When we are selling a product or service online or off, it is very easy (too easy actually) to get carried away with our own passion for what we are doing and forget about how our business will be perceived by our customers.
As business owners, we know our own products and services inside out. More often than not we have developed them, and we launch into the market, “on fire” to find qualified people to sell them to.
We each know the story of how our business was born (every business owner has a story – whether it is obvious to them or not), and the direction we intend to take it in. And this entire process is very exciting, rewarding, frustrating and challenging all at once.
Newcomers very frequently put together marketing messages and websites, landing pages and autoresponders with their own excitement and understanding of what they are doing at the forefront of their minds
But in their desire to begin building and growing and developing their business and their marketing, many people are inclined to disregard their potential customer’s experience of the process they are designing.
We have had a good deal of experience with business owners who suffer from what we call the “curse of assumption”, that is, they believe that potential customers will automatically understand their marketing message, and how it connects to their marketing process, their products and their services. Because they are so intimately tied up in how it all works, they assume that their potential customers will easily ‘get’ what it is they do.
And this simply is not the case.
Your prospects will not automatically connect each step of your marketing and sales process unless you take them by the hand and lead them through it in a way that it logical, consistent and interesting to them. You have to “join the dots” for them, so to speak.
We call this process of clearly and logically leading your prospect through your marketing funnel as ‘transitioning’
At every step of the way, your prospect has to feel that what they are learning both from and about you, is relevant to them, their needs, frustrations, challenges, fears and desires.
They must always feel that they are in the right place, because you have ‘joined the dots’ for them, using continuity in your content.
You can achieve this by making sure you are using the same keywords and headlines in your advertising copy, and to a far lesser extent, graphics and images.
This advertiser has made a strong connection between his Google ad and the headline and offer on his landing page
When you think about it, there are almost infinite choices a searcher can make if they are online looking for a specific product or service. As a business owner, it is your job to supply them with as much high quality information as possible (so they can make an educated buying decision), and then guide them as clearly as possible through your process.
At the end of the day, if your prospect does not understand how your product or service is going to benefit them, they are going to almost certainly ‘click back’, and keep looking elsewhere.
Cheers,
Tan
