Know-How Exchange : Website Critique

A few questions/thoughts:

1. Who is your primary target audience? Where? How/where are they going to learn about your existence (or the existence of your website)? What are you going to tell them that will make them want to learn more (by coming to the website)? Shouldn't your homepage be very clear about who your product/service is for?

2. Depending on your answer to #1 above, you need to have a very focused landing page -- or perhaps several landing pages. The website homepage has way too many options/links and doesn't focus the visitors' attention on a specific call to action. A great landing page will make the biggest difference in your next-step conversion rate.

3. What's the big-idea benefit? Why should your target audience be interested in what you have to tell them? What's going to be in it for them? If all you're selling is training, then you need to push harder for a benefit from that training. Training itself isn't a benefit.


I'm currently involved in a project that is pursuing the same goal you are (in a different industry/category), so I've been living these issues almost every day and become something of a lead-gen expert. You need to go back to the strategy stage -- perhaps with a tighter Creative Brief -- if you really want to make the lead gen process work. Right now the homepage has way too much going on, too many links. Needs to focus on the objective ... or be replaced by focused landing pages.

What are your analytics telling you about your visitors? How much is this information well aligned with your marketing strategy? And I totally agree with Michael's 3 points (above). Focus on what you're offering and why it's something that they shouldn't miss...

MGoodman is spot on, as always! Let me add the following:

1. Ask for the order. "Call now" or "Email for a free confidential evaluation."
2. Give people more obvious ways to reach you. The phone number is buried at the very bottom of the page, and there's no email address, or email collection form that I can see.
3. Your slide show of features is reasonably well-written, but: a) It starts with your company name -- not with your customer, or the benefit. As I read it, the unique benefit is the idea that training sales managers makes more of a difference than training sales people Somewhere in the slide show is the percentage, which is powerful. Put the stat up front! b) How many ways/reasons/slides are there? Only four, it turns out, but it's better if you tell people what to expect (I still remember "Builds strong bodies 12 ways" -- maybe you are too young, but if you just say "4 ways you will benefit" you'll get more people to read without the mounting anxiety about when this will end. Number the slides too, so they know where they are in the sequence.
3. Your audience appears to be VPs of sales, and/or the sales managers themselves. Separate the messages for those two groups. Having been both, I can imagine that sales managers would rather bring this to their boss, than have their boss bring it to them!