do public
praise. We've certainly been able to garner a lot of support from
our executives. We've built it into some of the employee goals for
a couple of different groups in the company. Get everyone
addicted to the process of blogging, the feedback and the positive
loop that can happen by publishing an article.

How to Make Search Engines Happy
It's important to make all search engines happy. Search engines
traditionally have looked at two fundamental things when they
decide who to show in the search results on that first page when
your persona, goes to make a search. They look at the context
and the authority. The context is what's happening on each page
of your website, and the authority is how important your website is
on the Internet.

You need to be careful about the keyword selection and think
about your personas—not what you want to be known as, but
what your personas would call you. So, someone who does work
on people who have been in a car accident and have damage to

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their teeth is technically called a prosthodontist. The problem with
that is, most people would call that person probably something
more like a ―cosmetic dentist.‖ If you compare the number of
people searching for each of those phrases, there's a lot more
people searching for a cosmetic dentist. Even though the true
professional in the field would probably prefer to be known as a
prosthodontist, the content that you would want to create and
optimize for would be for a cosmetic dentist.

Once you have done some keyword selection and figured out
what keywords your personas are going to be looking for, you
should think about including those in the page title and in the URL
as well as in the content and the description of the page. Those
are the basic places that you could optimize to make each page
show up a little bit higher in search results.

You should also think about making your site attractive to both the
crawlers and the humans. If a few pictures (and no text) on a site
tell the story of a resort in Vermont, Google actually doesn't know
what the site is about. The pictures convey the story to me. But
Google can't see those. Basically, you need to have some text
that is describing your business so that the search engines could
understand it.

What's interesting, though, is that authority is actually more
important than your On-page SEO. So, authority is probably 70 to
80 percent of the reason why any page ranks for any given
keyword phrase. Fundamentally, you need more links coming into
your website. So if you have a blog, you tend to be producing
more interesting content, and you get more links.
What's interesting is that you don't actually need a lot of links.
Your homepage should have tons and tons of links. Pages
besides your homepage, if they just have seven links incoming to
those pages from other websites, that actually puts them better off
than 85 percent of the pages on the Internet. Most pages on the
Internet have very, very few links. Getting just seven to ten links
into a given page can make a huge, huge difference.

Prepare for the Future of Search
Where is search going? Today search engines are starting to
incorporate additional signals to figure out that authority. Social
media has become really important and the ―like‖ is starting to
replace or become as important as the link. As people like your
content or tweet your content, that is adding authority to your

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website. What you want to be doing today is leveraging that
phenomenon in order to build more and more authority.

Some of the things you should be doing for SEO include using
keywords in the language that your buyer persona uses. Focus on
great content more than technical tweaks, because that great
content is what's going to attract a lot of links and a lot of ―likes.‖
Train the people creating content within your business on SEO.

My advice for the road ahead would be stop thinking like a
marketer or stop thinking especially like an advertiser; think a lot
more like a publisher and a socializer. That's what's going to start
to attract a lot of people to your website, help you turn marketing
from into an asset.

Tim Ash: My perspective is basically looking at the world and finding that
it's messed up.

Back in the early ’80s, when I was at UC San Diego, it was a
hotbed for usability research. In fact, I studied under Don Norma
who's arguably one of the top people in the field. He was the guy
that literally wrote the book on user-centered design. So, a lot of
the things that you have to say, and the paying attention to the
customers and to your visitors, that really resonates with me.

We've been working with lots of companies both in a consulting
best practices capacity and also doing live website or landing
page tests to see what actually works. That's where we get our
best practices.

Unfortunately, I'm here to tell you the world is a big, messy,
messed up place. The main reason for it is that we're all greedy
marketers. We care about what's making money, getting more
leads, getting more sales, getting our bonus at the end of the
year. What we don't really care about so much are the
experiences that people are having on our websites.

So, I'm going to walk you through a quick catalogue of the good,
the bad and the ugly, and show you through example what I'm
talking about. Hopefully, it'll energize you enough to send you into
the world out there and make your little corner of it a little less
ugly and a little more inviting. As a byproduct of that, you get to
make a lot more money.

Designing Your Calls to Action

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I'm going to start with calls to action. Here is a landing page, a
pay-per-click landing page on Google Adwords, believe it or not.
Imagine if you landed on this page, what's the desired call to
action on this page?

Now, you'd probably have to look all over it or you'd focus in on
the red section perhaps and see the ―Call before December 30th.‖
You'd see Vanna White, that pretty model, smiling and pointing at
the laptop screen, the report screenshots near the bottom of the
screen and in the middle. Believe or not, in this case, the iPhone
is the call to action. Clicking on it where it says, ―30-Day Free
Trial,‖ out of all of the other visual noise on this page is what they
want you to actually do. Now, if you're like me, you probably didn't
find that so obvious. I believe it took you a while to figure it out or
to zero in on it.

Yet, we have these kinds of experiences all the time on the Web.
This is a problem because as marketers, we want to cram
everything we can into our websites and landing pages. The
thinking that goes into this is, "Well, we want them to know about
how wonderful we are. We want to know every feature of our
product. And we want them to know – and, and, and, and," and
what you get is really kind of death by 1,000 cuts.

Your conversion rate, the effectiveness of your landing page,
basically, gets sacrificed for putting more and more information on

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the page. You can think of it like jam on a piece of toast. If you
spread it thin enough, it's just not effective or very tasty anymore,
and that's what happens when you try to spread attention around
a landing page and not direct people on what you're trying to get
them to do.

So, my first tip is to make the call to action clear. I also call this,
half-jokingly, the mother-in-law test. If your mother-in-law would
figure it out, then the call to action on your page is clear enough.

Now, that doesn't mean go to the other extreme and put a big, fat
button in the middle of it that says, "Press here," or, "Give me
your money," or something like that. That would be, obviously,
ridiculous as well. What I'm talking about is visual prioritization. I
should be able to glance at a page and at a moment's notice
know what's important and what's the highlight and what' the
interactive and actionable part of the page that you really want me
to spend time on. Most of the time, that's not at all clear.

Filling Out Forms in the Attention Economy
I'd like to talk about another idea here. And this, I'll freely admit, I
basically stole from Seth Godin and his excellent book,
Permission Marketing. Once you've the visitors’ attention, you’d
better have a very compelling value proposition. All of us are in a
kind of highly activated state—surfing around the Web, clicking on
things, the TV's on, the dog's biting our leg, it's all happening at
once, and we're not in a deep contemplative mood. So you have
to very quickly establish the value proposition. It basically goes
like this: what I need and what I value has to significantly
outweigh any perceived hassle or cost to me. When I say cost, I
don't mean necessarily financial cost, because it's not. What I'm
really talking about is friction, annoyance… My attention has a
cost.

We live in an attention economy and if you're not really laser
focused on that, you're going to lose. A cost to me is wasting 30
seconds of my time, and a high cost to me is wasting 5 minutes of
my team, so I'm going to cut my losses in this world of infinite
information. If you don't have exactly what I want, and if the value
of that doesn't outweigh the hassle and cost, I'm moving on.

One of the things that we do as greedy marketers is to ask for too
much information. That creates a lot of hassle, a lot of cost for
me, without creating any value. In fact, it almost makes it seem

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like the value of whatever it you offer is actually less. The scales
aren't going to balance.

Big companies like Adobe aren’t immune to this. Believe it or not,
this is a landing page to
download a free whitepaper.
Of course, you can’t really tell
there’s even a whitepaper
here, unless you dive into the
text of the page, but I did
think it was a bit ironic that
the title of the paper is
―Rethinking the Role of
Landing Pages and
Conversion,‖ probably a little
strange if you want people to
download a whitepaper and
it’s about landing-page
effectiveness that down the
right-hand side you have this
incredibly long form just to
allow me to download the
whitepaper. Is this information
necessary? I don’t think so.
It’s just nice to have, and
inside the bowels of Adobe
somewhere somebody said,
―Well, if we’re going to create a record in our CRM database, we
need to know their industry and their intent to buy and whether
they’re an influence or a buyer,‖ and all of this other garbage.

Unfortunately, they basically destroyed the chances of somebody
downloading that whitepaper, and it’s because we’re greedy and
we’re asking for too much information. That scale is going way too
far in the hassle direction, and it doesn’t have to be a lot of
hassle. Just remember that you only have light, superficial
attention, like a butterfly has landed for one split-second and it
could be gone, so don’t do that.

Below is another example. This is one of our clients, Hearing
Planet, and with Hearing Planet, again, taking a page from Seth’s
book, Permission Marketing, they’re offering a bribe, a good one.
If you’re interested in getting a hearing aid, The Buyer’s Guide to
Hearing Aids. Now, presumably you’d want to read that before
you spent thousands and thousands of dollars on the wrong one,
and so they let you download it here. But look at the amount of

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information they’re asking for. If you look closely at that form, they
start asking you for your first and last name, your city, state,
country and ZIP code.

Think about it, folks. This is a whitepaper download. Why do you
need my mailing address? Isn’t that a little bit intrusive? If this was
in a normal interaction in our day-to-day lives, we’d say, ―Are you
kidding me?‖ Imagine every time you walked into a store at the
shopping mall somebody at the door said, ―Hi. Welcome to our
shop. May I hold your credit card while you shop?‖ I’m sure your
answer would be, ―Go away.‖ Yet we feel it’s right to ask for
similar intrusive, inappropriate information that we could gather
much later in the
process.

So, quick question: do you want to increase conversion rate on your lead forms

Now, what’s left on
this form is name,
email and other
contact information.
But I think that even
this is too much.
Now, think to

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yourself: what is the minimum of information that you need to
have on this page to let someone download a whitepaper? Now, a
lot of you are probably thinking, ―That’s obvious.‖ Just an e-mail
address? To which I’d say you’re still a greedy marketer and
you’re not thinking this through. It’s a download. You don’t need
any information to let me download it. You just need to let me
press the button that says ―Download it Now.‖

In the case of Hearing Planet, for example, a different strategy
might look something like this. We’re experts on it, and a nicely
formatted, professional whitepaper goes a long way towards
allowing me to make a good decision, and you know what? I can
share this. I can share this with the caregivers. I can share it with
my insurance agency to see if I qualify. I can share it with medical
providers or other people, caretakers, the children of the older
parents that want to get the hearing aid or maybe don’t want to
get the hearing aid. All of this extended, viral spread of this
whitepaper can’t happen if someone didn’t download it in the first
place.

Folks, you haven’t lost anything. If they find your whitepaper
credible, then they’re much more prime to buy from you or interact
with you, and there’s a link in the whitepaper. It says, ―Come back
now. Schedule your hearing test anywhere in the country.‖ That’s
powerful. The only thing you lost was knowing who they are and
letting them act on their timing on their time frame. So, really
think: How much information do they really need?

Below is another example. This is a lead-generation form for a
debt-negotiation company. They sell off leads they get for people
who are in debt to other debt-negotiation firms. And they have a
pretty imposing form, as you can see. It’s a burgundy form. It asks
a lot of questions: for first name, last name, spouse, work phone,
cell phone, home phone, best time to call and blah, blah, blah.
And we asked them, ―What do you do with this information?‖
Surprisingly, their answer was, ―We call them. We pick up the
phone and we qualify every lead, because we can’t sell junk leads
or we’d be out of business tomorrow.‖ So we said, ―What is the
minimum information you need to be able to qualify and call or to
even know whether it’s worth calling them back?‖ That’s what
ended up at the end of our landing-page test being part of the
winning page. And, as you can see, the form is much shorter.
They just ask for name, email, phone, state, because they have
different laws in the U.S. with regard to debt negotiation, and debt
amount. If you don’t have a lot of debt, we can’t help you.

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Before redesign

After redesign
+51%

And this page performed 51 percent better for both the forms filled
and propensity to pick up the phone and call the 800 number.
This was a $48 million-a-year value. So, again, the takeaway is
make things simple. Don’t ask for information you don’t need.
Have a very strong filter for adding fields to your forms. It should
go like this, ―Is this information absolutely necessary to complete
the current transaction? Absolutely necessary?‖ If it’s not, take it
off. Do I need it now, or is it a nice-to-have that I can gather later
when I deepen my relationship with the prospect or the client?

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Don’t ask for stuff that you can collect later. Yes, it’s a little more
work to collect it in pieces, and it may drive your IT guys crazy,
because their database records are not complete. That’s okay,
but you’re going to have happy humans. You’re going to have
happy customers and prospects, and that’s much, much more
important.

Optimizing Landing Pages
Let me ask you a simple question: Do you like sitting in front of
your computer monitor and reading novels? There’s iPad. There’s
Kindle. There are all kinds of things better than sitting in front of
your computer at 72 dots per inch and reading off of your monitor.
Well, you’re not alone; nobody likes to read on the Web. Nobody
likes to read on the Web, because the Web is not designed for
reading novels, so don’t write novels on your landing pages and
on your Web site. Don’t have a ton of text.

Now, here’s a perfect example, Canyon Tours.

This page, again, is a pay-per-click landing page on Google
Adwords. They have just a boatload of text in it, and that text is
essentially unreadable. You’re using correct grammar and
punctuation and complete sentences and paragraphs, and it’s
guaranteed to be boring. It’s that simple. Remember, you’re just
in a highly kind of activated state on the Web. We’re not reading.
We’re scanning for information. We’re looking for headlines, for
sub-headlines, for links or graphics or buttons to click on. We’re
not reading, folks. It’s like the old Charlie Brown cartoons, where
whenever an adult talked in a class, all the kids would hear would
be, ―Wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah,‖ and that’s exactly what
people are seeing when they see correctly formatted text like this
on your page: ―Wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah.‖ I guarantee you
they’re not reading it.

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So, if you have a lot of legal boilerplate that you have to put on
your page, that is okay. Throw it up there, all 17 scrolling
paragraphs of it, because good news: Hey, no one’s going to read
it. But don’t do that with your marketing copy, because you’re
shooting yourself in the foot. Write clear headlines, just a few
bullet points and don’t wrap them. Keep your thoughts concise
and tight. Jacob Nielsen has presented at our conversion
conference in the past as a keynote. He’s probably the
undisputed godfather of Web usability, and he’s done study after
study over a long time that says less is more. Cut down on the
amount of text and increase readability and recall, you also
increase conversion, so don’t tell me the whole story. Otherwise,
you’re not going to get my money.

Trust Factors
I want to switch gears a little bit and talk about trust. We had a
landing page for one of our clients, CREDO Mobile, out of the Bay
Area, and what I’m about to show you is what we call an
attention-wizard heat map of their landing page. It’s a little hard to
see, but I just want you to get the general gist of it. It’s for a cell
phone offer, and the highlights you’re seeing all over, those yellow
hotspots, are where we predict attention’s going to go during the
first few seconds of their visit on the landing page.

What you’re seeing here are a hotspot on the left of the page with
some activation around the phone picture near the right. You’re
not getting a lot of activation around the green button that’s the
―get the offer‖ button in the middle of the page. So what we did is
an ―express review‖ of their page and, with their designer’s help,
redesigned it or what we call ―express fix.‖

Page 18 of 25

Above is the new page that we came up with. One of the things
that we added to it besides the offer was logos of the companies
that they give money to, charities. They’re a progressive
company. One of the things they pride themselves on is the fact
that they gave out over $60 million to Greenpeace and Planned
Parenthood and Doctors Without Borders and all of these better-
known brands. You might not have heard of CREDO Mobile
before I mentioned them, but I’m sure you’ve heard of some of
those organizations.

So, we ran this through the attention wizard several times to make
sure we got it just right, and notice where the hotspots are on this
page. Of course, they’re on the phone. It’s on the new button, as
you saw, the orange button down below. But we also intentionally,
very carefully, brought attention to the right side of the screen so
you’d be influenced by those trust symbols. By focusing attention
away from CREDO in effect and towards the trust symbols that
were on the page in the form of those charity logos, we were able
to increase conversion by 84 percent.

So, trust really matters. Trust can be piled onto your page in a
variety of ways: you can add reviews, the number of clients, the
years you’ve been in business. Why is it so compelling when you
walk into the hardware store it says ―since 1979?‖ Well, that
means you can trust them, and the same goes for online
businesses. Even a few years of being up on the Internet is a real
badge of honor and means you’re a survivor and are steady and
solid. The same thing is true of media mentions, those liberally,
―as seen on,‖ any kind of trade associations or groups that you
belong to. Of course, if you’re in B2B, you’re marquee client logos
can be a very powerful way to build trust. You combine and group

Page 19 of 25

all of those things on your page and segregate them into a trust
section, and all of a sudden you have a much higher form-
completion rate and the cash register’s going to be ringing more
often.

This is not rocket surgery, but it does require you to take off the
rose-colored glasses, see your baby as ugly. Your landing page is
your baby. It’s your ugly baby. Don’t look for good things and pat
yourself on the back with the fact that you’re making money with
your Web site or landing pages. Look for the problems, and then
go and fix them. These are things that you should be able to spot
at a moment’s notice on your page and then just go in and
change. It might be as simple as a headline change or using a
different graphic or toning down your covers a bit, and you’re
going to see a lot of improvement.

If you’re interested in one of our interactive express reviews,
which we record via GoToMeeting with all of your questions, I
would suggest that you go to ExpressReview.com, and I would
view the first three reviews. If you mention HubSpot Webinar in
the comment field when you sign up, I will read them personally.
So, just wanted to throw that out there, and also, as some of you
may already know, we have an international conference series
called Conversion Conference. Next event is coming up here
March 14th and 15th in San Francisco. I really urge you to get
there if you can, and there’s a special promo code that HubSpot’s
been kind enough to provide. If you register with CCW920, you
will get $250.00 off of the registration.

Mike Volpe: Thanks, Tim. Great stuff! We also have
a special offer here at HubSpot. Sort of
the next step in our process, if you’re
interested, is to talk to an expert, and it’s
no cost. It’s no obligation, and you can
get basically a free custom assessment
of your overall Web site. How optimized
is it to attract lots of people? Is it set up
right for the search engines? Is it set up
right to do the right things in terms of
social media and just sort of the overall
optimization of your site? You can do that at HubSpot.com/IMA,
which stands for Inbound Marketing Assessment.

Popular Questions

Page 20 of 25

Can you address prequalifying versus asking too
much information on forms?
Tim Ash: Well, if you have a B2B sale and the ultimate sale is worth $1
million and the sale cycle is 6 to 12 months, you’re not going to
want to push somebody off. It’s worth for you to talk to a few
prospects in order to uncover that $1 million deal. On the other
hand, if you’re selling something for $19.99, it’s probably not even
worth putting up your telephone number, because you don’t want
to interact with these people in person at all, whom you’d lose
money on every time the phone rings. So, it really depends
mostly on the economics of the business and how many steps are
involved in the qualifying process. If you’re going to talk to them
anyway, I would ask for a minimum of information and pick up the
rest in a conversation that may last 30 seconds.

Why does HubSpot have long forms if they are not
good for conversions?
Mike Volpe: There’s another marketing expert called David Meerman Scott,
who is an advocate for not having a form and just putting all your
content out there. Then people will eventually contact you when
they’re really interested.

We do a variety of things at HubSpot. Sometimes, we release e-
books and things like that and there’s no registration form at all.
Sometimes, we ask for email address. Sometimes, it’s more than
that. The truth is always proven out by the numbers. Is the value
of the data that you’re collecting, and are those extra three or four
fields worth the difference in conversion rate?

If you test a form that has two or three fields and you get a 50
percent conversion rate and then another form that has seven
fields, has a 30 percent conversion rate, what is that difference in
the number of people filling that out? What is that worth to you?
And maybe, at times, you’re actually willing to give up on fewer
leads because you’re actually using that information in your sales
process. We’ve done a fair amount of that testing here at
HubSpot, and for us, we’re relatively comfortable that our forms
are at the right place for our business. But, again, I think that
really depends on what you’re trying to accomplish and the value
of that information. Is that the right way to think about it, Tim?

Tim Ash: Yeah, I would agree. You should certainly test it head to head to
see the impact on conversion rate by making a shorter or longer
form, but the other thing I would say is never put on stuff that

Page 21 of 25

you’re not going to act on right away. If you don’t have a specific
campaign geared around that extra information or question you’re
asking and you’re going to use that as a business rule to decide
something, don’t put it on the form.

Mike Volpe: I totally agree with that. But at least for us we’ve got a maybe
somewhat sophisticated sales process. We do use all that
information in figuring out what our follow-up plan is and things
like that, and if people want to hear more about that, I did that
debate that I referenced with David Meerman Scott. You can go
to HubSpot.com/debate, and that will take you to the page that
has basically David and I talking about whether you should lock
up some of your content behind forms, etc.

What is a reasonable visitor-to-read conversion rate
that you should expect from your landing page?
Tim Ash: There’s no number. There’s beat what you have. It’s that simple.
It depends on way too many things. It depends on your brand
strength, your marketing campaigns, your traffic sources, what
you’re promising upstream and visitors’ intent when they get
there, so just to fill out a form can be anywhere from 5 to 25
percent, I’d say, but that’s such a wide range that it becomes
meaningless. I can tell you one thing: Whatever you have, I can
beat it or you can beat it, so keep improving and knocking off the
champion.

How do you identify buyer personas?
Mike Volpe: I think if you really have no idea who’s buying your product, then,
yes, it could be hard to identify them, but I think most people
should have some idea, and there’s a couple different techniques.
Start talking to the people that do the most work with your
customers. Ask them, ―If you had to put our customers into a
couple buckets, what would those buckets look like? Tell me
about the person that you think is our most typical customer.‖
Start to do some of that work, and that will put you in the right
direction. If you have any survey data about your customers, you
can start to do some analysis of those things as well.

Isn’t reducing the text on your landing pages killing
SEO opportunities?
Tim Ash: There is a balance there. The point is not to interfere with the
good user experience. At the top of the page you can have things
composed mostly of graphics, navigating somewhere else and

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deeper into the site. Then, at the bottom pile on all the SEO text
you want. But you know what? I think that’s old-school thinking,
too. From my understanding, only about a third of your SEO kind
of power comes from the stuff that’s on your page. Most of it, as
Mike mentioned, comes from authoritative outside links and off-
page factors, so don’t let the SEO stuff paralyze you into never
improving your user experience.

How do you manage to transform a blog reader
into a lead?
Mike Volpe: We have a call to action in every single blog article at the bottom,
and that call to action is related to the content of the blog article.
For instance, maybe we wrote an article about, landing-page
optimization or improving lead flow. That would probably have a
call to action to sign up for this webinar. Now that we’ve grown
our blog into a big, successful asset, a good media property, it is
one of our top three sources of leads for HubSpot. So if you have
the right calls to action and build up an audience on your blog,
your blog can become an important source of leads too.

What is the best way to drive people to a landing
page?
Tim Ash: I don’t know that there is a best way. It really depends on your
audience. You want to make sure there’s an alignment between
what’s happened upstream on your page and on your page.
That’s really critical, so basically keep your promises, whatever
their intent was, whatever they were expecting in your ad copy, in
your tweet, in your comparison-shopping fee description, that
better be on the page when you get there.

What about the risk for negative comments on your
blog? How do you reduce that risk?
Mike Volpe: So, I’m not sure that I necessarily want to. Who cares if
somebody says something negative? They could say that
anywhere on the Net. If people are going to say negative things
about you, I’m not sure that you starting or not starting a blog is
going to necessarily encourage more or less of that. People are
going to say bad things about you. People today have a huge
voice and this huge megaphone, because they can leave

Page 23 of 25

comments all over the Web. They can post stuff on Facebook and
Twitter. They can start their own blog. All those things are really
easy to do.

If you keep your blog content relatively positive, I think you tend to
get fewer troll-like or negative comments. If you’re the type of
blogger that’s throwing a lot of mud and criticizing other folks, you
will tend to get more comments that are like that as well. To some
degree, the voice you set with your blog will impact the voice of
the comments that you receive. To me, the benefit of starting the
blog far outweighs any risk of potential negative comments you
would get, except maybe something really extreme, highly
politically charged.

Do you have any insights on including multiple links
on a landing page and how that impacts
conversions?
Tim Ash: It’s okay to have multiple goals on your page, but I would say if
you have more than three to four choices it’s probably a really bad
idea. So what you need to do is group them into regions. What we
often talk about is what I call ―engagement continuum.‖ Imagine
three side-by-side boxes. The first one says ―learn more.‖ The
other one is ―download free whitepaper,‖ and the third one says
―talk to one of our sales reps.‖ You get more engagement at
every step of the process, so going from the ―I don’t care at all‖ to
the ―I might care a little bit about what you’re doing.‖ If you
organize things logically like that, side by side, then people will
self-select into the right activity and whatever they’re comfortable
with.

Additional Resources

 SEO for Lead Generation Kit

Page 24 of 25

 Think Like a Publisher: 3 Tips to Generate More Leads
 25 Ways to Increase Sales and Lead Generation
 Optimize Your Sales & Marketing
Funnelhttp://www.hubspot.com/inbound-marketing-assessment/

Ready to optimize your
site for maximum lead
flow?

Start today with your 30-
day free trial of HubSpot!

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