When new visitors hit your website’s home page, what impression do they get? Do they understand what you offer? Do they see something that interests them? Are they intrigued enough to contact you for more information?

If you want your website to pre-qualify sales prospects and encourage your ideal prospects to do business with you, your home page has to inform, engage, even delight. And it can’t do that if you don’t understand their expectations.

So, what do they expect? Here are the two questions new web visitors ask when they land on your home page:

Am I in the right place? Whether they came to your website from a search engine or typed in your address from your business card (you do have your URL on your business card, don’t you?), the first thing new visitors want to know is whether they’re in the right spot. Be clear about who you are and what you do.

Can these people help me? Here’s where a lot of websites fail miserably. A web page is not just an online brochure, it’s a virtual conversation. And the more conversational and needs-focused your home page is, the more powerful a marketing tool it becomes.

I came across your marketing materials a few days ago and was impressed enough to visit your website to get more information.

Wow. And I don’t necessarily mean that in a good way.

Don’t get me wrong. You’ve obviously put a lot into your startup – a lot of time, energy, thought, maybe even money. You’ve taken a big step into the often scary world of marketing your business on the Internet, and you are to be congratulated for your pluck and forward thinking. The absolute last thing I want to do is discourage you.

But while your website is very attractive aesthetically (the logo is particularly cool), I’m afraid it’s not doing you many favors from a marketing standpoint.

How can I say that? Well, consider these points:

Too much Flash + not enough text = little online visibility. Flash animation – the software powering most of your site – is a very in-your-face, very sexy tool. And when used intelligently, it does what it does very well.

But it’s got one really huge drawback: Google (and other search engines) can’t read it. Its robots take one look at your 100% Flash content and, not seeing anything they can index, move on to another site.  (For the skeptics out there: http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/googleisgod.html explains this further and provides some tools for you to see your own site through a search engine spider’s eyes.)

So all those nice words and phrases your potential clients are typing into the search engines are leading them … to your competitors’ sites. If you don’t believe me, try Googling yourself (not with your name, but with your keywords like “[profession] Mobile Alabama”) and count how many pages you have to scroll down before you see your own site.

Forced Flash. Once someone from your target market visits your site, you want them to come back, don’t you? Then why must your returning site visitors sit through your entire 42-second Flash intro every single time?

Forty-two seconds may not seem a long time when you’re just reading about it. But think about it the way your ideal prospect will. Imagine he (or she) is on the phone with a valued client who’s assigning the firm a new file. He/she tells the client, “We need an expert to evaluate these records.” So he/she pulls out your card, types in your website address … and then sits there for 42 whole seconds waiting for the intro he/she has already seen to finish so he/she can get to your Services or Contact page.

How many prospects do you think will do that more than once?

Too much sound. Here’s another potential turn-off. Since you’re selling B2B (business-to-business) services, most of your visitors will be accessing your site from their office computers. When their co-workers (or bosses) suddenly hear music wafting from a nearby office or cubicle, they’ll be thinking: “Uh-oh, Chris is out there surfing some entertainment site on company time again.”

Do your visitors a favor. Get your web programmers to put a “Skip Intro” link or button on the entry page. And that “Audio Off” button on the other pages should turn all audio off, not just the music. Your prospects’ co-workers will appreciate it.

Inaccessible to the visually impaired. Have you ever considered that some of your visitors may be visually impaired? Such site visitors often rely on tools like screen magnifier and screen reader software to use the web. The magnifiers make the text and images larger so those who have minimal vision can read it; the screen readers read the site out loud for the blind. Even people who are a little far-sighted (like me) use the web browser’s built-in font resizing tools to make the text more readable.

Many (but, certainly, not all) of these tools will be of no use on your site, for a lot of the same reasons that Google will not be able to read your site (the “all Flash, all the time” programming). True, visually impaired users probably make up a small percentage of your visitors. But what if one of them otherwise would have become your best client?

Why all the anonymous (and unsolicited) advice? I’ll admit it – I’m basically gutless. I don’t like getting irate phone calls from people any more than anyone else does. (And after writing this, I probably deserve a good chewing out for being so presumptuous.)

But you’d be better served by taking all that emotional energy you’d otherwise spend calling me and spending it improving your online presence instead. Your bottom line will eventually show it’s time and energy well spent.

And to prove I’m not just some mean-spirited know-it-all who lives for criticizing other people, I’d like to pass along some resources I’ve found really helpful:

Books (Amazon Affiliate Links)

Get Clients Now!: A 28-day Marketing Program for Professionals, Consultants, And Coaches by C.J. Hayden (ISBN 0-8144-7374-1) – A terrific cookbook approach to building a well-rounded marketing plan based on proven strategies and activities. Identifies where in the sales process you’re “stuck,” then helps you come up with 9-10 daily actions that, done consistently over 28 days, will increase the number of clients you win.

The Ultimate Sales Letter: Attract New Customers. Boost Your Sales (Ultimate Sales Letter)by Dan Kennedy (ISBN 1-58062-257-7) – If you’re using introduction letters as a direct contact marketing tool, this is a good resource on the art of writing for sales. Some of Kennedy’s advice may be hard to swallow at first (he works mostly in B2C, which has a higher “cheese factor”) but can be adapted to the more professional approach a B2B market demands.

Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Day by Jennifer Grappone and Gradiva Couzin (ISBN 0-471-78753-1) – If you want to learn about getting more visitors to your website, this is an ideal non-techie tutorial. You may be limited in how much organic Search Engine Optimi¬zation (SEO) you can do with the site being built almost entirely in Flash, but there are other elements of SEO you can benefit from like directory listings, pay-per-click advertising, link exchange, etc. And when you update your site in a year or two, you’ll be well prepared to guide your web designers in programming a more search engine friendly site.

Websites

Web Pages That Suck (http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com) – It’s got a rude title and an off-the-wall feel, but the approach – “the best way to learn about good design is to study bad design” – is sound. Behind all that humor are some great lessons in what makes a website work..

Action Plan Marketing (http://www.actionplan.com – affiliate link) – Robert Middleton is hands-down the best marketing guru for the solo professional I’ve ever seen. He’s got lots of free and low-cost advice available in the form of teleseminars and ebooks, and his coaching program is top-notch. Definitely consider enrolling in his coaching once you’ve graduated from Get Clients Now. In the meantime, his Website Toolkit alone is worth ten times what he charges.

Google Adwords (http://adwords.google.com) – Do yourself a favor and sign up for an Adwords Starter account. Set the budget low enough to be comfortable, then start testing ads for your site. Later, upgrade to the Standard Account and get free web analytics (shows you where your traffic is coming from). Most people are afraid of pay-per-click advertising, but you can set your own budget and limit search results to a specific geographical area so only Mobile area prospects see your ad (which further limits your costs).

Please understand – I sincerely wish you and your new business the best. I apologize if my approach offends. But if someone had taken me aside when I put up my first (very ugly and marketing-impaired) website and shown me some of these things, I would be light years (and mucho bucks) ahead of where I am now.

Good luck. I hope your new venture succeeds beyond your wildest dreams.

Signed, a fellow small business owner

Imagine you’re at a networking event. You’re meeting new people, exchanging business cards, having a pretty good time (even if you are working). You greet an unfamiliar but friendly-looking person in a nice suit, and he/she begins the conversation:

“Hi, I’m Chris with Generic Solutions, Inc. We provide our customers with proactive solutions for systemic organizational problems to positively impact the bottom line by leveraging the employee knowledge base …” And on and on it goes. It’s a good two to three minutes before you can get a word in edgewise.

How do you feel about doing business with Generic Solutions?

Not good, I’m guessing. And it’s no wonder. You’ve been “pitched” in the most insensitive manner imaginable. You’re just another face in the crowd to Chris, someone to recite an elevator speech to. You can’t wait to move on.

Now read a typical home page from a corporate website:

“Consolidated Megacorp is an international solutions provider with locations in 20 countries around the world specializing in document management technology for a wide range of industries …”

Granted, at some point in the business relationship, this information will be useful and appropriate. But doesn’t this leave you a little cold this early on?

It’s been said people don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. Put another way, it’s premature to offer a “solution” until you’ve convinced your prospect you understand his/her problem. Only after you describe the problem accurately and vividly – so vividly you get a “yeah, that’s me” response – will your web visitor be open to hearing about your “solution.” When prospects are convinced you “get” them, they’re more likely to “get” you.

Instead of inundating your web visitors with corporate facts and figures, think about your home page (indeed, your entire web site) as the beginning of a relationship. Talk to instead of at people. Ask questions (rhetorically, of course, but carefully worded to hit your target market’s hot buttons). Address your reader by using the word “you” (but don’t overdo it). Remember that you’re not talking to a mass of people – you’re talking to one person at a time.

Sure, it takes a little time and effort. You’ll have to think carefully about your ideal customers – what frustrates them, what motivates them, what problem they would give anything to solve. You may even have to pick the brains of some of your best clients to get their perspective.

But isn’t making a stronger connection to your sales prospects worth it?

Previously, we talked a bit about what a well-crafted website can do for your business: boost visibility and credibility, get you more referrals from colleagues and customers, even shorten the sales cycle by putting key information where prospects can easily find it. Of course, those aren’t the only reasons—you may have more, depending on your business.

So, now that you know what a great website will do for you, you’re ready to start putting it together, starting with your home page. Right?

Well, maybe not.

For a site to be truly client-attractive, it has to answer — very clearly — the basic questions for your prospects. Only then will they find your services compelling enough to give you a call.

To make sure you cover all your prospects’ questions, I’ve adapted the classic “Five W’s and an H” formula and applied it to the process of making a website into a client magnet. Over the next several months, we’ll take a look at these questions and how the answers translate into great web copy.

Who’s your prospect?

Website or no, one of the first things any business has to do is define its target market. After all, marketing to the entire universe is expensive, tiring, and pointless! If you’re not clear on precisely what customers you serve best, how will your ideal prospect know if that’s him (or her)? No one ever thinks of themselves as being “just anybody,” so why market to a group that nobody belongs to?

But how do you start identifying your target market? Here are some suggestions:

Look for common denominators among your clients. If you’ve already got a substantial client base, start writing down common denominators. If you are in a business-to-consumer market, do most of your customers tend to be in the same age range, occupational category, or education level? If you’re selling B2B, are your clients in specific industries or of a certain size?

But don’t stop at demographics like these. Think, too, of psychographics. What situations do they commonly find themselves in? What emotions are they experiencing? Identify both the demographic and psychographic components of your target market, and you’ll be way ahead of most of your competition.

What’s the “low-hanging fruit” for you? If you’ve been in business long enough, you’ve developed a sixth sense of who’s ready to buy and who’s just shopping. Think about the last time you made an accurate “snap judgment” about a prospect’s ability (or willingness) to go to the next step in the buying process.

What about that encounter tipped you off? Again, write these observations down. Once you see it on paper (or on screen), the patterns will become clearer.

Who’s your “dream client?” Go ahead, fantasize a little! What kind of clients would you love to land? Is there a market segment that really excites you? An area where you have a special knack? Let your mind wander (with pen in hand, of course) – you may be surprised where it will lead you!

So what’s the goal here? Eventually, what you want is a section on your website like the Who I Work With page I wrote for a recent web copy client. This business coach identified four typical client occupational profiles as well as a common set of problems her clients come to her with.

The result is a page that prompts ideal prospective clients to say, “Hey, that’s me!” while allowing less-than-ideal prospects to filter themselves out.

And if you find this exercise a little daunting, don’t worry – so do my clients! This question and the one we’ll cover next month are the two hardest for most people to answer. But they’re critical to your success with a client-attractive website.

Next up: the “How” question!

Previously, we talked a bit about what a well-crafted website can do for your business: boost visibility and credibility, get you more referrals from colleagues and customers, even shorten the sales cycle by putting key information where prospects can easily find it. Of course, those aren’t the only reasons—you may have more, depending on your business.

So, now that you know what a great website will do for you, you’re ready to start putting it together, starting with your home page. Right?

Well, maybe not.

For a site to be truly client-attractive, it has to answer — very clearly — the basic questions for your prospects. Only then will they find your services compelling enough to give you a call.

To make sure you cover all your prospects’ questions, I’ve adapted the classic “Five W’s and an H” formula and applied it to the process of making a website into a client magnet. Over the next several months, we’ll take a look at these questions and how the answers translate into great web copy.

Who’s your prospect?

Website or no, one of the first things any business has to do is define its target market. After all, marketing to the entire universe is expensive, tiring, and pointless! If you’re not clear on precisely what customers you serve best, how will your ideal prospect know if that’s him (or her)? No one ever thinks of themselves as being “just anybody,” so why market to a group that nobody belongs to?

But how do you start identifying your target market? Here are some suggestions:

Look for common denominators among your clients. If you’ve already got a substantial client base, start writing down common denominators. If you are in a business-to-consumer market, do most of your customers tend to be in the same age range, occupational category, or education level? If you’re selling B2B, are your clients in specific industries or of a certain size?

But don’t stop at demographics like these. Think, too, of psychographics. What situations do they commonly find themselves in? What emotions are they experiencing? Identify both the demographic and psychographic components of your target market, and you’ll be way ahead of most of your competition.

What’s the “low-hanging fruit” for you? If you’ve been in business long enough, you’ve developed a sixth sense of who’s ready to buy and who’s just shopping. Think about the last time you made an accurate “snap judgment” about a prospect’s ability (or willingness) to go to the next step in the buying process.

What about that encounter tipped you off? Again, write these observations down. Once you see it on paper (or on screen), the patterns will become clearer.

Who’s your “dream client?” Go ahead, fantasize a little! What kind of clients would you love to land? Is there a market segment that really excites you? An area where you have a special knack? Let your mind wander (with pen in hand, of course) – you may be surprised where it will lead you!

So what’s the goal here? Eventually, what you want is a section on your website like the Who I Work With page I wrote for a recent web copy client. This business coach identified four typical client occupational profiles as well as a common set of problems her clients come to her with.

The result is a page that prompts ideal prospective clients to say, “Hey, that’s me!” while allowing less-than-ideal prospects to filter themselves out.

And if you find this exercise a little daunting, don’t worry – so do my clients! This question and the one we’ll cover next month are the two hardest for most people to answer. But they’re critical to your success with a client-attractive website.

Next up: the “How” question!

Remember the catchphrase of the ‘92 Presidential campaign? Those four words – “It’s the economy, stupid!” – became the Democrats’ rallying cry and, many say, won Bill Clinton the Presidency.

I think about that phrase every time I visit an especially graphics-heavy website. You know the ones I’m talking about – Flash intro, pictures galore, and all the bells and whistles some hotshot programmer could squeeze onto a page.

It makes me want to scream: “It’s the content, stupid!”

I was starting to think I was alone in my protest … until I read about ongoing eye-tracking studies at the Poynter Institute. Lo and behold, they say the same thing I’ve said all along – that what you say (and how you say it) is more important to your website visitors than all those graphics.

Put another way, it’s the words that matter most. And they’ve got the scientific research to back it up.

(I love it when I’m right.)

According to ongoing eye-tracking studies at The Poynter Institute, words are what draw web visitors’ attention first – and foremost.

By tracking the eye movements of subjects in their lab, these researchers have found that:

* Dominant headlines in the upper right and (to a lesser extent) the upper left of the page draw the eye first.
* Unlike readers of print newspapers (studied in 1990), web visitors don’t look at the photos first. (This was the big surprise of this study, even to the researchers.)
* In terms of both the order viewed and the amount of time spent viewing, text is the dominant feature on the web.

(See http://www.poynterextra.org/eyetrack2004/main.htm for more information.)

Now, I’m not advocating plain Jane websites. Although I am a writer and (naturally) biased towards words, I do have enough appreciation for good graphic design to know what a difference it can make.

But I also know that the #1 reason people go to the Internet is to find information. When visitors hit your website, they want to know who you are … what you’re about … and why they should do business with you.

That means your message has to be well written – punchy, appealing, customer-focused.

So why spend all that money on shiny new web design, only to have poorly-written web copy undermine it? Make your words count by putting some serious thought into what your website says. Not just what it looks like.

You see them everywhere – on billboards, on everyone’s business cards, even on the sides of delivery vans. What are they? Website addresses! It’s almost as if you can’t do business without one.

But it’s like your mother used to tell you: just because everyone else is doing it doesn’t mean you have to. For your website to have maximum impact, you have to be clear on what you expect it to do for your business.

Three ways your business benefits from a well-written website

While every business is unique, many use websites in similar ways. Before you engage a copywriter (like me) and a web designer to develop your business’s website, take a few
minutes to write down what you want a website to do for your business.

Here are a few ideas to get you started:

A great website boosts your visibility and credibility. For a relatively small up-front investment (compared to hard-copy marketing materials or advertising), a well-designed and well-written website immediately communicates a high level of professionalism. But a cheap hack job of a website makes you look amateurish and can actually drive away business.

If you want your website to attract new business, it pays to plan your website carefully with the help of skilled professionals, including copywriters and web designers. It’s a good investment.

A great website gets you more referrals. If you’re got one or more referral sources – ideally, people in related businesses who see your target market on a regular basis – you may be reaping the benefits of high-level networking. But how accurately do they really represent your business?

Give those referral sources a comprehensive go-to place to refer serious prospects for more information (after they’ve praised you profusely, of course). Make your referral source’s job easier, and you’ll get more referral business.

A great website shortens the sales cycle. How many times have you spoken to a sales prospect and been asked, “Have you got any materials you can send me on that?”

Yes, sometimes it’s a stall tactic. But often it’s the start of the presentation phase of the sales cycle. Having work samples, white papers, testimonials, and other tangible results of your work available online keeps you from having to snail mail these materials out.
(And with postage rates going up periodically, putting up your website now will save you even more money!)

Just give those prospects a link to the relevant pages on yourwebsite. That way, you can follow up with them within a day or two while their interest is still high (and their memory hasn’t faded).

And who knows? If your website is well-written enough, maybe you’ll hear those magic words during your follow-up call: “When can you start?”

Of course, this isn’t a comprehensive list of benefits from a great website. And you’ll no doubt come up with ideas that are unique to your own business.

But careful planning up front will help ensure your new website is a hard-working piece of your overall marketing plan, not a haphazard waste of your precious marketing dollars.

I’m a woman on a mission: I want to stamp out unclear, unproductive, “stuffy” language on business websites! And I’m doing it, one client at a time.

Take, for example, one of my clients, a real estate-related firm preparing for a new marketing push. The company was under new ownership, and one of the first things they wanted overhauled was their website.

They recognized, intuitively, that the old copy didn’t really speak to the three distinct audiences they wanted to reach. So they asked me for help.

Right off the bat, I recognized the copy needed to focus on the people they were marketing to – real estate agents, homeowners, and prospective home managers. These people aren’t looking for a “new innovative, dynamic marketing strategy,” as the old home page copy trumpeted. They want to know what this company could do for them – how it could solve their problems, relieve their worries, save them money.

So here’s how we approached the task:

Before: Website circa 1990s

The problem: As the new owners described it, the existing website, which was “state of the art” five or six years ago, was now out of date.   And since they were looking to appeal to an upscale clientele, they not only needed a visual makeover, they needed brand-new copy to speak to their affluent, sophisticated audience.

While one of their in-house web designers tackled the visual aspect of the site, I took a stack of their marketing materials and began work on the text.  The goal: solid benefits-focused copy that spoke to three distinct audiences:

    * Real estate professionals who have vacant properties for sale
    * Homeowners who need to have their vacant houses staged for quick sale
    * Prospective home managers
After: New layout, new sales-oriented copy

The most obvious problem with the old copy was that it focused on features (i.e., what the company does), not benefits (i.e., what customers gain).  It didn’t speak to the things that concern its readers: the anxiety that homeowners have over leaving a vacant property on the market, the hassles real estate professionals experience trying to sell empty houses, and the desire of prospective home managers for affordable and comfortable temporary housing.

So the “teasers” on the home page start with these needs and how the company meets them.  Then the individual pages addressed to these separate audiences expand on those themes.  Contrast this with the old home page’s vague opening line about the company’s “innovative, dynamic marketing strategy.”

Lesson: Here it is again – the classic benefits vs. features discussion.  Your customers don’t care what you do – they care what you do for them.  It’s not an esoteric point.  Let them know why you’re the solution to their problems.  Don’t leave it to them to figure it out.

If you’re looking for sales-oriented web copy that speaks your customers’ language, contact me today for your free consultation!