The homepage is dead. Power to the user!
Brand Nazis spend hours labouring over their homepage messaging, ensuring every pixel is perfectly placed (nothing wrong with that) and that every clause reinforces the brand and leads the user to the point of sale conversion.
The trouble is that users don’t enter at home pages anymore. Nope, if you’ve done your SEO properly, and you’re directing PPC traffic to targeted landing pages, most of your users will be bypassing your home page permanently.
Your customers don’t want to be persuade; they want to get specific information, or they want to transact. So, they search for the phrase that defines what they’re really interested in, they CLICK, and voila they enter your site by some page deep in your site.
Now there’s no chance for the carefully prepared branding message, they just get the content the wanted. As Jakob Nielsen might say, it’s the ultimate in request marketing. The browser clicks on precisely what interests them.
So, what can you do with pernicious prospects that trample over your brand guidelines? Embrace them, and throw the brand guidelines in the recycle bin. Give your prospects and customers what they want.
Here’s a few starting points:
1. Make sure there’s an opportunity to action on every page
2. Make sure your copy is well signposted with intelligent hyperlinking that encourages browsers to delve deeper.
3. Think about a content management system that enables you to filter content according to user profile.
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