How can you best attract customers to your pages?
One thing is certain: Customers are not looking for your solutions. The vast majority probably don't know that the types of solutions you sell exist. Even worse - they probably don't even know that they suffer from the problems you solve.
Why you don't attract customers by talking about your solutions
To illustrate this, consider 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! Therefore, it's easy to think that "everyone knows what CRM is" - especially if you work as a sales or marketing manager. If you experience problems that CRM solves, you should therefore reasonably go out and search for "CRM".
Wrong!
Even in an industry as big as CRM, only a fraction of potential customers still have a CRM system. Most still live in a world of XL files sent to colleagues via email. (It's very difficult to measure the total market penetration of CRM systems, but industry experts "know" it's very small, and an interesting way to get a figure can be found in this article).
Therefore, if you want to attract as many visitors as possible, you cannot write about your solutions. There is simply no one out there looking for it. 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 looking for? Their problems?
No, they don't even look for it. Usually the customer doesn't even know they have a problem. Your biggest competitor is not other suppliers, but ignorance that something can be improved.
What the customer experiences are the symptoms caused by the underlying problem you are solving. Symptoms like "there's a bad smell in my kitchen" (your grease trap is old), "our power grid goes down" (you need better ways 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've worked with, and it's always the same: customers are not good at connecting their perceived symptoms with problems that you solve.
Often, you need to go beyond the symptoms to attract customers.
In many cases, the customer is not even aware of the symptoms - but of the indirect side effects caused by the symptoms (e.g. many of their electricity network customers call the support service).
Therefore, you need to think one, two, three and sometimes four steps beyond your solution. You have to think about:
- The problems the solution addresses
- The symptoms that these problems express themselves as
- The indirect side effects caused by these symptoms include
- Maybe even one or two more steps if possible.
Only then can you get your potential customers' ears - because it is the perceived symptoms they think they are interested in.
What do you do with the customers you have attracted 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, until they read Recurly's blog posts and realize the connection.
After getting the customer's ear and understanding that their perceived symptoms are not at all what they initially thought, it's time to kick-start the customer journey towards a purchase. You can read what that looks like in this blog post about what marketing really is.
