Finding the Right Message

by Jennifer Havice

  The question now is how to take all that hard work and put it to good use on your website. Here’s where I have good news and bad news.

  Let’s start with the good news. You’ve identified the most important messages your customers care about. You’ve cataloged and prioritized them. And you’ve done it in a way that’s repeatable. As your business grows and changes or you find you’re attracting new audiences, you have a process to rely on.

  Now it’s time for the bad news. There’s no one way to structure website copy that guarantees success. Every business is different. Every audience and set of visitors to a website varies. What converts well on one website—whether it be a piece of copy, a type of layout, or graphics—won’t necessarily convert well on another.

  That doesn’t mean you’re up a proverbial creek with no paddle. I’m not about to leave you stranded after you’ve gotten this far. Instead, I’m going to show you how to approach the copy on your website based on the information and findings you’ve summarized. This chapter will help you understand the relationship between what messages your website visitors need to see at any given point on your site, the goals your business needs to achieve, and what sets you apart from the pack.

  Your website goals

  Way back in the introduction, I talked about how your goals and those of your customers are inextricably tied. To achieve your goals, you need your customers to achieve theirs. While we’ve spent the first two-thirds of the book talking all about your customers’ needs, it’s about time we address yours.

  Each page of your website has a purpose. That purpose can range from educating visitors about who you are on an About page to providing them with a payment form on a Checkout page. Whatever that purpose is, it’s connected to the greater goals you have for your website and, consequently, your business.

  Unless your business is a hobby, your top goal is to make a profit. One of your business goals may be to increase revenue by a certain percentage over the next year. If you are a web designer or consultant, your website will need to do a good job of converting prospects into leads. That means you’ll want to do things like directing visitors to your opt-in, giving them reasons to make it worthwhile to join your e-mail list, and telling them what they can expect from working with you.

  Without a clear idea of what you need your website to do for your business, simply repeating your customers’ messages back to them isn’t enough.

  Align your goals and your customers’ goals

  When I helped a colleague optimize the home page for LearnVisualStudio.net, a significant number of survey respondents told us they had a difficult time understanding how much value the online programming courses provided. The main call to action on the home page directed visitors straight to the plans and pricing page, asking them to invest in a whole lot of video training before giving them the information they needed to make a decision.

  Based on what the voice of customer research told us, we decided to test out the following changes:

  A rewritten headline and sub-headline to highlight the specificity and unique quality of the courses, adding in phrases used over and over again by customers

  Go from being a C# & .NET beginner, to getting your first developer job

  With easy to understand video tutorials and practical exercises, LearnVisualStudio.NET gives you a step-by-step roadmap to jumpstart your career!

  Copy below the fold that framed visitors’ anxieties in the form of solutions the courses could provide

  CHOOSE LVS WHEN…

  Other .NET training programs move too fast…

  When you need a game plan to get the exact skills necessary for the job you want…

  Or when you could use a little help staying motivated and on track

  LearnVisualStudio.NET makes tackling the .NET learning curve manageable

  Button copy in the main call to action making it clear visitors would be led to a destination where they could learn more about how the courses worked

  Show Me How

  The .NET Curriculum Works

  A video featuring the owner and course instructor talking about what potential students could hope to gain by enrolling and addressing their biggest concerns

  After making these changes, more people clicked the main call to action by over 66 percent. Plus, we saw a bump in sign-ups. The results indicated that visitors wanted more information before becoming paying customers. Asking those people to invest in the training too soon didn’t help them achieve their goals on the site. Getting them on the right path made their decision process easier and the conversions jump. It was a win-win for the customer and the business.

  What makes you special?

  Let’s take a moment to talk about what sets you, your products, or your services apart from the competition. Part of conveying value and creating interest with your copy involves keying visitors into the things that differentiate you from the pack.

  Take Etsy as an example. The online marketplace connects buyers with a community of craftspeople online. It’s the diversity of handcrafted products for sale, along with its global reach, that helps make the business special. Vendors find these aspects appealing because it means they can reach an enormous audience of interested buyers and buyers get a smorgasbord of unique items to choose from all in one place.

  If you’re not sure what makes your business special, you’ll want to give it some thought. Here are a number of ways that you can differentiate yourself:

  Point of view: Do you have a “green” business? Is your business guided by certain religious or political principles?

  Personality: You may have become an Internet sensation or celebrity. Someone like Marie Forleo falls into this camp. Her personality has become a driving force in growing her business.

  Problem solving: Do you approach projects from a different angle than your competition?

  Types of users: This includes catering to a specific niche or group of people.

  Highly innovative: Have you created a revolutionary solution or design? Being able to say you offer the “only one” on the market is a strong differentiator.

  Product feature: This can be any aspect of your product that’s unique.

  The important thing to remember is that whatever element of your business differentiates you, it must be desirable to your target audience. If you’ve developed a cutting-edge feature to your software that none of your ideal customers cares about, it doesn’t matter if you think it’s amazing. It won’t sell your product.

  Which brings us back to knowing what’s going on in the minds of your prospects and customers. Great copy can only do so much. It can’t sell a product or service no one wants, but it can make a compelling case for one that does have a market.

  Let’s take a look at the headline and sub-headline on the homepage for Unbounce, a landing-page-builder application.

  Build, Publish & A/B Test Landing Pages Without I.T.

  The Mobile Responsive Landing Page Builder for Marketers

  Part of what makes Unbounce’s solution special is the fact that it’s been created with marketers in mind who don’t necessarily know how to code. As one of those marketers who spends more time with words than tech, I prefer a solution I can manage on my own. Seeing the phrase “without I.T.” front and center speaks directly to one of my biggest pain points.

  What sets Unbounce apart is also what makes their solution so appealing to me. Making that point crystal-clear as soon as I land on the page provides me with incentive to keep reading. That’s exactly what we’ll talk more about as we move into the next chapter. Once you’ve spent some time thinking about what your goals are and what defines your business as special, you’ll be ready to combine those things together with your voice of customer research to write more effective copy.

  What to do next

  Open a blank document or pull out a piece of paper and answer the following questions:

  What goals does your website need to achieve to support your business?
<
br />   What purpose does each of the pages on your website have?

  Does your website help both your business and your customers reach their goals? If not, consider ways you can change that.

  What makes you and your business special? Think about how you can set yourself apart from the pack.

  Chapter 7

  Nailing Down Your Value Proposition

  I often get asked, “What’s the one piece of copy advice you can give me to make my website better?”

  The answer is easy: “Write a value proposition that gives your customers a reason to buy from you!”

  It’s critically important. In fact, your value proposition is the key component of your messaging from which all of your copy should flow. Without it, your website visitors will be lost.

  Not sure what a value proposition is? In simple terms, it’s a statement or series of statements that clearly articulates why your ideal customer should think twice about your product or solution. It conveys what sets your business apart from the pack and keys your prospects into what kind of value you can provide for them.

  Plus, it lets your website visitors know they have landed in the right place and will find not only what they need but also what they want.

  Every time someone lands on your website, that person immediately needs to understand where she’s landed and what’s in it for her.

  If you think back to Chapter 1, you’ll remember the very real issue of limited attention spans. Your visitor more than likely has multiple tabs open in her browser, which she’s bouncing back and forth between. If she’s anything like me, her brain is full of a myriad of random thoughts, like I better double-check and see if tomorrow is recycling day, Oh crap, we’ve run out of dog food! and What’s the new black, and do I have any of it in my wardrobe?

  This is what you’re competing against—people looking for answers to their questions or solutions to their problems in varying states of distraction. They have only so much patience and mental bandwidth to figure out if you’re selling anything they’ll consider buying.

  Value proposition does not equal mission statement

  When I started working with a local nonprofit on a messaging strategy, I realized I needed to have a discussion with them about value propositions early on. Not thinking too much about it, I threw out the term during one of our meetings. I found myself faced with blank stares.

  After a few moments of silence, one of the women in the room said, “Oh, you mean a mission statement? Because we’ve got one of those.” She went on to pull out a sheet of paper with a paragraph that talked about all the things the company did and why it was founded.

  I could understand her confusion. I had been talking about how it was important to make it obvious from the copy and design where their website visitors had landed. Their mission statement had plenty of what and why in it.

  The only problem was that it was framed from their perspective. That’s what mission statements do. They are focused on the I or we of the business and what aims and values the people inside of it want achieved.

  Instead, a value proposition speaks directly to the customer’s problem and how your product or solution will help fix it. That’s what makes it key to your marketing. Your value proposition is your outward-facing statement to the world.

  If you’re confused, think of it this way: Your customers want to know what’s in it for them. They don’t care about boring platitudes or rambling messages describing how great you think your business is. What they care about when they go to your website is getting what they need in the least amount of time possible.

  What makes up a value proposition?

  For most website pages, the value proposition consists of the main headline and sub-headline, along with benefit-driven bullet points at the top of the page.

  Let’s revisit the Unbounce example from Chapter 6. The headline lets you know exactly what the solution does and what makes it different (no crazy tech skills required). Their sub-headline tells you who should be using their solution (marketers who need mobile-responsive landing pages). Even their button copy (“Build a High-Converting Landing Page Now”) informs you of the value you’ll be getting.

  In the few seconds it took you to read Unbounce’s value proposition, you’ve been able to assess

  where you landed;

  what type of business or solution is on offer;

  what makes it special, different, or unique;

  if the business or solution solves a problem you have; and

  there’s something in it for you, so you keep reading farther down the page.

  When you can put together all these things in a nifty little package as Unbounce has, your ideal customers will be far more likely to think there’s a good reason to stay on your site.

  Using voice of customer research to write your value proposition

  To write your value proposition, start by looking through your priority messages list and your customer mind-set analysis to find the answers to the following questions:

  What is my target audience’s biggest pain point?

  How does my business, product, or solution solve that pain point?

  Why are the people in my target audience motivated to solve this problem? Or, what are they hoping to achieve?

  Let’s use our women’s health coaching business as an example. We can see that in the Priority Messages list, the biggest problem (pain point) for these women is not being able to find a program that’s sustainable.

  The coaching programs solve this problem by being customized to each person and having a built-in support network. This information comes straight from the second section of the customer mind-set analysis.

  What’s motivating these women to seek out coaching? By looking at the “Motivational Triggers” column of the priority messages list, we see that the most frequently cited reason is a desire to feel more confident.

  With those questions answered, the next step is to determine what makes this business special and if that’s something people care about. Let’s say our health coach prides herself on how easy her programs are to follow and customize. Going back through the priority messages list and customer mind-set analysis, we know that the women in her target audience are fed up with cookie-cutter programs that don’t fit their lifestyle. That means our health coach has positioned herself well. Her key differentiators are in line with what her customers want:

  Biggest pain point = Not able to stick with a program

  Solution to problem = Customized program with support

  Motivation/hoping to achieve = Feel more confident/comfortable in own body

  Now we can develop a value proposition for the health coaching home page that speaks directly to the ideal customer:

  Get fit and healthy with an online coaching program tailor-made for you

  With one-on-one and group support, you can change your body and love yourself doing it

  Along with the main headline and sub-headline, adding benefit-driven bullet points helps better qualify the value proposition. For instance, nowhere in the copy so far have I mentioned the fact that these programs are for women. That’s an important fact that anyone landing on the page should understand quickly. An easy way to rectify the situation is to create another sub-headline and use it to introduce bullet points, like this:

  Programs designed for women who want to:

  Stay motivated to reach their personal health goals

  Gain confidence while losing weight

  Stop being their own worst enemy when it comes to diet and exercise

  If there’s a subset of women whom our coach plans to target, clearly spelling that out is a bonus. Is the coaching specifically designed to help women over forty? New moms? Suddenly, “Programs designed for women…” becomes “Programs designed for women over forty…” Whatever qualification these women most identify with is the one to use.

  Don’t forget about the customer quotes...

  Once you’ve sorted out the key pieces of yo
ur value proposition, look through your pulled customer quotes and list of frequently used words to see where it makes sense to incorporate any of them into your headline, sub-headline, or bullet points.

  For instance, I used the phrase “pasta that sells itself” in the headline for the Fun Pasta Fundraising home page I worked on.

  Choose an easy-to-run fundraiser with pasta that sells itself

  With Fun Pasta Fundraising, put the fun back in your fundraiser…and raise more money while you’re doing it!

  After going through all the testimonials and survey responses in my research, I found this particular phrase repeated over and over again. Parents and organizers of fundraisers seemed almost relieved that they finally had found a product to sell that people truly wanted to buy.

  If you’ve ever been greeted at your front door by a well-meaning child selling less-than-edible-looking foodstuffs to raise money for an organization or activity, you can only imagine the appeal of coming face-to-face with high-quality pasta. It’s a whole lot easier to convince yourself not only to buy but also to buy more.

  While I filed this phrase under Wants/Needs, it serves a dual purpose. Organizers of these fundraisers want a product that’s easy to sell because they have concerns about raising enough money for their activity. How do I know? The research told me. So, telling them they can run a fundraiser with “pasta that sells itself” helps alleviate those concerns. Once they’re hooked, they can find the proof as they move farther down the page and into the website.

  What to do next

  Based on your research and analysis, come up with a value proposition for your home page. To do that, you’ll need to do the following: