Writing copy for landing pages
stripe.com
stripe.com
2) If you address that then it's "Can I trust they'll deliver on that promise?"
3) And then finally "Does price being asked meet the value of that to me?"
Call to action.
p.s. "Doubt is the deal breaker." __Anything__ in the UX that makes me wonder "What is that?" __must__ be avoided. This includes any thing from a "weird" layouy, to misspellings, to you name it.
If you make me second guess you're going to increase the odds I default to my default. That is "no thanks. I'm out."
Unfortunately, this question seldom gets answered at all. Which is OK, because it says a lot about whatever is being peedled.
Peddlers of the term are also peddlers of ambiguity for what their tools do. Those that I meet that have seemingly been evangalised by these solutions describe 'only low level coding needed'. Assembly? Or not wanting/knowing/needing/trusting to multiskil a team?
There are good RPA tools. The authors of which are straightforward about what they do.
That's just an example of an audience (me) having trouble understanding something smoke and mirrors is often painted around.
I don't think it's reductivist to say that's just a small reframe of "What's in it for me?"
My first reaction was to agree with you. But then I realized how many times I've landed on a page and thought, "Ok. Sounds cool. But WTF is it?" :)
I agree. The two questions go hand in hand. But before you can tell me "what's in it for me" we had both be sure it's perfectly clear (WTF) it is. That is, I think too many brands don't step far enough outside themselves to see it how someone with zero previous exposure to the brand / product might see it.
To successfully demonstrate the value, you need to convey how that value's delivered in my view.
TL;DR - When you publish a new release of something, make sure to either include a link to an About page or prominently include the sentence “[TOOL_NAME] is [words I either already know or can easily look up].”
What's so hard to understand?
Only old people (aka over 25) won't get it ...
Also known as "the people with all the money"
Is the #1 thing that 99% of web sites get wrong - especially in tech.
"Let's maximize your ROI"
"10x your development"
"We make all of your customers happy customers"
Here's something I found: if I have to visit your Wikipedia entry to find what what you do ... then you'v failed.
BTW I don't always hold it against tech companies as often communication isn't their #1 thing.
Also - having done some of this myself, I do realize that sometimes what appear to be poorly constructed sites are actually well designed for clickbait action or some indirect metric.
on landing pages, you want that journey to be quick, but in our rush, we'll cut out important pieces, rather than shortening the individual components.
instead of just "add convenience to your life with our auto magic orchestrator 2000!", you need to say "the best home automation hub" --> "because we integrate with everything and our controller is twice as fast" --> "never worry about turning on your heater, lights and coffee maker again!" --> "buy our auto magic orchestrator 2000!"
As a headline is essentially click-bait.
That you had blowout conversions is great, but it's for the same reason Taboola and Outbrain also have ridiculous headlines and images, and not more informative content.
> Patterns may be used to subtly reference a logo or map out a theme. Take a logistics company that transports goods by railway. Perhaps it not only wants to deliver a message, but also simulate a train with a pattern of evenly spaced dots in a horizontal line. To mimic that visual, rewrite landing page copy to link only words of similar length, such as three- or four-letter words.
I find this very weird advice, even more so when it is presented so prominently.
Craigslist's home page is excellent again because it gets you immediately into use, but it again fails miserably in the what/why question. [2] Just a single line saying "find stuff locally" is all it needs.
Example of a site that gets you into the product immediately and gives you a one liner that answers the what/why would be vqRN. [3]
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/ [2] https://www.craigslist.org [3] http://vqRN.com
Typical objections (as noted by many people here):
- I don't know what this is
- Is it relevant to me?
- How is this going to help me?
- Who else uses this thing?
- Why should I use this over the competition?
- How much time will it take for me to get set up?
Even if she was, companies are companies - not individuals.
Plus, Stripe is big enough that the landing page will focus more on overall company branding than that of a single product.
Their target customer is seeking the standard.
From a marketing point of view, I'm more impressed by the fact that the author got Stripe to publish this piece.
1. What is it?
2. What does it look like?
3. How big or small is it?
4. Can it be delivered?
5. Can I return it?
6. Can I trust it?
People consume content in very different ways. And showing, telling and demonstrating the product/service helps achieve #6.
Elsewhere someone bemoans that landing pages don't answer "what is it?".
Some (most!) sellers couldn't care less if it's right for you, just if you buy it. Spelling out what a product is can lose customers.
Example: Back in the day I bought a minidisc player-recorder as you could easily put/remove tracks digitally. Turned out you couldn't do that properly, only from computer, not to computer, making it terrible for live recording (my need). If they'd told me properly "what is it" then I would instead have bought an mp3 player.
Yup, still bitter - cost me many hours that mistake.
A corollary to this though, they made the sale, but I've never bought from the company (Sony) again.
I also find that advisory articles like these lose a lot of their luster when you start trying to outdo other people’s work.
Following their rules would make it cringe-worthy.
Maybe for certain audiences, in certain types of corporate website, their advice is good, but the article doesn't define the domain to which the advice applies.
When you are trying to describe something which is new (to the audience at least) it looks reasonable to me, to begin with "what can you get out of this and in what situation".
For instance, look at rust's landing page at https://www.rust-lang.org/ :
"Rust : Empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software."
There is a hidden "you" in this sentence (the hidden message is "even if you don't think you can, with rust, you can build reliable and efficient software"). And then, they go on with features : performance (no runtime, no GC), reliability (borrow checker), productivity (great documentation, great compiler eror messages).
It also showed a code example, so you couldn't really miss the fact (https://web.archive.org/web/20181114045725/https://www.rust-...).
This reminds me of the Perforce landing page from decades ago - in the pre Git era. Unlike all the other commercial version control vendors of the time, their page said basically, "Perforce is fast, reliable version control. It costs $79 per seat". That made me made me think, "ah, this is product designed for engineers", so I bought it.
Today, Perforce's landing page says, "Your DevOps Journey Starts Here" in big letters. How times have changed. I don't buy Perforce any more.
Stripe doesn't have this same issue - they are still selling the same product they did when the founded the company.
Now, starting every sentence with "you" is a bit odd, but the general idea is to focus on the user's problem rather than characteristics of the product. Fetures are boring, bland and frightening. I'm an user, I have problems, do you solve any of my problems?
"7-Zip is a file archiver with a high compression ratio. 7-Zip is free software with open source. The most of the code is under the GNU LGPL license. Some parts of the code are under the BSD 3-clause License. Also there is unRAR license restriction for some parts of the code."
vs
"Are you fed up with buying hard drives after hard drives or choosing which files to delete and which files to keep, only to regret your decision afterward? Well, that time is over. With 7-zip, you can compress files more efficiently than ever and save space on your hard drive".
Or, if you're promoting free software:
"You don't want to buy one more software to archive your important files. At 7-zip, we heard you. 7-zip is free and open source, meaning not only you don't have to pay for it, but you can modify the source code if you really want to. You can even include it in your own, commercial software".
Technical landing pages are good when you address technical people that are already sold to your product.
Do regular people really don't care about accurate information, and buy based on who can make nicest sounding blurb?
Now, you can be much more "under the radar", and focus a little more on technical features, but still from the user's perspective. Look at rust's landing page : https://www.rust-lang.org/ , or clion's : https://www.jetbrains.com/clion/
They use "you" a lot, and rather than telling "our product has such and such and such feature", say "you can solve this problem thanks to this feature, and this other problem with this other feature".
"With CLion, you can create code that's beautiful and correct at the same time. Potential code issues are identified instantly and fixed as you type! Be sure all the proper changes are handled automatically by CLion.
CLion also performs Data Flow analysis to find out all the cases of the unreachable code, infinite recursion and more."
is more appealing to me than "CLion features a dataflow analyzer that is 47% more efficient than eclipse and can detect 153% more potential bugs (unreachable code, infinite recursion, etc.)".
Thanks to your comments, I'll be paying much more attention to use of the word "you" on product pages from now on :).
As for my objection - my favourite product descriptions follow the pattern of listing concrete features, and concrete problems they're meant to solve. I feel it's because I know the problems I have, I know what the features mean, and I don't trust vendors to be honest about general description. I think (I hope) this could be said about most technical people in technical fields.
The product pages for Rust and CLion essentially enumerate concrete features in prose, and that's why I like them. In CLion's case, this line didn't resonate with me:
> With CLion, you can create code that's beautiful and correct at the same time. Potential code issues are identified instantly and fixed as you type!
... but it got rescued by an attached screenshot, that effectively communicated what kind of issues they're talking about.
> [...] is more appealing to me than "CLion features a dataflow analyzer that is 47% more efficient than eclipse and can detect 153% more potential bugs [...]
Yeah, I don't like that imaginary line too, but that's because "47% better than competition", "153% better than competition" pattern-matches to me to car salesmen bullshit.
Customers at early stages of the purchase cycle are often not aware of the problems a given product solves. They need to be educated about the value of the product by starting from a higher level.
It's only when people are sold on the value of the product that they're interested in learning how the product delivers that benefit and what its features are.
The message has to match the sophistication of the reader.
Not only "regular people", but you too are disproportionally affected by "nicest sounding blurb", and just don't realize it.
Imagine a consultant who offers consulting on using cryptocurrencies as a payment method for your online business. The fees are $250 per hour. You're a paypal user and briefly considered using bitcoins for your online business, but are not sure about it.
Or imagine a physiotherapist who offers a treatment for a very rare (but not life-threatening) condition no traditional medicine could cure. It is rather expensive, but the guy says he can help you, yet you won't find any testimonial on the web because of the rarity of the condition.
But if we're talking food in general, I have a relatively simple algorithm: I try out various price points of any given food category, and then settle on either: 1) for few cases where I care about taste, on the item that tastes best; 2) for everything else, cheapest one that isn't plain disgusting.
So e.g. for soft drinks, I have a strong preference of Pepsi Max > Coca Cola Zero > el cheapo diet cokes, which is based on trying them all out, and which changed over the years (e.g. couple years ago, I used to like one of the cheap brands the best). For cheese, I'll take the cheapest thing you've got that's yellow and is called "Gouda" or "Edam".
Brands are nothing to me beyond a way to distinguish between different tastes.
The implication is that these blurbs are ads preying on the unknowing ;)
Me too. I'd guess most technically minded people will pattern match those two last examples as "company selling bullshit". In contrast, "7-Zip is a file archiver with a high compression ratio" conveys exactly the information I'm looking for.
Gentoo Linux used to have one of these cringe-worthy blurbs. Something about their mascot Larry the Cow and how he found all other distros "the same" but Gentoo was "different" [1]. It was confusing and embarrassing. Now Gentoo's landing page reads "Welcome to Gentoo, a highly flexible, source-based Linux distribution". I know which one is cleaner and easier to understand!
[1] now they seem to have moved it to a hard to find "about" page, right where it belongs: unseen! https://gentoo.org/get-started/about/
“You running more than one app for compressing files? We were too. Someone sent your a file with a new compression format that you don’t recognize? It’s really frustrating.
We realized that most people need a tool they can reliably encode and decide in the right formats. We created 7-zip to be your trusted go to tool for managing all of your file compression needs. It’s free, open source, and developer friendly.
Let us show you how we can help you and your customers.”
That's not a landing page in their sense. It's just a project page for a FOSS project.
Maybe it could have a video commercial even, I envision something with piano music? Two young, awesome looking people in a café on a rainy day.. they exchange a little glance, suddenly the image freezes and distorts, skip 20 years to the future, they have raised 4 kids, it quickly skips through birthdays, school rehearsals, all that stuff, then back to the present, where the tender love only just began to blossom.... and you realize, that's all contained in that simple glance, a lifetime of events and stories. As the 7-zip logo fades in, the camera pulls back from the table they're now sitting at together while staring into each others eyes to the point of going cross eyed, camera pulls further back through a window, and a homeless person sitting outside the café stands up and takes their hat off, to reveal fantastic, full, shimmering hair -- in the last instant of the commercial the viewer realizes: that's Jesus! He has come back, because finally, a product gets the whole mustard seed thing, and the time of healing has begun.
To the author's point about using "you", we could consider two hypothetical headlines for the 7-Zip page:
"7-Zip can compress and decompress just about anything."
"You can compress and decompress just about anything with 7-Zip."
I have to admit that if I had never heard of 7-Zip, the second line would probably be subliminally more effective because it gets me thinking about what I can do with the software, not what some abstract someone can do with it. On the other hand, combine such a headline with a Bootstrap theme and 500-pixel fonts over a giant stock photo, followed by three SVG bullet points, etc, and I'm going instantly into defensive mode--shields up!
4a : matter to be set especially for printing
b : something considered printable or newsworthy [...]
c : text especially of an advertisement