Small Business Website Blog

Photo by Marco Bellucci

Once you’ve figured out who you’re designing and writing your business website for, you need to check off the things that they are asking about.

Let me lead with an example.

1. Potential customer Fred has a problem.
2. Fred goes to google and searches about his problem.
3. He finds your website where you are talking about his problem.
4. Fred discovers that you have a product/service which will help with his problem.

What now? What goes through Fred’s head?

What usually happens is a critical evaluation.

Fred will consciously or sub-consciously evaluate if buying your product or service will actually help him solve his problem.

Copywriting – the art of addressing your potential customers – is damn challenging. One of the principles of copywriting is learning how to address objections and that’s what I’m referring to.

The critical evaluation our fictional friend Fred is going through is raising questions in his head, these questions need to be answered on your website.

The ideal place to answer customer questions (before and after they ask them) is in your blog posts, your product information, your sales pages and anywhere else they would look for answers.

A great “cover-all” is to build up an FAQ section. Frequently asked questions about your product and services.

If you’re not currently doing it, you should have a way for customers to ask questions (eg. providing an email point of contact or even filling in an anonymous form).

How do you address your customers questions when they come through? Do you update your pages to answer the questions they had? Maybe even turn it into a blog post?

Photo by Martin Kingsley

I was writing a post for one of my other blogs recently about writing techniques for business blogs and it came to me that when you’re writing for business websites you need to really nut out who it is you’re writing for.

I came up with three different kinds of visitors for business sites:

• Existing Customers
• Potential Customers
• Suppliers

Obviously sometimes it’s not always clear cut and people can cross over into more than one category (repeat customers?) – but for simplicity sake, let’s just assume these are separate categories.

What do existing customers want from your website?

Existing customers want information about what they can do with the products/services they’ve already paid for.

The want to know special offers and things to take advantage of by being a repeat customer.

And surprisingly, they also want to help you spread the word about your products and services. They want people to know they’ve made the right choice, and provided you’re doing a good job, they want to be able to spread the word far and wide.

These existing customers are more likely than other’s to spread the word of your site by becoming regular readers (blogging for business FTW!).

What do potential customers want from your website?

Potential customers are a bit trickier. Turning “browsers” into “buyers” is no small feat and it’s often not as easy as you think over the web.

The advantage of doing a sale face to face is the fact that it’s easy to respond to people’s reactions and change your approach. This is a luxury we don’t have on the internet, it’s largely a one way communication and they’re going to be evaluating your every move. Enter the challenge of copywriting.

Potential customers do want to know about product information first and foremost, but they also want information about how your products/services are a good fit for them.

Answering their questions directly is something that you need to do. Often it’s good to actually involve your customers at this point. I’ll leave that as a topic for another post.

When potential customers are ready to buy, they’ll only want one thing: Contact Information.

What do suppliers want from your website?

Designing for suppliers is probably the easiest out of the lot.

Most suppliers want to know about press releases and products or services that involve them (or their competition) directly. While this information may not be interesting to suppliers for smaller companies, it’s important for larger companies that do high turn over.