No one buy a product or a service. We always buy a solution to a problem. The problem may be practical or emotional but if we spend money on a product, its only because we believe it solves a our problem, emotional or practical.
If you give money to charity you solve an emotional problem. If you spend money on decoration you solve a emotional problem. If you buy a car you may solve both an emotional problem and a practical problem.
Your content needs to solve problems or inspire the visitor to buy your product to solve their problems.
Start by figuring out what the product may solve. If you sell shoes you may solve a practical problem such as “no more pain in your feet” or “run faster”, “walk longer distance and helps you get into shape”.
They may solve an emotional problem such as “Your friends will envy you…”, “center of attention”, “with these shoes, everyone is gonna love you”.
The reason we bought those shoes are not simply because “we need shoes”. We need benefits.
Whats in it for me?
Features are great but we never buy features. We buy what the feature does for us. We want the benefit of the feature.
“You do not need a drill – you need a hole.”
The drill is the product, the hole is what it does for me.
Your client may not need a website but they need online business. If you give them online business they are gonna love the benefit you provide. If you only give them a functional nice looking website, they haven’t got a benefit they only got a feature.
A simple way to convert features into benefits is the “which means that…” method.
Example
We provide businesses with great websites and CMS systems.
which means that… Our solution helps you make money online and you don’t need to spend money to maintain the website.
which means that… Communicate with your visitors through a website that works beautifully, turning visitors into customers. You can easily maintain the website on your own.
Notice how we are talking about the benefits for me. (as a client).
You are no longer talking about how great websites you can make but how great that website will help me in my business.
Always answer the visitors question “What’s in it for me?”.
You want to answer this very fast. Preferably in the main headline to keep the visitor reading.
Stay away from the hype!
People hate hypes. There is no tolerance in hype and you are likely to loose all of your prospects if you are doing a “hype”.
What’s a hype…?
A hype is an offer, a benefit, a proposition or result that you can not prove. If you claim your product is gonna make people run faster and do not prove it, then you are doing a hype.
You can prove it multiple ways.
Testimonials are probably the best way to do this but getting them is not always easy and takes a lot of time. If you are just starting out and haven’t even got customers then this is very tricky.
A much easier way is to prove it through illustrations, images of videos. This is time consuming and may cost money but its achievable in most cases and you do not have to overwhelm them with proof. Just enough proof to make it out of the hype.
The best solution is honesty. If you can not prove your product then market the product as a prototype to test. People can buy it really cheap in return of leaving some feedback to improve your product or as a testimonial on a finished product.
Make content shareable
You need visitors on your website and you need to convert those visitors. You don’t reallt need general visitors but targeted visitors that are looking for your solution. When they go onto your website they should already have an idea of what you have to offer.
The common internet marketing term for visitors is “traffic”. You get traffic from direct visits (those who write your domain name into their browsers), search engines like Google or referral sites that link to you.
Ranking on Google is very hard and personally I no longer work towards ranking. When I rank its either simply organic or with PPC traffic (Pay per click ads).
The easy way to get traffic is to make
- Great content
- Make that content easy to share
When people stumble upon content they like and may be logged into Facebook or Twitter then its a good chance of them sharing that content.
You really want the Facebook “like” button and twitters “tweet” button and even Googles “+1″ button.
If you make content that has information that benefit visitors you are quickly gonna have them share your content which will generate traffic and inbound links and will also make you rank in Google organic search.
The call to action
Every conversion has a process to it, for example
- Start on the home page
- Go into product page
- More info about product
- Contact page
- Send through a form
You need to design this conversion process. From the home page there needs to be a “Next step”. It can be anything but the next step needs to be obvious.
This is “the call to action”. Time to act. – Do what I want you to do.
People likes to be told what to do instead of trying to find their way. Make the call to action large, in a different color and at the end of the page.
The same process with a call to action at the end.
- Start on the home page > “Check out our products”
- Go into product page > “Find out the benefits of product X”
- More info about product > “Sign up and get started today”
- Sign up page > “Yes, sign me up!”
- Thank you for signing up.
Conclusion
We buy stuff that benefit us. We share stuff that we like. We always want to solve a problem when we buy stuff. We want proof before we buy.
Always have a conversion process. Always have a clear next step.
I suggest you write almost like you speak. People don’t want to talk to a website they want to know there are people behind it. Using a formal language is very common but no one likes to read a page that looks like its some legal document.
Giving people honest and personal information is the best way to create killer content and get the traffic for free.
