What Does Your Audience Really Need When They Visit Your Sales Page?
Five years ago, there was a standard formula for how to lay out a sales page. To oversimplify:
- The headline would define the key promise or result of your offer
- Then, you spent a fair amount of time empathizing with your client, sharing assumptions about what they’re struggling with, how they feel about it, why they’re looking for a solution, and what they want to achieve
- Here you’d present why your approach is unique and different
- And then you’d lay out exactly what that approach is (what’s included, deliverables, pricing, etc.)
- Longer sales pages also included: testimonials from past clients, countdown timers, FAQs, quick-glance summaries of the offer… and many did what marketing gurus called “handling objections”
I’m not gonna hate on this entire structure, because I think it actually makes a lot of sense if you consider someone’s path down the marketing funnel, from awareness to consideration to intent to purchase.
I also believe most of this formula can be executed ethically, without taking advantage of someone but meeting them with authenticity and understanding.
(That said, I’ve always been uncomfortable with the “handling objections” advice. It’s giving mob boss vibes.)
But as my team and I re-write service pages for our new site, I’m realizing how this structure assumes we have to lead someone through an entire sales funnel in one sitting.
And actually, when we think about the potential clients for our marketing firm, they’ve already traveled down that funnel a bit on their own time…
- They’re likely to have been referred to us by a mutual acquaintance,
- or they have done a bit of Googling on our company, or
- maybe some Instagram or LinkedIn lurking before contacting us
They’re already in the “intent” phase when they choose to visit this service page, so we don’t have to educate them about why they might hire us or push them to imagine the possibilities of working together.
Instead of crafting long-form sales pages that reassure our clients they’re in the right place, we’re going to trust they already know they are!
As such, our new sales pages will follow a tighter structure:
- Goal: overall outcome of our service
- Brief case study: a short story about a client relationship to demonstrate where our clients typically are when they come to us & what we can achieve together
- Service: our scope of work & deliverables
Of course, we’ll throw in additional case studies, where appropriate, and client testimonials, because it’s helpful to back up our work with the reviews of others…
I think what we’re crafting for the new site is a much better reflection of the type of audience we’re attracting to our firm — small business owners and organizations that already understand the value of digital marketing. They already want to hire someonefor this work, so it’s more about relaying our credibility and detailing our approach than persuading them to please consider our solution as an option.
I’m eager to share these pages with you when we re-launch our site.
For now, I’ll ask you to consider: what does your audience really need when they visit your sales or service pages? Do they require education? Empathy? Facts & figures? All the above?