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“It’s not about you – it’s about the customer.”
So quit being so damn selfish with your site. Ask any successful copywriter or marketer what the most important rule of thumb in advertising is, and they’ll tell you – think about your audience, not about yourself.
If you are a company marketing a product, thinking about your customers means telling them how your product will benefit them – telling them exactly what makes it great for them, as opposed to how you think it’s great. If you are a website looking to attract a bigger readership, this means writing for your readers – understanding what your readership wants and giving it to them.
But what do your readers or customers want? Ah, that’s the rub. Unless you are a powerful and wealthy brand (or a Hollywood producer) that can afford to invest a great deal of money in surveying large sample groups of consumers, chances are that you won’t get definitive data telling you exactly what you should do. Especially if you are a website just starting out or looking to expand its readership, you don’t have that kind of money or statistical insight into consumers. So what do you do?
Well, start by treating your customers as human beings.
Rational, Personal and Emotional
Keeping in mind the humanity of your readers does not simply mean respecting them and treating them as more than shopping cart pushers. You understand that. What it also means – especially for companies and websites looking to find a place in their reader’s minds – is being cognizant of their hearts. It sounds over-the-top, I know, but bear with me.
Human beings are emotional, and our voluntary actions and choices are driven by what we feel, more than what we think. What else can explain our individual and collective affinities to specific brands, specific people, specific causes? We live emotionally, we choose emotionally, and yes, we buy emotionally.
This means not that we are emotional fools who don’t know what’s good for us. It only means that as buyers we don’t switch into some kind of alternate identity that makes decisions based purely on the merit of the product or the calculation of their monetary or productive value. If you want to convince me to buy your product, you don’t just have to address my needs – you have to create them first. And if you want me to buy your product again (or visit your website again), you have to engage me on a personal, emotional level.
For a website as for any product, the loyalty of your customers can make the difference between a stream of visitors attracted by SEO or hype, and a continuous growth in sale and profit. It makes the difference between simply seeing the results of your efforts (through SEO or advertising) and seeing returns from them.
So how do you engage your readers on a level that is rational, personal and emotional? By aligning yourself with specific values that go beyond your product, and are encapsulated by it.
The Value of Values
So what are values anyway? Let me give you an example. Say you go to a website for handmade jewelry. The jewelry may be beautiful and the product may be affordable. But for every handmade jewelry artist or seller who has gained enough popularity and customer loyalty to quit their day jobs and work on jewelry alone, there are hundreds, even thousands of sellers whose products never get off the ground or beyond the simple advertising of eBay or etsy.
A successful manufacturer, when it comes to any product that is not a basic human need (and there are so few of those!), has to sell more than his or her product. Think GAP. Think Louis Vuitton. Think moleskin notebooks. Think Harley Davidson. Yes – they are big brand names. But how do they get big and stay big? Because they mean more than just a notebook or a bike. They fit into an entire way of thinking and living. In short, they have found their perfect niche by defining the values they stand for, creating an ideal based on those values, and clearly showing how they fit into that ideal. This is how a brand is created and continually cashed in on.
Defining values to create a brand is easily demonstrable with popular big brands like Harley Davidson or Volvo, but the lessons from such advertising and their application are visible all around the internet. Go to any popular blog, website or product. Chances are, unless the website is still pouring substantial amounts of money into generating hype, its popularity is largely a result of clearly defined values, be they political (the Huffington Post), humor (“I Can Haz Cheeseburger?”) trendy/celebrity (Perez Hilton), sarcastic (the Onion) or community oriented (Something Awful). Value alignment with your readers can take you beyond simply fitting into a genre or being just another example of it.
So I’ve put together a small checklist to outline the value of values in advertising and in web marketing:
Viral Marketing and Values
Values are not only as important on the internet as they are outside it, they may indeed be more important. Think about it: this is one of the few mediums where you interact directly, personally and individually with your readers and customers. For a consumer, the journey from arriving at a page to being converted by a call to action is a personal and usually short one.
At the same time, the internet relies a great deal more on viral marketing (using peer-to-peer communications to spread information rapidly – as in a virus) as compared to other media. You want people to tell their friends via email or word of mouth. You want people to sign up for your feed burner. You want user referrals. All this makes product values more important in online communication and purchase.
You can effectively create and satisfy your readers’ needs by defining your values, creating an ideal based on them and offering a product or site which fits into and delivers on the promise of that ideal. So if you are selling a product or advertising your website, take a long moment to think about what you’re really selling.
