How to make vertical landing pages work
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I keep getting social media ads from a company that sells job management software for tradespeople and home services providers. Painters, cleaners and soforth.
(I'm not going to name the company because it doesn't really matter, and singling them out is just kind of mean. You can probably figure out who it is if you really want to sleuth around.)
Anyway, each ad is targeted at a specific industry. Like this:
And each ad leads to a landing page that is also targeted at that industry.
It’s a great example of a vertical marketing strategy. Rather than target their entire audience, this outfit is targeting specific subgroups (a vertical).
By targeting the verticals specifically, they can communicate more specific benefits - and make a more compelling argument for their product.
All in all - a really good strategy. But I think they can do a better job of executing on it.
The landing page
When you click on one of these ads, you get taken to a dedicated landing page. Here's the lawncare one:
We have:
Plant the right seeds and grow your business
Save time, improve cashflow
You're the expert in providing garden maintenance solutions. We're the experts in providing the tools to help run and grow your business
Book jobs, send invoices and let us help you grow your business.
Do you see the problem here? None of these benefits are specific to lawncare! The headline is a cute little lawncare-related pun, and the picture is a fella doing lawncare, but the actual detailed benefit statements could apply to any business.
You could take the sentence "you're the expert in providing garden maintenance solutions," and swap "garden maintenance solutions" for any other industry - and the sentence would work just as well. It's not really saying anything to lawncare business owners. It's just ramming the term "garden maintenance solutions" into a broad benefit statement.
And it's the same with the other vertical landing pages (they have heaps of them!). Here's the concrete business one:
Solid foundations for your business.
Save time, improve cashflow
You are the expert on all things concrete. We're the experts in providing the right tools to help run your business.Same structure. Cute pun, mention of the vertical industry, and a background picture of someone working in that industry.
And it goes on like this, for another thirteen industries.
It's all pretty interchangeable. I don't think someone in one of these industries is going to be more likely to buy because they read a cute pun and saw a picture of someone doing the same job as them. The benefit statements are basically high-level, home page level benefits, so these pages probably do about as good a job as the home page.
The key to great vertical landing pages: research
The real value in targeting verticals is the ability to be specific.
If you're talking to lawncare business owners, you can be very specific about the exact pain they feel running their business, and how your product resolves that pain.
You can do this in a way that you can't usually do when talking about your product in general, because most products have lots of different segments.
But to do that, you have to find out what that pain is, and how they articulate it! And this means:
Getting some lawncare workers on the phone
Reading industry association publications in the lawncare industry
Reading reviews of other products lawncare workers use
And really anything else that's going to give you insight into what these people care about and how they talk about it.
If you were really game you could ask a gardener if you could shadow them for the day. Get some gardening gloves and be prepared to help out. When you're in the van going from job to job, see if you can get some insights about the business. In other words - just have a conversation. See what bubbles up. You've got eight hours!
This is the kind of research that is going to give you the information you need to write a solid vertical landing page.
The tradeoff is that it's going to take more time and money. But it's worth it! It's better to absolutely nail one landing page, and get it humming, than to have 15 landing pages that are fundamentally not that different from your home page.
So, bottom line: these folks have a solid strategy. Targeting verticals is smart! They just need to tweak it a bit to make the landing pages really deliver on the time and money they've invested in their social media ads.
Otherwise, they may as well just send traffic to their home page.
Have a good week
Sam
PS: Did you catch this? It's a quick and easy checklist you can use to review your own home page. Free - all you need to do is sign up to my list (which you've already done).
PPS: If you can't be bothered reviewing your own home page, just pay me to do it. $799, 7-day turnaround, money back guarantee.
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