The hero has five seconds to answer three questions
The hero has five seconds to answer three questions
The top of your homepage, the part visible before anyone scrolls, is the most expensive real estate you own. A visitor decides in a few seconds whether you are worth their time, and they decide it on what they can see without moving the page. If your hero is a vague slogan over a stock photo of people pointing at a laptop, you have spent those seconds saying nothing.
Three questions are running through every visitor's head when they land, and your hero has to answer all three fast. What is this? Is it for someone like me? What do I do next? Miss any one of them and the visitor either bounces or, worse, scrolls on confused and primed to disbelieve everything that follows. A hero that answers all three in plain language is doing more for your conversion rate than any amount of cleverness below the fold.
The answers are unglamorous and that is the point. "This is what we do" belongs in the headline, stated as the outcome the buyer wants, not the category you sit in. "This is who it is for" can live in a subhead or a single qualifying line, so the right reader feels seen and the wrong one is not strung along. "Here is what to do next" is one primary call to action, in a button, saying the specific thing that happens when it is clicked.
Resist the urge to be mysterious. B2B buyers are not browsing for entertainment, they are working, and curiosity-gap headlines that make them dig for meaning lose to clarity every time. If a stranger cannot tell what you sell and who it is for from the hero alone, the hero has failed, no matter how good it looks in the design review.
One discipline keeps you honest. Screenshot your hero, show it to someone outside your company for five seconds, take it away, and ask them what you do, who it is for, and what they would click. If they cannot answer all three, rewrite it before you build anything else. The hero is the page, and everything below it is support.
INTERVIEW EWOUD: Share a hero headline you wrote that clearly outperformed the one it replaced. What was the old version, the new version, and the metric that moved?
INTERVIEW EWOUD: When a client insists on a clever or abstract hero headline, how do you make the case for clarity? Any example where you proved it with a test?