Copywriting Effective SaaS Landing Pages: Research, Structure and Proof | Lana Rafaela, Cherry Red Content

Copywriting product pages is super hard (for me). Trying to find the balance between something that hooks readers, without being cringy, while still being effective. 😔

Thankfully I could ask Indiehacker copywriting favorite, Lana Rafaela for advice on how ordinary folk can write better pages.

This interview turned into a mini master class, where she shared:

The MVP and ideal landing page

How to develop interest in your product, handle objections, and use social proof effectively

Where to adapt your page to improve your conversion rates

How to get user feedback using existing information

Here are the details:

Important note: The following is a summary written by me based on the interview, not quotes. Please listen to the audio version for the exact wording.

The ideal landing page

While each page differs by industry, a starting point to aim for could include these sections:

Hero section. Focus on the main benefits in the hero section, above the fold. That's the initial thing that people are gonna land on and that has to be really convincing to make them keep scrolling. Then talk about different objections.

Benefits. For the purpose of skimming, you should have it as a specific section. It doesn't have to be titled benefits, but they have to be clear out there. For example, using a bigger font to save time savings or ease of use or better than XYZ competitor. And then obviously infuse the rest of your landing page copy with them.

Features or how it works. You can use a video to have this if it's very verbose.

Social proof. Ideally, testimonials that give some value instead of just being trust signaling.

[Optional] FAQ. I like to use this especially if the product is not quite intuitive or if it's a new product in the space.

CTA. Try to make your CTAs unified. So don't try to sign up in one CTA and then learn more in another. If you want them to convert, then it's sign-up.

Tips:

Differentiate to earn attention. People are exposed to so much content online that you really have to do something to earn that time that they're giving you.

Develop interest via consequences. Unless people feel like they're in real pain they're probably not gonna take action. More on this below.

Respond to objections on the page. You need to know what's making your leads start to think about and second guess whether they should be really in business with you. You have to respond to those objections whether through your copy or through an FAQ section, but you have to do that.

What are the essentials?

👉 Don't have all the material to create the page above? If you want to launch with just the essentials, include:

Value proposition

Explanation of what your product does

CTA

Crafting differentiation

You need to understand the frustrations that are making people seek you out. There are a few ways to do this.

Reddit. It is a great source of unfiltered feedback. You can do some brainstorming on there as well to work out why is this product necessary.

Competitor feedback. Try to find competitors on G2 and see how negative reviewers think about their products, and what words they use, and try to narrow down on a specific situation that's causing a lot of frustration. You can then replicate that and respond to that on your landing page.

Example:

Say you are building a project management tool that combines the features of Trello and Asana. From Reddit research, you discover that users are frustrated with the limited visibility of team members' tasks and progress updates which leads to a lack of accountability and confusion over who is responsible for what tasks. Following this, you decide to prioritize collaboration features and real-time updates in the tool, highlighting the benefits of increased transparency and accountability on the landing page.

How to make readers care

There are two parts to this.

The first thing is to focus on frustrations and the second is to explain how are those frustrations affecting a business. The first is the emotional stage, as we tend to make decisions with our emotions, and then we try to reason them away with logic.

👉 It is important to cover both because in B2B, you're not just convincing your immediate customers, (e.g. a sales rep), but you're also helping them convince their manager, VP etc, and that's where the second point has relevance.

Example.

If users have to waste a lot of time managing application integrations, that’s...