Big Ahha

It’s not uncommon for a business caught up in the “day job” to lose sight of what is really important to the success of their company. I was reminded of this recently when consulting with someone about their online message for their business.

Think about what it is like when you have a face to face meeting with someone to discuss how your company might be able to help them. What formalities are generally present? How you greet someone, shake their hand and engage in small talk generally all before getting down to business. Body language, tone of voice and questions based on comments all lend themselves to a decision being made about whether or not to do business with one another before you ever get to talking about price for product or service.

So how does all of that relate to the message you send through your website? Or more importantly how much time are you spending on the message you send through your website?

You don’t have the opportunity to influence a visitor to your site by talking about the photo of her children on her desk or by commenting on the tie he may be wearing that day. You don’t know what questions might come out of the information they are consuming on your site unless they are willing to ask you. You have not scheduled a half hour or an hour to meet with them so you are lucky if they spend 1 minute looking at the information on your site and if they don’t find something of value they are off to your competition in an internet flash. Companies tend to spend a lot more time on the messaging for in person visits and hard copy messaging than they do for their web messaging.

The bottom line is you need to spend a serious amount of time on what your web message is going to be. You can’t leave it to chance that someone is going fill out a contact form or call you from your website if they have questions and if they can find that information on your site.

Spend quality time crafting your web message.