Delete "will," niche positioning/vague messaging, great persona article
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Here's your three things to get the week started. Hit reply and let me know what you think.
Tip: Get rid of the word "will". The word "will" clutters your copy and makes it less persuasive. Eliminate it!
Example: SalesRabbit's home page, like lots of CRMs, is kind of generic. But unlike lots of CRMs, SalesRabbit is targeting a niche! I'm wondering what's going on here.
Thought: Promoting a great article on marketing personas from a friend of mine. Take a look then share it on your social networks if you liked it.
Tip: Get rid of the word "will"
This is such an easy one. If you find yourself using the word "will," get rid of it. Nine times out of ten, the sentence becomes a lot stronger. Here's why:
For one, it just makes your sentence a bit shorter and punchier, without losing any meaning. Great. Same meaning in fewer words is always a good thing.
But there's a bigger reason, too: it puts your reader in the present. Rather than talking about something that theoretically might happen if they take a bunch of steps, you're getting them to imagine something happening right now.
It's the mental difference between hearing a car described to you, and taking it for a test drive. Latter is a lot more compelling!
Give it a go - let me know how you get on.
Example: SalesRabbit has niche positioning but vague messaging
SalesRabbit is CRM software built specifically for field sales teams - door to door sales people, that sort of thing. People who are out and about.
It's a smart strategy, especially considering how much competition there is in the CRM space! Yet, their home page messaging doesn't lean into it. Take a look at their headline:
The headline could apply to any company with a sales team!
It's kind of weird. And for all I know, there's a good reason for this. Such as:
They don't get that much home page traffic and there is just no point in optimising it.
The traffic that does come to the home page is already highly qualified, and they just click through without really reading.
The home page is optimising for other variables
Or any of a million other things. I want to tread carefully because it's kind of annoying when copywriters take one look at a home page, and issue a decree about exactly how it needs to be made better, even though they don't really have any meaningful context (Linkedin post on how I learned this the hard way a few weeks ago).
But all that said, I do wonder why a product with such dialled-in, niche positioning to a highly specific subset of sales people has such generic messaging on their home page.
If they wanted to change that, I'd recommend they do two things:
Get some customers on the blower and find out exactly why they use SalesRabbit - and why it's so great for outside sales specifically
Have a deep dive through the rest of the website, which is positioned towards outside sales, and steal messaging from there (this is why I suspect the home page choice is deliberate).
From here, they can really dial their home page in to focus on the specific pains they resolve for outside sales people.
After all, SalesRabbit has gone through the effort and made the tradeoffs of positioning their business to a niche. They may as well do the same with their home page messaging to make the most of that effort and those tradeoffs.
As it stands, they just kind of look like Yet Another CRM. And if that's deliberate, that's great! But if not, the things I outlined above would be a great start towards making some changes.
Thought: check out this article on personas
Long-time subscribers of this newsletter will know that I'm not a big fan of the typical marketing persona - I wrote a newsletter about that a couple of years ago, and have been complaining about them on Twitter every few weeks for aeons.
So it was nice to read something that echoed my views - but in a more constructive way. My friend Daniel Sage wrote a great article on personas. It's a deep dive into where personas go wrong and how to do them right - and it's filled with solid case studies to bring the ideas to life.
Check it out here.
That's all for today. Have a great rest of your week.
Sam
PS: I'm taking on landing page reviews again. $799 for an in-depth review of your landing page copy. Top 3-5 highest-impact, lowest effort changes you can make, followed by line-by-line analysis of your landing page. Buy one here.
PPS: If you like this newsletter, forward it on! Great for anyone interested in squeezing more value out of their marketing resources by optimising their copywriting, messaging and positioning.
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