Bonus Episode: The Importance and Value of Landing Pages with Nik Sharma

Nik Sharma is widely known as “The DTC Guy,” a Forbes 30 Under 30 member, AdWeek’s Young & Influential, and a resource that brands and investors turn to for growth.

Nik is the active CEO of Sharma Brands and HOOX, where clients include Feastables, Chamberlain Coffee, Roc Nation, Everlane, Jim Beam, Poo~Pourri, and more.

Before entering the eCommerce world, Nik worked on social media strategies for A-list celebrities, including Pitbull, Priyanka Chopra, and MAGIC!, to natively increase distribution and increase fan interaction and engagement for the purpose of driving album sales.

In This Conversation We Discuss:

• [00:00] Intro
• [01:11] Nik’s timeline in Ecom
• [02:06] Landing pages and why you need them
• [04:27] Why brands don’t use landing pages
• [04:57] How you should approach landing pages
• [06:48] Higher conversion rates with landing pages
• [08:50] Landing pages are just one piece of the puzzle
• [09:19] The importance of a sales angle
• [12:02] The equal amounts of “push and pull sections”
• [13:23] It can take multiple CTAs to make customers act
• [13:47] Differentiating sales from conversion events
• [14:37] How conversion events help ad platforms
• [17:17] Scenario: Consulting a $1M brand to go 5 -10X
• [18:41] The Office’s definition of merchandising
• [20:31] Reduce the complexity of your offers
• [20:59] Landing pages for high AOV brands
• [21:55] Determining if email is for retention/acquisition
• [22:40] Parsing out content through different channels
• [23:24] The easiest trick for landing pages
• [24:13] Building out landing pages for mostly education
• [25:43] DIY landing pages and other platforms
• [27:52] How Nik got his passion from landing pages
• [29:38] The idea and model of HOOX
• [31:05] Where to find HOOX

Resources:

• Subscribe to Honest Ecommerce on Youtube
• Branding services are designed to grow, operate, and advise DTC brands in the digital landscape to meet their full potential sharmabrands.com
• Landing pages that unlock more efficient advertising spend hoox.co
• Follow Nik linkedin.com/in/mrniksharma
• Subscribe to Nik’s newsletter - nik.co/subscribe
• Follow Nik on Twitter - @mrsharma
• The only landing page builder to combine 10 years of conversion data with the power of AI unbounce.com
• Shopify pages without the dev time replo.app

If you’re enjoying the show, we’d love it if you left Honest Ecommerce a review on Apple Podcasts. It makes a huge impact on the success of the podcast, and we love reading every one of your reviews!

 

Transcript

Nik Sharma  

So customers coming from call it TikTok and they've no idea what the brand is, your page is not going to focus on trying to sell them a product right away. You want them to understand the punch line or your brand and what you plan to do.

Chase Clymer  

Welcome to Honest Ecommerce, a podcast dedicated to cutting through the BS and finding actionable advice for online store owners. I'm your host, Chase Clymer. And I believe running a direct-to-consumer brand does not have to be complicated or a guessing game. 

On this podcast, we interview founders and experts who are putting in the work and creating  real results. 

I also share my own insights from running our top Shopify consultancy, Electric Eye. We cut the fluff in favor of facts to help you grow your Ecommerce business.

Let's get on with the show

Hey, everybody, welcome back to another episode of honest ecommerce. I'm your host, Chase climber and today I'm welcome to show an amazing guest, Nik Sharma. 

Nik is up to quite a bit of things in the Ecommerce space. I guess I'll let Nick introduce himself. 

So if I've been living under a rock and I haven't heard of you, where might I have seen you on the internet?

Nik Sharma  

Let's see... Probably Twitter, LinkedIn or in your inbox? Those are probably the 3 places I hang out most. (laughs)

Chase Clymer  

I love that answer. I love that answer. So give me the quick timeline of your experience in the Ecommerce space and what are you up to these days?

Nik Sharma  

Yeah. So the quick timeline is I started working in the world of social media. I transitioned to the world of ad tech. I learned a bunch there. 

Then I moved over to a brand and learned all things Ecommerce. 

And then today, I run a couple different service businesses mostly focused on Ecommerce brands that are scaling and looking to grow by way of digital customer acquisition.

Chase Clymer  

Awesome, awesome. And so these days, you're doing a lot of stuff in the landing page space. It's definitely a popular concept. It's something that everyone's talking about on Twitter. 

Nik Sharma  

Yeah.

Chase Clymer  

The day that we're recording this, Threads just came out yesterday and I'm sure people were talking about it there.

For an Ecommerce brand that isn't necessarily familiar, why do I need a landing page? What's the difference between my product page? Can I just use my homepage? What are some of those easy questions to answer? 

Nik Sharma  

Yeah. Look, a landing page is just a more optimized sales page. It's like tour Hinge profile,, that's a landing page, your menu at a restaurant, that's a landing page. 

Your Ecommerce page that you're driving traffic to that's not a homepage, collections, or product page, that's a landing page. 

The entire idea of a landing page is how do you condense the education required in order to make an informed decision of whether or not this product that's presented here is the right fit for you? 

And the focus of a landing page is to really answer the questions of "What is the product? How's it going to benefit me? Why does this exist? Why is this the right product on the market for me? And how soon will I get it if I place an order?" And that is what a landing page focuses on. 

It's everything leading up to that purchase. Whereas a product page is entirely focused on the buy box. 

As soon as you get to the page, it's the product image, the price, the title, and the buy box. There's no education as to what is this product? 

Or how's it going to benefit me? Or how does this compare to competitors on the market? Or does the PDP even help the customer understand what the problem is that they're solving? 

And then if they understand the problem, do they know why this is the right brand to do it? Or maybe they know this brand, but they don't understand the problem. 

And so, landing pages take all of those questions out and really focus on helping people understand the main basics that people want to know. The problem is that otherwise people are... 

They see the product, they're like, "Okay." Maybe they're a little bit intrigued. Then they leave your site. They go to Google, they start doing their research. 

Anytime you add clicks or you make it easy for somebody to leave the site, you're giving the opportunity to somebody else to go ahead and steal that person away. 

And so with a landing page, the idea is you roll out this red carpet, you are the assistant on the red carpet, Kim Kardashian is your customer walking the carpet, and you better have everything this person needs to know as they're walking the red carpet, so that they can then make an informed decision.

Chase Clymer  

Absolutely. Now, I guess I kind of wanna play devil's advocate here. And it's why do brands not build a landing page for every product in their catalog?

Nik Sharma  

Yeah, it's a good question. I think, for brands that have smaller catalogs, I think, that's probably very possible. 

For brands that have massive catalogs, you could probably programmatically do that. You build a template, and then all of a sudden, you can duplicate that template across 1000 products. But really the point of a landing page... 

It depends on what you're using the page for. Are you using the page to... It really depends on the stage of the customer and the source of the traffic. 

So if a customer is coming from TikTok and they have no idea what the brand is, your page is not going to focus on trying to sell them a product right away. 

You want them to understand the punch line in your brand and what you plan to do, and ideally collect some sort of first party information and get back to them later. 

If you're running a lower funnel page that's coming from Instagram or Google, then you're probably more focused on selling the product and less on educating them about the problem that you're going to solve with it. 

And so, I think,  you absolutely can do that. There's a lot of apparel brands we work with,where we will have basically... 

We'll be focused on the punch line of the brand and then we'll even add "Here are all the collections you can shop." 

And then when somebody clicks through to a collection, the conversion rate is now quadruple of what it would be if that person came through and just went to a regular collections page without understanding the brand. And so there's a few different ways to do it depending on... 

It really depends on the source of the traffic and where in the funnel that traffic is coming from. And I hate the word funnel because I don't think it really exists. But are they somebody who knows... 

It's basically 2 things: Do they understand the problem that's getting solved? And do they understand why this brand exists? 

And it's a matrix of 4 squares. If they understand the problem and they don't understand the brand, that's one page. If they understand the brand but don't understand the problem, it's another page. If they understand both, that's your lowest funnel page. And if they understand neither, that's your most upper funnel page.

Chase Clymer  

Absolutely. Now, you buried something in there that I need to call out. And it's almost... 

Nik Sharma  

Yeah.

Chase Clymer  

The main benefit of landing pages is a higher conversion rate. Let's dive into that a bit more. What facts do you have to back that up? Why just from a theoretical standpoint would always have a higher conversion rate?

Nik Sharma  

Okay, so if we were to zoom out and take out the Triple Whales, and the Northbeams and the GAs of the world, the realistic path of somebody buying a product is they see an ad, they click on the ad, they go to a product page, they scroll the product page, they go to the About Us page, they leave. 

They get an email, they see, they're reminded that they came to this site. They click the email, they go to the site. 

Then they go to Google, and they search "Caraway Home" reviews. 

Then they go to some publisher sites, they read through these pieces. 

Then they come back to the site and then they leave. And then they see another ad, and then they click it, and then they come back. 

And then they finally buy the product. And in all that time, they're basically just... They just have unanswered questions. 

And with a landing page, the entire idea is just how do you constantly answer these questions over and over again, hammer these answers into their head, so that you have the best possible shot of converting people as soon as possible. 

Now, if you're selling something that's like a $500 cookware set, the chances of somebody seeing it for the first time and buying right away are probably low. 

But they're much higher than if you just send them to a product page and then they have to go scour their own answers. 

Versus if you give them the answers, you can understand the objections that you get in your customer service inbox, or Instagram DMS, your ad comments, and you can counter those objections. 

It's this entire concept of like, you set yourself up for the best possible at-bat. So the same way that when a baseball player goes up to home plate, if they have their feet completely wide, they're not setting themselves up to hit the ball well. 

If their shoulders turned out behind them too much, they're not setting themselves up well. And so all of these things... 

And again, landing pages are just one piece of this puzzle. Just having a good landing page is not going to make your business work overnight. 

But when you have good creative, you have good copy, you have a good angle for people to buy this product, and you have a good landing page, I call this concept of setting yourself up for "the best possible at-bat." 

And again, you're not always going to hit homeruns, you might hit some base hits, but you give yourself the opportunity to hit those home runs when you can.

Chase Clymer  

Absolutely. And obviously, this only works if you have a good product that people want to buy as well. 

Nik Sharma  

Yeah, of course. 

Chase Clymer  

So with these landing pages, you talked a bit about the types of answers that you want to be presenting to potential customer's questions. 

And so to me, it sounds like these are mostly long form pages. There's quite a bit more information here than you're going to find on a typical Ecommerce page on a standard store. 

What are some of the nuts and bolts, as you would, like the information that we want to put on these pages that is usually above and beyond what you'd find on a typical product page?

Nik Sharma  

Great question. I think the first one is an angle so like, if you look at a lot of the companies that have grown quickly over… 

I like to look at the companies that grew after this massive venture boom that happened in Ecommerce. 

So obviously, there were the companies that grew during the venture boom, but they grew because they were just burning a bunch of money, lighting money on fire. 

And for every $200 they spent, they made $10 back. They spent enough of those $200 to get enough customers. But those businesses are all upside down today. 

If you look at the companies that started after that, the Jolies of the world, the Canopies, these companies that raised a couple million bucks and then scaled up quickly. 

All of them focused on one thing, which is they found one messaging angle that worked really well for the product they're selling. 

And that's all they focused on to hit their $5 million or $10 million sales mark. I think that is the biggest key ingredient that people miss, even in landing pages that they make. 

And they have all the right sections, they have all the social proof, the UGC, the videos, the unboxings... Where's the product from? How is it made? How do you use it? The best deals and offers... 

If you don't have the angle, there's no way you're going to sell. And a great example is... 

There's this brand called Lundberg. They make these amazing rice cakes. But the average person is not going to look at rice cakes and be like "This is something I got to buy." But if it was... "This is a great pre-workout snack." 

Or "This is the best after school snack that mom approves of." 

Or "This is a 5-minute post-workout, 'get yourself full and not over full.'" 

You gotta have some angle that gets you in with these people. It's almost like, there's a big line outside and you have to open the side door and be like, "Hey, come here. I got the side door for you. This is the angle in." That I think is number one. If you don't have the angle... 

You can make a terrible landing page work with a great angle. And that too, I think you can test with understanding clickthrough rate on the ads you're running or if you have a good amount of traffic, you can even just put it up and see what works. 

But after that, I think it's pretty straightforward. It's like, I like to look at sections as push-and-pull sections. Pull sections are you're saying, "Hey, click here." 

There's a CTA, get closer to buying this product. Push sections are, "Let me teach you more. Let me tell you why this is a great product. Let me tell you how your life is going to get better as a result of using this product." 

And so I think you need an equal balance of push and pull. Pull sections can be your shop section, it can be a random section with a CTA in it... 

Your push sections are "Why does this product exist? A comparison chart. How does this compare to others on the market? What do customers say about it? What does the unboxing look like? What is the... What are the immediate benefits of this product?" 

And it's just giving more reasons that you want to buy whereas again, the pull sections are trying to get you to get to the next step of that journey. And the reason you want a good balance of the 2 is because... 

I mentioned the whole funnel thing is thrown out in the garbage, because of the way that advertising tracking is evolved. 

You don't know nowadays if the person who comes to your site knows everything about your brand or knows nothing about your brand. 

And so as a result, having the balance of push and pull, you give all of the information for somebody to learn, but you also have the opportunity for somebody to go ahead and make a decision right away if they feel ready.

Chase Clymer  

Absolutely. And that's something I want to highlight there. You're saying that these pages have multiple call-to-actions to push people to the next step in the purchase, which is basically add to cart almost maybe even to get to the cart page.

Nik Sharma  

Mm-hmm. Yeah. And again, I think also... I think the other thing, too, is depending on what you're trying to sell... I think it's less about adding to cart. It's more like, "What is that conversion event?" So  if you're selling to... If you're selling... 

If your landing page is pushing the fact that you're available in Petco, or PetSmart, or Chewy, then that conversion event might just be the button that chooses which site you go to. 

But it's like, you're now able to feed that button click back to Facebook as a conversion event and say, "Hey, find me people who look like people who are going to click this button." 

Or it might be that add to cart, it might be that checkout as well. But having some sort of a conversion event is almost like the bare minimum in today's environment where these platforms are already barely getting information. 

The best thing you can do is feed more signals back. And that's where I think the conversion event comes in handy. 

Chase Clymer  

Yeah, I think that whoever named conversion rate optimization just did the whole world a disservice by that because everyone just instantly thinks about conversion being a sale. 

So I guess, can you quickly explain a little bit more about what a conversion event is? And it's not necessarily a sale. It's just them doing the action you want them to, maybe?

Nik Sharma  

Yeah. So all of the ad platforms... For the people who are listening and have set up ads, they'll know this. When you're creating your campaign, you're usually setting up an objective. 

There's different objectives: There's awareness, there's reach, there's clicks, website clicks, there's landing page views, and then there's conversions. 

When you're running anything --pretty much anything except conversions-- all the ad platforms are basically just going to give you traffic that is garbage traffic. They weren't going to buy anyways so they're not going to... 

Facebook and TikTok, they're reserving the conversion event objectives to show to people who are likely to do those things because then as a brand, you're going to keep spending and playing that game. 

If you're just running reach and frequency, or website traffic, good luck getting these people to do anything else except getting to your site and bouncing. So what you want to do is, even if you're running like... 

Let's say you're running a pre-launch campaign. All you're doing is you have a landing page where you're collecting email or even the example with retail, you have a landing page, you have different buttons that go out to different retailers. 

By setting a conversion event, you are then saying, "Hey, Facebook, you're going to optimize toward a conversion goal that I'm going to set up on my page." 

And you could use the Facebook Pixel Helper tool in Ads Manager, where you literally just click the button that you want to set as your objective. 

And you can say, "Consider this the goal: So my goal is for somebody to input their email and click submit. So when somebody clicks Submit, that's a conversion. And that's what I want." 

And so now you're telling Facebook, "Alright, when you send traffic to my pre-launch page, I don't just want website clicks traffic, because that is traffic that's just going to get to my site and [bounce]..." 

And then in Facebook's eyes, it's like, "Alright, they've done their job. We don't care if they leave after. As long as they click through, we're doing a good job with our campaign." 

What you want is you want a campaign setup where it's still a conversion campaign. But now it's just that you change the goal. 

So instead of a traditional purchase or add to cart, you change the goal to be "I want people to click that button. And when people click that button, that means that they've put their email in or  they're going to the Petco store locator."

Chase Clymer  

Absolutely. Nik, I'm... So far this episode has been just knowledge from minute one and I'm so excited. Let's pivot a little bit. And let's pretend that we're consulting for a million dollar brand. 

They're looking to 5 - 10X over the next couple of years. And we're gonna build out some landing pages for them. Now this brand has got dozen or so products, but they've got... 80 - 20 rule with most brands you consult with, there's one flagship product, there's one flagship offer. 

So we're going to focus on that. What do you do? What is your thought process? How are you going to tackle something like this?

Nik Sharma  

Yeah. So I tend to look at first I look at what is the... "What am I selling here? Is this something that is well understood? Am I selling a moisturizer?" Everybody knows what a moisturizer does. 

"Or am I selling a new way to build like the new generation of an Ikea table? It folds up easily, it's easy to assemble..." And so right away, you're already understanding... 

"Okay, first of all, what is the AOV of this product?" Because there's just a certain threshold where under this number --call it under $75 bucks-- people buy right away. Over $75, you're gonna need to... They might be a 2 or 3-touch purchase. 

If it's under, then I'd focus on what I call a "hero product page". This is where you create your merchandising... Have you seen The Office? 

Chase Clymer  

I have. 

Nik Sharma  

Do you remember that episode where they do the garage sale and --what's his name-- Dwight has his table. He's like "You put the best beats in the front. And the ugly beats in the back." That is basically merchandising. 

Merchandising is a word that all the fancy people use. That's all it is. 

You put the best beats in the front, you make them look good, they smell nice, they look nice, they have a good price with them, and the worst one stays in the back. And so you want to find what that is for you. 

So merchandising is your product assortment, your price and your offer. So let's say I'm selling a moisturizer. Maybe it's like one moisturizer. If you're online... 

If your site is running a 15% or 10% off coupon when you put your email in, bring that discount over to the landing page. You don't even have to show the email thing, just add that 15% discount. 

So instead of you know $50, it's now --what is that-- $42.70 or $42.50 something like that. And now it's like alright, right away, somebody's getting a good deal. If they buy 2, maybe they get 25% off. 

So that becomes your offer. And then the rest of the page the --80% of the page-- is just filled with information. And all you have to do in every section is... Just go section by section. 

You answer "What is the product? Why does it exist? Who is it for? How's it gonna benefit me? How does it compare? And when does it ship if I order it today?" That's how I think about low AOV products. 

If you have multiple low AOV products... If I'm a skincare brand, I might make it more fun. 

I might say, "Hey, these are our 15 products. Build your own bundle. For every 6 products you buy, you'll get another 20% off." 

And so now you're creating an incentive for people to say, "I've got 4 in my cart. I might as well add 2 more and get another 20% off." 

But it's all about how do you make it easy for them to understand what's happening and what's being sold and then easy for them to understand the offer. Whenever you get too complex with the offers, that's when pages start to tank. You really have to... 

First of all, you have to always think that you are taking somebody's time out of their day that they could be doing anything else. And if you waste a second of their time, you will easily lose that customer. 

So I think that's how I think about the lower stuff. The stuff that's higher AOV, harder to sell, requires more education, you want to somehow build a... It's like you go... 

It's like you're trying to raise money. You're not going to get the money on the first handshake, when you meet somebody. You're gonna shake their hand, you're gonna build that relationship, show some credibility, and then you're going to follow up. So the same way here. 

You might run a listicle. You might run something like a clickthrough style page, which could be pretty much the same thing as this hero product page minus the shop section, where instead of the shop section, you just click through to whatever product pages that you're trying to push. 

Or a collections page, so they can then choose. But you're just trying to educate and you're just trying to give them information. 

You're just trying to show, "Hey, we're legit. We're real. This is how we work. We're kind of new. We're kind of expensive, but here's why." 

And ideally, you get their phone number or their email, and you can start following up after. This is also where I think email... Email is always talked about as a retention marketing tactic. I think in most brands case... 

If you're doing over $25 million a year, for sure, email is all retention. If you're doing under $20 million a year, your email is an acquisition tool and you have to get really aggressive with it. 

You gotta understand how to match the angles that people are coming in with, with the subject lines, and the content they see on their first email. 

You gotta make sure that you stay consistent from the ad, to the page, to the emails that they get. And yeah, I guess I started ranting but...

Chase Clymer  

No, no. I can tell you're passionate about this. 

Nik Sharma  

It's just my brand. Yeah. 

Chase Clymer  

I agree with you so wholeheartedly about the email channel being an acquisition thing. And it's something I find myself saying a lot. 

Nik Sharma  

Yeah. 

Chase Clymer  

When I'm talking about people building out like prospecting campaigns, and bringing in  net new customers. 

I'm like "Just get their email and let Klaviyo do the heavy lifting for you or whatever your email automation tool is." It's just like a lot of people... 

Nik Sharma  

Yeah.

Chase Clymer  

...they're going for the kill, they're going for that sale, they want that direct response, that immediate gratification, but you're not gonna get that every time. 

And if you could get their email, you're going to see a lot more funds coming through on the tail end of that advertising campaign if you just let those automation software's do your work for you. 

And then, with what you're doing with these landing pages, you've already got all that content already written, just parse it out, send some more digestible emails, or even text messages, if you want to go that route.

Nik Sharma  

Yeah, I'll tell you that the easiest trick that I think anybody can do is [to] go through your customer reviews [and] make a tally. 

So let's take a cookware brand for example. Let's say you go to the cookware brand's reviews. Just start making a list of things that people mentioned: Nice design, one tally. Oh, easy to store, another tally. Nonstick, nontoxic, another tally... 

By the end of going through, you know, as many reviews as you can, you'll have basically... You might have 45 different reasons people like the product, just take the top 10 with the most tallies, turn that into a 10 reasons why. 

Or take the top 5, make that a 5 reasons why. That is literally your customers telling you exactly what they love. 

And you just put that into a listicle and run your ad traffic there. And I guarantee you, the conversion rate will go up automatically.

Chase Clymer  

Oh, I love that. I do have a follow up about talking about higher AOV items. And you said that you're not gonna get on the first sale and it's probably gonna be a few more touches. 

Are you ever building out landing pages for products that have more consideration behind them where you'd never really go in for the sale on the first one? It's mostly just education.

Nik Sharma  

Yeah, for sure. So a lot of times what we'll do is we'll use what we would call the more "upper funnel page" up front. And then when you follow up on email and text, you focus on... 

Think of it as like a very LP style product page. So that means that you still have your shop section up top, but you add a headline so there's still that angle that's referenced and recognized as you come in. Immediately you hit them with the shop section. 

Everything below that is reasons to buy: countering objections, explaining why this is the right decision... 

So it's almost like you literally take that hero style landing page we talked about and you just move it to where you put the product/buy section or the shop section at the very top and then the rest of the page is just focused on educating.

Chase Clymer  

Okay, so if I'm hearing this correctly. It's like, might as well go for the sale at the top but then just underneath, go after their fears, their uncertainties and their doubts...

Nik Sharma  

Yeah.

Chase Clymer  

...about buying from you and about trusting your brand and just start to knock those out and be like, "Nope. This. That. The other. These are the reasons." 

Nik Sharma  

Exactly. 

Chase Clymer  

Awesome. Awesome. Now, let's talk a little bit about the technology because let's be real, there's a lot of nerds listening to this. 

How are you building these things? Can I do it just on my platform? Do I need to use third-party software? What should I be expecting?

Nik Sharma  

Yeah, it's really up to personal preference. 

If you're like me, you have no idea how to code, and you want to stay as scrappy and as cheap as possible, I want to say Unbounce is the best option. It's all drag and drop. You can quickly use the builder, you can drag things around, you can... 

Once you get a page that's working, you can duplicate it. 2 clicks. Double click, rewrite the copy, test that again. 

Double click, swap out the image, test that again. I've used Unbounce for probably 6 or 7 years and never had an issue with it. And I just think it's the easiest way to get started. 

If you want to stay on Shopify you could use something like Replo, which is obviously another  drag and drop builder. It is on Shopify, this time. 

I think it's slightly more expensive than Unbounce but it's also a great tool. The other benefit is you're using your same domain, so you don't have issues with cross-domain tracking. And then the last option, which I think I recommend, for anybody who is... 

If you're spending more than probably $100,000 a month on advertising, this is the only way you should do it, which is you should design your files in Figma use a developer to develop these pages in Shopify, don't use the third-party apps, don't use the subdomain just focus on developing this directly in Shopify. 

It's a little bit more expensive but your page load time is faster, your tracking is better, you don't have issues... 

You'll never run into a problem of what if the app, for some random reason, is broken or another store breaks the servers of that app. And so I think ultimately, the goal should be  developing all these things in your own Shopify instance. 

But until today, I will still spin things up in Unbounce.

Chase Clymer  

That's a fantastic answer. And I agree with you on all of those parts. I'm definitely... I favor doing things within Shopify natively. 

But there are reasons to do everything and there is no right answer to some of these questions. 

Now, if I'm listening to this and I'm picking up what you're putting down... 

We didn't really tell people as much about what you're doing these days and why you have such a depth of knowledge about landing pages. 

Do you wanna let people know what you're doing and how to get a hold of you if this is something that is interesting to them. 

Nik Sharma  

Yeah. So we, you know, Sharma Brands is a company I started about four years ago. And one of the things that we... I've been doing this longer before we started this. 

But one of the things I've always seen as just the easiest lever to pull is landing pages. If you can get... 

Most good landing pages will convert anywhere from 5% to 9%. And if you can go from a 1% - 2% to a 5% to 9%, you've immediately changed the course of the business. And so landing pages is something we do for all Sharma Brands' clients. 

It's almost like the first thing we do is we pitch not only good creative ideas, but also good landing page ideas with the angles. We got so much demand for just one-off pages. "Hey, I'm launching a campaign on TV. I need a landing page that addresses somebody coming from their phone sitting on a couch watching a TV ad." 

Or "I'm launching on Tik Tok and need a landing page that works for traffic that doesn't give a shit about me." 

Or "I'm launching on Google and I'm going after a competitor. I need a landing page that helps people understand why they shouldn't buy the competitor that they're searching for, but instead translates them to want to buy from me." 

And so we just ended up spinning up HOOX, which is... 

HOOX, the name and the idea is like you're testing different hooks and angles with landing pages. And HOOX is basically within 30 days from start to finish. you can... 

We'll present a strategy to you about what we think your landing page should be, we'll do all of the copywriting, the wireframing, design, development, QA it. And within 30 days, you get a live URL and then you can start running traffic. 

Our engagement ends there, which is what most people prefer, because then they can say, "Alright, now I've got a template. And now I can duplicate these 17 different ways, swap out the product or swap out the images, swap out the copy, and keep testing it." 

The hardest part that most brands have is they just don't have the resources to make that first one. Or if they do, it's like... The other problem is they're drinking their own Kool Aid. 

So what they think the brand should be selling or the way the brand should be positioned, is not really how the general public perceives it. And so one thing that we do is, we spend about 5 to 6 hours on this document called a Red Carpet Document. 

And with that Red Carpet Document, what we do is we basically go through from an outsider's perspective,  doing full market research, competitive research... 

We look at your ads, we look at your Facebook ads, etc. And we basically form an opinion of what we think your best strategy could be based on the goal you want to hit.

Chase Clymer  

That's fantastic. Now, what is the URL? 

Nik Sharma  

H-O-O-X.co. hoox.co.

Chase Clymer  

Yeah, we'll make sure to link to that in the show notes so people can get there if they want. 

Nik, I'm gonna have to have you back on in a couple months. We barely scratched the surface here. We did no conversation [about] A/B testing. 

Nik Sharma  

Yeah. 

Chase Clymer  

I know that we're gonna have some blast doing these. Is there anything I didn't ask you about today though that you want to leave our audience with? 

Nik Sharma  

No, I think that was a good little bit on landers. 

Chase Clymer  

Awesome, Nik. Thank you so much. 

We can't thank our guests enough for coming on the show and sharing their knowledge and journey with us. We've got a lot to think about and potentially add into our own business. You can find all the links in the show notes. 

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