Once upon a time, your leads stopped reading after the first line.
Your website is not an infomercial. It’s an extension of your team and therefore should be able to communicate and inform in addition to selling your product or service.
You respect your customers, you value them and their time, and you want to make it easy for them to find what they’re looking for. So you have to be (sneaky) strategic.
When I say don’t rep
eat yourself, I’m not saying keep your sales pitch to one page and one page only. What I mean is that you have to find different ways to funnel your website visitors towards your intended goal without saying “click here!” in every paragraph.
I’d like to eliminate the “click here!” phenomenon altogether but that’s for another post. I’d also like to encourage alternatives to the phrase “game changer” in reference to technological products and services. Baby steps.
Let’s talk about the good ol’ inverted pyramid of writing (that’s a triangle standing en pointe). You put the most important thing at the top of your page in case your readers take off partway through reading the copy you’ve spent days crafting. Trust me; I’m a journalism grad.
What is it that you most want visitors to do or know when they get to a page? That’s what goes at the top, be it the headline, the first sentence, or graphic depiction of “Visit our online shop now!”. It’s also perfectly acceptable practice to put that important bit in your headline and you first line. For example your page is called “Shop” and the headline at the top of your page is “Catherine’s Novelty Cookie Cutters Online Shop”.
Here are some examples of what should be at the top of your page:
Landing Page: Logo and what your product or service is.
About: Why you are an authority in your industry. This could be the number of years you’ve been in service or the extensive background you have. If you’re an organisation driven by local support, your location is most important.
List of services or products: If you can fit your entire list above the fold (the amount of your website a visitor can see on their device without scrolling), sort logically (e.g. by alpha order, price highest to lowest, grouped by the most popular, etc.), so that it’s easy for website visitors to find what they’re looking for. If your list goes below the fold start with your best-sellers and the items you most want to sell.
Contact: Phone number, hours of operation, email address.
Then you give the supporting information, again respecting the fact that your customers are smart people who want to know a little more about the page they’re on but remembering that their time is valuable- so don’t write a novel. Read my tips on designing sales funnels for your landing page to get specific ideas on how to call website visitors to action without being repetitive.
What else is happening in the digital marketing world?
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