Revenue Journal®

The better your content, the more you will sell.

A pretty simple concept to grasp, especially when we think of the buying process from the buyer's point of view. Most people who are buying something for the first time go straight to Google. They type in the search phrase they think will give them the right result, refine it if needed, and then start drilling down - mostly on the sites that come up "above the fold" on the screen. We all know this.

And yet, as I work with clients to improve content, and as I see content from the buyer's point of view, I am dismayed by how un-seriously managers take their own content.

Content has become your biggest, most important salesperson. Potential customers can interact more - and often exclusively - with your content than with your human salespeople. Before a customer calls the salesperson, they've been to your site and the sites of your competition. They've read customer reviews. They may even have done some research on the discussion groups. They are far, far along in their decision-making process. If your product is one where a salesperson must be involved at the very end, she had better be able to answer those critical, final questions in a second, or the customer will simply find a way to hang up and go to another vendor.

Throughout this article, I refer to content. What I really mean is WORDS. Of course your site also contains images, and perhaps video/audio. They are also "content," and they should receive the same care and attention as your words. But I want to focus on words here, because that's where most companies fall short.

Words are what they will see in search engine results. Words are what they will read when they get to your site. Words are what will lead them to click on a video - or not. Words are what will help them understand and appreciate what they are looking at when they view a product picture. Your words determine if they stay with you all the way through to a purchase, or not.

You can't sell without content anymore. The smartest companies are maniacal about content. They obsess over the words they use. They use those words to convey their character. Here's a great example.

Content comes into play at all stages of the typical Web/Google-driven buying process, in a variety of forms. Most people know how all this works. Very, very few are optimizing their content to support this process.

1) Search ads and listings. Your ad or listing should say one thing: "We have what you're looking for" - obviously not in those exact words. It's a formula, consisting of who "we" are, and "what they are looking for." The "we" part is easy, the second part is more complex.

You obviously have to actually sell what they are looking for - none of that "false promise" stuff that is so common today. So the questions then become: Do you know the words they use to search for your type of product? In addition to using WordTracker and all the other tools available, do you actually ask people what search term they used? Do you ask people who haven't come to your site what search term they would use if they were looking for what you sell? More importantly, have you asked current customers the problem they were trying to solve when they came to your site? The answers to these questions will lead you to ads and listings that pull better.

2) Home page content. Your home page content should be the model of efficiency, and a factual presentation of everything you offer for sale. It should tell the person in search of your solution that they have come to the right place. It should be obvious that the person can arrive at your solution via a number of methods - by search box, by brand, by product number or name, by type of problem, by ingredient, etc. It should also be obvious that you can provide deep educational material on your type of product or service. The more you have, the longer your prospect will stay on your site, digging around. The longer your prospect stays on your site, the more she will come to trust you, and the more she trusts you, the more likely she is to buy from you - now and later.

3) Individual page content. There are millions upon millions of web pages out there, and you'd think by now everyone would know how to provide the expected content on each type of page. Take the "About Us" page. Prospective customers want to know who's running the company. We've seen software vendors, for example, who don't list any executives on their About Us page. This raises a red flag for the buyer, who literally wonders if the executives are somehow ashamed to identify themselves to potential buyers. If you're worried about recruiters stealing your key people, use a group shot.

Whatever you do, don't be chintzy with your content. Divide it up into chunks, so they won't think, "too dense - don't have time to read it now," but give them plenty. Again, the more content you have the more likely it is you will make the sale. When you're writing your product descriptions, think "education." You know a lot about your products - how they hold up over time, what works well with certain materials, the best way to use the product, where the product comes from and why that's important, why it is an improvement over other products, and so on. This is the kind of content that builds trust, and trust leads to sales.

4) Transaction pages. Again, it's not like there aren't good examples out there. It should be ridiculously easy to buy something. The less input required, the better. Make sure they understand exactly where they are in the process and what is going to happen next. Use clear, short-word language. The tone should be that of a very friendly but incredibly efficient sales clerk.

5) Your service pages. Don't hide from the customer. There are so many sites where the customer has to go four levels down before the company provides an email address. Prospective customers pay attention to such things. "Looks like this company is going to run away when I have a problem," they will think, and they'll keep looking elsewhere.

Your content factory.

Imagine if all companies took content as seriously as they take finance or manufacturing or "sales."

• There would be a Chief Content Officer, who would be part of the corporate management inner circle, involved in strategic decisions and responsible for making sure the company's content accurately reflected those decisions. This person would actually have a budget. Yes, the more progressive companies have these folks on staff, but it has not yet become the norm, and it certainly hasn't trickled down to the smaller firms.

• There would be efficient content-creation and content-maintenance systems in place. Content owners should be able to make simple changes without asking permission.

• There would be content specialists, who did nothing but generate and maintain content on the company's website. They would:
  
  • Spend at least a couple of hours a week interviewing prospects, customers, and partners, to make sure that their content was addressing all concerns in the right way.

  • Work closely with the company's Web analytics folks, constantly working to improve the popularity and relevance of each page.

  • Make sure that their company did the most thorough job of describing the product and educating the customer, decidedly better than the competition.

  • Conduct usability studies to identify content that website visitors found confusing or hard to find.

  • Work closely with the sales force to make sure that salespeople had immediate access to those critical, specific questions and answers when they were on the phone with the customer.

  • Find out from salespeople which new questions customers were starting to ask.

  • Check the competition's sites continually and report back to management on any new content competitors were displaying, and work to out-do or counter that content, as appropriate.
    

• There should be an ongoing content quality effort, with someone in charge of that effort. The content should be continually checked, and any issues that arise should be resolved quickly.
  

Smaller companies should have at least one person dedicated to content, even if it is an outside resource. Content now requires the same kind of day-to-day attention as the other aspects of a business, including manufacturing and sales. There's just no way to remain competitive anymore without a serious commitment to content.