Homepage Audit for a Pre-Launch Marketing Tool

Context

A pre-launch marketing tool backed by the European Union, built for small and mid-sized German B2B companies without an in-house marketing team. The team came to me with a draft of their new homepage before going live. The old site sold a concept. The new draft sold a product. They wanted to know: does the new draft actually land with the target reader — a managing director with 90 seconds to decide?

My Role

A UX audit of the homepage draft, desktop-only as briefed. The deliverable: ten prioritized findings answering six specific questions from the client, plus a list of what should stay untouched and a low-priority backlog for later rounds.

Approach

A 5-second test on the hero first, then section by section from the perspective of the ICP — a non-technical founder of a B2B mid-sized company, no marketing background, about 90 seconds of scanning time. Every finding split into observation and suggestion, prioritized high / medium / low. Copy suggestions written out to be paste-ready. For each finding, I named the risk in the user’s words, not in UX jargon.

Selected Findings

The strongest section was buried as the fifth repetition. A responsibility matrix (five phases × three actors: AI, expert, you) visualized the product’s whole USP — “automated, with human review” — in one image. But it appeared only after four other workflow explanations. By then the reader had tuned out. Fix: move it right under the hero, strip the redundant steps above it. Single biggest lever on the whole page.

The hero named what the product does, not who it’s for. The H1 read like a positioning claim (“Your marketing. Clearly steered with AI.”), but the target reader — mid-sized B2B — only appeared in the second line of the subhead. In the 5-second test, “marketing with AI” stuck, “for whom” did not. Fix: add a small eyebrow above the H1 naming the audience explicitly.

The price card for the paid tier had no button. Two cards side by side: the free trial had a CTA, the 250 €/month tier didn’t. Visually it dominated — black contrast against the white free card — but offered no action. A founder saying “yes, Basic sounds right” had nowhere to click. Direct conversion loss on a pricing page.

The consultant audience was handled in two lines and a mailto. The brief named consultants as a strategically important second audience — each one potentially brings five to twenty end-customers. On the page they got one small tile and a mailto link. Fix: build out the section with margin info, consultant workflow, a small dashboard mockup, and swap the mailto for a Calendly booking.

Result

Ten prioritized findings with ready-to-ship copy, delivered three days before deadline. Signed off the same week. The team confirmed the audit was “very helpful” and that most findings were being implemented. The product goes live in late 2026.

Takeaway

For pages targeting non-technical founders, the fight isn’t over design — it’s over the first fifteen seconds. The strongest sections of the page already existed in this draft. They just weren’t where the reader would see them first.