Crafting Home Page Messages: Engaging Your Target Persona

Corporate and product marketing teams sweat over any changes to the homepage hero message. It is the most important message that should not miss the mark with your target persona. On top of it, every executive in the company wants to have a say in it. Depending on the company’s size, even board members have an opinion. So, how do you ensure you still speak to your target persona as you evolve the home page message, despite so many inputs and opinions?

There are three important pillars.  If you remember them, you will never go wrong with changes to the topline homepage message.

• Pillar 1: The message should deeply resonate with your target persona. The goal isn’t for my neighbor to understand it; but it’s about connecting with the target persona. They are the ones buying your product, not your neighbor or the board member. Take a look at Slack’s homepage message from November 2018 compared to now. Even after all these years, their homepage message is spot on for their target persona. As the product evolves and reaches a bigger footprint, marketers end up making the messaging more abstract, as they try to appeal to a broader market. But it is important to identify the capabilities that matter to your target persona(s) and focus your message based on those capabilities. The key is to keep the message relevant and avoid making it too abstract. In Slack’s case, you can see the shift in focus in their message from users and team leads at mid-sized organizations to executives at companies of all sizes, but the messaging, while it has evolved, still stays focused (though a bit more abstract than I would have liked). Test your messaging with a dozen customers from different target personas and company sizes to ensure you’re still hitting the mark.

• Pillar 2: The message should relate to the changing world around you. As your customers demand new capabilities in the solution (such as AI), they should become a part of the new homepage message. But make sure you are not incorporating buzzwords just for the sake of it (e.g., AI washing that many companies are doing today on their home page message). Do you have a proof point on your home page? One of my favorites in ‘relating to the world around you’ was the message on the Zoom home page in Dec 2020, during the peak of COVID-19 (see below). And they have evolved their message in 2024, keeping the AI wave in mind. But their message is still very well targeted towards their buyer persona, and they offer AI proof point in their home page message, instead of just AI washing.

• Pillar 3: Ensure you are growing your target available market. Make sure your messaging don’t get too carried away with your new products (e.g. next-generation architecture) and neglect the buyers of your mainstream product, who are not early adopters but are a key target market for you. Keep Geoffrey Moore’s “Crossing the Chasm” model in mind. For example, a major DXP vendor changed its homepage messaging from targeting a broad audience seeking a CMS platform to focusing on those seeking a composable, SaaS-based CMS/DXP solution— based on their new architecture, but a subset of their original CMS market segment. Time will tell if this narrow focus will cause them to miss out on marketing their classic product to prospects who are not early adopters of composable solutions. Maybe it might not affect their sales of their classic product, it’s a risky move.

Keep these three pillars in mind as you evolve your home page messaging.