Using Landing Pages to Generate More Leads for Your Clinic

On this episode of Propel Your Practice, we're talking about how you can increase the number of qualified leads you have coming into your clinic through the use of landing pages.

Hello, and welcome to the Propel Your Practice Podcast, where we discuss actionable marketing strategies clinic owners can use to propel their practice’s presence online. I'm your host, Darcy Sullivan. On this episode of Propel Your Practice, I'm joined by Nicholas Scalice. Nicholas is a growth marketing consultant and the founder of Growth Marketer Co. 

He helps businesses turn their funnels into lead generation and sales machines using conversion optimization and marketing automation. He's also the host of the top-ranked podcast called Growth Marketing Toolbox. 

Darcy: Hello, Nicolas. Welcome to the show.

Nicholas: Hey, how are you, Darcy?

Darcy: Good. I'm so excited to have you here. I've been on your show before, but this is your first time coming on the Propel Your Practice Podcast. 

Nicholas: Very exciting, super excited. Looking forward to it.

Darcy: Yeah. So we're going to talk today about landing pages, and I think there's some misconceptions behind them. And you are the go-to guy when it comes to landing pages; you have a program called- remind me of the name of it- Landing Page School?

Nicholas: Yeah, Landing Page School. That's my, one of my podcasts, and a sub-brand of Growth Marketer, where we just try to help people learn about landing pages. What they are, and how to build better high-converting landing pages.

Darcy: So we're going to talk today about landing pages and some basics, but when we go to wrap up, obviously, if they want to dive deeper into landing pages, you've got a whole podcast specifically dedicated to it, which is an awesome specialized resource. 

So can we start by talking about exactly what a landing page is? Why it's different from a regular page on your website? Do you want to dive into that one?

Nicholas: Absolutely. Yeah. That's a very common question that I get asked. So yeah, a lot of people listening might have never heard of a landing page before. So what is it? It is different than the standard page on your website, and it's primarily different in the sense that landing pages are created with one specific goal, or we would call it a conversion action, in mind.

Um, so you may have heard the term CTA or call to action. Well, your call to action would be one thing that you want the visitor to do. 

So, I'll give you an example- maybe we want to collect a lead. So we want someone to fill out a form. So we would have a form on that landing page, and all the calls to action would direct people to that action to get them to try to fill out that form so we can get a consultation or collect that lead or provide them with some follow-up.

Um, so that's where the main difference is between a landing page and, like, a Homepage, for an example. Because with the Home, you have a lot of different things going on. Someone may visit your Homepage, and maybe they want to just contact you, maybe they want to check out your social media links, check out your blog, learn more about your services, buy a product.

Uh, there's so many different things to do. So with a landing page, it's meant to be very focused, one clear call to action. Um, you know, sometimes you can repeat that call to action throughout the page, but you want to have one main focus. 

And the other really important thing, your landing page should be tied to a specific campaign for a specific target audience.

So all that means is that you don't want your landing page to appeal to everybody. I'm sure we've all been there, where someone says, “Hey, I want to reach everyone on earth with my message,” but that's just not realistic. So you want to pick a very specific persona, which I know is something you help people within your, in your programs.

So once you have that persona figured out, that's when you can then build your landing page. And then, you can create a campaign, a marketing campaign, to utilize that landing page and get people to that page. So, say, in a nutshell, that's what a landing page is. 

Darcy: Do you find that people are using these landing pages solely connected to advertising campaigns or do they also use them outside of advertising campaigns?

Nicholas: Yeah, that's a really good question. So, I would say in practicality, uh, I would say about 75% of the usage of a landing page is primarily tied to some type of paid advertising channel. Most notably, Google Ads or Facebook Ads, since that's where the bulk of paid advertising dollars is spent these days.

Um, although that is changing with the popularity of TikTok and some other channels. Um, so, you know, I'd say the vast majority of landing pages are built for paid advertising campaigns, but that doesn't mean you can't still use them for other traffic sources. Um, probably the most notable secondary source outside of paid advertising to utilize a landing page for would be email marketing.

So if you're running an email marketing campaign (instead of having a call to action in that email) for someone to do something very specific and then sending them to a generic Homepage where they could get lost, you could use a highly targeted landing page so that when they click that link in the email, they go to that targeted page. And this creates a much stronger connection between what they clicked on in the email and what they're going to see.

So yeah, I would say email is another great opportunity to use a landing page.

Darcy: And you mentioned getting distracted by sending them to a Homepage. And I, I do hear a lot of people- when they're first started, a lot of clinic owners, when they're first starting out with paid advertising, like, they want to touch, you know, they want to try out Google Ads, they just don't know, and so they're usually- if they haven't done enough research, they're not creating these landing pages. 

And instead, what they're doing, is they're just sending traffic to the Homepage of their website, which can be, you know, can lead to, you know, just throwing money out the door.

Nicholas: Yeah, I'd say it's probably the number one issue that I see businesses make.

They spend all this money focusing on SEO or focusing on, uh, you know, paid advertising or email marketing, which are all great, and these are amazing ways to get traffic, but then when they get that traffic or the visitors, they're just confused. Cause it's just going to this very generic void. 

I'd say it's very important if there's just one takeaway that the listeners of this podcast episode would get, it's that you need to invest just as much time, if not more time, in where people are, Once they get to your website versus how you're getting people to your website, you have to have both working together.

Darcy: That's a really good point right there. 

Now, just to be clear, if we could kind of talk about what are some of the elements of a landing page that, that make it different from another page on your website, what are we getting rid of that might exist on the Homepage or on an About Page or on a blog post that would limit the messaging and the direction that takes place on a landing page?

Nicholas: Yeah. So, I'd say first and foremost, going back to calls to action or, you know, what people can do. That's probably the most important thing that you're trying to eliminate. With a typical page, you're going to have multiple calls to action, a lot of links, both links to other pages on your site, as well as outbound links.

So you want to try to remove as much of that as possible. There's something called the attention ratio that was created by, um, Ali Gardner, one of the founders of  Unbounce, a very popular, um, page builder for building landing pages. 

And what the attention ratio is, he basically says you should have a one-to-one ratio for the things you want people to do on the, on a page versus the things they can do.

Right? So, you want them to fill out that form. That should be really the only thing that people can engage with on that page. And I know that sounds very restrictive, you know, but it works right now. There are some exceptions to that. Like if you're trying, if you're a chiropractor and you're, you're trying to get leads in a different variety of ways.

Like you can totally have a phone number button for people to call, and you can have a form. Right. So, so that's, it's still sort of the same goal. Cause you're trying to capture a lead, but you wouldn't want to have, you know, check out Facebook and check out Instagram and fill out my form and call me and this and that.

So you want to reduce the number of, of links. And, obviously, there's other exceptions. Like you need to have a privacy policy, so you're going to have a link at the footer usually. 

But what I see a lot of is these blocks of links, usually in the footer or in the navigation. And that's very, very confusing for, for a lot of visitors. So you'd want to remove those. So, I'd say that's probably the most important element, that, that you should have on a landing page.

Darcy: Okay. So, we talked about some things that you should remove from a page so that it's not a standard fixed page on your website to create a landing page, but what are some things that you should add?

What are some key elements to… what's the anatomy of a successful landing page?

Nicholas: Yeah. So we have actually created a whole framework around this at the end. I can share some, some resources if you want to check it out, but I'll give you the Cliff Notes version. So, there's about seven elements or seven items that should be on a landing page, and I'll run through them real quickly.

You want to have something that helps with clarity. And, so, usually, that's going to be, like, a very clear headline right at the top, because you want people to be able to understand what is this page about. And they need to get that in a fraction of a second. Cause people are, um, you know, time-strapped, too, these days.

So we would call that message clarity. The second thing is you want to have a relevant offer. Um, this is another thing I see happen all the time where people have these beautiful websites, beautiful pages, and the offer is like “Contact Us” or “Subscribe for Updates.” And it's this very vague, general thing that doesn't really mean anything.

So you want to have a very specific offer. Is it a free consultation? Is it $50 off your first, uh, adjustment? Right? There's so many great, um, offers, especially in this space. The third thing would be, uh, something that conveys the affinity of, of someone liking your brand or liking the, just, the overall look.

So we call this design and affinity. Um, and it could be as simple as just making sure that you have a really nice logo associated with your page or having a nice brand that's using your, you know, using your brand colors and isn't all over the place. 

And then, of course, social proof, that's really important. So you want to have, like, testimonials or case studies, something that people can see, “Hey, this has worked for something else.” So for chiropractors, um, you know, chiropractors, you need to have some type of testimonial on there. Cause people don't want to be the first one to work with you. Right? They don't wanna be the first one to get adjusted, and they want to see that with someone else. 

You also want to have some type of trust or security indicator. So the easiest way to do this is if you are affiliated with an association or the Better Business Bureau, or you have some type of credential, you want to put that on the page. Or, if you've worked with clients from big top companies, put the logos on the page. So you're building trust and affinity. 

And then the last two are- if possible, they want to have something like a unique advantage, like, how are you different? Because you have to remember, people are looking at your services, and then they're comparing you against a billion other resources, right? 

For instance, there's a whole bunch of these franchise chiropractic facilities, and you may want to stand out from that. So what is it that you can do that can help you stand out from the crowd? So we call that unique advantage. 

And the last one is, uh, having a call to action where it is very clear. This is what we want you to do next, and this is how you actually take us up on whatever it is that we're offering. 

So that, in a nutshell, that's the Cliff Notes version, but we have a whole framework that's absolutely free that goes into more detail on those seven elements.

Darcy: If somebody could set up a landing page, maybe to promote a video series that they have, that they are, you know… Basically, here, we're talking about having fun with funnels, and I know people get scared of the word funnel marketing, funnel, because it sounds fancy, but we're, all we're talking about really is lead generation and either capturing the email or somebody's phone number.

And the main way to do this is to have dated information where they have to provide you this information in exchange for their email address or you getting their phone number to contact them. And, there's so many different types of items that you could offer an exchange. Like you said, the consultation, it could be an eBook or checklist or discount, discount video series… 

Really there's, there's tons of things that you can offer. 

But, you mentioned something there, too, about what makes you unique or what makes your organization unique? And I think that's really important too, especially if you're running advertising because somebody could easily click out of your, if they're clicking through Google, they could click out of your ad and then back to somebody else's. 

So what is it that's making you stand out? 

So, okay. We understand what landing pages are. We understand why and when you would use them. Um, one thing I don't think we've really, kind of, hit on yet is what happens after they fill out the form.

Like, shouldn't it redirect them to a Thank You Page? What- do you have any suggestions or what happens after they fill out the form?

Nicholas: Yeah. So, I think this is another area that people don't give enough thought to because everything we're talking about here, it goes back to basic human psychology.

And, so one thing we have to keep in mind is that people are most likely to take an action right after they've already taken a similar action. There's some science behind that that goes into more detail, but basically, you have this window of opportunity where if someone goes to your landing page, that goes through and fills out a form, they've just raised their hand and said, “Hey, I'm interested in something.” 

So you want to take advantage of that window of opportunity to provide maybe a secondary offer. So the obvious way that this happens in the e-commerce space is with upsells and cross-sells, and we've all experienced it- where you go to checkout and then it's, “Oh, wait, here's another product.” They're taking advantage of that window of opportunity.

If someone is right there ready to buy, and they're adding on an additional buying opportunity, you can do something similar with lead generation where, yes, you would have a Thank You Page and on that Thank You Page, maybe you have a Facebook Group for your practice that you're trying to build up, right. And it's free, and you want people to join it. 

So put an invite to join that Facebook Group. That's something that I do for my newsletter. So when people opt in to get my newsletter on the Thank You Page, they can join one of our groups. And it's been a fantastic, secondary offer. 

So I would say absolutely use your Thank You Page as an opportunity to provide some type of secondary opportunity. Or maybe it's as simple as a video where the visitor can meet the, the practice owner and sort of build a closer connection. Or maybe there's just some information on what's going to happen next. “When is someone gonna follow up with me?”

So you certainly don't want it to just be: fill out a form, and then thanks, your form has been received. Right? You want to have something on that Thank You Page. So yeah, I would totally recommend having a Thank You Page.

Darcy: Okay. So if you've decided, if you've made the decision, “Hey, our organization needs a landing page or multiple landing pages for conversion optimization and to increase the number of leads we have coming in,” what steps does somebody take when it's time to, to set one of these up?

Nicholas: Yeah. So, there's a lot of tools out there that let you build landing pages very easily, so you don't, don't get discouraged by the technical components of this. Because, even if you don't have a website, we have a lot of clients where they don't even have a traditional website, but they have landing pages, and they have traffic that they send to those pages from paid advertising campaigns. And that's really all they do. 

I'm not saying to get rid of your website, but I'm saying you don't necessarily need to wait until your website's perfect. Cause I hear that a lot, where people say, “Oh, you know, we want to start building landing pages, but we have to redo our whole site, and we're just not ready.”

So there are a lot of tools out there that are dedicated landing page builders. Some popular ones are Unbounce; there’s Instapage, there's Landingi. And I'm sure we could put all these resources in your Show Notes, but yeah, there's a whole bunch of opportunities. 

And then you can also just use your website, right? So if you're using something like Squarespace or Wix or Weebly or WordPress, then you can pretty much build a landing page off of your site because it's not so much about where it's built. It, it's really the strategy that goes into what you're building. And so, as long as you have full control over what's going to be included and excluded on that page, you can pretty much build a, build a landing page. 

Darcy: Yeah. Yeah. So, I think it's something that people shouldn't be scared of. And out of those resources that you mentioned, obviously, there are people that would want to use their own platform, but let's just say they were considering using a different landing page tool; which of the ones that you mentioned do you think is the easiest from a DIY perspective?

Nicholas: Yeah. So I'm a little biased here because we are Unbounce agency partners. So we do a lot of work with Unbounce in particular. That's the page builder that I've been using the most, all the way back to, I think, 2015, or actually 2014.

And so a number of their conferences, (back when they had conferences, I'm waiting for the return after COVID), so, they have an amazing conference, by the way, for anyone interested. Well, hopefully, they will have one in Vancouver, Canada. But, um, yeah, so I think, you know, Unbounce is probably the easiest one to just jump into and get started with.

But these days, like all the tools are, are getting so high-powered. Like, we use Active Campaign for our email marketing. And when we use that, when we started using Active Campaign many years ago, they did not have a page builder, but now they do have a page builder. So, some email marketing tools are starting to jump in and provide, um, a page-building solution.

So you never know, you might even have that capability in your email provider, but if you just want something to just pick it and get done with it, I would say go check out Unbounce.

Darcy: Okay. And we'll definitely include that link along with some of the other resources in the show notes. 

So, okay, so let's talk a little bit about, then we talked about the key elements, but the process of somebody either building one out themselves or reaching out to an agency to help them build out landing pages, what does that process look like?

Nicholas: Yeah. So, no matter who's going to do the actual building, you want to start with a good strategy. And so it goes back to the basics of what is the offer, like, what do you really want to offer? Because your landing page will never work unless you have a great offer. So you want to figure out what you’re going to do, and maybe you test multiple offers, that's fine.

But you would do a separate AB test. So, let's say that you decide on the offer and you want to have a giveaway, “I'm going to give out a, a $99 initial consult,” that's going to be your offer. So once you figure that out, you got to figure out who's your exact target persona. Who's your, your customer avatar, whatever you wanna call it, um, your ideal customer profile. There's so many different names for this- many different names. 

And then you, sort of, put the two together and say, “Okay, this is who we want to target. This is the offer.” And then you got to figure out, “How am I going to get traffic to the page?” Because a page that you build for Facebook Ad traffic is going to look different than a page you might build for email traffic or Google Ads.

So that's also an important characteristic. And then I recommend starting with the copy, starting writing, writing the words because the copy is really what's going to sell more than the design. 

Now the design is there to support the copy. So you don't want it to just be a wall of text, but you really want to start with that, with that copy.

So yeah, you take all that, you sort of put it together. There are a lot of agencies out there that can help you do this if it sounds like too much work, but it is something you could totally do on your own as well, especially with all the resources you provide in your course. I know, you know, there's all the individual pieces there. People just need to put them together.

Darcy: So how do you know once you have a landing page set up, and let's just say you're running ads to it, and it's crickets? How do you know if it's that your ad is the problem or that your landing page is the problem, or that your offer is the problem? Is there any way to kind of walk through that and figure it out?

In a testing way, which, which one is what needs to be adjusted because if you adjust all three at the same time, that's too many variables.

Nicholas: Yeah. So, where do you start? So, I like to think of it as- start at the top and work your way down because let's assume you're using Facebook Ads or Google Ads. If you aren't even getting people to see your ads, then you know, you know, everything you do below that point doesn't matter. Because if people aren't going to see your ads, they're not going to click on them, and they're not going to get to your page. So you've got to figure out why are people not seeing my ads?

Once you start getting your ad impressions up, and, and it seems like we're getting visibility in search or on Google or on Facebook, but people aren't clicking right now, we know, okay, we need to figure out what, what we need to do to get more people to click. And so at that point, we have to work on the messaging of the actual ad.

And so now, okay, people are seeing the ads. They're starting to click on the ads, they're landing on the page, but they're not converting. I'd say that's probably the most common issue that we encounter, uh, that's where you'd want to apply some additional, uh, tools to try to collect data of what are people doing on that page?

Are they just landing on the page for a second and leaving? Cause that's a good indication that maybe whatever you're offering in that ad or how you're wording things in your ad does not stack up against what you're saying on the page. This is, uh, this is what's known as message mismatch, right? 

So you don't want, uh, a disconnect between what people clicked on because when people click on it, an add, you're, you're making a promise to them like, “Hey, click on this, and we're going to do this when you click on it.” You want to fulfill that promise. And that's why it's important to have a clear headline, a clear call to action that matches whatever's in the ad.

So if that's not happening and you see people bouncing back and just leaving the page, right? It may also be an ad problem. However, if people are on that page and they're spending a lot of time, but they're not really following up or taking the next step, then you get into some other issues where maybe it is the offer.

So you want to test some different offers, and you can do an AB test, or maybe it's the messaging. So maybe there's some confusion in the way you're presenting things. We've even seen it where it's a usability issue, where everything's great strategically, but you know, then you look at the page on a mobile device, and it's all jumbled up. It's not optimized, it's, it's slow to load, so it could also be a technical issue. 

Um, and so there's tools out there that'll help you collect this data. Um, one of my favorites right now is actually completely free. [00:23:30] It's from Microsoft, and it’s called Microsoft Clarity. You can check it out at clarity.microsoft.com. And think of it as, like, a mix between Google Analytics and if you've ever heard of a tool called Hotjar, just, like, a marketing tool, um, it's their version of that. And it's very powerful. 

You can see how people navigate your pages, and it's easy to set up. So I would recommend if you have or are getting serious about landing pages, check out a tool like Microsoft Clarity, so you can collect some more insights.

Darcy: Now you mentioned something that, um, I think is really important. The fact, you know, more and more people are using mobile devices. So, before you even start paying to drive traffic or promoting in any way to your landing pages, you do want to look at them on mobile and on multiple devices to make sure that they're loading quickly, that everything looks correct. Because so many times, you know, people are looking at things on a different device than the one that the end-users are visiting it on.

So that's definitely a very important step. Is there any, how often do you suggest people monitor, test change, make any adjustments to their landing pages? Is it just like a one-and-done?

Nicholas: Yeah. So I would definitely recommend always having some type of data collection or test in progress. So maybe that's just a matter of installing Microsoft Clarity or something similar and checking it once a week or once every few weeks. Or maybe it's having a more rigorous experimentation program, where you have a list of all the things you want to test this month:

• We're going to test a different headline next month

• We're testing different offers

• We're going to test moving the testimonial into the hero section

Like, there's all these things you can test, but I think what it comes down to is your results, right? And your, um, your urgency to get better results. Because if you don't test, you're probably not going to continually improve your… just your page is probably going to either maintain at a certain conversion rate or decline over time.

So, um, it really comes down to how much you want to invest in creating a page. That's going to incrementally improve over time because it really does take a lot of work. We have a lot of clients that we work with where, you know, we build an amazing page for them, um, usually in Unbounce and you know, it does good at first, but it's sort of, you know, it declines over time because that's just the way things work and things are changing. 

And so you, you want to keep it going. You want to have different programs, uh, different ideas you can; you can include in a testing program. 

So, um, you know, but it comes down to what's the trade-off because if you're right out of the gate, if your page is working amazingly and it's converting, then yeah, maybe you don't need to give it as much attention. Right. But that's usually not the case.

Darcy: Right. Well, that sounds really great. So do you have any other final tips for people? If they're, they're just getting started with looking into setting up landing pages?

Nicholas: I would say don't complicate it. You know, we've, we've had folks who try to create a hundred different pages; I’m not exaggerating, uh, for every little combination. 

I would say, you know, start with one audience, start with one offer, uh, just start with one traffic source and just test it, figure out what works best in terms of layout and design and functionality. And then, once you have something working, you could always duplicate it for another offer or for another audience.

So, you know, I know everything we covered here is, is probably overwhelming because it's, there's just so much if you're not… I remember when I was first learning all this stuff, it was overwhelming for me. So, you know, don't get overwhelmed by it. 

Start simple, start with one page, one offer, one audience, one traffic source, and just try to gather as much data from it and then take it from there.

Darcy: Okay. So if somebody wants to go the do-it-themselves route, what's the URL for your Landing Page School?

Nicholas: Yeah, you can just go to LandingPageSchool.com  or the umbrella brand that everything's under; you can check out all of the resources is Growth Marketer Coach, just growthmarketer.co. 

Darcy: And if they're interested in talking to you more about how your organization could build out landing pages for them as well, that’s the website they would go to?

Nicholas: Yeah, you could send me a note from there. We have a Contact Page in the footer and, yeah, happy to chat with anyone.

Darcy: Well, thank you so much for your time today. We really appreciate it.

Nicholas: Awesome. It was great catching up, Darcy, and I hope you have a great rest of your day. Thanks.

Well, Hey, before we head out, I want to invite you to join in on a free masterclass I put together on the Five SEO Secrets to Owning the First Page of Google Without Buying Ads.

You can find a link to sign up for this free master class in the Show Notes of this episode or by visiting PropelYourCompany.com/learn. 

During this workshop, we do a deep dive into strategies to help you improve your online presence. Including your Google Business Profile, that's what used to be called the Google My Business listing, and what controls the Google Maps section. Along with how voice SEO plays a big role in today's search and where you should be focusing your efforts online for the biggest impact. 

All right. Well, that's it for today. Again, you can join the masterclass by visiting PropelYourCompany.com/learn. And if you have a topic that you would like to hear on an upcoming episode of Propel Your Practice, please send it in by visiting PropelYourCompany.com/podcast-topics or looking for the link in the show notes. 

Thanks so much for your time. I'll talk to you soon.