When designing a landing page strategy, it’s critical to consider your prospect’s stage in the buyer journey. This way, you’d be able to provide content and information that is relevant to their needs.
If people are coming in with questions and problems, give them comprehensive, non-salesly answers. If they are looking for more information on buying in your category, give them persuasive evidence that you’re better than the other options they are checking out. If you think they’re ready to buy, give them an offer they can’t pass up.
A landing page that tries to do all 3 things is just rushing people through the journey. They will leave confused and without converting.
Here is the framework we use to align content and search intent.
The SEE-THINK-DO-CARE Framework
The See-Think-Do-Care framework represents the broader stages of a digital customer journey, characterized by achievable goals and unique value at each stage.
SEE Stage
See Stage is about discovery – this is where marketers ensure that the largest qualified (and addressable) audience sees the brand. With enough frequency and quality content, this audience will remember the brand later when they need a product or service.
THINK Stage
At the Think stage, people are searching for a particular solution to their problem. They enter a near-endless loop of exploration and evaluation. They are researching various options, looking at your services and your competitors, and evaluating these offers side by side. This complex decision-making process, or the “Messy Middle,” as Google calls it, is where customers are won and lost constantly.
DO Stage
At this stage, the potential customer has concluded their research, knows the brand, and is nearly ready to buy. It all comes down to the right moment and the right offer to make them choose us. Using the right triggers, a competitive offer, and a comfortable, intuitive, and smooth conversion experience will seal the deal.
CARE
It’s not over once we’ve won the client – we can invest in our relationship. By nurturing new and existing customers with useful content, we can encourage them to continue buying, build lifetime value, and advocate our brand.
Build Landing Pages for Each Stage of the Buyer’s Journey
Mapping the buyer’s journey helps us create tailored content and offers for each of these unique stages.
SEE Stage Landing Pages
At the SEE stage, people simply need information. They’re open to being educated about some new topic, or they might just have a problem that they need to solve. So, our best landing page here is usually just a piece of great content.
You could leverage your own data and publish research, join the conversation around a hot topic in your industry, create a useful free tool, or find another way to provide value. The goals are to expand your audiences and build brand awareness by providing useful and high-quality content.
Mapping Landing Pages to the THINK Stage
When prospects are at the THINK stage, some signals indicate that they are now considering your product or your service. While they are comparing and researching, what kind of content would urge them to consider our brand over other alternatives?
To help users exit this deliberation state, we need to provide them with enough information and answer all their questions. The landing pages mapped to this stage of the user journey are informative and often longer.
Applying cognitive biases in our landing pages, such as authority proof, social proof, category heuristics, and many more, we can nudge prospects out of the “Messy Middle” loop and closer to the conversion moment.
Also at this stage, premium gate content resources are another great tool for engaging prospective users. Offer your content asset in exchange for contact details, so you can later remarket these audiences and create email marketing journeys for them. You’d need landing pages to access these premium content pieces, whether they are webinars or white papers.
Another efficient way to influence your THINK stage audiences is by building head-to-head comparison landing pages. Instead of describing your solution’s features, put them side by side with your competitors, and show exactly how you deliver value. Client testimonial videos that bring relatable social proof to your offer, product tours, and use cases can also trigger action.
Landing Pages for the DO Stage
That’s where you want to convert the people who have been through the earlier steps of their buyer’s journey. You’d be using an online form – a free sign up, an online purchase, or a contact form. This is the page where all your marketing efforts come to fruition.
To make it as profitable as possible, everything on the page should work towards the end goal – the conversion. The design, the content sections, the color choices, and the copy of your Call-to-Action should lead the user further down their journey.
We’ve put together a full guide on DO-stage landing pages with true-and-tested advice on making them genuinely efficient and high-converting. Take a look!