If a website is not producing what you hoped, the cause is almost never the technology. It is a failure to communicate with the people who came to buy. These seven words cover most of what goes wrong.
1. Communication
Effective communication is the thing underneath almost everything that works, in business and out of it. Face to face, most of the work is done without words at all — tone, expression, the way somebody stands. Written communication has none of that to lean on, so it has to work a great deal harder to carry the same meaning.
You may have a genuinely excellent product and genuinely good ideas. If they do not survive the journey into words, they will not get you anywhere.
2. Audience
Drop the sales pitch and treat the people reading as an audience instead. A website is a presentation: a way of passing on information and getting a response. The objectives are the same three as any presentation — tell, sell, impel. Tell them what you do. Sell the advantage of it. Impel them to act, and to act with you.
To manage that, the message has to enlighten, entertain and engage. Bury people in facts and figures under high pressure and you will irritate them, and quite possibly put them off buying the thing they arrived wanting to buy.
3. Focus
Keep it simple and smart. Resist padding. Websites routinely drown their readers in detail and statistics, all in an effort to prove superiority over a competitor, and the effect is the opposite of the one intended — the reader cannot find the point, so they leave.
Focus on the few things that genuinely matter and your audience will focus on them too.
4. Language
Do not say a little in many words but a great deal in a few.
Pythagoras
The words you choose, and the order you put them in, are what give your message meaning and voice. They should engage somebody personally and leave them with something worth remembering. It is a matter of designing the pitch and then pitching it at the right level.
5. Performance
Communication is more than words. It is language, style, personality and delivery together. The old line holds: it is not what you say, it is how you say it, that makes a thing memorable.
6. Personality
Every business has a personality — that hard-to-pin-down quality people respond to emotionally and decide about quickly. This is an organisation I could deal with. Or not.
There are two jobs here. Recognise what your personality actually is, and then manage and promote it deliberately. It is less difficult than it sounds. What are our values? How do we want to deal with customers? How do we want to be thought of? That is the image to promote — and if what you currently publish does not do it, change the words, or change the image.
7. Psychology
When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but creatures of emotion.
Dale Carnegie
People buy things because of how it makes them feel. It is rarely only the goods or the service they want — it is what having it says. This brand will make me look the part. This car says something about how well I have done.
Whatever people tell themselves, and whatever they say out loud, buying is not usually a cool logical act. Discounts and fast delivery will help you compete, certainly. But in the end the features and the benefits are the excuse for buying, not the reason.
So the marketing job is to work out what your product actually satisfies in somebody, and then to say so, clearly and often.