What does your business do well but your website hide?
Three places to find reasons to choose you without inventing a fresh advertising promise.
In this edition
Your colleague can recommend the right product after two questions. The website gives that same product the supplier’s description. The gap between what the team knows and what customers see contains the material for better pages, ads and emails. You just haven’t taken it out of the conversations yet.
First: the questions you answer every day.
Listen to a few customer conversations or read incoming messages. Look for answers your team gives well and repeatedly. There may be real expertise that the website currently compresses into “expert advice”.
The useful change is from a label to an explanation. What do you help people choose? What information do you need? What will they have after the conversation? A concrete process explains more than a claim any competitor could publish.
Second: what happens after payment.
Patagonia makes care and repair instructions and access to its repair service visible. This is a public example linked below. The idea we find useful is that part of a product’s life after purchase can become helpful information before an order.
In your business, look for something already happening. Perhaps you have clear maintenance instructions or answer assembly questions. Show the help and its conditions. Avoid turning it into a promise the team cannot fulfil when orders increase.
Third: the work involved in choosing.
IKEA presents planning tools and services for furnishing a space. Its role in a decision is what interests us: sometimes the buyer needs a way to reach a suitable choice before reaching a product.
A smaller retailer can start with something simpler: an explained comparison, measurements to take or questions that prepare a recommendation. You do not need to copy the scale of the service. You need to reduce a real difficulty your buyer experiences.
Place the advantage where it matters.
If the help answers a suitability question, show it beside the variant choice. If it concerns delivery, do not hide it on a page people hunt for when they hesitate. If it concerns maintenance, explain it where expectations about the product are formed.
Start with one advantage and one location. Say what you do, for whom and under what conditions. Add evidence you own: an explanation, a process or real material. “We are different” can wait. People need to see how.
Before commissioning the next campaign, ask the team what customers appreciate after buying that they could not discover beforehand. You may already have a reason to choose you. You may simply be delivering it too late to help the first order.
ONE QUESTION TO TAKE AWAY