Buying from Your Website Sucks as Much As Making Gluten-Free Pancakes

Last Saturday, I made gluten-free pancakes.

Why? Because my wife prefers the GF life and likes our girls to avoid the gluten too. I'm okay with it. (But spare my gluten-free loaf bread. Yuck.)

I've made them enough times now to have a relative idea of how things go. Egg/flour/vanilla all in a mixture along with some other ingredients. But as my wife will tell you, I’m a bit of a rule-follower and need to exact teaspoons and order of ingredients to feel right about my pancake production.

So I do what we all do. Head to Google, search “gluten-free pancake recipes,” and begin my quest.

Mind you, hundreds of links pop up. I typically stray from brand websites that tout only their type of flour. There’s a problem with this approach, however.

In the dizzying search for a proper recipe, I stumble across any number of “mommy” sites. Poor descriptor, I’m sure, but it fits. There are more sites from (mostly) moms with recipes that “my kids just gobbled up” or “a healthy tasty treat for rainy days” than there are pancakes made at your local IHOP in a given year. I feel almost certain of this.

And listen, no knock on mommy sites from me. They’ve got their place, and I’ve certainly stolen a recipe or two from them. But there’s a massive problem with nearly all of them.

The info you’re looking for? It’s buried. Not “gated,” as we marketers like to say, just buried under paragraphs of useless info.

The issue is too many of these sites want to tell you a long story. It could be how they “discovered” the recipe on their own one Sunday morning. It could be how their Grandma Betty passed it down after winning the church breakfast bake-off five years in a row. It could be how mommy’s husband “would never eat gluten-free anything,?but he couldn’t tell the difference after these delicious flapjacks!”

In any case, what I’ve arrived at this site for, the lone prize of my quest is stuck under a haystack, a hopefully tasty needle I can’t seem to find. I'm constantly scrolling through stories I don't care about, hoping to stumble on the ONLY THING I CAME TO YOUR SITE FOR IN THE FIRST PLACE.

I love stories. Really, I do. And after going through Donald Miller's Story Brand course, I understand just why brands need to use stories to sell. It makes sense. But if I'm at your site looking for useful content, I'd rather not sift through the equivalent of a Tolstoy novel to find it.

So brands, here's what you need to be doing (And mommy-sites too)...

1. Get to the point. I need a clear call to action. If you're telling me to use salt and sugar in the pancakes, give me the exact measurements. Clarity over clever, every time.
2. Be accessible. First accessibility purposes, if your site isn't easily readable on mobile, forget it. I'm not pulling out a laptop to look up a recipe. I've essentially got a laptop in my hand. Make your site mobile-friendly before you ever focus on telling us a story of growing up in Vermont and how you just had the best maple syrup in the county.
3. Write useful content first, then sprinkle in story. What makes brands like L.L. Bean so great is how they tell you the greatness of their flannel shirts while also painting a picture of you wearing it by a campfire in the Smoky Mountains. It's fantastic. Your pancake recipe or whatever you're selling can mix the best of both worlds: fact-based selling and story. For example, if you say to add a dash of nutmeg to the batter, add a brief line saying, "nutmeg was what Grandma Betty used to make sure Grandpa was satisfied. He was a fool for nutmeg after discovering how much tastier pancakes were after using it while stationed in France in World War II." Boom. Now I want to also use nutmeg.
4. Do your SEO research. How are you ranking in terms of "breakfast ideas," "gluten-free pancakes," "gluten-free diet," etc. searches? Adding keywords makes your site more visible. You likely know this, but it's important enough a point to hammer home.
5. Give customers a chance to interact with you. Okay, now that you've made your amazing recipe available on my iPhone and I'm not sorting through Crime and Punishment to get to the basics, tell me a bit about you. Boost your credibility. Give me your socials. Let me comment or ask questions. Direct interaction with customers builds brand loyalty.
6. Nurture over nature. Now that I've made your delicious GF flapjacks, what else you got for me? Have you given me an opportunity to sign up for an email list? If not, is there at least a recipe for something else I may be interested in?

Look, marketing can be tricky. There are a gazillion businesses vying for the same attention you are. But keeping your user in mind with everything you do will make the marketing process so much easier. And you'll bring joy to the world with your gluten-free pancakes.?