It’s not about you.
That’s right. If your selling point is that you’ve been in the business for 20 years, then you’re using the wrong selling point. Newsflash: no one cares how long you’ve been in business. What potential customers and clients care about is how your services fit in with their own stories.
Does your website treat your customer as the hero?
Marketers have been telling us for years that we have to be the grandiose hero in our customers’ story. Unfortunately, what that’s done to our stories is make our business and service the subject of the story. Our customers, therefore, have been trying to fit into our story.
But what’s wrong with this is that we’re making ourselves the hero in a story we have no idea about. We aren’t truly considering our dream clients’ own storyline. I know you’re going to say that it’s impossible to know every one of our clients’ stories, and you’re right. But we can certainly identify what their problems are, can’t we?
Using “you” in your marketing messages
I know, I know: I taught high school English, and I always taught my students to not use “you” or any form of the second person in traditional essays and papers. But we’re not in high school anymore, Toto.
The single-handed best way to relate to our customers’ stories is to make the story about them. Instead of talking at them, why can’t we talk with them? Have a conversation so that we are in the same story together.
Use benefits instead of features
How can your service make your clients and customers’ lives better? What kind of utopia will they experience as a direct result of using your services? Try thinking of it this way:
- Pick a service you want to focus on.
- Identify the problem: what is it that keeps your dream clients up at night that coincides with the service you chose in Step 1?
- List all of the ways that your service can make your dream clients’ lives better. Consider using “Imagine if…” statements.
Combine this to create new client-focused content for this particular service’s sales page!
Have questions?
Join the conversation on Facebook or find us on Twitter and send us a message. We’d love to hear about your successes or any questions you might have.
We’ll be back next week with part two of our four-part series on rethinking website content in 2018!
