By Rick Sloboda
Are you self-centric? Your Web content might be, and that’s bad for business. To engage visitors and turn them into customers, you need to appeal to their self-interest, not yours. Think about it: When people get to your website, do they really care about your company? Probably not. Prospects, however, certainly care about what you can do for them.
There are two common culprits of self-centric, or company-centric, content:
1. The Writer With a Big Ego. You hire a copywriter who has little regard for your audience or even your business. He’s mainly writing to impress himself, and maybe his colleagues. Delectable prose might turn them on and possibly win a marketing firm an award, but you don’t want to overlook the purpose of your Web content: to get people to take action, be it sign up for a newsletter, contact you or buy a product.
2. The Business Owner Who Can String Words Together. You can write — great! But, as a business owner, what you want to say and what your audience needs to hear can be very different. For instance, your vision, mission and value statements probably make you feel warm and fuzzy all over, but imposing them on your visitors won’t spur them to take action. These documents belong in offices, boardrooms and manuals, not on your website. Visitors need and want information on your product or service offerings, and reasons to choose you over your competitors.
Getting Your Web Content Right
To engage visitors and turn them into customers, your web content must tap into basic human needs and appeal to people’s emotions. Benefits can do that. Why? Because website visitors don’t buy products or services; they invest in what the products or services will do for them.
- What’s a feature? A descriptive fact — what the product or service is or has.
- What’s a benefit? What the product does.
So a benefit is what the customer gains as a result of the feature. If written well, benefits provide compelling reasons the visitor should purchase the product or service. Also, benefit-driven Web content is naturally more visitor-centric than feature-driven Web content.
For people to take action, they need to care. Visitor-centric, benefit-driven content tells prospects why they should care, and gets them to act. So should your website content.
Rick Sloboda is a Web Content Writer at Webcopyplus, which helps designers and businesses boost online traffic, leads and sales with optimized Web content. He speaks at Web-related events, serves as a consultant, and conducts Web content studies with organizations including Yale University. Clients include Scotia Bank and AT&T. Connect with Rick on Twitter.
Image by Flickr user juhansonin (Creative Commons)
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