Cleveland’s recent sprint back toward economic power has sprung from a somewhat unexpected place: education. The “Ed and Med” district, as it’s known, is leading the city back to being a monetary powerhouse because people there are learning, and they’re learning because Cleveland has a great educational system in place.
Like Cleveland, web design can benefit from a good understanding of how to educate — but where Cleveland has universities, the Internet has landing pages. Every landing page has to do the job of educating the people who read it, and if you can’t do it efficiently, you’re going to lose business.
At the minimum, your landing page has to:
- Capture a surfer’s interest in the first few seconds that they glance at the page.
- Educate the surfer about your Unique Selling Proposition in an attractive way.
- Motivate the surfer to perform whatever business action you need them to take in order to transact with them.
Capturing Interest
The entire field of web design — as opposed to web coding, which is merely typing HTML — is devoted to communicating using all of the elements of a web page. A great web designer can tell a surfer what a website is for before they read any text.
Surfers have short attention spans, and if they don’t ‘click’ with your website within the first few seconds, they’re not going to click on your website to learn more or transact with you. The best way to get that ‘click’ and the subsequent clicks is to use powerful graphical images and short, read-at-a-glance headlines to capture the surfer’s interest in mere moments.
Educating About Your Business
Once you’ve sunk your hook, it’s time to go about the business of educating your customers. The more complex your product or service, the more difficult your process and the more critical it becomes to do it properly — and simply. If you waste a single pixel talking about your business, goals, or sheer awesomeness, you’re doing it wrong.
Instead, you should be answering exactly one question: what’s in it for them? Why should they give one iota of their time and money to you? The less words (and concepts) you can use to answer that question effectively, the better off you are. The Pareto Principle applies in full force here.
Motivate Them To Take Action
Once your customer understands why giving you money is going to improve their life, you’ve got a very small window to convince them to do so before they think twice and quite possibly disappear forever. Now is not the time to mince words: tell them outright exactly what you want them to do next. At that point, you’ve gotten them hooked, given them a good reason to want to give you money, and told them how to do it — anything else, at this point, really is just details.
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