Why your website & marketing should pass the grunt test

Blog Series: Essential Website Growth Tactics.

Article 4 of 4. View the full series at bottom of the article.

If you want your website to make visitors want to know more, then you’re going to love the simplicity of the Grunt test. When you apply this simple test to your website and even all your marketing, you will find conversions and enquiries will go through the roof.

What Is the Grunt Test?

Donald Miller from StoryBrand coined the phrase, which has now moved into the mainstream of online marketing as an effective metric for whether your website and marketing is getting the message across.

Essentially the grunt test is this:
If a caveman were to take a quick look at your website, would he be able to grunt exactly what it is you are offering?

In other words, is the message clear, concise and actionable to the point that anyone reading your site’s content can readily understand what’s on offer.

Passing the Grunt Test

Websites and marketing messages don’t all have to be about copious amounts of text, making potential customers sit through 1-hour videos, or trying to comprehend detailed infographics. Less is more. These days people have been conditioned to be somewhat impatient when it comes to things online, so you really only have a small window to get your message across before you lose the visitor’s focus.

Here are 3 key things your marketing and/or website should be able to tell its target audience in a short space of time:

1. What products or services do you sell?
2. How will it make my life better?
3. What action do I need to take to get this?

When people are searching for solutions to a problem online, they don’t want to wade through piles of fluff. They want to know, “Do you have what I need and can you help me?”. Following the fulfilment of the first two, customers then need to be presented with a clear call to action. They don’t want to click through multiple pages trying to work out how to take action or what to do next. Customers would rather you just simply tell them in very blatant terms so there’s no guesswork.

A simple example of this would be Amazon’s big, bold, bright-yellow “BUY NOW” button. It’s clear and concise and there’s no confusion.

Both your website and your marketing can offer more detail about your products and services as customers and visitors dig deeper, but people shouldn’t have to sift through all this extra information in order to find the answers to the 3 key points mentioned above.

Your online advertisement or the main landing page of your website should clearly define the 3 key points so that a potential customer can know within seconds whether you can help them and how.

As a simple exercise to really define the 3 points, if you have a Twitter account, try getting those 3 points across within 140 characters for a tweet and see how close you can get. Now while your website’s homepage and your marketing messages are likely to contain far more than 140 characters, you really do want to make those 3 vital steps absolutely clear the very moment someone sees your site or online ad.

The trick is, you want your visitors to be asking “tell me more”. That should be the priority. Get them interested by feeding them exactly what they are looking for. Then, when they want to know more, have that information available to them to fill in the details.

First let them know that you can solve their problem, how you can solve it, and give them a clear course of action to take. Itag Media has been helping businesses pass the grunt test since 2006 by designing and building websites and content that gets your message across clearly and concisely.

Blog Series: Essential Website Growth Tactics.

1. How can we get more leads to our website?
2. How to retain & grow your prospect list for repeat business
3. Push notifications, should you use them for your website?
4. Why your website & marketing should pass the grunt test