How good is your website at telling your story?

"Narrative - A telling of a story"

We hate 'About' pages. Generally, it's the 'same old - same old' with the attractiveness of 2-day-old porridge. No-one reads this stuff, it is boring and quickly forgotten once published.

What then is your website story?

An 'About Page' isn't what we mean by your website story. No! What we mean by story is the narrative that you use to engage potential clients into a meaningful relationship with your business.

Telling the right story is essential to converting more visitors into customers.

Your website narrative should be a series of vital conversations that you have with your customers presenting your business value proposition. 

This relationship goes beyond the transaction when your customers become your brand ambassadors, when customers believe in your brand story.

The Essential Website Narrative

There are a few essential components to this narrative:

1. Knowing your website customer personas

Knowing your audience allows you to tailor make your conversation with your potential customers. This means understanding their needs, present and future and addressing these needs directly.

In most cases understanding the problem faced by your customer and presenting the solutions that your business or products present for them will be the main subject of this conversational narrative.

Your website story must address these needs intuitively enough so that you can anticipate the questions and requirements of the audience sequentially and bring them successfully to a decision making moment.

Most products and services are not essential, because they do not fall into the NEED category. Needs are defined as food, shelter, safety, survival etc.

On the other hand, your business will probably be offering things or services that people may WANT.

This is the category where people exercise CHOICE in the service provider or brand that is normally one amongst many other providers.  

Narration is essential for this class of products and services because the business is selling something to help a client reach an aspirational goal. Eg. to look younger, to be more efficient, to be more stylish, to improve marketing, to have whiter teeth.

In this scenario, creating the aspiration, the desired outcome of the transaction, will be the most important element of your website story.

The WANT is the aspiration, and the website story must service this.

2. What's your angle? Using the Hook.

More than a company slogan, the hook goes to the heart of what you offer. It is a concept that expresses the aspiration from a unique or refreshing angle.

Using as few words as possible, it is the closest your product or service offering narrative will ever get to poetry.

Often the hook will be used as a Call-to-Action. Here we used the concept of picking flowers as an allegory: being picked by customers for our Search Engine Optimization services.

Defining the hook will require a lot of work to encapsulate your offering simply.

It may seem like a relatively easy element, but it will require a great deal of thought and brain-storming to get to the concept.

3. Use visuals and copy that fit together

A picture is worth a thousand words, but a good picture with the right words can make you a million.

Our best experience of the web is visual, made more so with Social Media and mobile devices. As with the hook, a picture must embody the story visually.

4. Diversify your story content into video

The progression from the static image is the use of video to tell the narrative. This is the most compulsive use of imagery and story line.

Sadly, many videos don't go far enough to join the narrative to a purchase decision making process as in successful advertising productions.  

5. Keyword integration, SEO and high-quality content

Conversational search is ideally suited to website narrative creation.

Search patterns have changed dramatically over the years, and search engine algorithms have progressed far beyond simplistic keyword analysis.

The use of artificial intelligence have made searches more intuitive and more human and continue to reward high quality content in greater degrees.

Integrating your keywords into your website narrative is critical to meeting the demands of conversational search patterns.

And just as with any narrative, your website content must be well organised into content categories, subtopics and even keyword clusters, an information architecture that caters for the search engine and your human audience alike.

The goal of narrative organisation is to establish your website story as the authority on the keyword topic, lifting your ranking on the search engine, by establishing relevance.

As content marketers, it's up to us to create valuable content people actually want. Content that is unique, efficient, helpful, human, and easily found.

Your website should tell your story.

If you need help with your website narrative, give us a call or Get a Quote We can help.