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KickoffLabs Blog:

Throw Out Your Pitch – It’s Not Working. Get Back To Basics.


By Josh Ledgard

Jun 27th, 2013


The hard sell doesn’t work anymore – especially on the internet. These pitches:

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Just aren’t going to work anymore.

So what about your pitch? What are you doing to set yourself apart from others without looking like an antiquated internet salesman from 1998 – and immediately destroying any chance of converting possible leads into just another bounce? The internet is growing up and your site and style has to grow up with it. As a marketer, how are you attracting them to your site, but more importantly, getting them to trust you enough to convert them into customers?

These thoughts have passed through the mind of everyone who has ever run a successful business over the internet. So remember this: if you’re constantly questioning yourself, you’re doing it right.

So today, we’re going to talk to you a little about conversion rate optimization. So what is it? It sounds big, like rocket science or thermonuclear physics, but unlike those, you don’t need to go study for years, learn new alphabets or anything like that. It can be as technical or simple as you like, really. Today we’re going to look at the most fundamental metric of conversion rate optimization. You can basically boil this down to the most basic of marketing principles:

“Providing people with things they like while avoiding things they dislike”

There’s no need to re-invent the wheel here, folks. It’s simply about obeying the two most basic parameters for establishing that trust you need in order to convert your leads:

  • Don’t break promises: if you promise visitors to your site a free ebook, give them a free ebook. No free ebook, or an ebook with a sudden hidden expense is going to devastate your conversion rates faster than you can say “Hi, my name’s…”.
  • Be useful: so now your leads have got your ebook and are settling down to read it. But is it a good ebook, or a badly-written piece of junk with no insights that’s only useful for the fire? You can wave bye-bye to that lead as they go off to find someone more competent.

At the heart of conversion rate optimization lies a simple fact: you providing guests to your website a good service before they’ve even started to think about giving you their hard-earned dollars. This doesn’t need to be a soul-searching exercise. Just take this quick and basic 4-point checklist below:

  • Informative – does your pitch tell people who you are, what you do, what you offer?
  • Well-written – people aren’t looking for Shakespeare, but they will notice you’re spelling and grammer mistakes – and that’s going to turn off exactly the people you’re looking for.
  • Entertaining – with so many distractions these days, it’s a pretty wise move to ensure that your site is entertaining – your possible convert is only a click away from the latest cat video on Youtube.
  • Helpful – last but most certainly not least. An informative, well-written, entertaining AND helpful website? Have a think about that – they are exceptionally rare – but also exceptionally successful, no matter what their niche.

Your online conversion rates will go up immediately if your website is providing all of these. The optimization comes from taking that first step to make sure that your website is giving people what they want, how they want it. When they see that you are an expert who is happy to share valuable information for free – they’ll begin to wonder what your really good stuff is like. That’s where you mention your services, your products.

At KickoffLabs, you may have seen a signup (on the right side of this blog) for our Landing Pages 107 course. 95% of the content there is designed following the guidelines we touched on above. The last 5% is, of course, a bit of a sales pitch for our service after we’ve earned your trust. We’re always working on making this course, and our other training guides, as helpful and informative as possible… and we can see the positive results in the form of additional PAID conversions from those techniques. Here is another site with a more helpful pitch to visitors: www.quicksprout.com

quicksprout

In the end, it doesn’t matter so much where your potential customers come from – although at the more technical end where metrics, analytics and good ol’ fashioned number-crunching marketing comes into it, it’s a great way to narrow your focus on landing pages to maximize the odds that visitors will convert into fully-fledged, credit-card waving, paying customers. Get useful and always do what you say you will, and the rest is a cakewalk.

Have you experimented with changing up your website lately to make it a more helpful, friendly place instead of one long sales pitch? How has it affected your conversion rates, and what’s the next step you’re thinking of taking to optimize it just that little bit extra? Let us know in the comments!

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