Insider Secrets to Killer Website Content: All About Your About Page

As important as good website design is, let’s face it, it’s not what brings visitors to your site. They come for the content, and if that content is sufficiently compelling, then they’ll take the action you desire, whether that’s making a purchase, completing a registration form or even just picking up the phone to contact you for more information. In short, the success of your website begins and ends with quality content.

That’s why in this series of articles – Insider Secrets to Killer Website Content – we’re taking a look at types of content that are common to many websites and exploring ways that they can be redesigned and improved. This second installment addresses a ubiquitous website presence – the “About Us” page.

The ever-present, often-overlooked “About Us” page

You would be hard pressed to find a website that does not have an “About Us” page of some sort. It may be called “Our Company”, “Who We Are” or some other variation on this theme, but in the end, these are all pages focused on telling the visitor about the company to whom the website belongs.

The problem is that these pages are typically as boring as they are commonplace. They generally contain little more than some basic facts about the company – perhaps an abbreviated history of the organization, some details about what the company does or a mission statement.

This information may be necessary – after all, it is your company’s website, so it should contain some high-level, general information about your company. Still, your site – and your “About Us” page – can also contain more than just the facts, ma’am.

A lack of depth

The chief problem with the typical “About Us” page is not that the information it contains is bad in and of itself; it’s that it lacks the depth necessary to play a role in advancing your visitors toward conversion.

Compounding this problem is that “About Us” pages, once written, are rarely ever rewritten. During a redesign process, a website’s content is audited and overhauled, but  if the basic facts about the company haven’t changed significantly, the content of the “About Us” page is usually just moved over to the new site with little to no change made at all. As a result, factually accurate but somewhat boring “About Us” content often persists stubbornly through redesign after redesign.

Your company’s history and the services it offers are certainly important information to share, but there’s so much more that truly defines your company, including its unique personality.

Bringing personality into play

Neither the factual history of your company nor your self-proclaimed statement that you “provide outstanding customer service” will set you apart from your competitors, all of whom are saying exactly the same thing, likely in almost exactly the same words. However, what will set you apart is personality.

Every company has a personality. It is the unique product of your people, your company culture and your interactions with your customers. I often find that a company’s personality is energetic and fun when they engage with customers in the offline world, but their online presence captures none of this energy. Instead, the only cards they show are the typical vanilla facts about the company itself. This is what we can change by bringing that offline personality and the particulars of how your company engages in the physical world into the digital space.

Examples of personality

Let’s take a look at a few great examples of websites that are infused through and through with personality all the way down to the “About Us” page, starting with e-tail giant Zappos.com.

Zappos’ “About” page is all about the company’s culture. Yes, the history of the company and their leadership team are there as well, but the main focus of this section is their culture, including images of holiday celebrations and videos of their people. In perusing this content, you get a much better sense of who they are than you would by reading a a mission statement, a brief company history and a bulleted list of achievements and awards.

Another example of a website permeated with personality is Northfield Savings Bank. The sense of fun that they’ve built into their brand is an unexpected but delightful surprise, since banking isn’t generally synonymous with fun. Still, Northfield pulls it off on their website. Starting with the logo, which features a flying pig, they carry this theme through their entire site, turning the popular phrase “when pigs fly” into a rallying cry for how they go above and beyond in serving their customers. These stories are told on a subpage of their “About” section as part of their “Pig Stories” video series.

It’s not all fun and games

Personality doesn’t have to be all about fun, holiday costumes or flying pigs. For many brands, fun would be an inappropriate trait – but that doesn’t mean you can’t display a personality.

Perhaps you are a not‐for‐profit organization that provides assistance to those in need in your community. Fun may not fit into your brand, but passion likely will. You can show that passion by using your “About Us” page or section to detail the impact your organization has had, profile the lives it has touched and convey the drive that you have to continue to do more.

Instead of simple facts and figures, personality will provide a well‐rounded, distinctive look at who your company or organization really is. That will be what sets you apart from your online competitors and their typical, boring “About Us” pages.

The more the merrier: Adding team bios

If adding unique personality to your company’s “About Us” page can help differentiate your organization, then adding individual bio pages for your employees can take this to the next level.

Granted, this approach is not a fit for everyone. A massive organization with thousands of employees obviously cannot have a page on their website for every individual. In these cases, the bio pages may be limited to board members or senior-level executives. For smaller organizations, however, it is certainly possible to feature each team member individually, and there is real benefit in doing so.

About a year ago, my company redesigned our website. During this process, we made the decision to include a section for “Our People” and give every employee a bio page of their own. We also decided to allow the unique personalities of those individual employees to shine through on their pages. Rather than using the professional headshots you would find on LinkedIn or in press releases, we encouraged our employees to submit photos of themselves that showed them outside the office environment. We received snaps of our team members atop mountains and glaciers, competing in races of one kind or another, enjoying vacations, feeding animals or just being silly and having fun. Taken as a whole, the photos show the variety of personalities and passions that make up our team.

For the bios, we included a short professional history, but we also asked our staff to share their hobbies, talents and an interesting or unusual story about themselves. Like the photos that accompany these bios, the stories and profiles we created reveal an incredible sense of diversity amongst our team.

What our customers are saying

Adding these individual bio pages on our website was a leap of faith for us. We were unsure how our clients and prospective clients would respond to this type of content. However, I am happy to report that our fears were unfounded, as the response has been overwhelmingly positive.

A number of our existing clients have remarked how they enjoy being able to see a picture of a team member before they are scheduled to speak or meet with that person. They also like to know a little something about them outside of their professional work. In more than one case, a customer and one of our team members have discovered shared hobbies or interests thanks to that team member’s bio page. This common interest has allowed them to engage in discussion and begin to foster a relationship that extends beyond the work they are paying us to do for them.

In terms of prospective clients, the feedback has been positive as well. In fact, we recently closed a deal where the client told us they hired us because of our bio pages. That client was wary about hiring a technology firm, fearing that we would only speak in techno‐babble and industry jargon and be on a different wavelength than their company. Seeing our interests outside the office, they immediately felt reassured that they could relate to us – a feeling they didn’t get when they looked at the websites of our competitors.

That’s a big win for personality if you ask me!

The argument against

The argument that I hear most frequently against adding personality to company or team bios is that it may turn some customers off and drive them away from your business. We worried about this ourselves when we decided to add the individual bio pages to our site.

It is true that a unique personality could drive some potential business away. But the better question is: should you really care? If you present your company’s true personality on your website, and that personality turns someone away, would you really have wanted to do business with them in the first place?

Yes, presenting a personality that is more than a safe buttoned-up suit-and-tie approach may turn some business away, but the reverse also holds true. The personality you reveal may very well be the deciding factor that sets your company apart in a  sea of sameness and actually attracts clients that may otherwise have passed you over – exactly as it did in the example I cited above. Had we not put our personality out there, we would not have won that business.

Finding the right fit

No one wants to turn business away, but the reality is that not every potential client will be compatible with the way you operate. Finding the right fit for your company is how you can achieve success in both the short and long term – because even if you do initially win over a company that isn’t truly a good fit for you, they are unlikely to stick around for long.

Finding the right fit allows you to build a relationship that may start with one job but grows stronger and deeper over time to create long‐term engagements and partnerships that can help drive success long after that first project becomes a distant memory. One of the ways to find this right fit is to always remain true to who your company is and not be afraid to let your personality shine through for all the world to see.

You’re not done yet

Finding ways to take “About Us” content from the typical company facts and figures to something that will differentiate your company is just one example of how rethinking content can make your website a more powerful conversion engine. Subsequent entries in this series will explore other common elements of website content that can be improved to bring more value to your visitors and greater returns for your business.

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Deconstructing the Viral Hashtag

Pick your platform — whether it’s print advertising, video, Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook or Twitter – hashtags have overtaken them all. Handy, catchy and often irreverent, hashtags are quickly becoming a mainstay of modern marketing. Like every aspect of marketing, though, some brands are more adept than others at creating hashtags that drive awareness and engage the public. As a marketing tool, hashtags can be a bit of an enigma. Many times the best ones are spontaneous and random. They have an incredibly short lifespan, and there’s no way to control them once they’re out there. So what exactly makes one hashtag succeed wildly while another one plummets into instant obscurity? Why are some hashtags so memorable and others imminently forgettable? The short answer: The most effective hashtags appeal to a wide range of people because they key into the human psyche in a powerful way. Let’s deconstruct a few of the most viral and memorable hashtag campaigns of the past few years and uncover the secrets of their success:

The appeal of social currency: #firstworldproblems

The nonprofit organization Water is Life (http://www.waterislife.com) was looking for a way to raise money to supply clean water to villages in developing countries. And they hit on an innovative way to do it, with a video and print campaign that capitalized on the popularity of the existing hashtag #firstworldproblems by juxtaposing the perceived problems of Americans against the all-too-real struggles experienced by those in less fortunate nations around the world. In the documentary-style video, complaints from actual #firstworldproblems tweets – including “I hate it when I go to the bathroom and forget my phone” and “My son got the wrong toy in his Happy Meal” – are read aloud by impoverished Haitian families. The stark contrast in conditions really struck a chord with viewers, who discovered newfound perspective on just how lucky they are to have such superficial issues. The campaign took off, with the video drawing a million views in just four days and response that generated enough donations to supply clean water to impoverished communities for a million days, according to Water is Life. The psychological appeal of this campaign and its signature hashtag is an interesting one. It leverages the natural human desire to accumulate social currency — to appear generous or to “look good” to our peers — to drive people to perform acts of generosity they might otherwise not consider. By poking a bit of gentle fun at the public while educating them to issues of real concern, Water is Life created a tidal wave of awareness and action.

The appeal of emotion: #SFBatKid

There’s no doubt about it: people share content that inspires strong emotions, and the BatKid story was one of the most emotionally appealing stories of 2013. The campaign, which was spearheaded by the Make-A-Wish Foundation, reached out to the city of San Francisco to help make a little boy’s dream come true. And five-year-old Miles Scott, who is currently in remission from life-threatening leukemia, got his dream — and then some. Powered by the Twitter handle #SFBatKid, the Make-A-Wish Foundation originally hoped to attract 200 volunteers in their effort to help Miles become Batman for a day. But the story and the hashtag caught fire, and the foundation was inundated by responses from as far away as Norway and Australia. About 10,000 San Franciscans turned out to watch as BatKid saved them from several dastardly villains. Even the mayor got into the act, giving Miles the key to the city as thousands of spectators watched from the steps of City Hall. It’s important to note that although this could have been framed as a sad story, it wasn’t. Sadness evokes a low-energy response that rarely results in action. Instead, the uplifting #SFBatKid campaign inspired a whole city to act by appealing to the most positive human emotion: hope.

The appeal of humor: #tweetfromtheseat

Who knew toilet paper could be so funny? In a cleverly designed campaign, Charmin managed to get people laughing in and out of the bathroom by transforming a taboo behavior into an ongoing conversation with their playful #tweetfromtheseat. With a little wink and some witty repartee, Charmin’s #tweetfromtheseat campaign incorporates current events and other brands into their Twitter feed — and the public loves it. As a result, they’ve turned a mundane household product into something special and built a huge, highly engaged following at the same time. It’s truly an inspired campaign, with an appeal that’s simple but nevertheless effective. After all, people do love potty humor.

The dual appeal of practical value and social proof: #40dollars

Talk about the power of a tweet: the Obama White House used the hashtag #40dollars to great effect to lobby for an extension on the payroll tax cut. The campaign began in February 2012 when the President tweeted “Taxes will go up for 160 million Americans by the end of this month if Congress doesn’t act. What does #40dollars a paycheck mean to you?” People all over the country responded — and a Congress infamous for not passing legislation was convinced to extend the tax cuts for the rest of the year. The #40dollars hashtag worked on two different levels: It inspired a response from Twitter users because it asked them to consider something of practical and personal value — what would an extra $40 mean to them? And it inspired action from Congress because humans are wired to respond to social proof. In other words, people embrace an idea or an action more easily when they see others agreeing with it.

#thebottomline

Even hashtags that seem to be completely spontaneous — and lucky at that — are often the result of some serious planning. (Check out Oreo’s #dunkinthedark Super Bowl tweet for a great example.) If your business is looking to leverage the power of hashtags to create a lasting impression, you can use these notable success stories as your model. Spend some time strategizing. Think about what type of appeal will work best for your brand, and make a deliberate effort to tap into it. Be thoughtful, be creative and be daring! If you can hit the right notes, you’ll not only be the brand of the moment but the one that people will be talking about for weeks, months and even years to come.

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