With the rise of digital marketing in the business world, almost everything in this era is online. Back then we used to send flyers and brochures to promote our business. Unfortunately, now that kind of marketing method doesn’t work anymore – not in this modern time. In fact, brochures have never been effective sales tools even from the start. Why? Let me make it easy to understand through this story below.
A salesperson named Thomas was trying to get close with a prospect, hoping the prospect would buy his company’s products. He then made a call to one of his prospects and the conversation went like this:
- Thomas: “Hi, I’m Thomas from Papdan.com, a professional web design”
- Prospect: “Hello, I’m too busy to talk right now.”
- Thomas: “Oh, OK. Can I send you a brochure then?”
- Prospect: “Sure, just send me the brochure. Sorry, I have to go.” (click)
Thomas then mailed the brochure and he waited for weeks, wondering if the prospect would call him. Sadly, the prospect never called him back. Why? That’s because the brochure was thrown in the trash.
From that story, we know that Thomas and the 1990s business website designers failed to understand the important part of marketing itself – the part that should have been made simpler but ended up being too complicated. Unfortunately, most website building programs default to creating a brochure-like template for marketing to populate, replete with default corny photos and drop-down menus. On top of that, additional content were put into the original brochure structure, thinking that providing customers with more information will eventually convince them to call, email or send inquiry.
Now most businesses have a website that is full of case studies, press releases, white papers, executive bios, etc. all combined into an ugly online presentation. While it is also important to add detailed product descriptions to help your customers understand, long written text will only be ignored by most people. Why? Well, let me ask you something. Why do you think Elon Musk is set on inventing stuff that makes life easier? The same goes with a website. In this era, people want things to be easier and faster, not complicated have-to-read-all-that information that end up being useless. So, if you are a business owner and your business has a website already and you see your website is exactly like what I have described above, don’t worry; this can be fixable in just 10 minutes. How?
First of all, get into your website editing program or you can have somebody do it for you and eliminate as many “top of window” menu picks as you can. Move stuff like “about” and “management team” down to the bottom of the home page. This takes about 10 minutes. Limit the initially visible “click points” to the actions that are most likely to lead to a sale. You want them to sign up for your newsletter not ready your executive bios! Here’s the example.
Instead of the annoying menu like this:
ABOUT PRODUCTS SERVICES SUPPORT TEAM PRESS CASE STUDIES BLOG
Change it into this:
PRODUCTS SUPPORT BLOG FREE E-BOOK CONTACT
Well, it is more effective, right? I’m not saying you should throw out all that content. You can just put most of the links to it at the BOTTOM of the home page where they will be less distracting. When your homepage is simplified like that, your visitors will immediately get to the most important part of your website information instead of being distracted by too much content. The simpler your website, the higher your chance to get more leads. Try this method and you will see the difference.