What the visitor sees when they first land on your website has to intrigue their crocodile brain within 2-3 seconds or your hard earned visitor will leave.
Basically you are going to need to make them want to eat it, fight it, or mate with you. The crocodile brain acts as a filter to preserve the energy of the other parts of the brain and if it doesn’t understand or have some desire for what it sees in the first few seconds it will not send the message upstairs and will leave your site.
This content that the visitor first sees is different to the content you need to create for your inbound marketing strategy. Your inbound strategy needs to create rich resources for clients to see you as the authority and share your information with the friends and colleagues.
The objective of the content the user initially sees has to be able to create interest and comprehension in under two seconds. Here’s how.
Make Your Company Information Either Interesting or Very Brief
Company information has traditionally been on the “about us” page but there is a trend towards more of this information on the home page which does provide good user experience (UX) as it is easier to scroll rather than click and wait for a new page to load.
Still there is a balance and we don’t want to bloat the home page too much with company information. A summary might be best and perhaps a link to the about page “if” there is some “interesting” information. Note “if” and “interesting” are in inverted commas because there should not be any boring marketing fluff.
Perhaps the company has a rich history and some interesting stories about its’ engagement with the community and surrounding buildings and land. That could be an interesting story and deserving of a link to a page with more details.
The objective of company information on the home page is to offer an honest insight into who the company is. For a service industry like an architecture firm then summary profiles of the team may be appropriate, or perhaps recent projects completed as a glimpse into the portfolio section of the site.
Allow Your Personality to Shine Through
Try and convey the personality of the company, especially if there is a rich cultural history or an interesting story that will grab the users attention.
Then go into a deeper explanation of the niche the company focuses on.
This niche will have been addressed in the tagline and core products or services further up the page, but as a customer scrolls down the page they are engaging and proving more interest in your offer and want more information. At this stage they want to understand you better and most importantly understand what you can do for them and if you are a good fit for them.
Addressing the uniqueness of your firm and the architectural or design build niche will assist keeping you in the customers mind after they have left the site. If your company sells products then addressing the uniqueness of those, where they come from, how hard it was to find them, or how environmental and sustainable they are.
If it’s Not Interesting it Shouldn’t be There
Whatever it is it needs to be interesting enough to make your target market continue reading. The headline needs to make them want to read the first sentence and the first sentence makes them want to read the paragraph. And then they need to be intrigued enough to click the link to learn more or continue to scroll down the page and build a relationship with you.
And what you don’t say is almost more important than what you do. If you have nothing interesting to say, don’t say it. About us sections like. “We strive for excellence and always deliver outstanding customer service……….. waffle…waffle” have no place in a company trying to break through the noise and differentiate themselves. Stating excellence and outstanding service do not differentiate. Have you ever seen a company state they settle for mediocrity and poor customer service.
Social Proof
Ever been at a market and seen an empty stall? You go over to browse and all of a sudden you are getting nudged out of the way by the crowd. You started that, you attracted people’s crocodile brains. People only want what’s popular.
Ok, having heaps of facebook fans faces in a FB box on your site was kind of cool when it first came out, but we grow immune to this pretty quickly and I think there are much better more time tested approaches that are more sustainable long term.
In saying that if you can get some industry famous people that your customers will recognise on your facebook or twitter feed on your site, then that is a different story.
Testimonials are effective. Effective 10 fold if this is someone known in the industry. They are also more effective if they are in context. What business relationship did you have with the person giving the testimonial?
Say you worked with a landscape designer and there is a testimonial from them and a link to the project and further details. Product reviews work really well for this same reason of having a testimonial in context.
Testimonials/reviews are even better with the reviewers’ photos. 6 month old babies can do what no computer can yet do to the same level and that’s recognise faces. The way our mind reacts to recognising faces provides extreme social stimuli and is part of our survival instinct. A trusted face is a strong endorsement.
With these techniques you won’t be able to keep everyone on your site, but you will be able to retain visitors that are your target market and that you can, and want to serve. Now you have their attention, next week we will look at how to make them feel “good” while they are browsing your site and want to do business with you.
Nickjco Ecommerce Marketing 