After laboring endlessly over your website design, spending countless hours carefully understanding your customer persona and carefully selecting keywords that will drive SEO to alert your target that you exist — the moment of truth arrives. A viewer, who you hope will become a prospect, clicks on your link and arrives on your landing page. What kind of experience they have in the first 5 – 15 seconds will likely determine whether they ever go any further.
“What?!? All that work will be judged in 15 seconds? That’s all the time I get to tell my story?!?”
Yes. But guess what, this is not new. As business people we have always had an incredibly narrow window to make a first impression with a prospective customer of client. Many experts say that a potential employer (or customer) forms an initial impression of a candidate within the first ten seconds of seeing them. Sometimes before the person even opens their mouth. And those first impressions are only altered in a remarkably small percentage of instances.
“So what’s all that got to do with my landing page and website design?”
Your landing page is the digital equivalent of that first impression. Assuming you get past the initial visual inspection, you still have a very short while to engage the prospect with a clear understanding of your business proposition and what it will do to make them more successful. In the analog world this is called your “elevator pitch”. The idea is to write a script in your head that you could deliver in a five story elevator ride — one that would leave a stranger with a clear idea of who you are, what you do and why it might be beneficial to them.
One exercise used to create the elevator pitch is to write down your story on a 3×5 index card. And only one thought or bridge phrase per line on the card — NO CHEATING. (OK, you might have to go to the office supply store to buy index cards — you probably don’t use them any more. But it will be a dollar well-spent.)
Still interested in knowing what all that has to do with your landing page? Check out this article from Target Internet to find out.