How to Leverage Your About Page in Your Content Strategy

Your About Us page is one of the most important elements of your business, but it’s also  one of the most undervalued.

Even if you’ve followed the countless tips online for writing the best About Us page there’s a pretty good chance that you’re making the same “set it and forget it” mistake.

The About Us page is where your customer turn to learn about your company. What they see can result in either the loss or gain of that customer.

Here’s what we can do better to leverage the About Us page in our content marketing strategy.

Make a Better Human Connection:  Design a Better About Us Page

I’m going to assume you’re at the point where you’ve invested time into your About page and have already studied how to get the most impact from that content.

If that’s not that case then I want you to read and digest this guide from CopyBlogger before reading on. It will give you a detailed rundown on how to vastly improve the quality of your About page content. If you are writing an about page for your personal website, check out a guide that I wrote.

This is where we need to step up our game to include better on-page engagement and make your About content an integral part of your content strategy.

Your About Us is More Than an About Page

Stop thinking of your About page as an About page and start thinking of it as a super-powered landing page.

Landing pages are the heart and soul of any marketer’s inbound lead generation efforts. Despite that relevancy to lead generation and conversion, 44% of clicks for companies are directed back to the homepage rather than any particular landing page according to MarketingSherpa’s Landing Page Handbook.

We can do whole lot better than that, and I’ll bet your metrics would agree.

Every set of numbers tells a story. Unique users, time on page, referral sources and visitor flow paint a pretty clear picture about why people visit your About page.

They’re interested in doing business with you while simultaneously judging you. On some level they’re engaging with you and your metrics can show you not only how they arrived but what they do after they read your About content.

That reveals two opportunities where you can work your About page into your content strategy – external and internal.

Pushing External Traffic To Your About Us Pages

Landing pages are awesome… blah blah. Don’t drive traffic to your homepage… blah blah. Do A/B testing… bah blah.

That’s all necessary and true but it’s been talked about a thousand times and it’s lame. Those tips never get to the heart of how to leverage your About content once you’ve made it awesome.

From an external position there are several ways to start driving traffic back to your About page in a way that makes it relevant to the user experience, and where it becomes a critical part of your sales funnel.

Tie videos to your About page

If you want to tell your story in a digestible format that is quick and engaging, do it with video. Push out video content on sites like YouTube, Vimeo and through shorter clips like Periscope videos and Vines.

In every video you publish you should link back to your About content. Let them get a taste for who you are, and your personality, then push them to your brand centerpiece when they click to find out more.

Don’t just give them a wall of text when they land there. Embed more relevant video and make the experience visually captivating.

Grove Labs built an innovative concept; that people can create a more resilient where food production is spread out, making it easier for anyone to build and grow healthy produce in their homes. It’s a very cool story and makes for an intriguing video.

Grove Labs greets you with this video preview that spans their About page with a play button that invites you to watch and learn more about their ideas, story and their founders.

What’s even better is that the video is responsive so it makes for an amazing mobile experience – something to consider since mobile search queries are now surpassing desktop and more people than ever are browsing the web from mobile devices.

Video is a compelling way to incorporate your About content into your content marketing strategy, just remember to use text along with your video for visitors who can’t watch or have difficulty playing it.

Send social traffic to custom About pages

There’s a lot of traffic being driven to websites from social media so a customized landing page is a necessity. Think about it: the people who click your ads and content links from social media sites – as well as paid social campaigns – are valuable visitors. They’re in the process of engaging with your brand.

1. Crew found that customers who engage with them via their social media outlets  (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest or Instagram) generally spend 2x more than the average customer.

You don’t dare send that traffic to a generic landing page or your home page! Send that social traffic to customized About pages.

Yes. I said pages. Plural. There’s no rule that says you’re limited to a single About page. You have more than one target audience and you create custom landing pages to match the audience of your campaigns – why not create custom About pages to match the different people who find you via social media?

Think about who your target market is: their demographics, geographics, likes and needs. Tailor your About content to talk to your audience in their language – show that you understand those wants and needs as you present your brand story. Then include the next-step or call to action relevant to that audience.

Source

Each of your social profiles includes a place to link to your website, so maximize the impact on conversion by sending them somewhere besides your homepage. Darren Rowse provides a perfect examplewith his custom About page that links from his Twitter profile.

You’re constantly engaging your audience as you share your own and curated content, so send the people you engage with to the one place where they can clearly get your brand story.

Link your people and your brand to your About page

If you’ve got listening posts set up online there’s a good chance you’re catching alerts for your company name, your name and the names of your team. Keeping tabs of brand mentions is smart, but you’re wasting an opportunity if you don’t do anything with it.

You never know when a reader is going to view you, your brand or a team member as someone who brings real value: an influencer. Don’t just settle for links to social profiles. Reach out to the content authors where the content originated and ask them to link those names  - brand included – to a custom about page that highlights your story and your team.

This is a great opportunity to set up supporting calls to action to follow the brand on your social channels and move prospects forward in your buy cycle.

Internal Content Promotion and Engagement

Using your About page with external content is easy – you drive traffic to it and customize it accordingly to cover that inbound opportunity. Now you have to think about post-engagement.

Control what they do after they engage with your site content by stepping up the presentation of what they digest.

Source

A new take on confirmation pages

I think Thank You pages and confirmation pages are one of the most value-wasted pages that we generate in marketing.

Your audience just made a conversion. They literally did exactly what  you wanted them to do, and your response is to serve them a “thanks for that” page?  Strike while the iron is hot and they’re in the middle of engaging your brand!

This is another point where you create a customized About page for receiving redirect traffic post-conversion. There are several benefits to this:

• The thank you message to show you appreciate the customer
• The presented company info to solidify the existing trust that spurred the sale
• Greatly reduced chance of buyer’s remorse
• Keeping them in the buy cycle (or launching a new buy cycle) for one more call to action
• Continued engagement with the brand

You don’t have to be done with them once the conversion is complete, and you shouldn’t be ok with letting them leave. Which leads us to the next recommendation…

Why isn’t your About Page your new information/social hub?

You can liven up your static brochure content with some video and images but why not turn it into more? We constantly churn content out through our social channels, so make your About page into the social hub for your business.

Present your social channels via live feeds in one place. Supplement that with a magazine-layout presentation of your most recent blog posts along with press features for your company. Embed your Snapchat stories, Twitter roll, and Instagram. Make it the one place a customer or prospect can quickly and easily digest every type of content you put it.

That’s the page you want them to bookmark and share – not your home page.

Let your about page tell a story

Good content marketing tells a story and there’s no better place than your About page for that. Level up your content by giving your audience an opportunity to be the storyteller.

Think about it from a customer or client perspective. Would you put your trust in a company talking about how awesometastic they are? What if instead it was a colleague raving about the work your company did?

That colleague is far more likely to be unbiased, providing a realistic view of what your company is like. Letting customers tell their story provides a more down-to-earth view of how you do business.

FortyOneTwenty provides standard goods on their About Us page with a well-designed value proposition, but there’s gold below the fold. By including testimonials that feature faces they present a list of companies that “trust” FortyOneTwenty, automatically making them more likable and trustworthy in the eye of prospects.

Conclusion

If you’ve ever celebrated a string of opt-ins from exclusive offers or witnessed the organic traffic from strategic content marketing then you know full well the power of customized landing pages. That’s why you should be employing similar tactics with your About Us pages.

You can transform those pages into an engagement and conversion heavy part of your content strategy with the right approaches:

• Use video and visually compelling content to drive traffic.
• Push social traffic to your About page for authority and further engagement.
• Create multiple customized about pages that are audience specific.
• Link published content with brand mentions back to your About content.
• Use customized About pages for redirected confirmations.
• Transform your About page into a content-rich social hub for your brand.
• Use content to tell a story, and embrace letting others tell the story for you.

This approach will bring more value to your customers and enrich the relationships & engagement you have with your audience.

Have you done anything unique with your About page to get more from your content marketing and audience engagement?