When trying to market something I quickly hit a familiar question:
Does the potential success of conversions outweigh the need to get more visits?
I’m not sure if that question is clear so I’ll try again:
Is the promotional material (in this case a website) set up to convert well? Does that even matter if there isn’t anyone viewing it in the first place?
It reads like a chicken or the egg situation.
I wrestle with this question for a few reasons. I wonder if you can effectively evaluate conversions unless you achieve statistical significance. This is complicated when working on a new product because you simply don’t have the numbers for any sort of statistical significance.
In the context of OrganizeWP’s website I’ve concluded (for the time being) that the existing copy is not facilitating conversions very well, and taking the time to improve upon that will be worth the return on investment.
I have no idea what that return on investment will be at this time, nor do I know how to directly correlate that with these copy changes. However I feel that the alternative is to start burning cash in paid traffic. My brain says that if I’m going to pay for eyeballs, it makes sense to work on optimizing the conversion potential first.
I have no idea if that’s the right call, but my gut says it is, and I’ve learned that my gut isn’t (usually) a bad guy. Ok maybe it’s 50/50 (see the first article in this series for more info on OrganizeWP taking off on its own and doing its own marketing because “why wouldn’t it?”)
Making content edits
I want to outline the content edits I’ve made to the site and why I’ve made them, in hopes of providing context to the advice we all get to write about solving problems, don’t write to list features.
In this article I’m going to review the changes I made to the home page, specifically taking into account the copy writing and the language used.
The underlying problem with the copy that I’m aiming to fix with this round of updates is to speak less to both agency owners/freelancers and site owners and instead focus on agency owners. Why agency owners? I think agency owners/freelancers are more likely to understand the nuanced pain points of why the WordPress admin experience needs improving.
I think that site owners have the pain as well, but I wouldn’t expect site owners to be able to verbalize (or even understand) why the pain points are pain points. My goal will be to have OrganizeWP instantly appeal to agency owners and freelancers that are much more familiar with the context.
Masthead copy
The masthead is very important to get that 2 second impression we strive after. For the first year, OrganizeWP’s masthead looked like this:
Case in point (of many cases in point if I’m honest) is that this headline does nothing to explain much of anything. Why I thought this was a great line to lead with I have no idea. Also despite the giant play button for a 3 minute walk through of OrganizeWP I don’t think it was very apparent that there was a video, and I feel the video is by far the quickest way to explain what OrganizeWP does.
The updated masthead revises the headline and also gives an abbreviated preview of the video, so as to encourage visitors to watch it for more information. I’ve forced myself to be okay with the fact that the animation is a bit over the top and approaching annoying. Time will tell.
When comparing the two headlines, it’s more obvious in the revised version that OrganizeWP tackles the issue of confusion in the WordPress Administration area.
Features overview copy
My goal for this project is to avoid talking about features specifically. To not word things based on what OrganizeWP does but instead talk about the problems it solves.
That said, I’ve decided to retain the feature overview on the home page. Why? Because I think it helps to facilitate a punch list of what OrganizeWP can do. The changes I’ve made to the copy though quickly depart from standing there as a feature list and instead present a set of problems that OrganizeWP can solve.
The features overview of the home page used to read like this:
While the copy does a good job (in my opinion) of explaining what OrganizeWP does, it’s just a breakdown of features that don’t evoke much feeling of alignment if you happen to be in OrganizeWP’s target market.
Here’s what the feature overview of the home page looks like now:
The main heading, titles of each feature, and blurbs have all been updated to be problem-solution oriented instead of plainly describing features. This helps to resonate with the visitor and also adds a link to find out more information which takes the reader to a page describing the problem and solution in more detail
So how’s it looking?
As I was making these copy edits I was slapping my forehead wondering what I was thinking when I went through the first published version. And then I remembered that I was simply running on the excitement of launching a product and “getting the site done” and out in the wild.
Letting the site sit for a while (and allowing for the lack of interest to date put things into perspective) has been a good thing. If nothing else it has been a reminder to cycle back on things you once thought were a good decision and challenge yourself a bit on it.
In the next article I’ll continue outlining the copy edits I’m making on the site, and hopefully have some other ideas to share as well!
Comments
Site looks fab, Jon!
This plugin comes like a ‘gift from heaven’, have been looking for features like this for days; guess with some marketing tricks this plugin can be a game changer in the WP community! May be consult a marketing expert for a few hours, I think it really might be worth the investment!