Homepage Value Proposition and Page Copy

Jakob Nielsen of Nielsen Norman Group, a user experience research firm, summarized a 2010 Microsoft Research study of visits to more than 200,000 web pages. People often left within 10 to 20 seconds. To hold them for minutes, he concluded, you must clearly communicate your value proposition within 10 seconds¹.

In those seconds, the top of the page has to answer three questions: what is this, is it for me, and why this one?

Begin with what buyers would do if you didn't exist. Positioning consultant April Dunford, who wrote Obviously Awesome, calls these options competitive alternatives² and puts them first in her method. Sometimes the answer is "do nothing," which she says means sticking with the current way, such as a spreadsheet, a manual process or hiring an intern.

1. 1

   List the real alternatives

   Name the three to five options buyers weigh against you, including the status quo. Ask sales which ones come up in deals.

2. 2

   Copy each page's words

   Put every headline, subhead, section heading and button label in one sheet, yours included, with the date you read them.

3. 3

   Mark the shared words

   Highlight any word or claim on two or more pages, such as "platform" or "all-in-one." Shared words can't carry your claim.

4. 4

   Note what nobody says

   A buyer worry no page answers, or a result no one claims, is a good place to look for yours.

To see the field on one chart, a competitive positioning map plots you and each rival on the two attributes that separate you most.

Formulas give you a shape, not an answer. Dunford calls the classic positioning statement a sort of "Mad Libs" fill-in-the-blanks exercise². It assumes each blank has one answer you already know, when most products could be positioned several ways.

Work through her questions in order instead. List what you have that the alternatives don't, then ask of each difference, "So what for customers?" The answer to keep is the one buyers care about most and no alternative can truthfully claim.

Check each candidate against what buyers have told you in win-loss notes, reviews and interviews. A customer discovery synthesis counts how many people raised each theme on their own.

Lead with what happens for the buyer, not your category. Michael Seibel, writing about investor pitches in Y Combinator's startup library, suggests walking people through the user path³. His example is Google: "We build a website with a box in it." Of the abstract "We organize the world's information by indexing the web," he writes, "With that description I'm lost."

• A specific capability beats a general benefit: "texts each customer a new arrival time" beats "a better customer experience."
• A number beats an adjective: "a median 6.2 hours a week" beats "dramatically faster."
• Your buyers' words beat yours: if they say "the 6 a.m. phone calls," so should you.

Three business professors, writing in Harvard Business Review in 2006, found that most value propositions make claims of savings and benefits without backing them up⁴. A business buyer, they wrote, will likely dismiss an undocumented claim as "marketing puffery."

In the US, the law asks for proof too. The Federal Trade Commission requires advertisers to have a reasonable basis for advertising claims before they are disseminated⁵. Wording raises the bar: a line that says "tests prove" needs at least the proof it advertises.

Not every line needs a file. The FTC's small business guide says subjective claims, or ones consumers can judge for themselves, get less of its attention⁶, citing "ABC Cola tastes great." Objective claims about performance, features, safety, price or effectiveness need proof you hold today, not proof you expect to have.

Naming a competitor is allowed, and it can be your clearest line. The FTC's policy statement on comparative advertising encourages the naming of competitors but requires clarity⁷, and it backs comparisons whose basis is clearly identified. Record what you compared, where you read it and when, then recheck it each quarter.

Before launch, show only the top of the page to five people who match your buyer, for 10 seconds each. Then ask what the company does, who it's for and what they would click. If they can't answer in their own words, fix the words before you touch the design.

After launch, give every number and comparison a review date, since rivals change their pages and your own figures drift. When a claim needs a customer's words behind it, a case study from a customer interview puts them on the record.

To start from the page you have, paste it into the tool at the top of this page. It reads your competitors' pages beside yours and drafts the rewrite with every claim mapped to its proof.