How to Rewrite Your Homepage with Sharper Positioning & Messaging by Anthony Pierri

Your homepage is one of the first points of contact a user has with your business. They may abandon the page if the messaging and positioning are confusing or contradictory.

Anthony Pierri knows this, and after helping over 200 businesses improve their homepage, he’s hosting the talk “How to Rewrite Your Homepage With Sharper Positioning & Messaging” on October 8th. There, he’ll share his framework to:

• Position your product.
• Develop a value proposition.
• Translate it into a compelling homepage.

In this article, we’ll cover the basics of product positioning and messaging and a brief overview of improving your homepage.

TL;DR

• Anthony Pierri is the co-founder of FletchPMM, a product marketing consultancy that specializes in improving B2B startup homepages.
• Positioning is about defining your product’s value and unique selling point.
• Messaging, on the other hand, is about using the right words to clearly communicate your benefits to customers.
• Nailing your product’s messaging and positioning can help:
  – Increase conversions.
  – Differentiate your product from the competition.
  – Enhance value perception.
  – Build trust.
  – Ensure clarity.
• To improve your homepage messaging and positioning strategy, you should:
  1. Identify your target audience and their pain points and needs.
  2. Craft a strong marketing positioning statement.
  3. Optimize your headline and subheadline.
  4. Ensure clear and consistent messaging.
  5. Highlight key benefits.
  6. Build user trust.
  7. Use engaging visuals.
  8. Include strong CTAs.
  9. Measure results and experiment.
• To learn more, join Anthony Pierri’s “How to Rewrite Your Homepage With Sharper Positioning & Messaging” talk on October 8th. Book a seat.

Who is Anthony Pierri?

Anthony Pierri is the co-founder of FletchPMM and has a background in content and product marketing. He is an expert in helping early-stage B2B startups position their product and rewrite their homepages with sharper positioning and messaging. Anthony has worked with more than 200 venture-backed startups.

Rewriting your homepage with sharper positioning & messaging

You can’t sell products that your target customers don’t understand. So, your homepage copy should be concise and clear, like an elevator pitch.

On October 8th, Anthony will guide you through his value proposition framework and explain how to position your product on your website more effectively. This talk is for founders, product managers, marketers, or anyone interested in product marketing.

But first, let’s cover the basics of the homepage messaging and positioning strategy.

What is positioning?

Product positioning is the act of choosing how you want your target audience to perceive your product. It usually includes defining your unique selling point (USP) and value proposition as it answers how you can solve your customers’ problems better than competitors.

What is messaging?

Messaging is how you communicate your positioning to your audience. It involves the specific language, tone, and content you use to convey your product’s value and benefits.

Why are messaging and positioning important?

Messaging and positioning compose your brand identity. When done correctly, they can lead to:

• Increased conversions. Communicating what your product does by addressing your customers’ pain points and desires allows you to capture their attention and optimize your conversions.
• Better product differentiation. Conveying your USP effectively makes your product stand out from the competition.
• Enhanced value perception. Highlighting the benefits allows your customers to see tangible ways in which your solution can add value to their lives. A good way to do this is to share case studies and testimonials.
• Improved trust. Being consistent in your marketing messaging and positioning across channels builds credibility and makes customers feel more confident that your product delivers on its promises.
• Higher clarity. Keeping your messaging simple and direct guarantees that your customers clearly understand your product’s value. Make sure to use simple words and avoid jargon or buzzwords.

How to improve your homepage messaging and positioning strategy

Your homepage is your business’s presentation card. It has to be clear, error-free, compelling, and directed to your ideal customer. Here are steps to improve your homepage messaging and product positioning.

1. Identify your target audience and their pain points and needs

Having a clear understanding of your target customer is the first step toward crafting effective positioning and messaging strategies.

To understand your target audience and identify what they’re looking for in a solution like yours, conduct market research and a needs and wants analysis. Here, you’ll identify who your target audience is, their likes, dislikes, pain points, and needs.

You can then use that information to create user personas. Include key characteristics about their roles, companies, and jobs to be done.

2. Craft a strong positioning statement

Your positioning statement should state exactly how your product will cover a market need. Do this by defining exactly what your product does, who it’s for, and why it’s better than current alternatives.

Make sure your positioning statement reflects your USPs and differentiators based on what your potential users value.

Here’s an example of a Userpilot’s positioning statement:

Userpilot is a no-code 3-in-1 product growth platform that helps product teams activate more users, increase feature adoption, and drive expansion revenue. It is the only tool that offers engagement, feedback, and analytics tools with such a level of customization and advanced features like auto-capture at an affordable price.

3. Optimize your headline and subheadline

If your users are stuck trying to understand what your product does or your homepage is not memorable, they’ll likely choose a different provider.

Therefore, you should write a compelling headline that grabs visitors’ attention and clearly conveys the product’s main value proposition. Subheadlines should provide additional context and benefits.

On our homepage, we use the headline to convey that we provide ‘the all-in-one platform for product teams’, and the subheadline presents the key benefits of our solution.

4. Ensure your product messaging is clear and consistent

For clarity, get rid of jargon and buzzwords when writing your homepage. Use simple words to explain your benefits and features—it’s better to be understood than to sound smart.

This LinkedIn post shares the struggle of looking at B2B websites or profiles and not being able to explain what they do.

The best advice is to just say what you do and avoid fancy language like ‘strategic and innovative solutions’.

A good resource for learning how to improve your messaging strategy from real-life examples is “Do you even resonate” by Peep Laja. In this series, Peep conducts actual message testing on B2B websites and comments on their home pages.

Don’t forget that a homepage needs to be clear and consistent. To build a consistent brand experience, you should use the same tone, logos, colors, etc.

5. Highlight key benefits

Potential customers should leave your homepage with a clear understanding of what you can do for them and how they can benefit from using your tool. It’s good practice to highlight your benefits in short paragraphs or bullet points to make them easily digestible.

Take a look at how we combine features and their benefits on our homepage:

By reading this, you can understand that the tool:

• Reduces time-to-value by improving the user onboarding experience.
• Allows you to map the product journey with product analytics.
• Lets you capture the sentiment behind user feedback.

6. Build user trust with your messaging

Your messaging should make potential users trust you enough to do business with you. So, avoid making false promises and too-good-to-be-true announcements. Also, support your copy with testimonials, case studies, and reviews. This shows that you care about the customer’s achievements and have a proven record of success.

It’s a good practice to use case studies or testimonials that align with the context. For example, if you’re talking about a particular customer pain point, use a story that explains how your product played a part in overcoming the problem.

7. Use engaging visuals

Your colors, fonts, and graphics are part of your brand’s image, along with your messaging and positioning. It’s important to use an engaging and consistent visual data to:

• Stand out from competitors.
• Emphasize the importance of certain messages.
• Become memorable and identifiable.

Some UX design best practices include avoiding stock imagery, using high-quality pictures and graphics, following a minimalistic approach, and incorporating interactive design elements.

8. Include strong CTAs

A call-to-action tells the user exactly what to do without jumping through hoops.

Best practices for creating strong CTAs include:

• Using clear and actionable text, such as ‘get a demo‘, ‘sign up now’, or ‘try for free’. Notice that these start with a verb.
• Including multiple CTAs. Place CTAs at strategic points throughout the homepage, such as the hero section, mid-page, and bottom of the page.
• Ensuring the CTAs are visually appealing. Use contrasting colors, larger fonts, or bold styling so CTAs stand out. Also, place them in prominent locations where they are easily noticeable.
• Communicating the benefit of taking an action by explaining what will happen once they click. For example, use clear sentences that explain the next step such as ‘get a demo‘ or ‘get a free trial‘, instead of vague ones like ‘explore the tool’.

9. Measure the results and experiment

Lastly, test your homepage to make improvements as part of your marketing strategy. Experiment with different wording, colors, visuals, layouts, and CTAs to determine which combinations perform the best.

Marketing experiments allow you to have a homepage that’s built with your users and conversions in mind. You can conduct message testing with Wynter to see how your messaging resonates with your target audience.

Want to learn more about nailing messaging and positioning?

We’ve given you a short guide on your homepage’s positioning and messaging, and how Userpilot has done this. But what if your product is complex and has lots of features and user personas?

Don’t worry, we have a solution—book your place for free and learn from Anthony Pierri an effective framework for rewriting your homepage on October 8th.