What is the best way to attract customers to your website?
One thing is certain: customers are not actively searching for your solutions. Most of them are probably unaware that the types of solutions you sell even exist. Worse still, they probably don't even know that they suffer from the problems you solve.
Why talking about your solutions does not attract customers
To illustrate this, let's take a multi-billion dollar industry: Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems.
Those of you reading this blog probably know what CRM systems are: tools for managing customer relationships. The industry is huge! That's why it's easy to think that "everyone knows what CRM is" – especially if you work as a sales manager or marketing manager. If you're experiencing problems that CRM can solve, it makes sense to go out and search for "CRM."
Wrong!
Even in a sector as large as CRM, only a fraction of potential customers have a CRM system. Most still live in a world of XL files that are sent to colleagues via email. (It is very difficult to measure the total market penetration of CRM systems, but industry experts "know" that it is very small).
If you want to attract as many visitors as possible, you cannot write about your solutions. Quite simply, no one is searching for them. And even if they found you, they would probably not understand that your solutions are relevant to them.
Customers are attracted by their perceived symptoms
What are they searching for then? Their problems?
No, they don't even search for it. Most of the time, customers don't even know they have a problem. Your biggest competitor isn't other suppliers, but rather a lack of awareness that something can be improved.
What the customer experiences arethe symptoms caused by the underlying problem you are solving. Symptoms such as "my kitchen smells bad" (your grease trap is old), "our power grid is experiencing outages" (you need a better way to test your transformer oil), or "our developers are bad because they let too many bugs through" (you probably need a better product strategy).
All of these examples come from companies I have worked with, and it is always the same: Customers are not good at connecting their perceived symptoms with problems that you solve.
Most of the time, you have to go beyond the symptoms to attract customers.
In many cases, the customer is not even aware of the symptoms—only of the indirect side effectsthat the symptoms cause (e.g., many of their electricity network customers calling support).
That's why you need to think one, two, three, and sometimes four steps ahead of your solution. You need to consider:
- The problems that the solution addresses
- The symptoms that these problems manifest as
- The indirect side effects caused by these symptoms
- Maybe even one or two more steps if possible
Only then can you get your potential customers' attention—because it's the perceived symptoms they think they're interested in.
What do you do with the customers you attract in this way?
A good example of this is the company Recurly. The company provides a system that handles online payments. But in their blog, they have a whole bunch of articles about "customer churn" (i.e., when a customer stops using your product). What does a payment platform have to do with churn?
A lot, as it turns out! But customers searching for "how to reduce churn" have no idea about this until they read Recurly's blog posts and realize the connection.
Once you have gained the customer's attention and understanding that their perceived symptoms are not at all due to what they initially thought, it is time to kick-start the customer journey towards a purchase. You can read about what this looks like in this blog post about what marketing really is.
