Last November, I strapped into the rear passenger seat of an all-electric, four-door sedan with BMW test driver and 24-hour racer Jens Klingmann behind the wheel. It was a cold day at BMW's Performance Driving Center in Greer, SC, and beneath the five-point harnesses, roll cage, and heavily camouflaged body, Klingmann had an unexpected co-pilot: a tiny black box called the “Heart of Joy.”
The Hero Section
1. The headline should be dumb, quick and transformative.
The objective here is to communicate the result of your offer and the positive impact it will have on your prospect in the shortest time possible. Given that we only have a few seconds to grab the prospects interest, especially in the case where they are in the research phase and maybe looking at different competitors for options, we need to make them understand how your offer will change their situation after they have bought from you. With that, this is not the place to list the "features" of your offer or to talk about yourself or your business. The only thing the prospect is interested in at this point is what they can get from you to help them solve their problem.
A good, simple formula for a headline would be to simply explain what the outcome of your solution is; not what you are going to do to get them there. So let's take a look at an example of a good and a bad header for an architect:
Bad headline:
"We are an award winning family studio specialising in sustainable self-build homes in Bedfordshire."
As a prospect, a this point in the pitch, I wouldn't be sold on this as a solution yet. I'm not interested in the awards, credentials or family business structure as much as I am the vision for my living situation. A more emotive and transformative style would help me see what I'm going to get from this offer. So let's try again...
Good headline:
"Realise your new sustainable home in the Bedfordshire counryside"
Now we have switched the language from "we" to "your", focusing on what the prospect is looking for as an outcome. This is all we need right now; customer and solution focused, emotive and descriptive.
There will be some exceptions to this rule against listing the "features" of your offer or talking about yourself where either; 1. your product or offer is more complex and needs some simple explination of what it actually is or does, like a complex software product or technical equipment, or 2. where the credentials and pedigree of the business is very important, like a law firm or medical practice maybe. Otherwise, unless you are selling a complex suite of products or services, it's always a good idea to focus on the specific outcome of your particular offer in the simplest way possible. Now we have your visitors attention we can unpack some details.
The image demonstrates the result of your headline proposition.
As a visual aid to the headline it's important to make the main image, if you have one, as simple as possible. With the Architect's example above, we might be inclined to search a free stock site for pictures of architect offices, plans or bulders in the process of work. Not really a good idea. We should really craft an image that visualises the good headline we drated to hammer home the idea of that transformative effect the offer has as a solution. So I would probaby use a lifestyle image that reflects the prospects vision: a house on the lakeside, or a view out of the glass panel living space with the countryside beyond. Here we are trying to put the prospect in the picture itself, once succeeded at the end of the process.
Exceptions to this rule may make sense to some. If you have a cup cake business pictures of the procuct would definitely give you more leverage than a picture of someone at your counter. But with a car hire business it would make more sense to depict someone enjoying a drive through the alps in the summer rather than a shot of a car in the showroom. Just visualise what your customer sees most value in as a result of having bought from you.
The Subheader should address the most common objections.
Here is where we can inject more information to answer some nuts and bolts questions your prospect already has. We could add information that we edited out of a cumbersome headline but this is really the point where we should address one or a few of the main objections the prospect has right away. It's always best to drive this content with data if you have it, so we'll park here for a second.
After your website visitor has digested your headline they will almost always have the same questions in mind while they're shopping around. So if we can nip these in the bud immediately we can convince them to continue with some confidence. But how do we know which questions they have? Though this is slightly outside of the scope of this article I'll outline some ideas to get this information.
- Survey them, either with Survey Monkey, Mail Chimp or just ask them directly
- Mine your own feedback and testimonials or look through the testimonials and social media comments of your competitors for questions and common objections
- Search Reddit for the objections that frequently come up for consumers in your niche. You could start by asking Chat GPT (or Microsoft Copilot which is driven by the same engine) for this information, which is heavily trained on Reddit content data.
Once we have a very short list of the most frequent or most valuable/painful objections that are likely to occur with one of your website visitors we can answer them in the subheader. It's difficult to give examples as it will be very specific to your business, but here are some generic examples to help:
- "Get a "