This is a vital key to marketing your business successfully. It’s about looking at your business from the customer’s point of view and tailoring your delivery to them for a change.

So let’s jump inside your customers head for a second. Are you there? Right, so what is the need that is bringing them into the store in the first place? Say you sell shovels. Does your customer need a shovel? No, he needs a hole. Sell decorating supplies? Your customer wants their house to look beautiful. Maybe they want to sell it, maybe the decorating is looking old, maybe their friend just repainted and they’re jealous.

Let’s look at my business. Did you come here looking to optimise your website for search engines and internet marketing techniques? Maybe, but what is the underlying need that got you to that point? That’s it, you want your business to make more sales and from that, more money! So am I selling search engine optimisation and internet marketing services? On the surface, that’s what my products are. But what you really need is to:

• improve your business
• make more money
• have more free time 
• delegate the hard work
• use an expert in an area you are not

Sound about right? If not, please drop me a line as I’m desperate to find out all the needs of my customers. As you should now be!

If you’re not collecting the data of your customers now, start immediately. Get as much as possible without impeding the sale. Worst case, you should have their age, location, sex, correlating with their purchase data. You should also obtain information from talking to your customers. Build up an image of who they are and what they like in your head.

Now you have the basics you need to ask yourself the big question: “What do my customers want from me?”

And no, the answer isn’t your product!

You need to look deeper, you need to look at the inner psychology of your customers, and you need to work out their deepest needs and desires.

These are the ‘benefits’ that you are selling your customers. Not a product, you are selling benefits!

Before you can sell anything to anyone, you need to know who you can sell to. More accurately, you need to know who wants to buy what you are selling. It doesn’t matter if you think your target market is teenagers, you need to know exactly the type of person that is buying your product. You need to know who, and you need to know why.

When you’re starting your business this will be trial and error. You will have an image of your potential customer and tailor your product to their needs. With time, you need to examine your customer profile and see if it fits with your marketing message. You always need to be evaluating who you are selling to and how you are doing it.

You also need to be aware of who else might want to buy your product. You could have many different customer profiles and need to tailor specific marketing material to each of their needs. This is where you should be using landing pages on your website, one page targeting each unique type of customer. Just be careful not to dilute your brand too much.

Your business is what’s on sale. If you can’t get a customer to come through the door of your business, how do you expect to sell anything to them?

We are in an age where consumers are spoilt for choice. There’s a business just down the road able to do exactly what you do, just waiting to take your customer.

“But they can’t do it as well as I do it!” I hear you cry. Well keep crying because it won’t be long before you’re out of business anyway and luckily for you we’re also in an age of depression and blaming others for our problems.

How does your customer know what the better product is? Are all consumers really able to objectively compare all products, in all markets, all the time? Sure, the Internet is great, but online reviews only get you so far.

If you sell a fridge, when does a consumer find out its crap? About two years later when it breaks down. If you sell financial advice, maybe they’ll work out its bad advice in ten years when the children’s inheritance is gone?

But before you run off and start making crappy products, stick with me a little longer. What would happen if you could have the best product, but make your customer aware that they’re the best? Then you both win and everyone goes home happy.

And how do you make your customer aware of this startlingly obvious fact, that your products are the best, you guessed it:

“If a tree falls in the forest, but no-one is around the hear it, does it make a sound?” I know, no-one warned you I was going to get philosophical on your ass. Let’s try an easier one that might open your eyes a little:

“If your business has a great product, but no-one knows it exists, does anybody buy it?”

Say it with me people, NO! There are millions of people around the world, working their guts out trying to please customers and just getting by. Do you want to just get by? Or do you want to actually make a little money from your business? To buy a few luxury yachts and holiday homes in exotic locations? I thought so.

How many times have you decided you can do the work you do, better than the company that employs you? How many of you have actually tried to put this into practice? How many people have seen businesses fail because the customer couldn’t see what they were missing?

People have been learning the lesson that a great product is not enough, over and over since capitalism was born. And by learning the lesson, I mean running into the lesson, failing because of it, and then going about trying the same approach with a different great product.

A great product is not enough!

Let me repeat that, a GREAT PRODUCT is not enough!

Now don’t make me do that a third time. Lesson learned, moving along.

Your business has a product or service that it is selling; from now on I’ll refer to it generically as your product. It’s something that you believe other people are willing to give you money for. You’re probably very proud of your product. If I asked you to describe why your product, what kind of words would you come up with? Unique? High quality?

If I asked you to tell me why your product was better than your competitors, what would you say?

“We have a high quality product that we deliver to our customers with superior service and after sales support. Our customers trust us to supply them with the best and the relationship with our customer is our most important asset.”

You may realise now that this is exactly what every business believes is its competitive advantage. So if everyone has the same competitive advantage, what are you really competing on?

1. People need to find your website
The main way you want people to find your website is through the search engines. This means people are searching for the products you are selling and are obviously interested in this area and perhaps making a purchase. Most people never put a thought into how their website will be found using search engines and are therefore saying goodbye to hundreds of potential customers each day.

Your website can also be found by word of mouth, either being told by you, or by other satisfied customers of your business. While both have their benefits, the search engines can easily bring you the greatest number of potential customers for your website.

2. People need to buy from your website
Just like any other piece of marketing material you send out, it needs to be designed to sell. You need to know the outcome you want from a particular page and focus all your effort on leading the potential customer to that outcome. Your website is not something designed to sit their looking pretty. It has a role, just like everything in your business, and you need to make sure it is fulfilling that role at all times.

Sales

There is no trick to measuring how successful your website is. You simply work out how many people have bought your product thanks to it. If you sell products online, you look at how many sales you made online. If you have a physical location, you need to work out how many people bought because they looked at the website.

You can talk all you want about your website enhancing your brand, giving customers more information about your business or saving you money. But when it comes down to it, a website should be part of your integrated marketing plan. This means that it should have a return on investment just like all your other marketing. You’re not going to advertise in a newspaper and not find out if you made more sales than the advertisement cost. At least, I hope you’re not, because many businesses do exactly that.

It’s time to start holding your website accountable for its results. It’s time for it to start making you money. It’s time for a change and the only one that can make that change is you.

Welcome to the home of conneXted. Connecting your business is the next step.

Our passion is doing business online. Well, doing business anywhere really. But we’re here to focus on your website and how it is completely failing your business right now. Our job is to connect customers with your products. We do this is two main ways:

First, we get customers to your website via search engines.
Then, we make sure your website is set up to sell to these customers.

There’s nothing worse than having a website that your customers can’t find. Or is there? What about a website your customers find, but then don’t want to purchase from.

End of the day, same result: No money for your business.

We believe one of these services shouldn’t exist without the other. We’re experts in both with over 5 years experience in the industry. Read on for loads of free information on making your website perform, or have a look at our packages if your business can’t afford to wait.