Is your About page set up to generate and nurture leads? Is it doing a good job?
Does it make your brand interesting enough for a blogger or a journalist to include your brand in a story?
Why not?
Ever since we were kids, we’ve been instructed to avoid strangers.
Your About page needs to make your brand relatable and memorable enough for every visitor to feel they know you well.
Your About page is likely to be your outreach contact, the final incentive to link to you, mention you on social media or help you spread your message.
How to turn your About page in an effective lead generation and link acquisition funnel? Here are a few ideas:
1. Combine Multiple CTAs
Your About page serves multiple purposes and hence it is supposed to have different CTAs:
- It serves as a lead generation funnel (so invite visitors to contact you, request more information or sign up for a demo)
- Your About page should encourage more coverage and links, so make your copy sound interested and help journalists or bloggers locate your contact info
- Furthermore, your About page should help you find talent, so include a CTA to join your team
To avoid the clutter and confusion, position your CTAs the way each of them matches its immediate context.
Don’t try to sell your premium memberships when talking about your company’s history and values. This is a good place for “Contact us to learn more” CTA though.
And what is the point of inviting readers to “Subscribe” to your list when talking about what makes your company stand out. A quick CTA inviting them to download use cases or case studies make much more sense here.
CTA Examples
Here’s Twilio combining several CTAs within one About page:
It is a good idea to include both your press contact info and your brand assets (e.g. logo, screenshots, visual testimonials). This way bloggers and journalists will not have to look for visuals to include in their coverage.
It is a good idea to set up event tracking for each of your on-page CTAs to monitor their performance. You can do that using Finteza, which is much more robust than Google Analytics. You can use Finteza’s WordPress plugin to add events. This makes it very easy to use.
Here’s Finteza tracking the performance of multiple “Download” CTAs on About page versus home page:
Depending on the niche and nature of your business, you can check out more analytics solutions. Here are a number of SaaS platforms providing various data analytics features for you to look into. You can also use Finteza to create on-site remarketing campaigns to better engage your returning visitors.
You may also want to read: 5 Reliable Tips to Turn Your Online Store into a Lead Generation Engine
2. Add Social Proof
People trust people, there’s no denying that. You can talk about your milestones and achievements all you want but in the end, that’s your customers’ words winning your link building leads’ hearts.
Social proof is your most powerful weapon. Customers consume a huge amount of content on a daily basis: Back in 2016, it was found that forty-seven percent of B2B buyers consumed three to five pieces of content before even engaging with a salesperson (Demand Gen Report).
If you want your About page to convince anyone you are worth a backlink, add social proof. A better strategy is to integrate several types of social proof into your About page copy, such as:
- What your customers are saying
- What press is saying about your company
- And if applicable, what your investors are saying.
To give you some inspiration, here are a few ideas for social proof placement and layout for you to experiment with.
Social proof can also come in different formats, and it may be a nice idea to have all of them created:
- Quotes (text testimonials)
- Downloadable case studies
- Videos (These are easy to reuse in blog posts, so make sure there’s one for your link building targets to grab)
You can use inVideo to put your curated positive mentions and testimonials into a video format. InVideo is web-based, so there’s no need to download anything. You can also share your account with your team members for them to create videos too.
This video can be used on your About page as well as repurposed across all social media channels.
You may also want to read: 7 Psychology Facts That All Social Media Marketers Should Know
3. Tell Your Story
Stories make brands memorable and relatable. Interesting stories also trigger word of mouth (press coverage). Your About page is obviously the best place to make your story known.
There are multiple ways you can tell your company’s story to make it memorable. Evernote uses video:
And Deputy uses a visual timeline allowing you to become part of the journey as you scroll down:
Visuals (like timelines and infographics) make a great linkable asset. So this is actually a very good idea for a link-worthy About page.
Finally, The Copywriter Club does nothing fancy but uses really interesting copy which reads like a real book:
Whatever you do, make sure to add textual content on your About page because that’s what Google is going to use to rank it. If you optimize your About page well, it may become a powerful entry page too (top of your lead generation channel), driving customers to your site from Google’s search results.
To create better-optimized copy for your About page, use Text Optimizer. This uses semantic analysis to find related concepts that could make your page more relevant. It is a good idea to type your (or your close competitor’s) brand name into Text Optimizer to learn what Google associates the brand with.
Here are semantic associations Text Optimizer identified for “Mailchimp”, for example:
Don’t get me wrong! Semantic analysis is not about keyword stuffing though. No need to stuff those TextOptimizer-identified terms into your copy, just to make it better optimized. Treat TextOptimizer as a research tool. Use these concepts as guidelines to better understand what Google already knows about you. Then use that knowledge to build your copy in a way that makes your business niche and model even easier to understand for Google and its users.
Conclusion
Making About page part of your lead generation funnel will bring about more positive changes, including stronger reputation and brand loyalty. So this effort will pay off in many ways, in the long run. Keep a close eye on the page engagement and keep experimenting with CTA placement and social placement design to try and improve the page performance.
Featured image: Copyright: ‘https://www.123rf.com/profile_artursz‘ / 123RF Stock Photo
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