Everyone knows that building a new website for a business or startup can be super overwhelming. In today’s article, I’m going to be sharing with you the two types of pages that I would focus on building first before you build any other page on your website. By the end of this article, you’re going to know exactly what these two types of pages are and I’m going to dig into examples that you know, what you can reference when you are building these pages for yourself.
Core Marketing Pages
When it comes to building out your website for your business or your startup, the first type of pages I recommend you build are all of your core marketing pages.
So these are the pages where you’re going to want to answer things like, what do you do, how do you serve customers and exactly what sort of results you get. These are the sorts of things that people are always going to be asking you, whether or not you are ready to accept their business today. So it’s really important that even in the case where you don’t have customers yet you can create a page that essentially speaks to the types of customers that you would like to serve.
What you’re going to want to do is think about the questions that anybody might have if they were to just to walk by your digital storefront. If you cannot answer 80% of the questions that people have for you, then your core marketing pages are not in place.
How Bannerbear done this pretty well
To dig into an example, we’re going to take a look at Bannerbear. In case you didn’t check out my recent article on how that founder has generated over 250K in ARR without any additional staff members, you can check out that article here.
Digging right in, the first thing that we’ll notice on Bannerbear is that their homepage clearly speaks to what they do. They focus on automating and scaling your marketing, and they do this by auto generating social media visuals, e-commerce banners, dynamic email images and more using their API integrations.
So right off the bat, you need to be able to answer in your marketing pages what is it that you guys do. And this is clearly answered as we scroll through this page, as they title themselves the complete toolkit for automated media generation. So typically, you’re going to list out some features like they do here in terms of their homepage. And you’re also going to share things like what people are saying about your startup or business.
This means that the most likely customer that they are serving are social media influencers, as well as potentially directors of content or marketing teams at different startups who want to make sure that they are growing their presence on these different channels. So naturally that leads us to the question of whether or not social media marketing is even something that can generate an ROI.
The other thing you’re going to want to consider in your core marketing pages though are answering other common questions. So what you can see here in the top navigation is that Bannerbear has a solution section in which they are answering and speaking to the most common things that they solve for. They solve things like automating your marketing, which they talked about in their homepage, and they will essentially detailed that on this page, and they also talk about scaling your marketing, which is the other thing that they often solve for.
So right off the bat, as I scroll through these core marketing pages, I have a clear understanding of what Bannerbear does. Aside from their solution section, Bannerbear has also done a great job of having some other core marketing pages, such as breakdowns behind their integrations, as well as their product.
And so if I click into this image generation API, you can see how they are explaining their API a little bit more in depth and showing you visual examples of how they’re doing things. And then what they’re also doing is they have a demo section in which they actually will show you a few demos of their tool.
So key takeaway for you is when you are building your core marketing pages, you should be able to answer what you do, who you serve and what your customers think of you.
Bottom of the funnel (BoFu) pages
Moving right along the next set of websites you’re going to want to build when you are starting out your businesses website or startup, you are going to want to build bottom of the funnel pages. They are also known as BOFU pages. And the reason why these are really important is because when you think about where customers are in their journey of buying, they’re either going to be in awareness consideration or decision.
And usually these bottom of the funnel pages are going to be great for influencing the people to make a decision at the end of that funnel. So what this means is creating pages like how to use your product to solve a particular problem. You might also create things like product comparison pages, which detailed some of the differences between your product and their product.
This is something that I also covered in a recent video. So be sure to check that out for what you should include in these product comparison pages. Another common bottom of the funnel page is creating your own coupons or discounts page. This way when people are searching for discounts behind your brand, you can be the one that owns that first search result, as opposed to somebody else.
Now, if you’ve been watching my YouTube channel for a while, you know that I love real-world examples. So digging right into the examples of BOFU pages, here is Bannerbear’s example of how to auto-generate videos with Bannerbear and Zapier. So this is a great use case page in which they are teaching the potential prospect how to use Bannerbear with other tools that they might already be using.
Or taking another example of a larger company, we recently featured HubSpot and their landing pages. You can see that they have built out an entire library of software comparisons to HubSpot. So on this particular page, they have created bottom of the funnel content targeting each of their competitors. They’re talking about things like Salesforce versus HubSpot, MailChimp versus HubSpot, Zendesk versus HubSpot. And you can see that they’ve actually done this 30 different times. So by doing this, they’re capturing the search intent of the people that might be considering HubSpot with another CRM or picking it against another CRM to make that decision process a little bit easier.
The reason why I recommend building your overall core marketing pages followed by your both BoFu pages first is because a lot of times people start to focus on top of the funnel or TOFU content when they are building out their content marketing. But that’s a big mistake because in the case where you are actually getting the eyeballs with your top of funnel content, you’re not going to actually have enough bottom of the funnel content to convert that traffic.
It’s ultimately not very helpful for you to get eyeballs on your website if your website is not ready for those. The key things I want you to remember are, make it really easy for somebody to understand what you do and why you do it so effectively. And then on the other side of things, make it really easy for somebody to switch or make the decision to buy from you.
It’s all about removing the friction from these different parts of the decision-making process so that they can become your customer
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