Use JTBD to create landing pages that convert

By combining Jobs to be Done and growth marketing techniques, you can create a proposition that increases customer conversions by 10x. Nopadon Wongpakdee took me through his 4 step process that anyone can follow.

The great thing about Jobs to be Done is that it is effective in both product design and product marketing. You may have a great product but if it's not well communicated it will never realise its full potential. Whether you're a new startup founder with a great idea or a product manager or designer trying to launch a new proposition, then there are some consistent challenges:

• How do you use the customer's language and prioritise the information they want to read?
• How do you know if what you've written is clear?
• How do you structure the information on your website?
• Is there a best way to do this?
• Your product has loads of great benefits that have tested well, but which one do you lead on?
• How do you maximise the conversion of customers when they land on your website?

At a recent JTBD meetup, Nopadon Wongpakdee walked me through his four-step process that answers these questions.

I've worked with Nopadon in the past using this kind of methodology. It always gets great results so it's definitely worth listening to him first hand. If the video is too long, here's a summary of his process.

1. Understand your customers using The Four Forces

Nopadon has been using Bob Moesta's Four Forces framework for a long time. The Four Forces are designed to understand the causality behind why customers switch from one product to another.

He's a big fan of the Four Forces framework because the information collected fits perfectly into the design of a landing page. Understanding how the customer is struggling with their existing solution, what outcomes they are trying to achieve and what's holding them back is exactly what you need to know when designing a landing page. The more you understand the motivations, problems and outcomes of your customers the more the landing page will write itself.

If you're not familiar with Bob's Four Forces read this and if you want to know how to conduct a Jobs to be Done interview with your customers read this.

2. Design your landing page

Once you've understood your customer's problem and designed your new solution, the next critical step is to focus on the messaging. The key thing you're aiming for is clarity and comprehension. Your landing page should simply and clearly describe what it does and who it's for. The articulation of the benefits and other details are designed to maximise the effect of the drivers (Push and Pull) and minimise the effect of the barriers (the Inertia and Anxiety). Nopadon recommends time-boxing 15 minutes to write your landing page. Here is the structure he recommends.

Nopadon's advice for each section:

• Headline: Write this as the Job to be Done
• Subheadline: Describe who it's for and what it does. Keep it simple.
• Benefit blocks: These are your features written as benefits. Avoid techy language like "AI" and focus on the outcomes customers desire and how you'll overcome the pain they currently experience.
• Social proofing: both professional and customer validation is required. However, customer validation is the most powerful. Choose quotes that talk about how the product helped them make progress or how the anxiety they had before purchasing was unfounded.
• How it works: shows how simple it is to get started and honing in on some of the typical behaviour patterns you have to overcome.
• Details: you can continue describing more benefits after this if it's relevant to what customers want. There's no rule of thumb as to how long a landing page should be. It's all about the hierarchy of information and using it maximise the chances the visitor clicks the call to action (CTA).
• FAQs: are good to include at the end of the page to go into more detail about how the product and customer servicing works.

The important thing to remember when creating your landing page is to design it in PowerPoint or Google Slides. Do not spend time designing this nicely otherwise you'll not want to throw it away. You will need to iterate on this 3-5 times before you get to a stage when you're ready to create something for a live environment. Therefore, an easily editable format is preferable.

3. Improve the comprehension of your landing page

Now that you've written your landing page, your main task is to improve its comprehension. There is a very quick test for gauging comprehension. Funnily enough, it's called comprehension testing and it goes like this:

Define the top five points you want to communicate. Something like:

• What the product is
• Who it's for
• Benefit 1
• Benefit 2
• Benefit 3

Find some willing participants. They can be anyone but not someone on your team. You're not looking for a representative sample or feedback on your proposition, just how well they understand what you're showing them.

Test 1: 5 seconds. Print out the landing page or show it on-screen to the first person for 5 seconds. Ask them what the product is and tick off which points on your list they recall.

Test 2: 10 seconds. Show it to them again for another 10 seconds and ask them what else they know about the product.

Calculate comprehension. For each point recalled and described to you with a reasonable level of understanding, give yourself 20%.

Your first couple of tests will score low. Play around with the wording, imagery and order of the benefits. Keep testing until you get 80-100% comprehension.

4. Test the demand levels of your proposition

Based on your Jobs to be Done research, you should have focused your proposition down to its key benefits. A handy tool for finding this focus is to use, what Nopadon calls, a Proposition Wheel.

If you overload your proposition with lots of features/benefits you'll drown out your message. In Nopadon's experience, when someone lands on your website, they'll give you 3-5 seconds. You can buy more time by communicating a clear message which is why comprehension testing is so important.

The question now is which of the three messages pulls the strongest. To test this, you should create three adverts with the same image but with three different benefit statements from the proposition wheel.

Nopadon then tests its effectiveness by measuring the Click Through Rate (CTR) on a landing page for each ad message. To follow the funnel all the way through, you can measure onsite conversion by adapting each landing page with a different hierarchy of messaging for each advert.

The results show which benefit statement is the most effective at driving traffic to your site and converting visitors to customers. It will also give you a benchmark for the Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) of using paid social or search.

In summary

In a short space of time, you can align your proposition to the reasons why customers would "hire" your product to help them make progress. You'll simplify the messaging and improve comprehension without lots of time spent on copywriting. Once you've tested comprehension, you can spin up a landing page and test which message is most effective at converting visitors to customers.

It's worth noting that even if you do not plan on spending anything on paid social or search in a marketing campaign, just using this technique as a research process can deliver amazing results.

Further information:

• Here is Nopadon's presentation from his talk
• You can find Nopadon on LinkedIn and at Startup Core Strengths
• If you work in Financial Services and are building fintech propositions then drop me a message. We're a big user of JTBD and growth marketing at 11FS and specialise in applying it to financial services.