Note: This is aimed at serious corporations who need a working marketing site. If you are running an eCommerce platform and analytics show these tactics convert, I digress.
The Issue
Somewhere along the line, marketing teams decided for you that your website should no longer be a tool for conveying information, but a theater of psychological warfare—a gauntlet of visual tricks, magic words, and interface traps attempting to force-push users toward a conversion.
Let me save you a massive amount of marketing budget
If you are engading in any of the "strategies" listed below, you are actively burning your money to make your visitors hate your company. If your target audience consists of serious decision-makers with actual budgets, these "conversion hacks" will do nothing but actively push their cursor toward the "Back" button, while considering canceling their internet subscription.
Here is how you are currently destroying your digital presence, and how to fix it.
1. The Silent Film In The Background of Your Hero Section
If it is not a showreel of your work or your venue (in which case the clip is your main conversion tool) the 260MB, three-minute, 4K background video in your hero section that cost you 20k to produce, is being scrolled past in an average of 1.8 seconds—even if it was directed by Denis Villeneuve. No one is grabbing popcorn to watch your corporate mood board.
Background videos are decoration. 5 to 10 seconds is the absolute limit, assuming you can fill that time entirely with mind-blowing money shots.
Pro Tip: If you want people to watch a video about your company, you either need to shoot an actual documentary with real information value and display it unobstructed and with an interface, create something excessively entertaining for TikTok, or just go ahead and hire a sicario to physically threaten the user's extended family until they watch all the slo-mo shots of your workspace.
2. Assasination Attempts Using Pop-Ups
If you are using pop-ups in a desperate attempt to force-convert users by obstructing their path, you are engaging in a UX felony. You hijack the UI to shotgun a message they did not ask for into the user's face.
Anyone with the capital to afford your product or service will happily sink their router into the nearest body of water before they engage with a pop-up.
Pro Tip: Show the message / offer where it matters. Use high contrast and prominent typography within the actual page layout. The user will register it if it's relevant to them, and can freely scroll past if it's not. Never force anyone to kill a pop-up, for any reason, ever.
Which leads me to...
3. The Fullscreen Cookie Banner Felony
Companies deploying full-screen modals that require a law degree to comprehend are in the business of data harvesting. They design these pop-ups with the sole intent of overloading the user's cortex so they throw in the towel and just click "Accept All."
Even though the GDPR clearly states that the banner must not completely block access to the site in a way that forces interaction, companies do it anyway because it happens to work (just think of how many times you have fallen for this).
Pro Tip: While a GDPR-compliant cookie banner has to be prominent enough to inform the user, it does not dictate specific pixel dimensions. If you are not a data broker and have a modal like this on your website, immediately have it redesigned so it is as unobtrusive as possible. (If you are a data broker, please leave this site immediately and re-evaluate your life choices.)
The Privacy-First Alternative: You do not actually need to subject your users to this crap. Stop using Google Analytics. Stop embedding YouTube videos (just link to them). Stop using embedded Google Fonts (fun fact: Google Fonts follow your 12-year-old daughter around the internet). Ditch the Facebook pixel. Switch to a privacy-first tracker like Plausible. It's fully GDPR compliant without using cookies or pop-ups. Let your users experience the sweet delight of reading your website without having to engage in physical combat with an overlay first.
4. The "Community" Grift
Marketing agencies are currently making a fortune selling "Community Building" to B2B companies. They are actively robbing you. Nobody is looking to hang out in a digital space dedicated to a single business. Even if it's in VR, Mark.
Pro Tip: If you want a community presence, find an existing, active community relevant to your business and make the effort to fit in by posting genuinely valuable, informative content. Do not pay an agency to build you a digital ghost town and expect your clients to populate it.
5. The Magic Buzzword Fantasy
Read these actual headlines from some of the most stylish, award-winning B2B websites currently live on the web, and try to guess what these people are selling:
- "Form Follows Feeling. We create innovative and thought-provoking environments that foster deeper human experiences. Empathy shapes everything we create, from the first impression to the final detail."
- "Powering engagement where money moves."
- "Feel the strength of the dollar."
- "Adaptive Wealth. Purposefully Built."
- "Getting it right ain’t easy. Reshaping SMEs, entrepreneurs, and startups with clear, targeted actionable strategies to sell your brand story. That's why we're here."
- "From chaos to clarity. [REDACTED] is a smart and scalable platform that gives complete control over how organizations plan, execute, and manage work. Unified, integrated, evolutionary. Plan, manage, and deliver services with confidence and control."
Now look at your own website. Is there a disturbing similarity?
No potential client has ever landed on a website, read "we create thought-provoking environments that foster deeper human experiences," and immediately clicked the contact button because that was exactly the vague, atmospheric sentiment they were looking to purchase.
Pro Tip: Think about the questions your clients ask you on a daily basis via phone or email. What are the most common objections? What are the basic logistical answers you find yourself repeating on every single 45-minute discovery call? These are your talking points.
Final Pro Tip and Summary
Users visit your website to find out what you do, how much it costs, and if they can trust you. They are not looking to get jedi mind-tricked.
You cannot force people to buy your services. You cannot force a user to convert. You cannot hypnotize them with magic words, pretty videos, animated SVGs of your proprietary business process and you absolutely cannot win their trust by obstructing your UI.
If your product or service is actually worth something, the formula is devastatingly simple: Make the key information readily available and clearly organized, ensure the typography is legible, provide bulletproof navigation, and give the user the freedom to make their own decision.
Clarity is the ultimate conversion tool. Everything else is just noise.
