Being a content marketer, your concern is just to produce customer-facing content that converts. Often, easier said than done. But why is it so hard?
Write to Convert visitors into Customers:
A roadblock of knowledge, one of the biggest culprits. For sure, that is important, but your potential customer makes a purchasing decision on the basis of benefits, not features. Therefore, turning it around – while producing content for marketing purposes, focus mainly on the benefits your customer will see, not the features of the product or service that will provide those benefits.
Explain how? Lets get deep into it.
<h3>What Can Hurt You? and How You Can Avoid:</h3>
The most important job responsibility is to become an expert on your companys product or services they offer. However, this expertise is extremely valuable, as it hurts you when it comes to generating content that – relevantly speaks to your customers.
About the features and technical specs of the things you are selling, you often tend to become more knowledgeable and believes that your potential customers are longing for complete intricate details.
Although the hard truth – Potential consumers actually could care less about these things, in fact, they focus on – “how it makes their lives better” and “how it fulfills their wants and needs”.
First and foremost, create customer-focused content that converts. Also, make sure that your vast feature knowledge should express clearly the believable benefits of customers.
The Method – Convert Features into Benefits
Being aware of awesome features, you’re selling – would you be able to convert those into benefits that completely resonate a potential customer while helping them find what they get out of it?
In order to effectively convert features to benefits, here is an inordinate five-minute-check, you can follow. The five-minute-check comprises the last persuasive piece, you have formed for your company (blog post, landing page, sales copy) while listing complete features you spoke about.
Feature included:
- The analytic reports
- The patented technology
- The return policy
- The specifications
- The design
- The pricing tiers
Further, copy and paste these features into a new document, after each feature listed, add the words:
So you can…
Following the same, the new-fangled phrases sound pretty in the form:
- Generated powerful analytic reports with the simple click of a button, so you can save time, showing impressive analysis without even firing up an Excel sheet.
- Virtually unnoticeable due to the sleek design of hearing aids, so you can feel confident about how you look while also being able to interact flexibly with your family and friends.
- In no-questions-asked return policy, take pride so you can order worry-free.
The amazing practice alters your customer`s viewpoint regarding your offering and overlays their thinking – what they gain from it.
Avoid Oversimplifying Customer Benefits
Being content marketers, the inherent nature of simplifying text and messages into compact and concise points – save time, words, and space. Usually, this practice hurts the content’s conversion ability, taking away the emotional storytelling features and benefits, you are trying to sell.
Let’s look at the image, represented an example:
Comments! The left statement is simple and to the point. In contrast, the right statement targets emotional level of the customer letting them know that painstaking measures are taken to get them the data they want. Also, it’s just more fun to read as it allows some personality to shine through.
One more, as an example:
Simple yet convey much better – advantages listed on the left side. While the right side paints a picture of what the customer could do with the benefit.
By painting the picture of what they can do, along with the features and benefits of your offerings, your copy becomes much more customer-driven, thus upsurges its chances of conversion.
Avoid Thinking for Your Customers
At some point in time, we all take a pew with our co-workers to talk about a profile/persona of our customer base. In order to find the basic information about your customers such as age, geographic location, and more – is relatively easy, but it’s really difficult to guess how they think.
Though, you do it all! Sit in a room, and talk about – what possibly annoys the customer, what they worried about, or what they expect from our product/service, but it’s all a complete guess and a completely pointless exercise.
Rather than predicting your customers thinking, simply ask them!
To get information from customers, some of the most common mediums are:
- Customer interviews
- Email surveys
- Review and testimonials
- Chat logs
Incredibly valuable! As these mediums help you find the truth – how customers feel about your offerings. Otherwise, if you embark on creating a customer survey, essentially ask the right questions in order to get the right information.
An approach to mine this information – giving customers the opportunity to share their true thought process by asking finding/feeling questions, such as:
Perhaps you noticed that none of these questions can be answered as yes/no. In fact, these questions hit customer at a more emotional level, soliciting more raw and honest answers.
All these questions help you gain a true insight into your customer’s buying process. Though, all the pointless guessing-game meetings with your co-workers go away – Since all responses to these questions can be turned into the selling points of your marketing copy, thus increasing its conversion chances.
Focus On Customer Demands
As marketers, when you sell anything – you need to make sure that you meet customer needs
Meeting the needs of your customers are essential to make a valuable product or service. However, when it comes to creating sales copy that converts, you must be sure that the recognized advantages are the things your customers want, Instead of things – you think they need.
It seems to be boring when you`ve to buy things for your need. It is more convenient for you to buy plane tickets to go on vacation rather than a life insurance policy.
In order to ensure that your advantages are being driven by desires, you need to mainly target the emotional motivators that customers have, including status, pleasure, comfort, and pain.
Certain values, including fairness, patriotism, and justice are sometimes intertwined with emotions. These values sometimes act as factors to your persuasive writing while helping you to ensure – the excessive impact of benefits and the satisfaction of the customer’s needs.
There is an art of convincing them. Usually, customers follow it to convince themselves that what they want is already better. Let`s elaborate it better, if the customer is looking a blue car, then probably they already have convinced themselves – a blue car will comparatively better than one that isn’t, even if the features are exactly the same.
Binding hidden demands behind the reasons your customers would benefit from your product/service are central to writing copy, as it connects these demands with the benefits of your product/service in order to convert more.
Conclusion: Writing customer-driven content has made the process of conversion much easier. Only if, you take a step back from your existing knowledge, convert features into benefits, completely understand your customer thinking – by asking them, and recollect that benefits should be driven by wants.
By keeping these things in mind, your customer-focused content will be able to better meet the customers’ needs as well as demands in a realistic and truthful way – giving them the confidence they need in order to try your products/services.
