Having established that ‘welcome‘ as a home page headline doesn’t work on any level, here’s another copy crime countless companies commit.
If you’re a regular Copy Break reader, you’ll know I often refer to the psychology of selling. For good reason…
With just seconds to attract a visitor’s attention, you need a way to switch on their interest. Something to hook their eyeballs so they don’t click away!
One of the best ways to do this is appeal to their self-interest – to speak directly to them. That means the last word people want to see introducing every paragraph is ‘we.’
Sadly, website copy is often peppered with this tiny word, without any thought to how the target audience will subconsciously respond.
Whilst it’s only a two letter word, it can have a detrimental effect on visitors – particularly if all they read about is your business.
In fact, the message it sends out is that you are more important than them. To a buyer, this is an instant switch off.
The great switch off
Though tempting, bragging about your achievements on your home page – including how many years you’ve been in business – means nothing to anyone else.
That means if the focus is on you rather than on your potential customers, you can’t expect the killer response you want. i.e. For prospects to stay and browse, get in touch, or buy.
It’s simple really. People just want to know whether your service offers them anything they need.
To make sure this happens, your home page copy (and, in fact, every other landing page) needs to motivate the reader.
With motivation, emotion pulls the strings. Therefore to elicit a positive response, it’s better to put the emphasis on your ideal buyer. What are they motivated by? What do they want?
What triggers their pain? How can your service or product solve a problem?
This doesn’t mean great copy is sentimental; far from it. It simply means you connect with people on their level. Once you’ve done that, you can press their emotional buttons.
No wonder copy focused on giving people what they want always outsells formal, dull copy focused on the company.
Try this
Have a look at your home copy now. Is content focused on your customer, or all about you?
If the latter, change your copy. You’ll spot the difference once you start getting more enquiries…
Image courtesy of jennylincoln.com
This is a timely piece to read. Thank you. I always get value from your posts. It’s particularly relevant since I’m just putting a new business site live for my South Devon boat charter business and I’m now scanning it with care to make sure it has ‘you appeal’ instead of ‘me appeal’. I think it’s been achieved pretty well. I’m still polishing, though. It’s all text at present, so it looks a bit wordy, and my emphasis is on fun.
The one area I think you may have over emphasised slightly is the use of ‘we’. I know why you’ve hammered the point home. A site must be customer oriented. Without a customer ‘we’ are nothing. But that brings me to the thoughts I have.
It may be that, because I’m a tourism business, things are slightly different, but the use of the first person singular is important in tourism. ‘We’ will do things together. The business becomes about ‘us’, but the pronoun refers to the combination of our customers and our enterprise. “we” will go for a wildlife cruise, because ‘you’ cannot skipper the boat yourself.
So we aim and hope to get people’s attention by making them feel part of our business from the moment they arrive on our site. I’m sure we haven’t yet achieved that everywhere, but I think we have in more places than we have not.
I’m glad I subscribed to your blog feed.
And, of course, as you can see above, proofreading is important too! My excuse is that I was interrupted, had to run a half hour urgent errand, and came back thinking I had dotted the ‘i’s and crossed the ‘t’s! I wish your blog had an edit button for comments, but wishing won;t do!
Hi Tim,
Thanks for your comments and for sharing your new site: http://dartmouthboat.co.uk/
Whilst I understand what you mean about making potential buyers feel part of a team, the focus should be on their experience. So, I would still look to amend some of your ‘we’ sentences, by switching the focus back to your reader.
Writing for tourists isn’t easy as you have to almost help the reader visualise – almost sense- the experience. Your ‘wildlife’ page, for example, could be geared towards what people will get out of the trip.
When you put visitors in a boat, a bus overlooking a a busy city, or on a bench edging a tranquil lake, the key thing is to help visitors imagine they are there. If you do that, you’re more likely to ‘sell’ them the idea.
Glad you enjoy the blog! Keep reading – and do let me know how you progress with your website.
P.S. I’ve amended your typos, Tim. Many thanks for the suggestion. Since this site is due for a makeover, I’ll look into it.
At present I’m constantly revising the site. I had a primary objective when getting it online: to get search engines interested. Now I’ve achieved that I can tweak and am tweaking. I agree with all that you say. Sometimes it’s hard to achieve, but you have given me great input for my wildlife page. Once I get that right I can get the rest right.
It feels at times as if one writes for Big G as the master and the audience comes second. I think that can hold true during a site’s very short creation phase and must then change absolutely to be customer, customer, customer focussed.
The input you’ve just given me I ‘knew’ already. It’s the same input one gives to a writer of fiction who tells people things. Instead they must show people things.
And then we come to adverbs! That;s a whole new discussion. I must now screen my text for adverbs. In the right place, great. Used everywhere, not so much!
Oh, thanks for getting the typos
You made me think. You made me think a lot. Having thunk I hope the entire site is better for it. There’s a way to go in many places but the Wildlife Safari page feels much enhanced.
I haven’t failed to learn something each time I visit here. Like everyone I sometimes fail to apply it as well as I ought. Thanks for the gentle kick!