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.

Five Seductive Pick-Up Lines That Leave Your Visitors Wanting More

For many of your website’s visitors, the page that will greet them when they first arrive on the site is your homepage – and the section of your homepage that is likely to draw their attention upon arrival is the billboard.

Similar to roadside billboards that are meant to attract the attention of passing motorists and promote some company or service, homepage billboards are meant to grab the attention of a website visitor, welcome them to the site and convey some important message to them, and then send them forward to other content or actions within that site.

Take a look at just about any website today and you will see this “billboard” area. It is typically presented as a large, visually rich display that features striking imagery and/or powerful typography, important messages, and a subsequent call-to-action. Additionally, these messages can also be animated in some way to add an element of motion to the site and to allow you to use the billboard to display more than on message on your homepage.

While the purpose of the billboard is nearly identical on all websites, the way this section is executed varies from site to site. In this article, we will take a look at a few popular approaches to the website billboard.

1. Allow me to introduce myself.

Probably the most common billboard approach is what I call the “here’s who we are and what we do” technique. In these examples, the billboard message is all about your company.

Similar to an elevator pitch, this billboard approach quickly introduces your company and summarizes what you do. With attention spans online being as short as they are (many experts say that website visitors will scan a page and make a decision of what to do next, including leaving the site altogether, in as little as 3 seconds), this approach can be an effective way to get your message or value proposition across in a succinct fashion. If that message resonates with your visitors, you then have an opportunity to continue the conversation by driving them deeper into the website to learn more about what you have teased in the billboard message. You could provide links to read more about your services, products, or even just the company or organization itself.

A few examples of the “here’s who we are and what we do” method are below:

Studio1 Architects

This site uses very large images of the firm’s work (the images animate and multiple photos fade in and out over time), coupled with an opening message that explains what they do and a link to view their portfolio: http://studio1architects.com

AF Technology Solutions

This site’s concise billboard message summarizes what the company does (business and technology solutions) and who their audience is (small to medium businesses) and includes a link to learn more about their services: http://af-techsolutions.com

Raw Seafoods

This company uses their billboard to highlight their value proposition and then link visitors over to a page detailing what sets their products and services apart from their competition: http://www.rawseafoods.com

2. What can I do for you?

While the “here’s who we are and what we do” approach is the most common way to utilize a billboard’s messaging, there is a downside to that tactic – it focuses solely on the company or organization and not on the audience they serve. As a variation to that approach, you can consider the “how may we help you?” method.

With the “how may we help you?” technique, the messaging focuses on the website’s audience, not the company that owns the website. Instead of being about that company, their products, or services, it instead looks to its users and illustrates about how that company can help them. The focus turns from “us” to “you”.

A few examples of the “how may we help you?” variation are below:

2-1-1 RI

This not-for-profit site run by the United Way does not use any imagery in its billboard. It instead turns to bold colors and large typography to display its message – “Find Help Now”. The billboard does not explain what the organization does (that content is below the billboard). Instead, the focus here is on the user and the action is all about getting them the help they need by answering two simple questions (what do you need and where do you need it) or by clicking on a popular category: http://www.211ri.org

RIHCA

This site uses animated photos alongside a large message to attract their audience’s attention and address their main need – “Do you need healthcare?” The call to action is a simple and obvious button to “Get Started”: http://www.rihca.org

3. Tell me more about yourself.

Similar to the “how may we help you?” method, the “tell us who you are” approach speaks directly to your audience, but it does so in such a way so that it can ask that audience a specific question about who that audience is. The best example of this is a website that requires visitors to self-segment themselves.

Most websites have more than one audience and oftentimes there is different content on your website that is intended for these specific audiences. Having visitors “choose their path” by self-segmenting early on is one way you can drive them to content that is relevant for them, without worrying that they will have to get through pages that may not be necessary for them to see.

A few examples of self-segmentation on websites are below:

Traveler Beer Company

Any beer or liquor company will present this “Are You 21+?” message on their opening page to require that visitors confirm that they are of drinking age before entering the site. This is a form of self-segmentation: http://travelerbeer.com

Cosmed Group

This company knows that their customers fall into one of two groups – those looking for the pasteurization services that they offer or those who want to buy the equipment to do it themselves. Therefore, they present these two paths (looking for services vs. looking for products) in their billboard so that visitors can self-segment based on their needs: http://cosmedgroup.com

4. Let’s get personal.

Taking self-segmentation a step further are sites that already know who you are. These are sites that you subscribe to or have a user account on. Based on your preference or previous activity on the site, the content that is displayed is deemed to be most relevant to your needs.

The most prominent example of this method is Amazon.com. Visit the Amazon homepage and, as long as you are logged in, the products that you see will be based on your previous browsing or purchase history.

Another good example would be eBay. That site will show you results from searches you have conducted in the past in an attempt to present you with new auction items that you would be interested in.

Many news sites work in this way as well. Content that is most relevant for you, based on your preferences or geographic location, will be presented to you up front to try to best tailor your site experience to you.

One note here is that in these examples, Amazon, eBay, and the typical news site, do not present this information in a true, billboard-style fashion - but the same principal of filtering content based on a users’ preference or past behaviors on the site could also be applied to a billboard area.

5. What’s new?

The final approach we will look at in this article is the “latest news and announcements” method. This approach ensures that your site’s billboard is continually updated with fresh content. It displays current promotions, latest news, or important announcements (and usually a link to read more about that content) instead of general marketing messages.
The value of this approach is in the aforementioned freshness it brings to your content and your display. The downside is that it requires you to be publishing that new content on a pretty regular basis and you need to make a commitment to doing so.

If your organization is already producing relevant press releases or running promotions, then this method may be a great fit for you.

A few examples of this method are below:

Fame Foundry

This approach is exactly what we do on our homepage. Each month, our latest articles are highlighted in our animated billboard.

Honey Dew Donuts

Current promotions and seasonal menu items are featured in this site’s animated billboard. Those messages align with other marketing the company is doing - including print, radio, and television, to ensure that the latest content is always presented front and center: http://honeydewdonuts.com

Marvel

Upcoming films, new comics, and other announcements are the focus of Marvel’s homepage billboard: http://marvel.com

Mix and match

These billboard techniques are not mutually exclusive – you can mix and match them as you see fit. For instance, you may highlight a current promotion or announcement in your billboard, but then allow it to animate to a second and third and fourth, etc. message that is more generic – like the “here’s who we are and what we do” approach.

With so much space on your homepage being given over to the billboard’s display and understanding that the use of striking images, large typography, and animated messages will undoubtedly draw the focus of your visitors, it is important to make sure that the approach you choose for your billboard is the right choice for your business. Consult with your web design and development team to determine which approach, or which combination of different approaches, will best fit your overall goals and needs.