Designing Effective Hero Banners

Communicating your value proposition

Unless you are a national brand and have become the “Kleenex” of tissue paper you need a great hero banner. Most visitors spend about 2 seconds on your homepage or landing page to decide if they are interested, or if they’re going to drop off. In most cases on loading your page, the first thing they experience is a hero banner.

Present your visitors a great first impression in these first few seconds with a hero banner that accomplishes a few key goals:

A great hero banner will combine headline, copy, and imagery to quickly and succinctly accomplishes these goals. Try to think of your hero banner in terms that it’s possibly the only promotion that someone will see and it’s the one time you can communicate your key message and desired action.

This speaks to the what your company is about. How many times have you gone to a company’s website and can’t figure out what they actually do. Many service company websites lead with a hero banner choked with hyperbole or just plain ambiguous. You don’t want your visitors trying to figure out what the company or organization actually does.

Be authentic and use descriptive narrative content for headings, copy and buttons to create an understandable value proposition that speaks to your intended audience.

Authenticity about your brand speaks to the visuals as much as the headline. Not every client has the budget to have a professional photo shoot, but the worst thing you can do is grab a generic royalty free photo that’s used all over the web or a random background that says absolutely nothing about the product or service.

This is key to any effective marketing, the more specific you can get the better. The more you can “speak” to your target audience the better. Remember the headline is also used by search algorithms for SEO which will have extra benefits if you can include your audience or product keywords or phrases in the headline.

Your brand style comes across in your choice of words and imagery. You want things to “click” in more ways than one, don’t use language that causes a cognitive disconnect.

That’s what you want to hear after you’ve combined a call-to-action that matches both your companies goals and your visitor’s goals. This is what we call a successful conversion funnel. I’m going to review a few diverse yet very effective hero banners, each have a clear what, why and how.

Your hero banner will be effective if it meets all of these requirements. Now that you have call-to-action you can verify and measure the effectiveness using event tracking analytics and monitor or iterate as necessary.

Coming soon: Next time we will discuss some technical aspects of creating hero banners for responsive web design.

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