Business owners today face a real problem. The majority of people that visit their website leave without buying anything.
You realise that you need help figuring out how to get more customers, so you go out and talk to the experts. And what happens is you invest some money in Facebook, SEO, Twitter, LinkedIn, Yellow Pages and so on.
You start generating more traffic, but most of your website visitors still don’t buy. You have no idea why things are not working? So what I’m going to discuss in this article is what you can do to get better conversion rates on your website.
The 7 Second Rule
When I go to your website for the first time, the following questions go through my head:
- How can your service or product make my life better?
- Why should I buy from you?
- Do you have an irresistible offer?
- Could I get a better deal somewhere else?
If your website is not able to answer my questions within 7 seconds, I am out of there. Unfortunately most businesses describe what they offer in boring, generic phrases that do not differentiate them from other competing offers.
If you make the same mistake, and you’re unable to create something unique about your business you’re not going to make as many sales as you should be.
Instead of fixing their offer, most business owners fall into the trap of spending more money on advertising. They mistakenly think that generating more traffic will help them attract more customers.
But they’re focusing their attention on the wrong end of the equation. You can get traffic just about everywhere, but if it doesn’t convert into customers, the traffic is worthless.
As a digital marketing agency, we are regularly approached by business owners asking us for help to generate more traffic to their website. Most of the time though, they have a problem with their offer, and they don’t have a good enough value proposition.
Do You Have a Real Value Proposition?
Your value proposition is a concise and punchy statement of value that describes why someone should do business with you instead of your competitors. The typical business owner thinks their business has got a value proposition, but very few fully understand the concept.
Let’s say you sell life insurance, and then your value proposition is your answer to this question: “Why should I buy life insurance from you rather than from any other life insurance company?” When you have a crystal-clear an answer to that question, then you have yourself a powerful value proposition.
Seems simple, but when we ask business owners about their value proposition the answers we frequently get are vague, confusing and does not differentiate them from their competitors. They would base their value on things such as ‘good service’ for example.
But that’s not what most customers care about. Even if your business does offer good service it is not a good enough differentiator because everyone is saying the same thing.
A Value Proposition That Generates More Sales
If you want to convert more people into customers, it is vital that your website persuasively describes what is unique about your offering. Although there are other things you can do on your website to increase conversion rates, there is no other single factor that can have such a big impact on whether you’re going to be successful or not.
If you’re unable to pinpoint your company value, it will be easy for competitors to copy what you do, and you will always be subject to the lowest market prices.
How to Quickly Test Your Value Proposition?
In case you’re wondering which value proposition would get your customers attention, you can test this by using Google ads (Adwords).
The very best value propositions are those that you can express in just a few words. Since there are limitations to the number of characters in a Google ad, Adwords forces you to create concise value statements.
By creating different ads with different value statements, you can quickly find out which ones delivered the highest click-through and conversion rates on your website. Higher conversion rates mean you’ll convert more website traffic into buyers.