What's new?

Month 2 in 2024 and what has changed?

In reality nothing but besides the elephant in the room (AI) there is also a greater tendency for taking action. I noticed this during the Autumn and it has continued. This is mainly about focusing the mind and is one benefit of tougher economic times.

3 things to consider to make real progress:

1.???? Is your website speaking to the right audience?

2.???? Are you getting reviews that lead to more sales?

3.???? Are you engaging your audience (real engagement not the likes and clicks fallacy)?

Your website

It is your shop window whether you are using it for e-commerce or not. This week we ran a session for members of the Swedish Ecom Association about websites. Not the usual stuff of site speed and issues with how Google measure (for another time), not about design, fonts or usability.

All of that is important but pointless if you don't have one thing in place.

Are you speaking to your visitors or not.

There is a way of testing this and it is not in analytics. It is through understanding customer needs and pains and aligning your website to this. You do need to decide who you are speaking:

1.???? Customers

2.???? Leads and prospects

3.???? Experts

Many get this wrong and the greatest growth opportunity lies with speaking to leads and especially prospects. The root cause of the issue here is not your website or platform. It lies with really understanding your client needs and pains. You need to find where they are in their mind to speak to that.

Engagement

Too many businesses struggle with getting real engagement from their potential clients. It was the biggest issue in a survey we did last week. We are not talking about agency style engagement driven by social media and advertising platforms.

We need to focus on real engagement. To put it in retail terms.

You don't measure the success of your shop by the number of people that walk past. You may measure the number that visited you (footfall) but you can’t take that to the bank either. So you will measure quotes you provided and sales.

Online is no different.

So focus on how you can engage your potential clients.

Again the solution here lies with understanding client needs and pains. Don't know how to engage them? Then you don't know them well enough.

Reviews

Reviews is area that often puzzles me as to why it is so underused. It is an area that many struggle with especially in using reviews for sales. Sure, most can collect reviews but unless used it is of a lot less value.

So decide how to use them.

Understand what is in it for your clients, it is not just about you getting a review.

Then use reviews to help you turn customers into more customers. Sounds easy? It takes work but it is one of the easiest way to grow when you get it right.

I will say it again. The easiest way to turn clients into more clients is to... yes, understand client needs and pains.

You may experience symptoms like your website is not getting leads for you, hard to get engagement working, reviews not flowing. The truth of the matter is the root cause of these ills lies with better understanding client needs and pains.

Only then will you be able to;

Join the conversation going on inside of your clients head.