43 | Create Highly Converting Landing Pages: Blending Human Insight with AI Execution with Audrey Chia, Founder at Close With Copy

0:00Hello and welcome to Leveraging AI, the podcast that shares practical ethical ways to leverage AI, to improve efficiency, grow your business, and advance your career. And I'm sure you've been paying attention, but there are thousands of AI tools out there today, and many for almost any single task you can imagine in business and outside of business, and more are coming out every single day. And it's so confusing that so many business professionals are not seeing the forest for the trees because of that, because we're so looking for the right tools and forget that behind it, there needs to be a process, a strategy.

0:39And if we understand the process and the strategy on how to leverage AI tools for specific tasks, we can maximize the benefits. And the tool, the specific tool is not going to be that important, which means we'll be able to keep on switching tools to better tools, but still maintaining the strategy in the process. Now, our guest today is Audrey Chia, and Audrey is the founder of Close With Copy, and it's what she calls a hybrid human and AI copywriting consultancy. She has been posting incredible content on LinkedIn regularly. Really, the first time she caught my attention was when she published the ultimate AI copywriting tool battle, which is probably the best researched LinkedIn content I've ever seen.

1:24like serious research with eight different copywriting tools and how they perform on multiple copywriting tasks from short form to ads to long form, et cetera, with the help of additional people who are experts on each and every one of these topics, really well done and really well presented. And that's the level of content that she's generating. And today we're going to focus on Audrey's expertise, which is how to write copy, but more specifically, how to create landing pages that convert. And we use landing pages for multiple things in our businesses, but they're all, at the end of the day, needs to drive people to take specific action.

2:02And going back to what I said in the beginning, if what are the key strategies that you need to take, then you'll be able to use any AI tool in order to make your efforts more effective and more efficient, meaning you'll end up with more landing pages that convert better. And this is really the thing that Audrey does very well. And so I'm really excited to have her as a guest on the show. Audrey, welcome to Leveraging AI. In the next few years, AI technology will change our world dramatically. Whether you are a business executive trying to catapult your business forward or just somebody who refuses to be left behind and want to advance your career, this is the show for you.

2:47I'm your host, Isar Maitis, a serial entrepreneur and an AI enthusiast. You'll hear invaluable practical tips from innovative business leaders, AI practitioners, and some of the brightest AI minds in our world today on how you can leverage AI in ethical ways to advance your career and grow your business.

3:09Thank you for having me, Isar. I'm so glad to be here. And I'm really excited to share a lot more about learning pages and my secret tips and tricks. Awesome. First of all, Audrey, you're in Singapore, right? It's really late for you right now. Yes, it's a little bit late, but I'm still looking fresh. No, I know. I appreciate you. You're a good sport. I'm just sharing with people. Audrey, I'm here on the East Coast. She's over there. So it's late at night, but she's very fresh and all energetic, probably even more than me. So, let's really get started with the high level. I know this is what you preach, but what are the steps, what are the key things before getting into the copywriting aspect of things that make a landing page or any copyright for that matter successful?

3:54Yes. Before we talk even about content, you have to think about the strategy behind the content. Content without strategy is pointless. AI content without strategy is absolutely ineffective. I can say that because I have seen it floating around. When you see something that sounds a lot like AI, you don't respond to it. And of course, you can't convert because it doesn't sound human. It doesn't sound genuine and it doesn't tap into your audience insights. So to answer your question, the key thing for any copy that converts is actually your audience insights. Before you even write the copy, you have to figure out what are your audience's pains, fears, desires, wants, right?

4:37Because you need to tap on your emotional triggers in order for you to help them to make a decision to purchase. And the triggers can come in both ways, right? It can be an emotional trigger, or it can be like a logical trigger. For example, I need to purchase this for this reason, so I'm going to do this. That could be one kind of appeal. But beyond that, it's actually about what they feel inside, because there are reasons why people purchase something. They want to feel more powerful. They want to feel loved. They want to feel less alone, right? So I'm actually always looking for these triggers in order to get them to convert.

5:12I agree 100%, right? There's the known statement, right? That people buy by emotion and then they explain it to themselves or they justify it with logic afterwards. And so the most maybe famous one that I always go back to is the grill commercial. And you don't see the grill. you see a backyard party, right? That the grill is the center of because people are around the grill having beers, but whatever, but it's not showing the grill because nobody cares about the grill. You care about the outcome of what it's going to generate. You care about how it's going to make you feel. And so it's exactly that.

5:45So really let's start diving into your process. You're saying, starting with a strategy, starting with understanding your customers' desires and fears and wants. How do you do that? What's your actual process that you do for yourself and for your clients? Yes. So firstly, when it comes to landing pages, you have to figure out what kind of landing page you are creating because there are so many different types of landing pages. You have the brand landing pages, for example, something for Nike or Adidas, right? It's all about inspiring people. You don't see that much of a sales pitch there. It's more about sharing a dream, for example, finding your greatness.

6:22And that's a really, really strong landing page for a brand. but there are also sales landing pages sales landing pages are the kinds where you read and it says you have to buy this because it's 99 % off and you'll never get this discount ever again so those are your sales landing pages and I'm sure you have seen many of those as well yeah of course and of course there is like the funnel landing page where it's just one headline one subhead one call to action button you can't scroll and the only thing you can do is to click the submit button. So that serves a certain purpose as well. And finally, you have what I would call conversion landing pages, which is what we'll be talking about today.

7:04Conversion landing pages to me are landing pages that combine the best of brand and sales in a really, really similar way. For example, a brand is tapping, a client is tapping on an audience's insight right of my audience has this fear so i'm writing a certain message for their audience but i'm not pushing it like a sales discount i'm just using it and leaving it into my message and i'm going to show you some examples of high converting landing pages that i love so you have a better idea firstly define what is the landing page and define what a good landing page looks like that is even before you do any work into copywriting so i'm going to share my screen so that we have a better idea of landing pages.

7:48And I always say this, some people like they hoard shoes, some people hoard bags. I love landing pages. I just have so many of them in my collection, like saving, saving. Yeah. So you can see here, for example, Mutiny, right? Mutiny is a brand that helps people to A-B test their website, right? And the headline goes turn your website into your number one revenue channel. They didn't say A-B test your website, even though that is what they do. They gave you the end benefit, which was turning it into your revenue channel. So this is an example of high conversion copy that combines the audience desire to want to earn more or help their company succeed together with what their product actually does.

8:34So this is like one example of what I would say is a conversion landing page. Another one could be something like this. I also like this brand a lot. It's design as a service kind of tool that allows you to get quality designs at scale, right? So here the headline goes, design at scale for ambitious brands. So you see what they did there? They didn't stop at design at scale. They continued by saying this is design at scale for ambitious brands. The word ambitious relates to the audience's desire to want to grow their company and to scale even faster than before. So you can see that they are playing on your emotions, even with just one or two words in the headline.

9:17And I think that's the beautiful part about it. Yeah, I think going back to what you said, I think the thing we need to remember when we try to sell stuff to people is you're selling an upgraded end state of the customer. That's what you're selling. It doesn't matter whether you're selling a service or a product, what you're actually selling is a better state of the person you're selling it to. And that could be, they will be more beautiful. They will have a more successful business. They will be able to entertain better. They will be able to run faster. But whatever you're selling, an upgraded version of the business or the individual.

9:56And if you can find a way to state that what is that upgraded version that you're actually buying, and to touch on the two examples you gave, the really amazing skill of being able to do this right is to touch exactly on that, on the thing your audience wants and the future state that you're going to sell to them with very few words, right? The first one was seven words. This one is one of three, six words. So very short and yet exactly to the point of touching exactly the right things. yeah and i think that's the beauty of landing pages and conversion copy which is why i love it there are many different types of conversion copy but i think landing pages is an art and science i see as a craft and i really enjoy looking at what other people have done and finding out why does it convert so back to the question of how do we even begin this process right firstly define what is the landing page you're trying to create so if you're creating a brand landing page, like what I mentioned for Nike, it will not look like something like this, which is probably better for a SaaS company.

11:05So what I would do if I were you is to figure out, okay, what are some top performing websites in my specific niche and why are they working? The goal is not to copy what they're trying to say here. The goal is to figure out why they're working and think about how you can integrate it into your own process. So taking a step back, right, Like, for example, I have a few different sales landing pages here. And I'm figuring out, okay, what do I like about it? What do I not? Why is it working? Why is it not? And then you figure out the commonalities, right? Or the similarities between each page. And you ask yourself, as an end user looking at it for the first time, how do you feel?

11:45Are you responding to it? Is the call to action strong enough? Are the features interesting for you? If so, what? How do they write it in a way that's interesting? So you can see there's a lot of thought behind breaking down a landing page and thinking what makes a copy convert. This even comes down to, for example, the structure of it. So many people don't know this or they think that it's the designer's job to structure the landing page. When in fact, I would actually say that it's the copywriter's job because you're taking the audience through a narrative. And you need to put yourself in their position and think, if I am the reader reading this, what objections do I have?

12:22How do I counter their objections? What questions do I have? They need to think, how do I shift the different sections and make sure that the audience has every single one of their pain points addressed as they read my landing page? So by the end of it, they should feel like, yeah, I think they managed to address all of my questions and concerns and I'm ready and interested to purchase. That is the goal of a beautiful landing page. A few questions. First of all, for those of you who can't see the screen because you're listening to the podcast, Audrey has this document and I don't know which tool you're using.

12:56Oh, it's Figma. So she has a Figma page with dozens of landing pages, the full thing, like you can see the whole scroll of each and every one of the pages. So you can actually go and research and compare and group them into different groups. So from going back to what Audrey said, from a research perspective, that's where it all starts. The first question that I have with regards to the research is you said, why does this page converts? I assume that's in your eyes. You don't have actual statistics of how these pages are doing. So how do you judge a good versus a bad landing page to pick what you're going to put on your Figma document as great examples?

13:39Yes. So I think it comes down to two things. One, of course, is your own personal experience and what matters to you. But the second thing is if a brand is putting paid spend behind and advertising for that landing page. There is a high chance that it is working, especially if it's a big print. Got it. So you're saying you're making the assumption that if somebody is paying for ads to drive people to that, there's a positive ROI to the process, meaning that page converts enough to pay for the ads and then some. Okay, that's fair. The second question that I have with AI related stuff, I am in some of my lectures that I'm doing, I'm talking about the visual capability of AI today.

14:18And the other thing that a lot of the AI tools definitely chat GPT today, it can actually browse pages. Do you use AI tools to evaluate the landing pages as well? Meaning one of the things I would do now that I'm looking at your stuff, I'm like, oh, I would take the five top or the 10 top that I like and say, put them to chat GPT and say, try to find commonalities from a marketing perspective. why do you think these pages convert or which one do you think have better components and highlight them for me is that stuff that you do that's a great question and also a great use case so prior to chat gpt's image browse image feature right i was also doing it manually but actually just today i wanted to test its capabilities to see if i could do that right i actually ran a test just before the chat to make sure i know what i was talking about i promise i wasn't looking at your computer yeah you read my mind but yeah if for you guys who are listening on the podcast right now i have chat gpt4 on my screen and i uploaded an image mutiny's full landing page an image of it a screenshot and i asked it to analyze it for me so i asked it firstly to analyze the components of the landing page and it did pretty well it has the header section the value proposition section a trust building section, feature section, and so on.

15:45And then I also tested something else. I got it to basically figure out as an expert landing page copywriter. So I gave it a custom instruction as an expert landing page copywriter. I switched that on. And then I also reiterate that you are an expert writer. Can you analyze the following? The tone of voice, writing style, the components, and what makes it persuasive. And it did pretty well. So you can see here that it talked about the different components of my page. It talked about my writing style and my tone of voice, because this is another example I gave of my own landing page. And it even talked about the persuasive elements I included in my personal landing page, which is very accurate.

16:29So Audrey is very impressed. So I want to touch on something here that I think is very important when it comes to using AI for these things. You are an expert, right? You know how to look at a landing page or 20 landing pages and find these components because that's what you do for a living. Most people don't. But now we have these tools that know how to do that at a professional level. And you can take more than one. You can say, I think these 10 are great. I don't know why, because I don't have the expertise that Audrey has. But you can load all 10 to ChatGPT and say, tell me what's common about them.

17:09Tell me what are the good things and the bad things in each of the pages. Tell me if I want to create a page that does one, two, three, and I might be jumping ahead here on your presentation, but help me build a page that will take the best out of all of these 10 pages. And my goal is to do X and my audience is Y. And I'm sure you have examples on how to do what I just said, but I think the capabilities of the tools of ChatGPT today to A, browse and B, look at images is something we did not have a month ago and is magical for these kind of things definitely and i think it's i always say i is able to empower people who are writers and who are not as well to do things at a scale like never before right so even if you're not a professional copywriter you can use the tools to your advantage and get to really high conversion copy but at the same time if you're a writer say at this point in time, you don't have to be afraid of AI taking your job.

18:10What you can do is learn how to utilize it even more effectively. And you must remember that the playing field is going to change, right? But at the same time, all landing pages are going to be even more optimized. So the only way for you to win is still to have that human element, right? How do you add the human insight, the human element, the human storytelling back to your page? Because when all landing pages eventually are AI optimized, what is going to stand out? It's the people and their stories inner experiences or their unique perspective that I think is going to make a difference. Awesome.

18:41I'll add one more thing and then we'll continue to what's the next step after the research step. In general, to generalize what you said, I think in the AI era, human relationships are going to become even more important because everybody will be able to do everything pretty damn well. The average content, the average landing page, the average proposal, the average research paper, the average everything is going to be 5x better than it is today, just because AI can help anyone get to that level. So what's going to make the bigger difference is people who on the human level can understand their clients, can develop human relationships, and that's going to be a key differentiator, definitely in B2B businesses, but also in B2C marketing, like we're talking right now.

19:30So what's the next step? We do our research, we understand what's a good landing page? What's the next step in your process? Yeah, of course, the next step is to figure out how do you prompt for it, right? My process is always very specific. It's a three-step process, human strategy, AI, execution, and then human review. You need to go through these three steps in order to make sure that your landing pages are still on point and you maintain the quality of it. If you compromise on any of these three stages, the output is not going to be as fantastic as what you're looking for. What I would also do in addition to this research is I would like to use AI to support me in developing audience insights.

20:11There is a way to do that. Ideally, you get your audience's transcripts and you put in the chat GPT and you just pump a prompt in that says, tell me what are the pinpoints from this full list of transcripts. So that is option one. And option two is you get ChatGPT to put itself in the shoes of your target audience to answer questions that it creates. So it sounds a bit meta, but basically you can get ChatGPT to develop a list of questions for your company and then say, now can you put yourself in the shoes of my audience and tell me how would you answer those questions? That actually works surprisingly well for ChatGPT 4.

20:55that's brilliant so basically you're starting with it looking at it from the brand's perspective and then you change the roles around and saying okay now you're a customer you define to it what it is right what customer it is and saying through that eyes do you have an example of a prompt on how you do that because that's very cool yes let me put it out i have a prompt here so I could like the way I use AI is really fun for me because I just see as a tool to support me in different parts of my strategic thinking or research process so I don't actually think that you have to use it only for execution there are many ways to use it to your advantage and to create a kind of like workflow there's a lot smarter so there are always smarter ways to skill this i've always been telling my clients who my work with so let me share my screen yeah so this is one of the many prompts that i have created as you can see here i have different ways to prompt for um target audience research right so for example in this prompt i'm actually getting chat GPT to develop a full list of questions for me before I even launch into creating any kind of creative assets.

22:19So for those of you who can't see it, it says as an experienced audience researcher and brand strategist, please develop a series of deep and detailed interview questions to help me gain audience insight. So I'm not even jumping to the audience insights part yet. I'm saying I want questions. Let's start with that. So I break down the entire process into very granular path so that the output is hyper specific it's as though i'm doing myself but now i'm getting ai to do it so i guess you can put it through chat gpt to see how this looks right so i'm just gonna pop it in here i will create a new tab and i will switch off my custom instructions then i'll pump it here so for example i'm gonna type in what my brand is close with copy and then I will tell it what I do.

23:05So we are a hybrid human AI copywriting consultancy focused on helping agencies develop bespoke prompts, right? And then now I'm getting ChatGPT to provide me with three questions for each of the points that I included in my prompts. so I'm asking it for demographics psychographics channels and so on and now chat gbt will give me three questions or four questions each for each section so I'm going super specific into the question there first right and now it's telling me demographics four questions like what is your age range what is your gender or where do you reside what's your occupation all the way to like channels what online platforms do you use what types of content do you prefer how much time do on these platforms.

23:57So this is a very comprehensive audience insight research toolkit that I use, not just for landing pages, but specifically for different marketing strategies or ad creation. So you can see it's very robust. It's not everything you need for a landing page, but it's a great starting point. Yeah. And it's giving me all the questions. I'll say one thing before we continue, which is there is huge power in reiterating with playing with these kind of longer prompts to do things very specific and saving your prompts to a prompt library. So Audrey is using Notion, but you can use Google Docs. You can use ClickUp.

24:38You can use, I use Magical Chrome extension, which is already in the browser. And then you don't even have to copy and paste. You just type it into anything, but you have to continuously upgrade your prompts and you have to save the ones that generate the right results for you. It is even more important when you're in an organization of people, not just one person, because then you want the best prompt to be used by multiple people, not just one person. So on one hand, keep on researching and trying new things, but every time a new thing works, save it somewhere so we can reuse it across. But this is a really great start, like you're saying, because now you have all the list of questions across multiple aspects of what you want to know about your audience.

25:24Yeah, and I agree with you about saving the prompts. So I used to be really messy. Then I was like, I did this before, but I can't remember. So I had to go and re-prompt. And a prompt is like solving a puzzle, right? Once you found the code to this puzzle, save the code. Okay. Do not forget it. It will take you another few hours to figure it out again. Yeah. Yeah. So I think what ChatGPT has here is a list of three questions for different, basically buckets, right? I gave it. So it's giving me questions about the audience's pain points, their fears, their desires, motivations, channels, and so on.

26:00Then we move on to part two of the prompts. Right here. I have a let me see this there are two options like what I said right one is you could ask it to analyze the transcript that you are uploading but in this case we don't have a transcript of the audience right now so what we're going to do is to get it to pretend to be the audience so I'm just going to have this here put yourself in the shoes of the interviewee and answer the following questions in detail. You can see the magic for yourself. This is a very powerful prompt that I don't think people are utilizing as much as they should because chat activity is actually great at thinking about an audience persona and answering questions in that way.

26:47But in this particular case, you did not define the exact persona, right? You're just letting it answer the questions. Yes. So what you can do is if you have someone in mind, you can, Yeah, you can. Oh, there was a time to that. You can definitely do that. But this is just an example of how you could run it. Yeah, this is really cool. Yeah, but if you already know who you're looking for, so for example, I'm targeting agency owners of web design agencies, then I'll be very specific. Web design agency owners, size 10 to 50 employees looking to scale, then it will get a different kind of output. Yeah, and if you can see the output here, it says, I'm in my mid-30s, based in New York.

27:26I work as a marketing manager. my lifestyle is pretty busy. I'm juggling work, networking events, personal development courses. I value creativity and efficiency. And then I'm on YouTube for relaxation or I like watching marketing strategy videos and occasionally digital art tutorials. So you see how specific chatGPT is in crafting a persona. It is so good at that. I'm like always blown away. And it talks about their audience's pain points, right? So for example, I have a basic understanding of AI, but I am no expert. I want to try to use AI more in copywriting, but I don't know how. I try to apply new insights after I learn something and I'm always experimenting with new strategies and tools.

28:09So pretty good for a prompt. Yeah. Yeah. What happens next is, okay, this is an example of how you can gather audience insights, right? Ideally, you speak to a real human being, but if you can't, This is great option too, right? Now you combine your knowledge of what makes a top one. What you want to do is figure out your top performing frameworks, right? And figure out how best you can put them together. So let me show you what this looks like. So while you're opening it, I just want to go back and reiterate the steps that we've done and combine some of them together. The first thing is getting inspiration and understanding what's a good landing page, right?

28:51From other landing pages. So just do the research and find the components that you like. Step two was to understand your audience, right? Build your own strategy. So figure out who's your target audience, figure out all the questions that you have about them, figure out what questions you need to ask them to understand, and then preferably actually perform these kinds of interviews. If you cannot use ChatGPT and probably the best option is the combination of the two. So like Audrey said, you can interview people, take the transcript of the interview, load it to ChatGPT as a first step, and then A, ask it to analyze it, and B, create additional ones based on the ones you've already uploaded.