The homepage can often be the first place a new visitor lands when they find your site. Many of us get the feeling of wanting to get everything on the page. You want to explain what you do, showcase your products or services, talk about who you are, get people to sign up or take action, etc.
The issue is that if you put too much on your home page, people will end up taking no action at all because there are too many actions. Landing pages do great because they focus the visitor’s attention on the main action, usually signing up for your list or offer.
So how do you get your value proposition across to a visitor on your homepage?
No Carousels
That’s it. Period. They’re distracting.
Strong Value Proposition Above The Fold
You want your statement of value to appear as soon as they see the homepage, no scrolling needed. You may need one big sentence (H1) and a sentence underneath (H2 or H3).
This is the most important piece of the homepage. Your statement needs to be clear and written for the visitor. The visitor doesn’t care about you. I repeat, the visitor doesn’t care about you. They came to your site to find a solution for themselves. They don’t want to read about how you’ve been in business since 1957.
It will take time to get this part right. You may need to do some A/B tests of different value props for a few weeks (until you reach statistical significance).
How to Find Your Value Proposition
Start doing research! I’m not saying to steal a value prop from another website. But start going through sites (even ones not in your industry) and see how they explain what they do.
After a while, you’re going to notice that some sites do this well and many do it wrong. You’ll find sites where after reading the value prop, you still don’t understand how the company solves your problem.
Create a swipe file. This is a folder on your computer where you store screenshots of different pieces of copy or websites that you like in order to reference later.
Testing Your Headline
You’ll need software like VWO, Optimizely, or something similar to run A/B tests. These are just tests where you have two different options: Your homepage with headline A and another with headline B. Randomly different visitors will be shown each one and you can see which headline option produced the most conversions (or your preferred metric).
Get a few strangers to run through your site and take note of whether they understand the business from the value proposition on the homepage. You can also do this on UserTesting.com and have strangers create videos of themselves walking through your site.
How to Write Your Value Proposition
You don’t need to be a copywriter to write an effective headline. You just need to understand what makes a headline effective in the first place.
Here are two useful articles to help get you started:
Value Propositions and USPs: “My Product Is the One That…” from CopyHackers
Useful Value Proposition Examples (and How to Create a Good One) from ConversionXL
