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Landing Page Construction Kit — Part 1: prepare and define

Senior Technical Writer
Mar 12, 2015

In the past months we built several landing pages for different products and startups. To make this easier we created a content collection form. While the advice in that form might not be new, it helped us a lot to have it all in a concise, easy to fill out format. The form has reduced the time we need to create landing pages drastically, so we thought it would be useful to share it with the startup community through this blog post series and as a free download.

  • Part 1 of this series will explore the preparation phase, where you will have to clearly define all aspects of your offering.
  • Part 2 will delve into writing targeted sales copy: the headlines, statements and call-to-actions that will grab the attention of your potential customer.
  • Part 3 will help you inform and educate your potential customers so that they can confidently decide for using your product or service.

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## Your target audience
As a first step, find out everything you can about your target audience. You will build on this knowledge when making decisions on each element of your landing page, so putting in a lot of effort at this early phase will pay off later on.

Some ideas for gathering information about your target audience:

  • Think about the problem you solve with your product or service: Who is going to need it?
  • Do some research: Find existing research about your industry, market or competition. Do your own research by conducting surveys or interviewing focus groups.
  • Find out where your audience is: Attend events, conferences, user groups, online forums. Organize meetups and see who turns up.
  • Monitor and improve: Start collecting users with your landing page and refine your knowledge about your target audience.

Your unique selling proposition (USP)

Think about what makes your product and company different from your competitors. If you can’t think of any competitors, keep looking. Think about a unique quality, and explain how that quality will benefit your customers.

Some examples of great USPs:

  • Nerd Fitness: Among the plethora of sites about health and fitness, this site targets a specific niche — nerds — with laser sharp focus.
  • Rosa’s Fresh Pizza: The shop sells pizza slices for $1 each — but you can also donate pizza to people in need, who can walk into the store and grab a slice for free.
  • Kiva: There are many places that offer loans, and others where you can donate to make the world a better place. Kiva gave a unique twist to microloans — you can loan money to change people’s lives in the poorest places on Earth.

Your concept

Think about a good visual to convince your potential customers. What would be the best way to convey your message? Think about images, diagrams, infographics, screencasts, videos.
Sketch, experiment and test it with your target group!

Benefits of your offering

Describe the problems you are solving with 3 benefits, and add a brief description to each. Keep it short!

When discussing landing pages for our products, we often got carried away and started talking about features instead of benefits. Make sure you don’t confuse them! Benefits are the problems you are solving, features are how you are solving them.

An example from our Drupal documentation service:



So, you’ve clearly defined who you are talking to and what you would like to convey. Stay tuned for part 2 of our series where we help you get your message across!

Diána is a Senior Technical Writer at Pronovix. She is specialized in API documentation, topic-based authoring, and contextual help solutions. She writes, edits and reviews software documentation, website copy, user documents, and publications. She also enjoys working as a Program Monitor for NHK World TV and Arirang TV. She graduated as a programmer, then went on earning system administrator and system analyst and designer degrees. She's fluent in English and German, and worked as a translator for a publishing company translating books from German to Hungarian. She's the Hungarian translator of Basecamp. Before becoming a writer, she worked with international clients like Sony Pictures Television, Da Vinci Learning and The Walt Disney Company as a key account manager in integrated marketing campaigns focusing on digital media.

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