How We Are Reworking Website Copy To Get Better Results
One of the things a Startup that raised a series A has to be doing is getting some ROI, and that means conversions, and all that means, testing… a lot of testing.
That also includes bringing the website closer and closer to full optimization. What does that mean?
The website needs to clearly communicate, and in our case, that is answering the question “What does Treblle actually do?”
The second thing, but equally important is “How does it do it and why would this be better than any other solution?”
Both of those are still being worked on, but here’s how we are getting some insights. Some are free, and some are paid, but at this phase, we want to get as much valuable feedback as we can.
3 main ways we got to our final version of the site in 2 months
- Talking to users (and potential buyers)
- Using UX testing software
- Talking to people within the industry
1. Talking to users (and potential buyers)
Talking to users (and potential buyers)
For this, you of course have to have users, and not only that, you should probably have at least a semblance of a marketing/sales pipeline.
You need to attract them to have meaningful conversations with you and your lead developers and designers. This is all feedback they need to hear and keep an open mind.
Some things about your product might even be super easy to understand for your entire team, and still, you’ll get a user that just doesn’t know how to do something, misses some critical information you wanted them to see and so on.
2. Using UX testing software
There’s a really cool service called User Testing that gets you really valuable insights about how people interact with your product. You literally get a video of a person using your site and product and audio comments as they are going through the motions.
There is a free trial that might hook you to go into paid territory when you see what you get, but even if it is a bit pricey for you at the moment, the ones that you get for free can already show you some things you might have taken for granted.
There is also Hotjar and you can research similar tools to user testing to see if there are some other avenues you could explore to get these.
3. Talking to people within the industry
Also known as networking. It really helps if you have a DevRel (if you are a developer tool like we are).
Getting people to follow your content (that needs to be valuable to developers) is no easy task. There are certain ways you can help yourself with, like organizing a series of talks on a relevant topic within your niche.
We do it with Twitter Spaces and it has been a blast and we got a lot of engagement and content out of it. TechTwitter is great and usually influential tech people are more than happy to talk about some of these topics.
What this does is, it gets you to have a relationship with these tech “stars” and at a same time paints you as someone that provides valuable info on a topic. Win - Win.
The evolution of our Value Propositions
There must have been at least 100 variations on what will be our main claim. The main sentence on the top of the site that is supposed to hook you into the Treblle story.
The first one:
“Stay in tune with your APIs”
Smart, but probably too ambitious. The name of the product is Treblle, and treble (with one L) is a musical expression for a high note. So, IF you know that, the “stay in tune” makes sense, right?
It's fun and it makes sense and it kind of does say what Treblle does. However, expecting everyone to get this is, like we said, a bit ambitious from us.
The second one:
“All-in-one platform for the entire API lifecycle”
We wanted to be as easy to understand as possible. But there are traps here. It turns out there are a lot (and we mean a lot) of tools out there claiming to be an “all-in-one” solution. Even if that isn’t true, the perception of people that we talked to was, that they’ve already heard that and they by default, simply do not trust it.
We came up with another, third one.
“Mission Control for Your APIs”
This one actually has the same idea as the previous one, so we used A/B testing (Google still offers a product named Google Optimize for free, so use it while you can).
Turned out that people were reacting way better to the last one, so there we have it. Current title/main value proposition is
“Mission Control for Your APIs”
Will it stay forever? Maybe, there are no guarantees. We can always test more and more and as soon as we get better results with something else, we can easily change it.
What do people see?
By using some of the tools we mentioned earlier we could see not many people stopped to read a lot. A few of them went through the docs, some read the social proof section, but most were kind of stuck on the top of the page, scrolled really fast, and moved on from the homepage.
That means, they actually did not see what features does Treblle actually have, and how can it help.
A good website tells a story. That’s what everybody will say. What we discovered it's probably actually an 80s/90s movie kind of story.
You know, those movies that had an extraordinarily long intro listing all of the main actors and productions houses, directors, and whatnot.
Similarly to that, we needed to introduce our main characters (in this instance, our features) immediately. They are the ones telling the story anyway.
So we made little boxes introducing them immediately, and voila, the average staying time on our site went up, sign-ups went up, and not to jinx it, even self-service paid customers started to emerge.
At this particular point in time, we are still trying to confirm all of our findings and are trying to see what else could we possibly do to get those clicks on “book a demo” up.
We are always open to even more feedback. So, if you have the time, you are most welcome to go through our website and tell us if we are missing anything and if we can anything better.
