The Primary Enemy of Great Marketing is Friction

No matter what you're selling - product or service - if your potential customers are feeling friction, you're going to turn them away.

So what leads to friction?

Complex language. Acronyms. Highly technical words.

Anything that disrupts the 'reading flow' when one of your potential customers is checking out your website, reading a blog post, or scrolling through your social media.

You don't want to insult the intelligence of a smart audience by making things too simplistic, but you also need to ensure you don't alienate people who would like to learn more but are overwhelmed by too much complexity.

So what can you do to actively reduce friction in your storytelling and messaging?

2 Tactics to Try: The '1 Minute Website Test' and Customer Journey Audit

The 1 Minute Website Test

Your have 1 minute or less - some would even argue 30 seconds - to grab the attention of someone visiting your website for the first time, and keep it.

When you're close to your message, you make an assumption that your website does just that. After all you wrote it, right?

Well, it's not such a sure thing. To confirm have a friend that knows nothing about your industry check out your website home page on a 1 minute timer.

Have them write down everything they think about what they see in that first minute, and absorb their notes.

Is it crystal clear what you do? How you do it? For whom you do it? How people can get in touch for the next steps?

Are you making it easy for people to take the next step?

The answers to these questions help you know what to do next.

The Customer Journey Audit

As founders we often build out a customer's journey at a specific moment in time, with best intentions to tweak it as necessary. Sometimes this gets done, but often it goes on the back-burner.

Take a step back and pretend like you're a potential customer. Walk through the journey as you have it established.

What parts of the journey feel:

1. Forced
2. Aggressive
3. Mistimed

If these emotions bubble up for you as you go, you're encountering friction. Make the tweaks necessary to improve the flow so everyone that encounters your brand doesn't feel 'sold to' but rather that you're leading them to a transformation as a trusted resource.

Is momentum stuck in the mud but you're not sure why?

Need an impartial point of view and some fresh ideas?

Book a Marketing Strategy call with me and you'll walk away with a fresh perspective and something to try.

Book a Marketing Strategy Call

3 Momentum Builders: Try Out RB2B, Check Your Backlinks & Repurpose High Performers

Try Out RB2B

If you're driving a decent amount of traffic to your website each month - at least a few hundred visitors - it's worthwhile to give RB2B a try.

RB2B automatically profiles (at least) 20% of your website visitors from publicly available information, and sends you a Slack ping, pushes a new CRM entry, or automates an email so you can see who's visiting your website.

You can then build warm outreach campaigns to say hello to these visitors - especially since they're already showing intent - or reach out them via social media to start a conversation.

Make Sure to Check Your Backlinks

There's something we don't often check as marketers or business owners, but should more often: the backlinks to our websites.

There's a few easy ways to do this, the easiest being tools like SEMRush or Ahrefs. Within these tools - and others like them - you can find out what websites are linking to you and also which keywords would be helpful in your content strategy. Here's the thing - all backlinks aren't created equally. There are times when you want to disavow them and other times you'll want to double down on your outreach efforts when you land a good one. We'll cover that in more detail someday.

Repurpose Your High Performing Content

One of the best ways to 'lighten' the lift of content creation is to make better use of what you've already created. Not every piece of content has to be brand new!

Find your highest-performing blog posts and repurpose those into multiple social posts. Review your highest-performing social posts and re-purpose those into posts for other platforms - turn text posts into videos for example - or just share them again word for word.

Chances are if something worked once, it'll be likely to again.

In short, reuse and recycle along with creating new stuff to make life easier on yourself.