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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The New Ice Age: Lessons Learned from the ALS Challenge for Achieving Viral Marketing Success

If you have been online in the past few weeks, you have undoubtedly come across the viral phenomenon that is the “Ice Bucket Challenge”. Videos of people dumping buckets of ice-cold water on themselves, recording the video and posting to social media, and then nominating others to do the same, has taken the Internet by storm. Anyone who refuses to accept the challenge is asked to make a donation to the ALS charity of their choice, and the viral sensation as a whole has also raised significant awareness for ALS, which is often called Lou Gehrig’s disease. Fire up your social media site of choice and you are bound to see video after video of your friends and contacts dousing themselves in ice-cold H20. Even if you are not a big social media user, you have likely seen information on this freezing cold phenomenon as news outlets have gleefully reported on, and posted videos of, celebrities from the worlds of sports, entertainment, business, and more participating in the fun. A recent video even had actor Vin Diesel nominate Russian president Vladimir Putin to take the challenge! It seems as if everyone has happily dumped a bucket of water on their head for charity and good fun. The success of this campaign, which has raised millions of dollars, as well as that aforementioned awareness, for the ALS Association, is an interesting case study in the concept of “viral marketing”. In this article, we will take a look at what this Ice Bucket Challenge can teach us about this type of potentially powerful marketing.

You never know what will go viral.

The concept of the Ice Bucket Challenge is pretty simple. You film yourself doing something silly (and somewhat uncomfortable) and you challenge others you know to do the same. Pretty straightforward – so what makes this such a craze? What does this campaign have that so many other campaigns that were hoping to “go viral” were missing? The truth may actually just be dumb luck, because the reality is that you never know what will find an audience and go viral. Many organizations that try to initiate a viral campaign try many different ideas hoping that they will strike gold with one. They do this because they know that even one viral sensation can be all they need to meet their goals, whether that goal is to raise awareness for a cause like the ALA Association is doing, or to just draw massive attention to a business or a product, similar to what Burger King did many years ago (and what they are trying to do again) with their Subservient Chicken campaign. Viral marketing is really a roll of the dice, but there are some things that can tip the odds in your favor. We can see some of these things at play here in the Ice Bucket Challenge, including the presence of celebrities.

Celebrities sell.

The Ice Bucket challenge has now been taken by celebrities including Bill Gates, Ben Affleck, Justin Timberlake, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Jimmy Fallon, Oprah Winfrey, and Charlie Sheen (who mixed it up by dumping cold hard cash on his head instead of cold water – although he promised to donate all that cash to the ALS Association). The participation of celebrities, who then in turn nominate other celebrities, is absolutely one of the reasons why this Ice Bucket Challenge has blown up the way that it has. Their participation is what has driven news outlets to cover the videos, which prompts others to share those videos on social media. This in turn introduces the campaign to more people, who then do the challenge as well and nominate others. This is the very definition of “going viral”, and these celebs are helping to fuel that success! Compare the Ice Bucket Challenge to another “video for a good cause” from some years back – the Pink Glove Dance. Created by Providence St. Vincent Medical Center in Portland, Oregon, this video of medical staff dancing to raise awareness for breast cancer has been watched almost 14 million times on YouTube. That is amazing by any standard. If you asked any company if they would take 14 million views for one of their online videos and the answer, I am sure, would be a resounding “YES!”. Still, as popular as that video was, it pales in comparison to the reach that this Ice Bucket Challenge has found, largely because of that aforementioned celebrity involvement. So if celebrities can make your viral campaign, how do you go about getting them involved? Well, that’s the trick, you really can’t get them involved, it just has to happen! This is an important factor to realize, because if you are looking at the success of a viral campaign like the Ice Bucket Challenge and thinking, “How can we do something similar”, you need to realize that there is a “lightning in a bottle” aspect to what is happening here. You could do something identical and not find that audience that pushes it to this level. Yes, celebrities can make your viral campaign, but counting on them to participate is not a sound marketing strategy!

There is value in the ridiculous

One of the other factors that has contributed to the success of this campaign is the sheer ridiculousness of the act of dumping cold water on yourself. The Internet loves spectacle and the Ice Bucket Challenge delivers on that count! A successful viral campaign is often over the top and ridiculous. If you are considering trying you hand at a viral campaign, think outside the box and be willing to get a little crazy. When it comes to viral marketing, conservative rarely succeeds.

There is value in helping others.

Another factor helping fuel the success of the Ice Bucket challenge is that all of this silliness is for a great cause. While a viral campaign to promote a company or product may take off, one that is designed to help others has something that those others do not – good will. Doing good for others makes people feel good too. That is a powerful force that you can take advantage of if your viral campaign is for a good cause. With the Ice Bucket Challenge, many of the people who took the challenge also decided to donate to the cause. This combination of silliness and charity is something that has helped make this campaign what is has become.

Make it easy to participate.

Many viral campaigns require other people to get involved. The Ice Bucket Challenge has succeeded because so many people, celebs and normal folk alike, have recorded a video and posted it for the world to see. The key to this audience participation is making it easy to do! Take the example of the Pink Glove Dance again. After that initial video went viral, many other organizations recorded their own Pink Glove Dance videos, but none of them ever came close to matching the success of the original. One of the reasons is because there was not the massive flood of videos that we see happening with the Ice Bucket Challenge. This is absolutely because to the level of effort required to produce one of those dance videos, which includes a cast of dancers, music, editing, etc. Compare that to the Ice Bucket video, which only requires a cell phone camera and a bucket of ice water! By making it easy to join in the fun, the Ice Bucket Challenge has become the viral sensation that we see online now. If the success of your campaign requires others to get involved, make sure that the barrier to them doing so is as small as possible!

In summary

Viral marketing campaigns can raise incredible awareness for your organization, but there is never a guarantee that a campaign will achieve any kind of success, much less the massive reach that we are seeing with the Ice Bucket Challenge. Being willing to take a chance on a potentially viral idea is great and I encourage you to explore those ideas, but you also need to make sure that your entire online strategy does not center on a viral campaign. A well-rounded strategy that may include a viral campaign as one of the pieces, but which also embraces other initiatives as well (search engine ads, email marketing, content marketing/blogging, etc.) is how you will want to proceed. That way, if the viral campaign explodes, then you have the exposure you wanted, but if it fizzles, at least you have other initiatives working towards your online success.

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