That may sound like a completely obvious statement, however, so very few people follow it through with their marketing online.
It is much more common that they will start with their company or their product.
How many times have you seen it?
Here is product X, it is revolutionary, it does this that and the other and you should purchase it because it will transform your business.
Now I am not saying that your product or service is not great nor that it will have a very positive effect for your client, all I am saying is perhaps to look at promoting your product or service in terms of the problems it solves for your customers.
Let’s Look At How The Customer Is Thinking
Here’s A Real Search Scenario
I have a small business with an office and from time to time I have clients visit.
I would like to offer them a nice cup of coffee.
I search on Google for “coffee machine” and I am rewarded with the following Adwords links at the top of the page.
So lets see what is returned for our search efforts.
The first entry shows as follows;-
I searched for coffee machine so the results are promising. These are most definitely coffee machines and I can purchase one right on that website.
The sub-text in the add promised “Professional coffee machines using smart capsule technology. See How!”
I am not a coffee expert unfortunately but the promise of smart capsule technology made me click the link.
When I got to the page what did I see? Coffee machines. Certainly and well priced too!
But what about the longer term cost of ownership?
What about the “smart capsule technology. See how!” Not a mention.
I could click on a visual link at the top of the page or I could click one of the links to the left of the products or even do a search for smart capsule technology.
Once I performed that action I would be off the landing page though and once I am gone I may never return.
No real call to action apart from placing an item in my cart and no statement that makes me want to purchase this product to solve my small problem.
This is a very product centric page.
The company believes I know what I want before searching for a coffee machine and that I have sufficient experience in the art of coffee making to fill in the dots that they have left out.
The fact is I am just “joe average” and I do not know how to fill in the dots.
Treat Your Site Visitors Right And They will Reward You
Some things to learn from this search and resultant website page;-
- Never, ever make a site visitor guess. They may not bother.
- Never, ever make a promise in your advertisements that your landing page does not deliver on
- Always, always think in terms of the issues your customers may have and that you can solve not in terms of the products or services you sell
- Always make your call to action stand out from the rest of the page
- Never allow your customer to get away from your landing page by not delivering on their expectations – sending them to another page is a failure – unless it is the checkout page
If you can think in the above terms then you will start to improve the conversion rate of your pages and thus increase the ROI for your marketing spend.
