The clever headlines
When we first launched our product pages, every headline tried to be smart. We wrote things like “The demo your prospects actually want” and “Product content that converts itself.” They sounded great in the positioning doc. The team loved them. They tested well in internal reviews.
Prospects did not love them. We watched session recordings of people landing on our product pages, scanning the headline, and leaving. The clever framing did not tell them what the product actually was. A VP of Marketing who landed on our Interactive Demo page had to scroll past the hero and read the feature blocks to understand that we made interactive product demos.
What we changed
We rewrote every product page headline to follow a simple formula: what is it, what does it do, stated directly. No metaphors, no clever turns.
- “Showcase your product with interactive demos”
- “Beautiful product videos for every feature launch”
- “Let anyone experience your product without signing up”
Each headline names the category and the capability in plain language. A reader who sees only the H1 knows exactly what they are looking at.
What happened
Time on product pages increased. Scroll depth increased. Demo requests from product pages increased. The headlines were doing less literary work and more functional work, and the numbers reflected it.
The interesting finding was that the direct headlines did not make the pages feel generic. The subheadlines, feature descriptions, and visuals still carried the brand voice. The headline just stopped being a puzzle to solve before the visitor could understand the page.
The lesson
Clever headlines optimize for the internal audience. Direct headlines optimize for the prospect who has 10 seconds to decide if this page is relevant to them. In B2B, the prospect wins.
We still write interesting copy elsewhere on the page. The hero subheadline has room for nuance. The feature descriptions can be specific and opinionated. But the H1 does one job: tell the visitor what they are looking at, immediately.