This is some test copy to make sure things look good

My Digital Marketing class required us to create a landing page design for a fictitious company called "Kent's Camera Castle" who sold cameras such as the GoPro Hero. Following the parameters of the project, I created a responsive eCommerce-focused landing page with Adobe XD to illustrate my conceptual design.

Being one of the few students who received a perfect score on this project, it has also been showcased to undergraduate students as an example of what a landing page should look like.

Scope of the Project

During my last semester of my graduate studies, I took a marketing research class that required my group and myself to conduct a real-worldstudy on the topic of our choosing. Throwing my personal experiences and careerpath into the ring, we ultimately decided to research the impacts of social media marketing activities on consumer purchasing behavior.

To collect the data we needed, we utilized Qualtrics to handle the questionnaire design and distribution among potential participants. When building out the survey, we quickly realized that the default templates with the Hofstra University “branding” looked somewhat cheap, old-school, and to a degree, a tad scammy in respects to its dated design. Knowing that we will be sending this survey to a generally younger demographic, we decided to take control of how this survey looks as best we can.

Creating the Environment

With the topic of choice in mind, we wanted to immerse the participants as best as possible in order to garner the best results from the survey. Our experiment involved four different scenarios to test for interaction effects against our hypotheses. While most of our peers relied on text-based scenarios to provide context, we wanted to utilize as many visual assets as possible to achieve our goals.

This decision to use visual assets is further reinforced by1) Our target audience of younger individuals being used to interacting with visual queues, and 2) The environment of the scenarios taking place on Instagram.

Having the strongest design background, I opted to take the lead on designing all of the assets needed for the four random scenarios we were creating. Using Figma’s design tools and mockup plugins, I created the deliverables that we needed to achieve our goal of providing the best possible environment for our survey.

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Replicating Instagram’s Interface

Designing the Instagram interface was probably the most difficult part of this task since the goal was to make a near 1:1 replica of its user interface. While I could have just used a screenshot of Instagram from my feed or somewhere online, there were some problems.

For both cases, quality would be the biggest issue. Depending on the final scale and file size of the mockup’s export, the quality of the original screenshot would have not scaled properly would have resulted in poor quality, diminishing the survey taker’s experience. Additionally, privacy would have been a concern. Taking a screenshot of my own feed could potentially pose some issues if a fellow friend of mine would not want to be plastered across our survey.

So, redesigning the interface was the best solution. While the task was tall, the final end product was highly convincing (according to independent people who I’ve asked) and served as the perfect environment for these scenarios.

Creating the Ads

Working in paid social media marketing, I’m accustomed to the little things that make an ad what it is. The text near the profile labeling the content as sponsored, the call to action button’s color matching the colors of the creative, and the recommended 125 character limit for the primary text.

While many of these things may go unnoticed by most users, on a subconscious level, these small details end up making the mocked up ad appear more convincing.

Designing the Landing Page

This is where I had the most freedom since the entire brand is fictional and does not have a website that needs to be replicated; this is where I had the most level of design freedom. Considering that a significant amount of users now view websites on a mobile device, designing the landing page with a mobile-first approach was the ideal decision.

Wanting to keep the design sleek and easy to interpret, I used a clean off-white background with light greens as an accent for information chips and points of emphasis. While the design was intended to feel like a mobile website, reflecting on it now resembles more of a mobile app considering the lack of the standard UI elements seen in a mobile browser such as a top navigation bar or quick action buttons on the bottom. Never the less, the core design is functional and aligns with the ad creative shown in the previous image.

Promotional Material

While asking immediate family and family to take the survey would be a good place to start, it wouldn’t nearly hit the minimum requirement of garnering 100 valid survey completions. This meant that we needed to reach out to our network asking those who are willing to take our survey.

While we could have just made a post or story with text and a link to the survey, we wanted to continue down the path of using compelling imagery to tell a story. Spearheading the design for the survey itself, I took on the additional task of making creatives to encourage those we are connected with to take our survey after viewing our post. Below is the final result.

Wanting to state our intentions clearly, we made it immediately clear what our survey is about and what our affiliations are in the context of our study. Building this trust was crucial since I personally do not post a lot on my Instagram and LinkedIn, and a connection of mine seeing a random survey from my account may be a tad off putting and may raise a few understandable red flags.

To provide more context, I added a device mockup of the landing page shown earlier to provide further context on the environment of the study.

But why didn’t I show the Instagram feed mockup?

Since the experiment calls for four randomized scenarios, we did not want to show any of the variable elements from the survey that could potentially sway results if seen in advance. The landing page is shown at theend of every scenario and will not sway users in any particular direction, regardless of the scenario they are presented with.

A similar creative is used as the header image for the survey when a user first clicks on the link we provided. This correlation between the creative and the landing page (our survey) adds an additional layerof trust and confirms that they have landed on the right page in respect to the information they saw prior.

The Final Results

While it is difficult to accurately calculate, and for that matter display, the final click-through-rate, we managed to get 158 total valid submissions garnering about 30-40 new submissions per day over the span of four days.

For further context, we also sent out requests for submissions via our school’s internal list of student emails, which consist of tens of thousands of emails. Taking into account every channel that we have sent this through, the blended CTR will be too small to even display. While we didn’t have any means of accurately tracking CTR via the LinkedIn post or Instagram Story, we have determined that a significant portion of the responses have come from our outbound messaging efforts.

All in all, we garnered well more than the minimum amount required resulting in an overall successful research project.

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While working at PS Digital, a client of ours who runs Google ads saw a decline in boarding appointments compared to the previous year. After looking into their Google Analytics data, we determined that their page engagement was suboptimal.

In response, we proposed a landing page design that will be used for their Google Ads campaign to boost conversions. Following all the best practices, this design was built to be as engaging, informative, and conversion-centric as possible while still maintaining the brand's playful image.