Listing "customer personas" instead of features improved our CTR by 200%
brandregard.com
brandregard.com
I am obviously not the target market here, but why do you think this works?
At that point the features don't matter. They understand your problem so well, that odds are they now how to fix it - most potential customers with problems figure someone else knows something they don't.
In fact, the target customer is likely to be more receptive to not needing a particular feature if they are convinced that you understand the problem.
I can't speak for Zak but this is certainly not true for me and many others.
If I can't find out what you actually offer, after selling me a nice story about solving my problems, I walk away. It's such a frustrating experience that I assume doing business with them will be just as frustrating so I don't bother contacting them with my questions.
I had this happen recently, finding out later that they did almost exactly what I was looking for... and it was a technical product. I can respect that they wanted to market primary to non-technical types but if I can't get the info anywhere on your site, I'm not interested.
People like you, or rather customers like you (and me) are usually the biggest pain in that ass for a company. You not being interested is a much larger problem for you than it is for them. I'm not being insulting, but I am serious.
If you are technical enough to read HackerNews, you are probably technical enough in your chosen domain to write the software yourself, or a least come very close to doing so. That means you're also more than likely to push the envelope, demand excellence and try to make the software do something that 99% of the user don't do. While this can sometimes be beneficial, when you have a targeted market it is often just very loud noise.
People like you and I tend to be early adopters, and while we are critical for determining market fit, we tend to be a giant pain in the ass once that fit has been found, because most often we are not it.
It all comes down to understanding that you are not the target market, even if it's still true that you would have use for the product.
My comment when sharing this link to others:
"The premise is that while features are needed for your product to function in a specific way, you are selling the benefits of using this product and not the features. Focusing on the benefits of use, is fundamentally an emotional appeal."
Thoughts:
If you see the emotional appeal as verifying the benefits of the features, it makes sense. If you see it as them trying to sell you something by using emotion and hiding the features, it won't. I think the best way is a balance of the two where you show the features as linked to emotional appeal. It hits both groups well.
There was an interesting article on HBR about research Clayton innovator's-dilemma Christensen was doing into customer segmentation vs. a job-to-be-done approach (http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6496.html).
Once someone clicks on a link that calls out to them as a customer, you need to tell them pretty quickly what you can do and how you can do, i.e. what job you can help them do.
On brandregard.com we simply moved the discussion about features down one level, behind a customer segment link. We also discuss features in length below the fold on the landing page.
This post is a great example of how applying typical established marketing knowledge to a product presentation can improve things a lot.
It's well known that presenting benefits, use cases and personas is a more successful approach than presenting features and screenshots. - For most users - I thought every A/B test in the world had already proven that.
And yet we have all these startups out there presenting nothing but features. I think presenting features might probably work better for techies and more tech-savy people, but for the great majority stuff like this will always work better.
Great job. Iceland ftw!
I'd be interested to hear about other people's experiments both with A/B tests and customer segmentation.
You will also get a much better indication on the type of audience your site is attracting, enabling you to tailor content and better position your offering.
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Like I implied, human language is ambiguous.
I like how Foursquare appeal to their customer personas, "merchants", "brands", "developers", without making it too obvious but still very findable.
Yes, and that is itself a huge benefit. If going this route forces you to think about who will use your product (hint: it's not "everybody!") then it's a net win for everyone involved. Understanding your customer is key to building a useful product.
The personas work better. Proof is in the numbers.