Tell Me About Your Service
You want my business to sign up for your fabulous service. You have a link, but
Oops!
You forgot to tell me what you do and how it works.
I’ve been looking at a number of Software as a Service (SaaS) sites in the past few weeks. I’m just astonished at how many make it very difficult to find out what the service does.
Place your overview front and center…and above the fold. Don’t make your site visitor search and search and search for what it is you actually do. Yep, your benefits may be earthshaking but tell me how it works. Even a few bullet points would help.
Here are a few recent experiences:
*explanatory video marked “this video is private” — that tells me a lot
*no navigation bar or menu icon — four online searches to find an overview
*four-slider navigation to get to basic description — pretty pictures with hidden information
Or, a website with little information which is difficult to find with no menu/navigation bar. Buy here, with no differentiation to business as to why the monthly fee based on user count but starting at a minimum of 10 users, is different from the free version, or how it is secure for the corporation’s proprietary intellectual property. There is mention in the Agreement (yes, I found it) of intellectual property rights protection after the fact. So, oops! we didn’t mean it and now let’s have an international lawsuit because they are based overseas.
Today, I saw a SaaS ad for a service I might use. What came first? Sign up with my name, email address, business name, phone number before they told me what it did. And I’ve seen signup forms that were longer and just short of the location of my firstborn. All this just to find out what the service is. OK, I was game, because I really wanted to know. I submitted my form and got to the website. AIEEEEEE! A tiny click-through to…another tiny click through. This wasn’t a joke. This was the introduction to the product with no overview.
Who Visits Your Site?
It’s probably not the decision maker. Your first contact may be someone who is working within a cumbersome and antiquated system who wants a solution. They will need all the ammunition they can muster to sell your service to the decision maker. Give it to them. You’ll make more sales.
Target your content to not only your buyer but other folks as well, especially if your sales folks are giving you feedback that that’s where they’re getting stymied. — Rand Fishkin
Get A Clue
Conversing with customers is a two-way street. Organizations/businesses/entrepreneurs need to think of a website as the beginning of a conversation. Answering a question is the way a business responds to that question in dialogue. If they are not thinking that way, the website will not work. [fusion_builder_container hundred_percent="yes" overflow="visible"][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type="1_1" background_position="left top" background_color="" border_size="" border_color="" border_style="solid" spacing="yes" background_image="" background_repeat="no-repeat" padding="" margin_top="0px" margin_bottom="0px" class="" id="" animation_type="" animation_speed="0.3" animation_direction="left" hide_on_mobile="no" center_content="no" min_height="none"][clickToTweet tweet="Every way possible to engage prospective customers is a new avenue to conversation." quote="Every way possible to engage prospective customers is a new avenue to conversation."] Thinking the one-sided I sell this…Buy my product way doesn’t build a conversation which leads to an experience of expertise, authority, and trust (E.A.T.). Instead, what happens is a non-experience, no dialogue, non-engaging, and brief experience for a visitor who goes somewhere else, even if your product or service may be just what they need.
If you are selling to businesses consider all the people who will visit your website. Target pages and articles to different stages of the buying decision. First and foremost, tell even the most casual visitor what it is you do.
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