How to brief a designer for a landing page

Start the brief with your offer

When you brief a designer for a landing page, start with the offer. The visuals come later. Write one paragraph on what you sell, what it costs, and what the buyer actually gets. Add the delivery format, the timeline, the guarantee, and anything you include that rivals charge extra for. If you cannot explain the offer in six sentences, the page will not manage it either. Most weak landing pages come from a fuzzy offer rather than a fuzzy design.

Name one audience and get specific

Pick the one group this page has to convert, then describe them properly. Something like “operations leads at 20 to 80 person logistics companies who still run scheduling in spreadsheets”. Add what they have already tried, what they call the problem in their own words, and who else they will compare you against. A founder spending their own money reads a headline very differently from a marketer spending a budget.

Choose one conversion goal

One page, one action. Book a call, start a trial, buy the product or join the waitlist. Links to your blog, your careers page and your Instagram all pull attention away from the thing you are paying for. Write the goal as a sentence the designer can test against, like “a marketing manager books a 20 minute demo without speaking to sales first”. Every section then earns its place or gets cut.

Send the analytics you already have

Give read access to your analytics, heatmaps and ad account. Or export the basics: traffic sources, top pages, scroll depth, form drop-off, and which ads or emails send the visitors. A page built for cold paid traffic looks nothing like a page built for warm newsletter readers. If you have no data yet, say so. This is useful too, and it changes how much the first version should assume.

List the objections you hear on sales calls

Open your last 10 calls or 20 replies and write down every reason people hesitated. Price, timing, switching cost, “we tried something like this in 2023”, “I need to ask my co-founder”. Rank them by how often they come up. These objections become the FAQ, the guarantee block, the comparison table and the line of copy sitting under the button. Nobody outside your business can guess this list.

Hand over proof, assets and constraints

Proof means testimonials with full names and roles, case studies with real outcomes, logos you have permission to use, and any press or certification. Assets mean brand fonts, colour values, product photography, and access to wherever the page will live. Constraints mean the legal wording you cannot change, the launch date, and anything that has to match the rest of the site. One folder beats six messages spread over three weeks.

Leave the layout to the designer

Skip the wireframe you sketched, the competitor page you want copied section for section, and the notes about hero height or button colour. Hand over the raw material and the outcome you want. Then let the designer decide order, hierarchy, type scale and what to remove. Feedback works better as a problem than a prescription. “I don’t believe the pricing section” tells a designer far more than “make the pricing bigger”.

Fit the whole landing page brief on one page

All of this fits on a single page or one short Loom. Offer, audience, goal, data, objections, proof, constraints. If it runs longer, the offer is usually still undecided, and that is a conversation to have before design starts. A tight brief is why a landing page can go from kickoff to live in five working days instead of five weeks of back and forth.