Are we boring our clients with our website copy? Consider the HIIT approach for photography marketing.
Image by:@johnarano
HIIT or High-intensity interval training is a type of exercise that alternates between short, intense bursts of work and brief recovery periods.
There is a time and place for long form content, such as for an informative blog post (like mine!). If someone is seeking education, or has a special interest, long form may work. But if they seek a product or service they probably want their information to be quick and concise. For that reason, websites are more scanned than read these days.
I’ve reviewed many websites in my former marketing career and throughout my last few years of offering website and brand audits. Many websites suffer from too much text. We want to give our clients so much information because we want to serve them (it comes from a good place), but in doing so, we overwhelm with paragraph over paragraph and lose them instead.
Let’s borrow a page from the fitness industry to help us get better in communicating with our clients.
What’s a website HIIT?
Help to Inspire with Intensity, to Take the next step.
Arrangement of content in short, intense bursts of information and brief recovery periods, helping people take the next logical step in order to get to submitting an inquiry.
The short, intense burst can be a title, sub-title and then a small paragraph that elaborates on the title.
A recovery period can be a photo/ set of photos to break up text, white space, and buttons with solid calls to action. The call to action in the “intense” part - it should compel movement to click it!
Below is a section of the ShineSparkL Home Page, as an example. The rationale:
I created a headline that catches attention through a larger font.
I completed the sentence of the headline by creating graphic bubbles for each descriptive word instead of writing in sentence format or creating a boring bulleted list (like this list lol. Appropriate here when educating, not so interesting on my home page!). This is the recovery period, easing up on text with a visual.
I added supporting information in a normal paragraph.
I added button that urges movement to somewhere else.
If someone is scanning quickly, the title catches their eye and they will read it. The sentence ends with a colon, and it draws their attention to the bubbles. There is only one word in each bubble, so the brain says ok, I can read this. I added the normal paragraph to elaborate on the title, but it’s extra. If no one reads it, it’s ok. I still got my main message across in the title. So they can skip it without losing too much. And then there is a button literally telling them to click it. HIIT.
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