Is your website all about you? If so, you’re missing a huge opportunity to grow your business, regardless of how great your products are or how eye-catching and compelling your website design is. It takes the right words to engage your visitors and prompt them to take action.
The best website copy shows prospects how they benefit from doing business with you and makes it easy to for them to get started. Take time to develop a core strategy around these concepts to ensure your copy speaks to the right people about what’s important to them.
Focus on who you’re talking to
Science has shown we have a natural inclination to talk about ourselves more than any other topic. That’s an easy trap to fall into when you’re building your business website. As an expert in your products and services, you likely view your site as a place to explain the nuts and bolts of how they work. That’s certainly part of the mix, but it’s not the starting point for your strategic process. Instead, take a step back and begin with understanding who you are speaking to.
Start by broadly defining who is the best fit for your products and services. Small business owners? Working parents? Investors?
Then look at your current “best” customers. What makes them that way? What do they have in common? What industries do they work in? What kind of jobs do they have? Which of your products do they use the most? How often?
Starting with a mental picture of who you are talking to — and returning to it on a regular basis — helps copy development throughout your website and marketing efforts.
Uncover their problems
If you want to be successful at growing your customer base, you have to identify your potential customers’ needs. Copy that speaks directly to these grabs their attention, and that’s a big challenge with the average human attention span now a dismal 8 seconds (and falling every year).
So how do you determine what obstacles your target audience is facing? Ask them!
Depending on your resources, there are many ways to conduct marketing research to better understand your existing customers and your broader pool of prospects. Surveys cast a wide net and can be administered online or by mail, email, phone, or in-person. However, one-on-one interviews and focus groups allow for more in-depth conversations and may be more effective in uncovering the problems your target is experiencing. If you have stores or a sales team, get feedback from those who interact with customers and prospects every day.
Whether you use the insights you gain to start developing actual personas or just write a few paragraphs to describe your audience and their needs, starting from this reference point keeps everything else on track.
Show how your product or service makes their lives better
Understanding your prospects’ needs and challenges only matters if you have a way to address them. (And let’s be honest — this conversation needs to be an integral part of product development to begin with.) Rather than focusing on your product’s features, think about them in terms of benefits. Features are facts. Benefits give customers a reason to buy.
For example, here’s the homepage for Harvest, a time-tracking application used by agency and in-house teams. While there’s information available on the site that explains how it works and what it looks like, the immediate impression from the home page is not about the details of the software. It’s “This is going to be easy! Tracking time doesn’t have to take up all my time.”
Use your copy to paint a picture of how life will look once your prospect becomes a customer.
Identify how you do that better than your competitors
Understanding what your competitors offer and how your company stacks up against that is key to your business strategy. The way you differentiate yourself is what makes your marketing messaging work, including how you present this on your website.
Direct comparisons by name can be tricky, especially on a publicly viewed website where you might not want to share all the details. There are several ways around this, however. You can anonymize (us vs. Company A and Company B) or compare to industry averages. Or, make this a gated piece of content so prospects who are really interested can access the comparison after providing you their email address.
Sometimes the difference between you and the competition is already clear. For example, CarMax offers a completely different customer buying experience from a traditional auto dealership. That’s part of their brand and their website highlights the differences by showing them as features. Is there a way you can highlight your differences as strengths of your company or product?
Note: While you may not want to spell out the differences between you and specific competitors on your website, this information is vitally important to your sales team. Make sure they’re equipped with specific, head-to-head battlecards.
Tell your prospect what action they can take NOW to make this happen
You’ve spoken directly to your prospect and their needs. They are intrigued by your solution and the picture you’ve painted of the successes they’ll achieve once you’ve eliminated their problem. Now, make it easy!
Clear calls to action throughout your website are essential. Show visitors exactly what they need to do to get started, whatever their level of readiness might be. That could be linking to more information, inviting them to sign up for a tips newsletter, or offering free tools or downloadable resources. For shorter buying cycles, prospects may be ready to sign up for a demo, speak to a sales representative, or purchase now.
Every page of your website should include at least one call to action (CTA). That makes it easy for visitors to take the next step, whatever that might be. While it’s possible to effectively feature more than one CTA on a webpage, don’t overwhelm the prospect with too many choices. Your website doesn’t have to do the entire sales job up front. Build a marketing funnel to continue engaging with prospects as they move through the buying cycle. Build buyer campaigns for customers to increase engagement and rebuy.
Your website can be a goldmine of opportunity if you use it to speak to the right audience in the right way. Never make your prospects do the hard work of figuring out how they would benefit from buying from you.
Need help assessing your website and improving your copy? Let’s talk about it! Contact me to schedule a free 15-minute consultation.