You have a robust social media marketing strategy. You have a beautiful website that is easy to navigate, you have good SEO results, a solid brand, and an effective email marketing campaign. What more can you do to drive sales, subscriptions, or clicks?

One effective marketing tool you may have overlooked is one many people do: the “About” page on your website.

If you think you don’t need to bother much with it, or you put minimal thought into creating it, you should know that your About page is the single best chance you have to let prospective customers learn about you, and what you can do for them.

An effective About page will humanize you in a way nothing else on your website can, and help visitors relate to you as a person. It can also reassure them that you’re legitimate, credible, and trustworthy.

Take a look at Amazon’s About page, or better yet, an entire website dedicated to learning ABOUT them. You could probably spend hours reading everything on their page, from a statement of their principles to their plans for expansion and innovation to stories highlighting some of their employees.

Obviously, Amazon can afford to invest huge amounts of money in developing its About page, but you don’t have to. In fact, if you’re not Amazon or Google or another multi-billion dollar company, that’s actually a plus, because you have to opportunity to connect with, inspire, and even captivate your customers in a way that these monster firms can’t.

It’s a place to give your creativity free rein. As long as the basics are there (which we’ll describe below), the sky’s pretty much the limit for what you can do.

 

Who are you?

The key is in telling your brand’s story effectively: what led you to develop your product, store, or service, how you got started, what obstacles you faced and overcame, and how what you sell can help your customers, your supply chain, even the planet.

The key point to keep in mind is that your customers are coming to you because they have a problem they want solved. You can use your About page to demonstrate how you’ll accomplish that.

 

What’s your story?

What problem led you to create your business? Did you get laid off from your corporate job and saw it as an opportunity to pursue your passion? Were you frustrated that you could never find clothing in your size so you decided to create your own? What obstacles did you overcome as you began to create and grow your business?

Keep your story relatively compact and reader-friendly. You can use graphics, photos, timelines, or videos to break up long text. But don’t turn it into a multimedia show, unless that’s the only way to convey the information. If you have a team, be sure to reveal the faces/stories behind the scenes.

Keep your tone conversational and jargon-free, as if you were telling your story to a friend, and make sure it reflects the style of your company: professional, casual, artistic, etc.

 

What’s your value proposition?

Why should visitors buy from you? Are your designs unique in some way? Do you feature products unavailable elsewhere? Does a portion of your profits support a specific charity? Do you source sustainable supplies or employ only physically challenged individuals?

The most important question to answer is how your product/store/service solves their problem. That is, after all, why they came to your website.

 

Let others speak for you

Feature brief testimonials from current or former customers or clients, media placements, awards, speaking engagements, etc.

This is where you prove you’re legitimate, with a proven track record of external recognition and successes.

 

Include a call to action (CTA)

If your About page doesn’t feature some way for visitors to take some kind of action on or from the page, it’s just so much wasted time (theirs) and effort (yours). Provide a link to your contact page, your blog, your subscription opt-in page, the sign-up form for your newsletter, where they can leave their email address, or whatever action you want your visitors to take.

And be sure to include links to your products or services wherever you mention them on your About page.

 

Our marketing experts can offer more ways to help you spice up your About page to humanize your brand, so be sure to contact us with any questions or for additional guidance.