The Telltale Sign of a Doomed Home Page
Here’s a dilemma that comes up a LOT:
Pete runs a business creating church management software.
His software automates and streamlines dozens of administrative processes—from keeping track of members’ tithes and offerings to keeping tabs on the kiddos during summer day camp.
And precisely because this software is so powerful, it’s a struggle to focus the marketing message.
Pete recently ponied up the dough to have me do an end-to-end critique of his funnel, including his home page and email courses.
Several times during my review I remarked that I really wasn’t clear on WHO his software was for.
Pete responds:
Went through the video again. All great feedback, and I think I’m pretty clear on everything. Got a lot of work to do, but it’s great knowing WHAT to do!
Because our solutions cover overall church management – and all of the different needs associated with that, there are several different types of prospects or “avatars” – some of the main ones are:
– Pastor using paper/spreadsheets, wanting to get organized, everything in order
– Admin struggling with contribution tracking/reporting needing an easy way to print contribution statements
– Pastor/Leader wants to do better at visitor tracking and followup
– Children’s pastor needing a child check-in solution
– Nursery or volunteer coord. needs help scheduling their volunteers
In a previous life I worked at a couple of colleges here in the Pittsburgh area, and we had this same headache of multiple avatars.
The audience “slices” included: prospective students and their parents, current students, alumni, donors and philanthropists, regulators, the media… And on it went.
The tendency in these situations is to try to be all things to all people, and that’s exactly what these colleges did.
Their home pages were an absolute mess—crammed with snippets of information, nausea-inducing slideshows, competing “call to action” buttons…
(A “slider” with rotating images is a dead giveaway that your home page is doomed.)
Marketing is getting the right message to the right people at the right time. And when you broad and try to include everyone, you run the risk of the “right people” missing the message entirely.
Here’s what I told Pete to do with his home page:
Go through this list of avatars and pick ONE.
How to decide?
The criteria is:
– Which group is the largest?
– Which group spends the MOST money with you?
– Which group most acutely feels the pain points that your software addresses?
Then write the home page to speak to this avatar, *especially* the part that falls “above the fold.”
Specificity rules in marketing.
When you narrowly address the concerns of one slice of your audience, you’ll make more sales than if you try to include everyone.
P.S. What do you do about the other “excluded” segments of your audience?
This is where email courses really shine.
With a good email course, you can take specific groups off for a “sidebar” chat about their specific pain points—without muddying your message to your main audience.
If you’d like to see a real, live demonstration of how this works, you’ll want to sign up for the class I’m hosting on September 1.
It’s called “Behind the Scenes of a Six-Figure Email Course.”
To register, go here: