One-pagers make it easy for your prospects to quickly learn about why you’re worth talking to—and then easy for them to share your value with others in their organization.
April 10, 2024
Head over to Canva, the everyman’s design platform—or at least this person’s design platform—and you’ll find an entire menagerie of templates for one-pagers. I’m talking hundreds of thousands of templates. Sure, you might come across a Valentine’s Day card that wound up in the wrong algorithmic bin, but you’ll find a LOT of one-pagers. Different in shape, style, color, and, of course, content, they all have one thing in common. Say it with me: one page.
Zapier defines a one-pager as a “one-page document that clearly and visually lays out all the key items you need to know about a product, service, project, or concept. With a combination of text, visuals, and design elements, one-pagers grab the reader’s attention and provide a comprehensive overview in an easily digestible format.” That same article offers up 11 different examples of contexts in which one-pagers may come in handy, including investor updates, employee orientation, product, and B2B one-pagers, as well as some useful best practices.
Okay, great, but why are so many corners of the interwebs expending so much time and energy on such bite-sized content?
“One-pagers can be a secret weapon in accelerating your sales cycle and increasing your win rates,” says Maestro’s founder, Will Fuentes. “Not only can you use them to overcome objections before they arise, you can control the message, and also use them as a litmus test to see whether your point of contact (champion) is moving things along internally.” How? By conscripting them into the process and seeing how they react: “You can send over an infosec one-pager and at the next meeting ask, ‘What additional questions did your infosec team have after you shared the one-pager?’ You can learn a ton by how they answer this question.”
We sometimes think of one-pagers as a kind of caged animal. But the back of a cereal box is also a one-pager. Resumes are one-pagers. A movie poster is a one-pager. Even an Instagram post can be a one-pager. All of these products offer information in an attention-grabbing way. All of them say, “Here is the content that is paramount to most everything else.”
I’m not the first person to remark on how our busy modern lives have intensified the allure of short things. Short tweets. Short text messages. Short videos. Short voicemails—or, if you ask The Youth, no voicemails. But some things, like TV commercials and their catchphrases, have always been short. In a way, efficiency is, in itself, a kind of customer service. What you’re saying in a one-pager is, “Allow me to do the work for you. Allow me to present to you the proverbial needle. No need to sift through the haystack. Sit back, relax. Listen to me.” A colorful one-pager with relatively few bites of information teaches you what’s most important without you having to turn a page, to open a new browser tab, hell, to move your eyeballs too much! It’s right there and, ideally, it’s nice to look at.
We’re not. We’re busy. We’re overwhelmed. We’re anxious. We’re bad at disconnecting, and even worse at relaxing. What a one-pager promises is manageability. You can do this. You can take a quick peek. It’ll only take a moment. I’ve also found that, paradoxically, the shorter something is to read, the more likely I am to linger on its contents. Messages you want to shine get to shine. The only catch: you have to know what should shine.
Andrés Peters, Maestro’s chief learning officer, knows a thing or two about how the brain preserves data. “I like to talk about memory/retention/recall [as it relates to one-pagers] in particular with the use of images and metaphor.” There’s a science to the way a successful one-pager looks and functions. You may have stumbled into creating one accidentally, but there’s still a reason why it worked. One such reason could literally be attributed to the way people’s eyes move, or, to put it formally: “page scanning patterns.”
A valuable resource toward which Andrés pointed me is this piece by designer Ying Lai. Among other things, it lays out the findings of several studies that show how the human eye moves about the page. “F patterns” and “Z patterns,” referring to the path our eyes take, were two common trends of page scanning that emerged. This means that you can set up a one-pager to accommodate the natural tendencies of your readers’ brains and eyes, directing them toward information you want them to see.
Lai also has some tips on typography and content:
For more, check out his (fascinating) article up on Medium.”
We are visual creatures. Use that. But don’t overdo it. As Kelsey Erickson, our senior consultant in strategy and coaching says, “It’s nice to see branded pieces, but the simpler the better for readability.”
There’s a reason for that, too. This Chicago School article lists scarcity as an example of advertising psychology. “When things are in short supply, people rush to get them. Limited availability = mass appeal. To use this tool, advertisers may put deadlines for promos and limited quantities for really good deals.” It’s not hard to see how this applies to one-pagers.
I’ll keep this short. Next time you’re creating a one-pager, no matter the purpose, remember that there’s a long list of ways to create a good, short product. The long and the short of it is: keep it simple, but do so strategically. And don’t forget to read the cereal box—for its marketing ingredients, of course.
Further reading:
How to Create an Effective One Pager + Examples
Make One-Pagers That Grab Attention, Engage & Convert (2024)
18 Stunning One-Pager Templates: How to Use Them & Best Practices
How to Write a Killer Company One-Pager (With Examples)
https://hbr.org/2023/12/use-strategic-thinking-to-create-the-life-you-want
Do you need feedback on your one-pagers? How about training and coaching on sales strategy? You can reach us at mastery@maestrogroup.co.
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