A good landing page brief answers three questions: what is being offered, concretely; who it is for, narrowly; and what counts as a win. It leaves out layout instructions, adjective stacks and everything else you sell. We know because we looked at four thousand briefs and sorted them by whether the first draft was published without being redrawn, and the pattern was not length. Some of the best briefs were two sentences and some of the worst were two paragraphs.
The three questions a landing page brief must answer
Briefs that produced a publishable draft answered all three. Briefs that did not usually answered one and elaborated on it.
- What is being offered, concretely. Not the category. "Payroll software" is a category. "Payroll for companies of fifty to five hundred people, with the migration done for you" is an offer.
- Who it is for, narrowly. The narrower the audience, the better the copy, because a sentence written for everyone is written for nobody.
- What counts as a win. A demo booked, a stay enquired about, an email on a waitlist. This decides the form, and the form decides the page.
The win decides the form
The third question does more work than it looks. If the win is a conversation, such as a booking request, a quote or a demo, the page needs an enquiry form. If the win is a sale the visitor can finish on the page, it needs an order form. Of the 196 templates in the landing page template library, 106 are built around an enquiry form and 90 around an order form, and the sections leading up to each are different because the visitor needs different reassurance before each.
A brief that leaves the win out leaves the model to guess the form, and a page with the wrong form is redrawn, not edited.
What to leave out of the brief
Three things showed up constantly in weak briefs and never helped.
Layout instructions. "Hero on the left, three columns underneath" describes a page you have already seen. Describe the offer and let the direction handle the arrangement, then move sections in the layout list if you disagree.
Adjective stacks. "Modern, clean, professional, trustworthy" narrows nothing. Every one of the 196 directions claims all four. "Quiet, no exclamation marks" narrows a great deal. How a style gets picked from a brief is in landing page design styles, and how three get chosen.
Everything you sell. A landing page with four offers converts worse than the same page with one. If you have four, that is four pages. It is the same reason we only make one kind of page.
The best brief we have on record
A page for our eleven-room house on Cap Ferrat. Goal: direct enquiries for autumn instead of OTA bookings. Quiet, no exclamation marks. Open March to November, two-night minimum.
Thirty-four words. It carries the offer, the audience, the goal, the register, and two constraints that end up as real copy on the page. The first draft went live with one edit.
A landing page brief template
The pattern fits in five lines. Copy it, fill in each one in a sentence or less, and stop:
- Offer: what you are selling or inviting people to, with the detail that makes it specific.
- For: the narrowest audience that is still big enough to pay for the ads.
- Win: the one thing a visitor does on the page.
- Register: how it should sound, written as prohibitions.
- Constraints: dates, minimums, prices, places: the facts that must appear as written.
Three examples of what that looks like, each matched to a template whose structure fits it:
- A restaurant. "Our twelve-seat counter in the old town, one sitting a night, a changing tasting menu. For couples marking an occasion. Win: a table enquiry for a date. Quiet, no superlatives. Closed Mondays." A page like Chef's Table is built for this: twelve sections, ten photographs and an enquiry form with booking.
- A small hotel. "A converted farmhouse with six rooms and a pool, two hours from the city. For couples booking direct. Win: a stay enquiry. No exclamation marks. Two-night minimum at weekends." Quiet Luxury Stay has ten sections, twelve photographs and an enquiry form with booking.
- A developer product. "A hosted queue for teams already running their own workers. For engineering leads at companies of twenty to two hundred. Win: a trial signup. Plain, technical, no metaphors. Free up to a million jobs a month." Developer Tool has eight sections, nine photographs, an enquiry form and a pricing table.
The businesses in those three are invented for the example; the template details are as each template page states them.
A note on tone
Tone instructions work better as prohibitions than as aspirations. "Confident" is hard to act on. "No exclamation marks, no questions in the headline, no words like unlock" is easy to act on and produces the confidence you were asking for anyway.
A brief is the start of the page, not the end of the work. Before anything goes live, the page still has to clear the six checks on our landing page checklist, and every lead it collects should arrive with its campaign, as in lead source tracking without a tag manager.