Do you have plenty of people going to your website, but leaving before doing anything? Has this led to you believe that your website is a useless marketing tool for your business?
Before you tell your IT team to hit the “DELETE” button on your website file server, let’s walk through a couple things to determine if a there may be a simple fix for getting your website heading in the right direction.
Is your site providing value to the buyer personas you serve?
Please fight the urge to quickly answer … “of course it does”, because chances are, the reason your site isn’t producing any fruit is because you’re not providing value to your personas.
First of all, let’s take a look at what value IS NOT!
Creating an online brochure with static content talking all about your company, products, services and history is NOT valuable.
This may break your heart, but unfortunately your personas don’t care about you, the awards you’ve won, or your company story that provides a historical recollection of how wonderful you are. They only care about how you can help them solve their challenges. If you’re talking about anything beyond this, or not relating what you’re covering to how you can solve their problems, you’re wasting your words and their time.
Help your personas treat symptoms of a looming problem
Chances are, your personas experience symptoms of a problem long before they realize they need to “buy something” or “hire someone” to mitigate their issue. The most effective way to gain credibility with your personas is to actively help them them identify what their specific problem is and offer solutions. For example…
Let’s say you sell closet organization systems, your personas could have the following problems:
- They may not have enough closet space
- They may have expensive clothing that needs to be stored a certain way
- They may want to get organized, but just aren’t sure where to start
If you create content on your website that helps them solve any of these issues, you’ll instantly gain
credibility and begin to position your organization as a thought leader in their eyes.This will increase the likelihood that they’ll return when they face additional challenges. You can provide value through blogging, offering tools, eBooks, white papers, or even software they can download from your website in exchange for their email address.
When you provide value to your personas without charging for it, they’ll look for ways to return the favor. Ultimately that may lead to them doing business with you, or even passing along your name to one of their most respected colleagues. Make sure you don’t adopt the “old school” mentality of keeping all your “secrets” secret until they whip out their checkbook. This is called “old school” for a reason. That crap just doesn’t work any more. Serve your personas, and you’ll win!
Like I said, to really serve your personas you have to really understand them, get inside their heads, find out what makes them tick. This is no easy feat, but we’ve created a tool that can help you out. Check out our Target Profile Worksheet!
