Articles: Who’s the Villain?

Capture visitor attention by making your website dramatic!

We've all seen ho-hum websites that are instant snoozes. The words are long, the sentences dry, and the meaning obscure. Even if the site offers the best products or services on the planet, nobody will discover them. Visitors immediately click away to the competition.

How can you make sure your website doesn't suffer this fate? Identify the villain in your customers' lives — and portray yourself as the hero who vanquishes the villain!

Here’s a familiar scenario from an old vaudeville routine:

Villain: You Must Pay The Rent!	Damsel in distress: I can't pay the rent!	Hero: I'll pay the rent!

By identifying the villain, even something as mundane as stainless steel can be cast as the hero in a dramatic struggle:

Stainless Steel Fights Corrosion!

This headline gives customers an opportunity to learn about the insidious dangers of rust and the ways in which stainless steel defeats it.

Step One: Be a Casting Director

Every customer has an urgent need—some form of Can't Pay The Rent — and is searching for a solution to fix the problem. Instead of publishing a grocery list of features and benefits, cast your product or service as the hero and ask, “What problem do I conquer for my customers?”

Often, seeing your service as the hero makes the villain obvious. For example, if you offer green-grass landscaping, the villain is crabgrass and bare spots. If you run a dating service, the villain is loneliness and time wasted on Mr/Ms Not-A-Match.

Listen to your customers — especially when they are thanking you. They'll tell you what problems you're solving in their lives. Those problems are the villain.

Step Two: Exaggerate the Villain

Imagine the villain as a child might see it. Perhaps your customers feel embarrassed by the amateurish quality of their website or newsletter or business cards or whatever. We've all had nightmares stemming from embarrassment — such as going into the classroom and discovering we're wearing pajamas. This exaggerated image gives the villain both immediacy and emotional impact.

Step Three: Make It Visual and Concrete

If your service is abstract, find a way to make the villain-and-hero concrete. How would you explain to an 8-year-old child what you do? Or, imagine yourself playing a game of Charades, or onstage as a mime like Marcel Marceau. How would you portray the villain and hero — without resorting to clutching your ear for “sounds like” or tapping out letters of the alphabet for “starts with”?

Flash animations can be another valuable tool. For example, if you put together “package solutions,” a Flash movie can portray a gift box with the lid rising off and solutions emerging from the box — perhaps payroll savings or tax credits or foundation grants.

Step Four: Make It Exciting

Dramatic tension comes from suspense: Who will win? The villain or the hero? Tension rises when there’s something at stake, something at risk, something important that can be lost. Often, customers are motivated to buy something precisely because they are losing something in their lives. Perhaps it’s money. Or time. Or self-esteem.

When you show how your product or service enables them to win their struggle with the villain and keep whatever is at risk in their lives, that’s what converts prospects into buyers.

Step Five: Putting It All Together

Once you know who the villain is and have some strong visual images and concrete examples . . .

Portray either the hero or the villain on your home page, as simply and as graphically as you can. Whether it’s an image or a few short words, show the essence of your hero-villain struggle. In this article:

The hero: Knowing how to capture the attention of visitors.
The villain: Boredom arising from dull, long-winded prose.

Describe what’s at stake in a short phrase or two. In this article:

What’s at stake: Whether visitors stay or leave the website.

Create dramatic subtitles that focus on the struggle between hero and villain. Insofar as possible, phrase your subtitles as variants on the theme of:

Stainless Steel Fights Corrosion!

Keeping this hero-villain dynamism clear in your mind makes it easy to portray your product or services in an exciting way that both captures and retains your visitors' attention.

—October 2004, Issue #2, Wyn Snow

  
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