This marketer generated thousands of leads using cookie-cutter landing pages: Discover How [2022]

"Cookie-cutter" is one of the last things you'd wanna hear when it comes to describing your marketing.

"distinguished by a lack of uniqueness or distinction." "Exactly like other people." "Individual variations are not given enough consideration."

You've heard it before: the only way to capture your audience's attention is to provide relevant, one-of-a-kind content. It's about bombarding one consumer with a latte ad before they realize it's barely midday and they're already fatigued, and then bombarding another with a cold brew promotion because geez, it's hot where they live.

While these personalized experiences may have appeared coincidental at the time, they are now anticipated by your consumers.

But what about the small print? Infinite quantities of time? A large marketing staff? Six limbs? Let's face it: small businesses don't have the resources to handcraft content for each and every prospect.

So, what if we told you had discovered a scalable method for creating relevant marketing experiences? Even better, what if we told you there's proof that it works? (It has resulted in a slew of effective ad campaigns and over 120,000 leads for him.)

The best thing is that you can do it on your own. So read on for the three-step method after this essay. Bring a blank landing page, Smart Traffic, and your marketing knowledge with you.

On a Mission To End Cookie-Cutter Marketing

So, who exactly is "this guy?"

Christian Krohn is the owner of Patient Clicks, a marketing firm that works with independent paramedical clinics such as physiotherapy, massage therapy, and chiropractic treatment. He has over 20 years of experience in the sector, from operating clinics to leading the marketing department for a big national chain.

Throughout his career, he's discovered an obvious issue: this sector is plagued with cookie-cutter marketing. All websites, advertising, and landing pages seem the same, making it extremely difficult to attract new patients' attention. He elaborates:

John's Spa does one thing, and then Jane's Spa comes along and sees what John does, so Jane does the same thing. Then James imitates Jane. And before you know it, everyone is doing something similar. — Christian Krohn, PatientClicks Owner

In other words, there was a big chance to assist Spa businesses in creating eye-catching marketing materials. So, when he founded Patient Clicks in 2018, he had a clear goal in mind: to eradicate cookie-cutter marketing.

A screenshot from Patient Clicks' homepage ⬆️

Relevant Marketing Experiences Really Pay Off

Christian's marketing strategy combines the best of both worlds. He generates more leads for his clients while lowering their cost per conversion and cost per acquisition: "That's the name of the game; we want [our clients] to pay the least amount of money to acquire a new patient."

Saving money while increasing income is music to the ears of every small business owner. Some of his clients have seen an increase in annual income of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Relevant marketing is much more than simply satisfying your consumers. It is shaping out to be a significant competitive advantage.

Wait—$300,000+ additional annual revenues?! This isn't chump change, people.

25 Clients, 300 Locations, 120,000+ Leads—How Does He Do It?!

With his customers' Spas covering 300 places, Christian must provide appropriate information to a diverse range of visitors. And anyway, he doesn't have time to manually design 300 distinct landing pages for each campaign.

As a result, he doesn't. He makes use of landing page templates.

Surprised? I was as well. Christian appears to be battling cookie-cutter marketing with cookie cutters.

Then he explained they aren't any ol' templates. He created his own templates tailored to these industries. 
 

Traditionally, this would involve months of split testing and loads of ad spending. But that's not how he did it. He used Unbounce's conversion intelligence tool, Smart Traffic.

Smart Traffic: The Secret Sauce

Smart Traffic—you say? What's that?

Smart Traffic is an AI-powered marketing tool that makes optimization a reality for even the busiest marketers. We're not surprised that someone like Christian—with oodles of campaigns on the go—incorporated it into his toolkit. 

How does it work? You create a few landing page variants, turn it on, and let AI do its thing. In as little as 50 visits, it'll start reading your visitors' attributes and send them to the variant most relevant to them. 

More relevant experiences = more conversions. (No wonder users are seeing double-digit conversion rates.) 

While most marketers will just use Smart Traffic for its AI-powered traffic routing (which is totally groovy by us), Christian takes it a step further: He also uses Smart Traffic to conduct variant tests. Through these tests, he gains insights into his audience's preferences—and then uses these insights to build and tweak his templates. 

These supercharged templates are his starting point for every campaign. That means every variant he publishes is already data-backed from previous tests and the landing page elements are proven to convert in these industries. Now, it's just a matter of making these templates convert even higher.

An AI Skeptic-Turned-Advocate

But he had to take a leap to get there. While Christian describes Smart Traffic as "a linchpin in [his] PPC efforts," he admits he wasn't an early adopter. We get it—marketing tools are sprouting up everywhere, so it can be tricky to weed out the bad ones from the good. 

So he started off cautiously. He turned on Smart Traffic for half of his campaigns and continued to test the other half manually. The verdict?

Smart Traffic was exceeding our abilities as humans to test. It was better on every level.

Now, it's practically clockwork: he creates a few variants, turns on Smart Traffic, and checks back on the results to gather learnings to tweak his templates. They keep getting better and better, and so do the campaigns' performances—in no time flat.

Smart Traffic provides the levers we need to pull to ensure our paid campaigns are viable. I wouldn't ever think about leaving Unbounce because it has all the key things we need—even if there was a cheaper platform out there. I'm so content with what we have at Unbounce.

Three Steps for Building Relevant Landing Pages Using Smart Traffic

You stuck around for the goods—and let me tell you, it's worth your while. Here's how you can create those supercharged landing page templates for your own business, straight from Christian's playbook.

1. Create a handful of landing page variants

To build a landing page template that'll convert in your industry, you gotta do some testing to see what resonates with your audience and what doesn't. To do that, you'll need some variants.

Variants don't need to be (and typically aren't) new landing pages. They are variations of one landing page, made to isolate and test an element. You could play around with different:

• Layouts
• Headlines
• Calls to action 
• Form fields 
• Hero images

Depending on your business and industry, certain information has to be on your landing page. (Like for paramedical services, you gotta include insurance and payment information, doctor bios, a list of treatable conditions, and patient testimonials.) Once you've nailed this down, you need to consider how you'll present this information. That's where the testing comes in. 

If this is your first time testing variants, consider taking a page outta Christian's book:

We start with two to three completely different landing pages—visually different, messaging is different—and then eventually Smart Traffic will help pick the winning one. Once we have the winning one, we'll create multiple variants. Just duplicate the page two to three more times, and then tweak one element at a time, like just the headline. It's very micro-focused.

It could be as simple as swapping out hero images, as Christian did for this campaign. Here, he wanted to test if authentic photos from the clinic would perform better than stock photos.

These little changes may seem insignificant, but they all add up to provide a clearer picture of your target audience—and what'll get them to convert. Whether you're a digital marketing intern or a bigshot CMO with years of experience, if you simply publish one landing page and never look back—you'll never know why some convert and others bounce. 

So create that landing page. Duplicate it. Build some variants. And publish 'em.

2. Turn on Smart Traffic

Really, that's it. One-click and you're done. Set it—and then forget it.

The main reason why small businesses put off testing and optimization tactics is that they take a whole lotta time and resources. Find a tool that'll do the legwork for you, and all of a sudden it becomes a possibility. 

To Christian and his team, this is one of Smart Traffic's biggest selling points. With Smart Traffic handling the testing and optimization, you can put your bandwidth into other parts of the business. 

Manually tracking is way more labor-intensive and time-consuming. We've been super busy…but we do know in the back of our minds that [Smart Traffic] will find the right variant for us and continue to show the right variant until we're ready to get back in there and put ideas into some new variants.

Once Smart Traffic is turned on, you too can sit back and let AI do its thing. Heck, go ahead and work on another task—your optimization strategy is officially on autopilot. 

You'll know Smart Traffic is starting to work its magic when you see the Learning Status shift to "Optimizing" on the dashboard.

If you want to evaluate how Smart Traffic is affecting your performance, you may look at the conversions obtained and the conversion lift on this dashboard. It's so satisfying to see everything come together.

3. Take those juicy insights and build a template

You built variations to test a component of your landing page. You activated Smart Traffic. It optimizes like it's no one's business. So, what now?

You start taking notes. After each test, you'll uncover a nugget of information that'll help you build a cookie-cutter template that's relevant to your industry and audience. Christian explains:

As we continue to test and learn which variants—and which parts of those variants—perform better, they get locked in templates. Then, when we acquire new clients, we immediately plug them in. It may not be ideal, but we have a wonderful foundation to work from, and then we adjust for that client—rather than beginning from zero.

Take a look at your dashboard. Which variants are performing well? Which ones aren't? What's different about them?

Tip: One underrated feature of Smart Traffic is that it'll suggest deactivating variants that aren't performing well. So what? This boosts your ROI by focusing traffic on your best-performing variants. 

For this campaign, Christian tested a call option, and look how much better it's performing:

He now incorporates click-to-calls into the majority of his templates and campaigns.

While testing still takes some effort, Smart Traffic makes it much more possible. You don't have to wait months for data to arrive. You do not need to be an expert to examine this data. You may put it all in the hands of AI.

You'll have a few tests under your belt before you realize it, which means it's time to develop your template. With this template in hand, every version you make in the future will be powerful and relevant.

The bar has been formally set—and it has been raised. Your focus will change from converting existing visitors to converting new ones. Yes, you can have your cookie and eat it too with Smart Traffic.