Gone in Six Seconds: How to Keep Your Audience from Speeding Away

We all know startup founders don’t have a lot of spare time.  While wearing many hats and juggling a seemingly endless to do list, important areas of focus can unintentionally fall very quickly to the bottom of the list.  One of those common areas is your website.  While you’re likely busying yourself on customer acquisition activities—nurturing your prospects, attending networking events—taking the time to create a well-thought out website (and especially a homepage) can bring in some of those leads your team has been chasing.  But without the time or resources to devote to full-time web development, there are still things you can do right now to keep those new visitors on your site longer and engage them with the contents of what your company has to offer.

Simple, Clean Design

You’ve seen those websites before – the ones with the neon textured backgrounds, animation on every corner, and annoying pop-up windows.  Don’t be that website.  A simple, clean design is not only modern and professional looking, but it keeps your visitors focused on what you have to say.  And with an average of 10 seconds or less to grab a visitor’s attention, you can’t afford the time to create distractions.  Here are some quick tips for creating a simple design:

• Choose a simple color scheme mixed with neutrals that matches your logo
• Use high-res photographs and images to add visual interest 
• Keep your homepage text short and sweet.  Save your long company and product descriptions for your subpages. 

Engaging User Experience

Your website isn’t just a place to put every piece of information about your startup.  If you want your visitors to stay a while and take a look around, you’ve got to give them something to do.  Creating an engaging user experience will increase the probability that your visitors will stay longer, learn more about your company, and maybe even sign up for one of your offers. Here are some quick tips to engage your users:

• Place “calls to action”, otherwise known as buttons or links that a user can click on to get more information, throughout your website, and especially on your homepage.
• Keep your most important information above the fold (what the user can see before they start scrolling down the page).  
• Engage your visitors with rich media. Offer a product video or a webinar.

Clear Messaging

Creating a clear and compelling message for your target audience is often the most challenging and arguably the most important piece to a great website.  When trying to decide what you want to say and where you want to say it, you can think of your website as a funnel, starting.  Start with the gateway—your your homepage.  This is where you’ll place the least amount of content with the broadest information.  And as a user travels deeper into your website, your content can become more detailed and more targeted toward your audience.  Here are some quick tips for placing the right messages in the right places:

• Your homepage is a great place for your tagline and a one-line company descriptor.
• Keep your ‘About’ page content at the company level by sharing your unique value proposition.
• If your website segments by industry or audience, get specific with your messaging. Show that you understand your target customer’s pain points and share your solution.

Magnetude Consulting offers individualized messaging workshops for startups that are interested in improving the way they convey their value to customers and how that applies to their websites.  Contact us today to schedule a complimentary consultation or to find out more about our workshop.

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