Delete the pointless stock photos, CONQA's great hero image, you should read Built to Sell today
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Let’s get right into it:
TIP: Make your hero image mean something
EXAMPLE: CONQA have a killer hero image
THOUGHT: Read Built to Sell today
TIP: Make your image mean something
It’s very rare that you’re going to find an example of copywriting that is literally just words. Images are going to be part of it.
Yet, so many images are just an afterthought, or something that looks kind of cool without adding any real value to what you're talking about.
For example, here’s the hero section from a company in the HR tech space:
That image is most of the section! Yet, it’s not really telling us a single thing about what this company does, who they’re for or why those people use them. It’s just some faces on (what appears to be) ID cards. Huge missed opportunity.
(I’ll show you an example of good practice in the next section).
That’s today’s tip: look at your images, and ask yourself if they are working as hard as they could to make the case you’re making.
For software, screenshots are often a great way to do this (even though they don’t look that pretty). Physical products are a lot easier - you can just use a picture of the product!
But stock images, pretty designs, things like that - these things look nice, but don’t tell the reader anything. Replace them with something that does!
Example: CONQA’s great hero image
One of my all time favourite hero section images is from construction quality assurance software company CONQA. Check it out:
(Disclosure: I wrote the words on this page, but, regrettably, had nothing to do with the image).
I love this image because it works so well to illustrate CONQA’s overall value proposition. CONQA is software that helps construction companies with their quality assurance. Individual construction workers can pull up CONQA on their phones, find the relevant set of things to check for the task they’re working on, mark it as having passed or failed, then take a picture to document it.
That is a lot of words I just used to describe it right there! But when you look at the image, it’s pretty much immediately clear. It tells us everything we need to know:
You use it on your phone
You can mark stuff as having passed or failed
You can document it with a photo
So it’s backing up the claims made in the headline and subhead in a really effective way. Any ambiguity from the copy gets pretty much immediately cleared up by that image.
That’s how you should think about images in your copy: ask yourself what message you’re trying to get across in your copy, then use images to help clarify those messages. Think about them as two parts of a whole, rather than two separate entities, and you'll end up with a much more effective marketing asset than someone who gets bogged down in aesthetics when they think about their image.
Thought: read this book
Just finished a great book - Built to Sell by John Warrilow. It’s about getting professional services businesses into a position where they can be sold.
Don't let the title fool you: it's actually full of useful tips and insights for anyone. If you run an un-sellable busines (like me, with my one employee, who is also me), or even if you work for someone else, it's still useful.
The most valuable bit is around turning services into products. Rather than create a custom service for every single potential client that gets in touch, the book advises people to look at what they do really well, then turn that into pre-priced, prepackaged products.
(Much like landing page reviews).
This is just as useful for me as it is for someone in an in-house marketing team. When I was in teams like that, we spent a lot of time doing everything from scratch. Thinking about things as products rather than services helps to reduce - but probably not eliminate - a lot of the high fixed costs of briefing, scoping and arm wrestling that don't really add any value.
This is what I’m going to work on over the next 12 months or so - identifying the projects that I’ve enjoyed the most and that have been the most profitable, then turning them into packaged services. That’ll (hopefully) give me a much more systemised business than I have at the moment. Not going to lie to you: right now, it's less chaotic than it used to be, but it's still a lot more chaotic than I'd like.
Anyway, it’s a great book. Super-easy read, written in this fictionalised style that’s very easy to engage with. If you run a business, particularly a professional services business, you should definitely pick up a copy.
That's all for today. Hope you enjoyed. As always, hit reply and tell me your thoughts.
Sam
PS: You know what to do by now: forward this newsletter on if you liked it. Great for anyone who does a lot of writing as part of their job. IE, most marketing people get stuck with a bunch of copywriting tasks as well. Send this to the marketing person in your life!
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