Today more than ever it is really easy to build landing pages for you or your clients with drag and drop page builders.
This is not a new concept and there have certainly been many page builders launched in the past few years that have allowed anyone with a computer and internet to build their own landing page in just a few clicks.
Helping businesses sell and promote services fast and easily has been a race that page builder providers have been fighting for a long time with various degrees of success.
As we all know, HighLevel is not a page builder. However, HighLevel does include a page builder as one of its features – making it a Swiss knife for marketers all around. HighLevel’s page builder is just one of its many components but, alas, a component with superpowers.
Up until now, page builders have concentrated on one or two core competencies. Though when HighLevel’s page builder launched, it allowed for easy transfer of data among users that wanted to move to it, thus seeing a massive influx of agencies and business owners migrate their pages over in order to build smart websites and funnels.
If your pages or your customers’ pages are somewhat connected to the HighLevel ecosystem you are immediately and inevitably exposed to a higher degree of connectivity and automation within all the sales systems that a business needs to achieve in order to thrive.
You’re basically building a page on steroids.
I run a design company called TheFutures (https://thefutures.io/) and, at the time of this writing, we are building an average of over 300 landing pages natively within HighLevel every month for our customers.
Doing this has allowed us to see first hand what many highlevelers are putting together day in and day out every single month.
Having a page builder that allows you a high degree of automation and connectivity is helpful. But, in our experience, working with tons of HighLevelers at TheFutures.io, we have noticed that as the community grows and more people discover HighLevel’s capabilities, being able to stand out from the crowd in launching your SaaS landing page – specifically without looking like another business also using HighLevel – can be a challenge.
Today, I want to touch on 7 things that we, at TheFutures.io, have learned from helping hundreds of businesses design and scale their pages built on HighLevel, more specifically those being made for SaaS.
I hope that me sharing this will only help in bringing some clarity on how to structure your SaaS pages.
This is by no means a comprehensive guide of what to do, so I have been very selective and have picked what I think are the most helpful tactics to create and design pages for SaaS on HighLevel.
All of these pointers come from seeing hundreds of design iterations, questions and build ups coming out of our design pipeline daily from business owners just like you. Without further ado, here they are:
1. Define what Saas means for you.
SaaS in the basic sense of the acronym means ‘Software As A Service’. However, I’ve heard it all and have seen many takes on what SaaS could mean to the several business owners that we serve. Some see it as ‘Software as a Service, others rather angle it as ‘Strategy As A Service,’ and I have even seen ‘System as a Service.’ Whichever route you decide to take, stick to it and implement the way you talk about your process based on that.
In basic terms, stick to your narrative.
At the beginning, many businesses seem to be all over the place and tend to copy one another in how each is doing things and designing their pages. We constantly jump on calls with prospects and often find the same questions, it is not uncommon to hear:
“Do you have any samples of other customers in my niche that you can show me?”
What people don’t realize is that sometimes this approach hurts them more than it can help them. Since your inspiration tends to come from someone that perhaps doesn’t necessarily have the degree of success you think they may have with the way in which they designed their page.
I’ve come to notice that businesses that have spent too much time being inspired by other businesses’ pages within their same niche end up not only looking too much like their competitors, but also run the risk of losing credibility within their market due to having their prospects confused as to where to choose from (if they were to find the two pages). As a consequence, this will dilute any competitive advantage they may have had to start with and undermine their efforts in launching their offer.
Instead of trying to emulate someone coming from the same industry as you, when looking to get inspired, you should really look at other industries/ niches selling ‘Systems or Strategies’ which are backed up by software alone.
To put it succinctly – start from structure, not from niche.
2. Beware of offer/ page exhaustion.
Be ready to adapt and change direction at any moment.
Think of your landing pages as liquid. This means that each one of your pages should be constantly adapting to the ever changing needs of your customers’ market or your market.
Constantly check what’s working and what’s not and what’s giving you more results. This process of iterating your page’s sections is imperative in obtaining a page that converts.
At TheFutures.io we offer all of our subscribers a way to have all their projects basically LIVE forever as long as they’re a customer. This means that any time a page needs a change, we can make those changes on their behalf quickly and easily with our unlimited revisions policy.
3. Address your avatar head on.
Whether you are having a vertical or horizontal approach to your SaaS, you will quickly find that at some point you will need to address the specific pain points of those you are selling to.
Thinking that you can sell to everyone and using language that tries to sell to everyone can be the epitome of selling to no one.
The language you use may resonate with a market which is dying for you to talk to them directly and if you don’t you will be missing out on a huge part of the market that really wants you to talk to them in their language directly.
4. Apply the “It’s not me, it’s you” tactic.
Your landing pages are NOT about you, they’re about YOUR TARGET market. Phrases like:
“We are professional!”
“We know the drill!”
“Better than our competitors!” will only get you so far. Instead of focusing on you or on your tech, focus on handling objections and benefits and, most importantly, highlight the benefits through RESULTS (screenshots of comments from satisfied customers, video testimonials, etc are good examples of this).
People love results. For example, if you’re selling swimming pools, your focus isn’t the chlorine you will use in the water. Your focus is on the refreshing summer days your prospect will enjoy once getting that pool built! Same with SaaS. You will not want to drag on talking about triggers, workflows, or pipelines etc.
You want to focus on specific numbers of customers your clients may be getting by using you!
Focus on how much money they will add on their revenue every month or how much time you are going to get them back after engaging with your SaaS!
That alone, will make you different from more than 90% of businesses out there that also sell SaaS.
5. Make it easy for your prospect to buy from you.
A lot of businesses that come to us to design pages for them seem to miss this point, but we often try to let them know that it is important that you constantly remind your audience to take action on your offer.
The easiest, most straightforward way to do this is to actually place your call to action message and/ or button on EACH SCROLL of your page.
Your button can either act as a straightforward CTA (call to action) or can also have a built-in subtitle that creates a sense of urgency.
IE:
Button with 1 CTA:
Book a Call NOW
Button with 2 CTAs:
Book a Call NOW
‘Only 3 spots left on our Calendar this week, HURRY!’
6. Don’t be wishy-washy with your copy
When it comes to marketing and sales, we have noticed that where most people struggle most is when coming up with what to say on their landing pages when it comes to copy (text) and how to create a proper narrative around their offers.
In order to avoid analysis paralysis, we found that a very effective way to structure your pages is to think of each scroll as a slide on a slide deck.
Each scroll should be on inspiring information based on potential growth, but most importantly, just a couple of bullet points, arrows and sometimes a graphic or illustration can really make you seem extremely persuasive.
No more details are needed (leave those for your sales calls or info sub-pages).
7. Avoid market numbness
As more people dive into HighLevel and SaasS in particular, the market will begin to mature and most people and businesses that had it easy at the beginning will start to look like everyone else, unless they really make an effort to stand out and differentiate themselves.
At the end of the day, you have to remember that everyone has access to the same page builder and its other features.
You will see more people beginning to use templates or copy/ paste versions of what they see their own competitors using, in fact, we are already seeing this!
Regardless of the industry you’re serving, you may experience market numbness, where your users or prospects will begin to tell you that the image on your website is similar to one they saw on another website, or they will start to notice that the way you explain your service is not dissimilar to another one they have seen around, thus making you run the risk of becoming a commodity.
One thing that we have seen brings a lot of differentiation and starts to make your offer stand out is the fact that not only your offer should really behave as its own take on how your SaaS, or Strategy or whatever you want to name it, proposes in added value to your specific target market.
Try to simulate the situations in which your dream customer would love to purchase your product or service.
What would drive them toward opting in?
Think of yourself as your own client and try to figure out what kind of thoughts would lead you to make an order!
This is called immersive research and can be a great way for getting inside customers’ heads and to be proactive in catering to their needs.
I hope the 7 points above can help in gaining clarity on some of the things you’re doing to build your pages. Gaining such clarity is imperative when building your offer. Once you’ve got this down, TheFutures.io can really help you with the rest by creating graphics, PowerPoint design templates and landing pages that are unique to you, your brand and your niche market.
William Villalobos
Founder/ CEO