01. Landing pages

Show the dream, then the dashboard

Insight from Joey Noble, Creative Strategist at Demand Curve

Every visual on your landing page answers one of two questions:

What is this, or what happens to me?

• What is this? Show the product.
• What happens to me? Show the outcome of using the product.

Say you sell distribution software for musicians. You could show the dashboard: upload a track, push it to Spotify and Apple Music. That's useful. It explains the product.

But what does the musician actually want? Probably not a really good distribution dashboard. They want people listening. They want fans. They want recognition. Some of them are picturing a stage and a few thousand faces looking back.

So the stronger shot is the artist on stage, looking out at the crowd. The dashboard is the mechanism, but the crowd is the dream.

There's a term for why this works: mental simulation. People want an outcome more once they can picture themselves having it, and a screenshot leaves them to do that picturing on their own. Faces do work a UI can't. Someone celebrating a result says something a dashboard reading "+23%" doesn't say by itself.

You don't need to swap every product shot for lifestyle photography, or fill the page with stock photos of people laughing at laptops. Nobody has ever laughed at a laptop. You need a mix of both product and outcome visuals. Show me the dream, then show me why I should believe your product can get me there.

Pull up your own page and count your visuals. Most pages answer what is this six times and never get to what happens to me.

02. Positioning

What kind of differentiator are you standing on?

Insight from Devon Reynolds, Growth Strategist at Demand Curve

Okay, so you did the work and you have a great value prop.

We’ve written plenty about value props. In our #339 newsletter, we ran an exercise for finding a claim that's actually yours: list the bad alternatives, write down what specifically makes each one bad, then keep only the claims your closest competitor couldn't paste onto their own site.

That gets you from benefit to value prop. That's important work.

But say you did that and landed on something solid. There's a second question worth asking before you build a funnel on it:

How long does it stay yours?

Look at the failure your claim points to and ask what it would take for a competitor to answer that same failure. The best advantages are moats: things like proprietary data collected over years, distribution or trust relationships that took time to earn, network effects, a regulatory approval. Incumbents can copy a feature, but they can't copy five years of your customer data.

Most differentiators aren't moats. They're a specific feature, workflow, or claim, and a well-resourced incumbent watching a smaller company win with one will often just build it. Snapchat's whole positioning was posts that disappear. Instagram shipped Stories in August 2016, and by January it had 150 million daily users, about the size of Snapchat's entire app. In the quarter after launch, Snapchat's sequential daily user growth fell to 3.3%.

That doesn't make the short-term differentiator worthless. You can still run with it, build on it, sell with it. But it's important to know which kind you're standing on, because a moat is worth building your whole brand on and a one-year head start is worth a campaign. So if your current differentiator isn't one that'll last, start working on your next claim before someone closes the gap on this one.

03.Pricing

Price high enough to afford customers

Insight from Marc Andreessen, via Startup Archive.

Pricing usually gets decided as a revenue question.

What will people pay, what does it cost us to deliver, what are competitors charging?

But it's also a marketing decision.

Here's what often happens: You price low so the product is easy to buy. The low price means each deal brings in too little to justify a real sales and marketing effort. So you can't afford the rep, the ads, or the outbound that would get the deal in the first place. Sales stall, and the instinct at that point is to cut price again, which makes it worse.

So what happens if you price high instead? The same loop runs in your favor. Marc Andreessen has been telling founders this for years: price high and you can fund a more expensive sales and marketing effort, which makes you more likely to win the market, which pays for the R&D you want later. He thinks engineers treat price and value as a one-dimensional tradeoff, pricing a product nobody can replicate as if it were a commodity. Higher prices and faster growth go together.

The rule underneath it: price by value, not by cost. Selling to businesses, charge as a percentage of the business value you create. For an AI product, price against marginal productivity. If the tool makes someone better at their job, charge against the size of that gain.

One more reason a high price isn't the customer-hostile move it looks like. Higher price means higher margin, which means more money going back into the product. Most buyers aren't hunting for the cheapest option, they want the thing that works best. And pricing high makes that possible.

HOT OFF THE PRESS

News you can use

• Amazon is being sued by the FTC and 22 state attorneys general over its ad auctions. Advertisers were told they'd pay a cent more than the next-highest bid; the complaint says Amazon added an undisclosed price floor in 2019, plus a fake bidder to push winners higher. Over a million brands and sellers are covered, so if you've run Sponsored Products since 2019, you're one of them. (FTC)
• Google won't have to sell AdX. Judge Brinkema threw out all three of the DOJ's structural remedies on Sept 2 and took the behavioral ones instead, then sealed her reasoning for 14 days. The real obligations should surface soon. (PPC Land)
• Google Ads is invalidating promo credits after advertisers spend to earn them. Consultant David Melamed watched it hit two clients, one a $3,200 credit marked "Invalidated" a month after the client spent the qualifying $3,200. Nobody's found an appeal path, so go look at yours. (Search Engine Roundtable)