I spend a lot of time focusing on marketing, messaging, and storytelling.
Shoot, if you happened to know my background in politics and are friendly with me, you likely were on the end of any number of rants I made about the need for the Hillary Clinton campaign to be better at marketing, messaging, and storytelling in the lead up to the election in November.
Which often led to me stating with emphasis that I knew Donald Trump was going to win because he was much better at marketing, messaging, and storytelling.
BS or not.
That being said, I don’t want to go off on that tangent again.
What I do want to do is spend a little bit of time focusing on what direction your marketing points.
I say it like that because if you spend any time looking at people’s websites with any regularity, you know that too many websites are littered with the worst kind of buzz word, meaningless corporate speak that you have ever seen.
WTF?!
The thing is…who are you writing this crap for?
Let’s look at some real world examples of this crap in action:
First, let’s think about what you even lead with.
If I ask you, does your website focus on value or features?
You should be able to say right away one way or the other. Usually, if you are value focused, you know it right away.
I know this because if you are talking about features, you start talking about your BS methodology, or your technology, or something else…
If you are talking about value, you go right there.
You say things like:
“We’ve helped our clients improve their online fundraising by 300%.”
“We helped our client improve revenue 100% in 18 months.”
Second, are you trying to dump everything that can possibly be done into your website?
You’ve been there.
You’ve been reading a website and you have been so confused by what the organization wants you to know or do that you have no idea where to go.
That’s usually because some sort of committee got together to blast out everything that anyone in the organization does in regards to a possible task.
That’s just wrong.
You don’t tell everyone everything you know, everything you do, everything!
You only tell them the most important things.
The things that are going to move them to action.
The things that are enticing.
The things that are emotionally exciting.
Those are outcomes.
Those are results.
These are only the first two things…but really if you start here, you are going to improve your marketing and website tremendously….like 100% improvement in the results that are meaningful, at least.
Later, I will come back with some rewrites of some website content in the near future.