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> June 4, 2012

Too Many Businesses Make This Mistake

Potential customers come to your website and leave in seconds.  They listen to your speak and don’t engage with you.

You know you’re talking about something very important to them.  Why aren’t you connecting?

Probably because you’re talking about you…and your best friend, your products.

This fits neatly into our Top 10 Mistakes Made By Small Businesses.  It’s not about you.  As great as your company is, and fabulous as your products are, when you’re marketing, it isn’t about you.

I can’t tell you how many companies I work with who yak on and on about themselves.  Insert huge clue here—your customers don’t care about you!  Quit talking about yourself and start saying what matters.

What matters is this.

Your customers care about themselves.  What’s on the mind of your consumer today?  Don’t waste your breath (or your marketing budget) bragging about your products as bigger, better, faster, or the envy of the neighbors.  Customers don’t care about you.  Not yet.

Instead, spare no words or images to describe how your product or service can save your customers’ money or grow hair on their head or save them from a legal battle or improve their health without prescription medicines or protect them during surgery or bring the right customers to their website or restore their zest for life or take them out of their crushingly-boring W2.  Talk about their aspiration…and that you deliver it.

Let’s toss out an example you can role model.

We have a client who reduces credit card debt.  They were spending all their marketing time talking about how long they had been in business, how safe their service was and how easy they were to work with.  All these things are true.  But what their customers care about is how to get out of the debt they have run up.  And do it with the least pain possible.  Now our client is talking about the documented fact that they can negotiate at least 50% of the debt away and create a repayment plan that eliminates your credit card debt in 4 years making the new minimum payment.  They then show that making your current minimum payment, it will take about 116 years to get just your present debt—nothing new added to your card—down to zero.

See the difference?  Only after you’ve shown me “what’s in it for me” can you begin to get my attention about “why you.”

Start talking to your customers about what matters most to them…and by the way…do you know what that is?

Go forth and do great things,

Martha Hanlon and Chris Williams