Content Marketing Today

What Do You Tell Your Web Visitors About You in their First Second on Your Site?

Why That Very First Impression is Vital to Your Content Marketing Strategy

Your website may be chock full of terrific content that is both relevant and compelling to your ideal target customers. But, you won’t have a chance to share that content unless you communicate  instantaneously that you provide the precise solutions they are desperately seeking.

Your visitors are the potential customers for whom you have developed your content.  But those visitors won’t root around in the hope of buried treasure. They have neither the time nor the inclination to guess whether you understand their needs and how you can help them.  That’s why you have to engage them them immediately on their arrival on your site.

First Impressions are Important in Person, But Life or Death on the Web

You may make a misstep when you meet someone if you are a bit slow off the mark,  lack an elevator speech or take a business fashion risk. You can often recover from that less than stellar first impression because your prospect will give you more than one second to communicate understanding and value before moving on to another solution provider. 

Unfortunately, you won’t get away with an imperfect first impression on the web. You have only that single second to communicate your relevance to your visitors verbally and visually . If you blow it, they’re racing off to your competition.

On the other hand, if you get it just right, they will almost certainly stay for another 5 seconds to better understand how you can help them. Even better, there is a darned good chance that they’ll hang out even longer to investigate how they can benefit in obvious ways from the information you provide.

Keeping your prospects on your site long enough–with just the right combination of verbal and visual content–enables you to earn their trust. Winning that trust is the essential first step in winning their business.

Want to know how you’re doing with first impressions on your website?

Gather an informal user group and ask them what your site says to them in one second…in five seconds…in two minutes. You may not like what you hear, but that feedback will put you on track to reshape your home page so that those same users grasp exactly the right message when you ask them back. 

I should confess that I just went through this very exercise with a preliminary web design for a good client. The feedback was painful, but it will enable us to reshape our verbal and visual components so that we communicate exactly what our prospects need to know.

Thanks to Kristina Halverson of Brain Traffic for the content pyramid concept (and for a host of other ideas from the Content Strategy Forum in Paris).  If she doesn’t have a fan club, I’d like to start one. She is sensational. Visit her site and buy her book.