Your Website’s Intro Text

The intro text on your site needs to immediately capture people’s attention and give them a reason to read more. It shouldn’t be a book, more like a sentence or two that pulls them in. The majority of visitors will take a quick look at your site and go elsewhere. If you use Google Analytics, this is called your “Bounce Rate”, i.e., what percentage of people go to your home page and quickly bounce away from it. How to you grab visitors and get them to stay? Simple, you speak directly to their core needs and major concerns. Here’s how you do that…

Building a Relationship with a Visitor

In order to build credibility through the text on your website, you need to know who you are talking to. This is marketing 101 – who is your customer? How old are they? Do they skew towards male or female? Next, you need to know what their core needs are. Low price is rarely a core need, so in general you should stay away from saying that you are less expensive.

Core needs include saving time, saving money, reducing pain, feeling more secure, feeling happier, more successful, etc. These are the primary reasons that people buy your product and you need to understand what core needs your product or service satisfies. One core need that most people have is to feel understood. If you speak directly to your audience’s core needs, they will feel understood, or “gotten” by you. A visitor that feels gotten is one that will want to buy from you.

For example, if you sell shoes, you are probably meeting the core need of comfort, or possibly to feel attractive. However, if you sell shoes that have better arch support, you might also be addressing the core need of reducing pain. When you write the copy for your site, talk directly to your visitor rather than talking in the third person. It’s much more powerful to say, “our shoes are more comfortable and will make you look great” than to say “our shoes make people feel more comfortable and make them look great.”

Address your visitor’s core needs and speak directly to them with a clear message and you will increase your credibility with your visitors and turn more of them into customers.