People Don’t Care About You

This month, I’ll write about a topic near and dear to my heart … digital marketing. I spend a lot of time on my web site, blogs, email marketing and Twitter so it won’t be difficult coming up with good content.

Today’s post will focus on your website and how to use it as a marketing tool. The first thing you need to consider is what is the purpose of your website? Why do you have it? Is it to conduct eCommerce, get leads, attract heavy traffic, or something else? Only when you consider this objective, can you design a website which is optimized to achieve your goal.

The next thing to do is conduct a Blue Red test. I learned this technique in one of my favorite marketing books is Reality Marketing Revolution by Entrepreneurs’ Organization Philadelphia member Eric Keiles and his partner Mike Lieberman. In this book, the authors explain that you should print out a copy of your home page, and then underline everything about your prospective clients in blue and everything about yourself in red. The more blue you have, the better. Work on eliminating as much red as possible.

Why? Very simple. Because people do not care about you. Rather, they care about themselves. Obviously, you want the copy on your website to engage your visitors and the only way to do so is by talking about them (or what you can do for them). Eliminate the ego-feeding content and replace it with information which is helpful to the user.
The next things to include on your site’s home page are testimonials. Third party endorsements are very helpful to give yourself credibility. They are much more impactful than your own sales puffery. One or two testimonials are fine (although, I have a link to a full page on my site).
Finally, figure out something you can give away for free which will entice your visitors to submit their contact email. For instance, I give away a free download with tips on how to beat a traffic ticket. The idea is to get your visitors to stop lurking and come out and be identified. A free download achieves this and allows you to follow up with them. You most likely paid to get people to your site in the form of pay-per-click (PPC) fees or search engine optimization (SEO) efforts so you might as well capture and use this information.

You use this information with follow-up emails or newsletters. You want to continue the conversation by touching them with helpful, follow-up communications. In fact, you want to send information which hopefully they will view as so useful that they forward it around for you. Keeping your company on the top of people’s mind is critical. You never know when they or one of their friends may need your product or service.