Picking a fight for positioning
One exercise that's helped us hone in our landing page messaging at Relevance AI is to pick a fight. Something to rally against to emphasise our point of difference/UVP.
Why? Because early adopters need something to fight for. A cause to identify with.
For us, we've made "traditional search results" our arch-nemesis. Where you type in text and then you get a giant paginated list of text-matched results. For many people this is fine, but for us and our early adopters, this is an antiquated way of engaging users.
Think about the way Google displays results! They don't just give you a list of pages. They have featured snippets, products, images, bio cards, questions and answers etc. This is what a true discovery experience looks like.
We're building an API that lets you implement fast search, but focuses on helping you grow that into an AI powered and diverse discovery engine.
Originally we tried to emphasise that we could do everything Algolia does, but cheaper and with more upside. We hoped this would get people in the door, so we could then convert them into users of our more advanced discovery features.
Our thinking was that this taps into a large existing market that already knows what it wants: fast search.
But we found this was failing to convince people to buy in vs. large incumbents. It didn't inspire or motivate people to become early adopters. Why pick this new fast search tool when I can just use these other tried and tested ones.
So now we've picked a fight against the status quo that Algolia and co. represent! And suddenly it's much easier for us to explain why you would want to pick us over the tried and tested.
We're hoping that this doesn't turn off too many people who just want instant search, as we're also a great solution for that. But in general, we've accepted that we're OK with this trade off if it convinces more passionate early adopters of our overall vision.
We'll see how this goes! But I've found this has made it a lot easier to write copy for my landing page.
Let me know your thoughts: https://relevance.ai/discovery
Hope your conversions stay high!
I love this approach! Often, when writing landing page copy, people want to emphasize everything at once and, as with CTAs, you want to hone in on one specific thing. (Obviously, yeah, that needs to be tested constantly so you're not putting a lot of your audience members off.)
One thing that I'd personally like to see is a use case or a video explaining how it works behind the scenes but, overall, great work! :)