Every business owner wants more clients, don’t they? And every service business owner knows the challenge of making their own business stand out from the competition.
Whether you are an accountant, a financial planner, a lawyer, physiotherapist, or chiropractor, the challenge is to set yourself apart so that prospects realise why they should do business with you rather than any other business providing a similar service.
Your website is an important part of your marketing strategy – not the only part, but an important one. It does worry me when I see business whose only marketing tool is their website because they are deliberately narrowing their reach and making themselves dependent on a single avenue for generating business.
Tell Your Story In a Client-Centric Fashion
The element that makes your business unique is its story. No other business can compete with that. So does your website tell your story? Or does it say the same things as all other businesses in your category?
Your core website copy should tell the story of why you are in business and how you serve your clients and meet their needs.
Notice the second part of that statement – ‘how you serve your clients and meet their needs’. People are busy, and they have problems – especially business owners. Your website copy needs to be about them. That’s why a website which clearly answers the questions your prospects have will always generate more business than ones which don’t.
I can’t tell you how many times I have been frustrated by businesses whose website doesn’t even answer my basic questions – and I’m not the only person who has chosen a provider or product based on the information I was able to get easily.
The interesting part of that is that when I speak to business owners most of them agree that when they visit a website they want their questions answered – but their own website doesn’t do this.
Your Business Is About Your Clients
Without clients you don’t have a business. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos built the mammoth company into what it is today by focusing on the customers. He actually makes decisions that reduce profit in the short term in pursuit of customer satisfaction.
You can all do this. If you apply that same dedication to satisfying your clients in every possible way, your businesses will grow! A website is only a small part of that success, but it has potential for enormous impact and for many people it will be their first point of contact with you.
What your website says is even more important than how it looks. The cover may be the thing that gets people to open a book, but the story inside is what makes them keep reading. Website design is only one element in the puzzle – unless you have a well known logo, the text is what tells prospects whether they’re in the right place or not.
Writing Website Text That Works
Small businesses are notorious ‘do-it-yourself-ers’, and of course most professionals can write. I have written copiously all my life between writing essays, fiction, writing to learn, project documents and proposal and so on – but it wasn’t until I studied copywriting that I learned the difference between writing and writing copy.
The thing is that most of us know all about our business, what it does, and how it makes a difference to clients – but we don’t understand it very well from their perspective, and sometimes we don’t think that matters.
The core of copywriting is understanding the person who the copy is intended to attract. A lot of research into the thoughts, motives, and habits of your target client stands behind the words that finally appear on the page, and it’s from that background that effective copy is written.
With the information about your prospect gathered the right motivators can be found – and the right words to explain how you are the perfect fit can be discovered. Of course, there’s an art to finding those words as well – and you can only confirm that by testing. Sometimes just changing a few words around will dramatically increase your conversion rate.
Ask yourself these three questions about your website:-
- Does it tell a story?
- Is it about my prospects and clients’ needs?
- Have I tested different headlines and text and compared conversion rates?
– If your website isn’t generating as much business as you would like, you may not need a new design, you may just need to study your audience more deeply and write fresh copy.