Customers decide if they’re open to working with you within a split second of seeing your homepage. Could you get more leads out of the traffic you’re already getting? Take 15 minutes today and ask 3 people outside your organization to go to your homepage and answer these 3 questions:

• What do we do?
• Who are we for?
• What does one do next?

If you pick people not familiar with your organization, you’ll be able to rate your site’s effectiveness by their answers. Like anything else, there are exceptions. Perhaps your target audience is so narrow that only your specific audience will “get it”. That’s fine, but for 99.9% of us, this exercise provides valuable insight. I guarantee you’ll get a good return on your 15 minute investment.

1. What do we do?

It’s really easy to be “in it” so much that we don’t see anything wrong with the way we communicate what we do. This sorta thing tends to happen in cycles. Every so often, we need to ask questions that challenge our thinking to improve results. Remember “Dead Poets’ Society”? Mr. Keating suggested that we continually look at things in different ways in order to grow.

2. Who are we for?

Is it really clear who your offering is for? Perhaps you have multiple audiences – is it clear to all of them that they are at the right place? For Stoett Industries, this meant changing the presentation drastically to jive with the middle to upper-class home owners.

3. What does one do next?

Is it totally clear what a visitor should do next? It’s it not obvious, you have room to increase leads. Often times, websites give visitors too many possible next steps. This creates the assumption that there’s “more work involved with this site than another”. The number of people who look further depends on their level of interest and availability of “competition”. In short: Make the next step absolutely clear.

walking the walk

We (Effect) recently asked ourselves these questions about our own website. We evolved our offering and wanted to make sure we communicate our approach clearly. The feedback we received was a little surprising. With the focus on the !nsight Lab service, people wondered if we still provided web development and online marketing services. We revised our homepage. (What do you think?)

If you’d like to know what we think of your presentation, just ask.