Not all pages on your website are equal. Your Home page does 95% of the work to engage your browsers. It should use direct and simple messaging to get the point across on how you can deliver what the person browsing needs (and to do this in under 5 seconds).
The other big-hitter, and one that too few websites use to their best advantage, is the About Us page.
About Us, pages are often overlooked or feature ‘that’ll do’ content that does little to engage browsers further. Browsers are looking for something; they want to know that they’ve found the right people to solve their problems. They need to feel a connection with the business’s values to be convinced to continue the journey. Your About Us page is the perfect place to build rapport on an emotional level.
Customers don’t care about your story; they only care about their own. So, therefore, you need content that aligns your business and your story with your customers and their stories.
There are different methods of building content for About Us pages, including these most common approaches:
Version 1: Chronologies
Too often, there’s a list that goes something like this:
- 2008: Person A started X company with two wheelbarrows and a stick of rock, working out of an under-the-stairs cupboard.
- 2010: Person B joined the company.
- 2012: We moved all of the wheelbarrows and sticks of rock to a unit on a new business estate and took on three more staff.
- 2020: We’ve worked really hard and had a few bumps along the way. Now the largest importers of wheelbarrows in an 18-mile radius. We ditched the sticks of rock in 2015.
So what?
This is all about the business, a random back story that does nothing to paint the simple picture of how the business can help customers solve their problems.
Done well, a chronology can tell a story using imagination, warmth, humour and emotion. It can build a picture of a business that people can work with, trust and want to be associated with.
A term I use often is ‘people buy on emotion, words do that’, and that’s because it’s true.
Words sell things.
Version 2: Meet the team
A favourite with professional services that often shows a block of mug shots, ranging in enthusiasm, and organised hierarchically. A couple of lines of text below each person presents their job title, maybe how long they’ve been with the firm, rounded off with a witty ditty to show that they are real people. There are frequent references to marmite/ coffee-consumption/ fell-walking/ death-metal (Shona from purchasing; who knew?)
There are many problems with ‘meet-the-team’ type profiles, but chief amongst them is that they are rarely kept up-to-date.
Half the people don’t work there anymore, or if they do, they’ve changed roles and certainly don’t look like they did seven years ago when those photos were taken!
I see lots of examples of ‘meet-the-team’. Some firms try to make them human and personable by following a theme or using avatar images rather than mug shots, which is confusing and can come across as pompous.
The other, and far more significant, problem is that they don’t tell a story. So if you’re going to use this approach, stick to these rules:
- Introductory sentence – ‘meet the XYZ team; we’re here to help, so let’s start with introducing who we are and who does what…
- Professional, head and shoulder photos of real people are updated at least every two years.
- Departmentally listed with a clearly stated job title and primary responsibilities, and that’s it.
- Monthly monitoring and updating for new starters and leavers, changes of job title, names, etc.
Version 3: Tell a great story
Another tack is to use the About Us as an extension to the Home page content. For example, repeating some messages about how you solve your customers’ problems, but adding a layer of engagement by using the framework of About Us to tell the story of how the people involved in the business make issues disappear.
For example:
Meet Shona from accounts. Shona does ABC so that you won’t get caught out by XYZ.
This is Harvey, our delivery driver. Some days, Harvey’s van is fully loaded. But, on other days, he’s just as happy to deliver the one order you know your customers depend on you to have in stock.
Aswan looks after our website. Aswan has been with us for just six months, but has totally changed our e-commerce processing, so we now pick up every order from the website and despatch it the next working day.
Susie is the boss. She knows that the entire team knows their jobs and how to put our customers first. She can’t run (business name) without Shona, Harvey or Aswan, or any of the 23 other team members.
Trust your brain
The brain remembers stories. It connects with order, events and real people.
Use your About Us to tell a story about real people, your customers and you.
