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User Scenarios and Contextual Perception in Landing Page Design

How do you design fans? And welcome back in the last few lectures, we spoke about different persuasion frameworks, psychological mechanisms that you could use in your landing pages to more effectively appeal to your visitors and move them to action, moving them to convert. But at the end of the day, these persuasion frameworks are only effective or rather you'll only be able to use them effectively if you understand your visitors in this lecture, I want to talk about understanding your visitors getting into their shoes, getting into their hearts and minds through empathy and contextual awareness. So let's jump into the slides. So as you see here, we have this beautiful image of empathy and like I said, persuasive techniques could only be used effectively by you if you understand your visitors. And a lot of studies have been shown that when people sit around and think about talk about who their visitors are to their website. To the landing page is a lot of what you think about your visi...

tors is wrong. They're often not the people that you think they are, they often don't buy your products or are interested in learning about your product and services for the reasons you might think they are and they tend to do things differently on your site than you'd expect them to do. Okay, so that's those are interesting things to realize when it comes to kind of developing a sense of empathy. Being able to get into the head of your visitors, I think this picture over here is great. Um one of our account managers sent this over to me yesterday so I decided to throw it into the slide, this is a classic conundrum you have user experience and design, right? People design things in a certain way, but they don't always get used in the way that you think they're going to get used. Right? So that's kind of the concept of empathy, contextual awareness of your visitors. People don't come with name tags. Visitors on your site don't come declaring who they are, what their anxieties are, what their fears are, what the demographics are. Okay. So it's it's up to us and it's up to you to be able to glean that information using a sense of intuition, um a sense of thoughtfulness when it comes to really trying to figure out what different types of people are looking for when they come to your site and also your analytics tools. So in order for you to truly enable your visitors through your design to accomplish their tasks, you have to be aware of who they are. What led them to your site? Did they wake up that morning with a problem? Did they experience something in their day? Were they kind of thinking about your products and services for a long time and then they just finally decided to do some research or come to your site where they just browsing and saw an ad on social media, Did they go to google and do it and actively take time out of their day to search for something? Okay, what led them to your site? How much knowledge do they have? Are these are these educated people and educated in general and educated with regards to your products and services? Is the traffic source tied to a certain level of education? Do email marketing leads or do visitors from your email campaigns tend to bring in a more educated visitor than your PPC campaigns or organic clicks to potentially blog posts? Right, figuring out the level of education. These are questions that take time they take thought to answer. Here's A Big one. What are their anxieties? What's really going on inside them? Not on an intellectual level. What are some of the emotional anxieties? They're feeling that led them to get to your site. Whether it was that whether it led them to click on a on a facebook ad or lead them to click on on an organic result? What are their anxieties? And what are their expectations? What are they looking for when they come to your site? What do they expect to find? Okay, so these are not I'm not talking about these things in the context of a specific landing page design technique. Like we spoke about a lot in this course, like color schemes and clarity in in shadows under buttons. Right? I'm talking about really being able to get a sense of the people that are on your site? So when we talk about the question of who are they? We want to get an understanding of who these people actually are we talking about demographics, um interest groups, affinity audiences. What types of things do they like? Right. Like I said, visitors don't have name tags. So you need to aggregate your data from analytics. And on the picture on the screen shot on the right shows a demographic report from a simple google analytics installed, the age, the gender, ethnicity. These are demographic factors that could have a major impact on how you should design your site and the aesthetics of your site. The messaging of your site. Right? These are things that really can make a difference. Cultural differences are just as extreme or or it could be just as prominent or just as pronounced as differences in what people of different age groups, gender and ethnicity are looking for as well. On site behavior and conversion rate are also things that could vary, vary greatly between different demographic groups. So where did these people come from? Right. When we're when we're thinking about where they came from, what are we looking at in this picture on the right shows an audience acquisition report from analytics showing all the different traffic sources and getting a breakdown of some of the key behavioral kPI s from each source segmented out in a different role over there. Different traffic sources will bring in different types of visitors who are susceptible to different persuasion frameworks. A person who's coming from PPC might not be the same type of person. Right? The who are they might be different than people who come from an email marketing campaign or people who come from seeing an offline ad or people who walk into a retail store. So different people are susceptible to different persuasion frameworks. For example, social media campaigns clicks from facebook, they tend to bring in less committed, more curious browsers to your site. Right. And obviously whether or not those were paid ads targeting something very specific or clicks on an organic post could make a big difference. On the other hand, PPC campaigns offers a lot of control with who your who's coming to your site. Yeah, they might be first time visitors, but you could also gauge that they have a high level of commercial intent. So that's something that PPC is unique with. Organic traffic doesn't offer you that same level of control. But using analytics, you're able to tell which types of keywords, our ranking and that are generating traffic to your site. Right? So you could use keywords and that sort of data analysis to get a sense of the demographics, the who of your traffic as they're coming into your site email campaigns, which is another very popular form of getting traffic. Could bring in very, highly engaged, highly committed people to your site. But you should still have a good sense of your demographic groups and your demographic segments from your email campaigns. Very important in becoming contextually aware, meaning who these people are is having the ability, developing the ability for you and for your team to come up with the user scenarios. It's really, really an indispensable tool. So we're all familiar with personas that really account for the type of the person, the role of person. For example, you're a small business owner, that's who you are at your role. But scenarios take into account the context of the visit the different events, the different feelings that lead to somebody actually being on your site regardless of their role. That's why user scenarios are so powerful. The user scenarios seek to answer what brought them to the site. What are their underlying concerns and fears? What motivates them? What are their desires and coming up with user scenarios. Also, it's not just task oriented trying to figure out how somebody would actually complete a role. Um but it's the whole picture, right, understanding that different people will approach the same task differently. And on the right hand side we have a picture of a behavioral flow chart in google analytics. Um that's a really cool chart. If you guys are not familiar with any of these analytics screenshots just as a side note, really shameless plug you can check out my other course on re marketing if you haven't checked out that yet. But moving forward. So creating our user scenarios. Right, get out your pattern paper. That's what this is all about. You want to bring together everyone from your team that comes in contact with a lead or a prospect? Regardless of what stage in the final that person comes in contact with them. In fact having more people from different stages who interact with leads and your customers is even better. And obviously if you're doing this on your own, that's fine too. Each person should take a pad and paper and write down a brief description of the person, Right, Come up with a fictitious website visitor and just describe them, right, The basics, demographics, who are they, their age, their ethnicity, their gender, just different demographics. And don't give anybody, don't overthink it, right. It should just be natural based on what you feel and your experience has told you about your visitors, then you want to get a little bit more detailed right? Who are their anxieties? What are their motivations? For example, how price conscious are they? Could some of these more affective states of the person, what stage in the funnel might they be in? And we're gonna walk through a very specific example in a minute just to give you a good sense of what this is. Write a detailed intent for your fictitious website visitors, What are they trying to accomplish on your site? Then take the time to write down more of a detailed intent profile, Right? What are they trying to accomplish on your site? How do you imagine them actually going about and accomplishing that task? Do you imagine them converting if so, which conversion action do you imagine them converting on? Right. So more of a taking the emotional affective states and predicting what and how they're going to go about accomplishing their task. Okay. That is a user scenario. You should not be writing out the entire user scenario on the site. Okay, this is a mistake. And I'm gonna talk about this example in a second. The point of the user scenarios for you to write it out and then for you to figure out how to take all that and design your headlines, which persuasion technique is going to work the best. How are you going to use the concept of anchoring and reciprocal concessions and cognitive dissonance theory. The best appeal to appeal to your users and your bullet points and your short paragraphs and your action block and you're clear call to action right. Whether it be e commerce or services. This website is a landing page for CPAP which is consumer directed personal assistance program. It's a Medicaid sponsored program where people can get paid to take care of their loved ones through insurance. Okay. It's a it's a popular thing. There's a specific reason why I want to show you this landing page because in the next section we are going to build a landing page from scratch, particularly for this service. Okay, because I think it kind of brings together a lot of it has the opportunity for a lot of different things we've spoken about in terms of landing page design, persuasion frameworks and I'm actually gonna spend money getting leads and we're going to test and track the results over time. So you guys are gonna have a fun time being with me through that process with a B a B split, testing all different kinds of cool things. But look at this landing page, they literally wrote out a user scenario, right? Consider the following scenario. Sally Bronston was a dedicated mother who had worked hard six paragraphs. This it might be better than some other landing pages we've seen. But the point of this is not to write out your entire user scenario because people are not going to read that right. We already know very clearly that people don't read on landing pages. People scan. That's a rule that you should remember. So I wanted to come up with my own user scenario for that specific landing page. We're going to use this user scenario reference back to it when we're actually going and creating our version of our landing page. But this example should give you a sense of how you're going to create user scenarios. Right? So my summary says visitor is the daughter of an elderly patient who needs help every night administering insulin shots. She's in her Middle 40s, lower income bracket, She's on Medicaid and saw an ad on a billboard for the new york state cd Pat program. Okay, so we're starting to talk about her demographics, who she is. A little bit of how she came to come to our site. What made her aware? Okay, roll. She's anxious about getting her mother a home health aide who's a stranger. Her mother doesn't do well with strangers. She feels hopeful that she can take care of her own mother and get paid to do it. She's a little skeptical that this is a legitimate program overall, she's very anxious to get her mother care either way, whether she pays for it or not as soon as possible. She's early in the funnel, but you can make a decision very quickly. Okay, so this role describes who she is. We started talking about a lot of different emotional affective states like anxiety like hope skepticism. Right? These are all things that she's feeling and there's going to be important emotional affective states that we understand that this user is going through so we can now go in craft a really good landing page based on this and many other user scenarios that you can come up with for your products and services. My task outlined, find out more about the Cd Pat program, understand how it works and if she's eligible to enroll, meaning, could she enroll her and her mother if she is she wants to enroll and start getting paid to take care of her mother immediately She wants the process to be simple and quick. Right? So her task, her expectations and for our conversion path. Look for insurance information endorsements from Medicaid in new york state and how to enroll. Okay, that's how we envision her actually going through and converting. So you have to walk in the shoes of your visitors. That's what we've opened up this lecture. Talking about. Go back to your landing pages with the user scenarios that you and your team actually put together. Look for commonalities and traits, right? You should come up with multiple user scenarios if you're by yourself. But if you did it with the team, collaborate. Is there did most of the people or the most of the user scenarios come up with have a similar age bracket or demographic? Similar anxieties, similar desires and motivations. Similar conversion paths. Similar intent. Find the commonalities between the different user scenarios that you've created. Take all that and go back to your site and assess your information architecture. Are you providing relevant information to these people with these anxieties with these fears? With these motivations and desires? Are you answering their questions? Are you providing a sense of safety, a sense of affinity, a sense of security? Right? Ask yourself these questions and imagine you're that person. Close your eyes, take a few minutes and really imagine that you are your user scenario. Now open your eyes and go back to your landing page. Right. What obstacles will you face? Not you you you your visitor. What questions will you have? What elements of your site might cause you frustration. This is a really good exercise. I've done this. If you can get this right, it could be extremely powerful. Once you do that, you want to come up with ways that you could lay out that information in a way that's easier for your visitors to understand in a way that's more engaging for your visitors in a way that's easier for visitors to interact with. Ultimately, what you're trying to accomplish is just making sense for your visitors. The types of people, they are the different fears and anxieties. They have the context, the scenario, the events in their life, the things that they've experienced that led them to your site and you want to design accordingly. Just as a very quick example, you know, at our agency, we often get phone calls from people who are really fed up and frustrated with the previous agency managing their PPC campaign or they hire development team that that didn't do a good job and we know that from our data. So we know that a lot of people who come to our site are feeling frustrated with a previous digital advertising agency. So we have to design accordingly. Right? We have to talk, we haven't, it's an opportunity to talk about that fear to to to write copy in a way that shows that oh we understand where you're coming from. We're empathetic with the fact that you've hired a PPC agency and your results tanked or they didn't get in touch with you. You haven't heard from them, right? Or they don't take the time to understand your business metrics. So we could use those fears. Those anxieties only by understanding the context of their visit that the events that led up to them coming to our site and that's your exercise for this lecture really do that, right? Your user scenarios, right? The roles, the traits, the intent and the conversion path. Get as many of them as you can if you're doing it by yourself four or five, find commonalities and then close your eyes, close your eyes imagine you're that person, you might be a different race, might be a different religion, different age. But to feel those fears, feel those anxieties, feel the motivation you have, feel the need for more information to get your questions answered, open your eyes go back to your site, experience the site with a sense of empathy from the perspective of your user scenarios. You'll european literally and figuratively and emotionally. An eye opening experience and I'm excited to hear from you guys how this experiment went, how this exercise went, what your results were and what you did, what you implemented on your landing pages as a result of this exercise. So with that I will say goodbye and I'll see you very soon in the next section.