Website content that puts your client first

Are you creating awesome, helpful content for your prospective customers on LinkedIn while neglecting your website?

I see this often. Well-crafted LinkedIn articles, full of wisdom and insight. I like what I read and want to know more. So I hop over to the business's website and to my surprise not only is the website dated and sometimes unpleasing to the eye, more importantly none of that really great content that I enjoyed reading on LinkedIn is there. The site is all about the business and what it is selling, its number of years in business, previous clients, its founder and their qualifications (which often mean nothing to me)...but very little about me, the prospective client. It jarrs.

For your website to be effective, the content must be written through the lens of your customer. Yes, the goal of your website is to achieve business goals for you, but you are more likely to achieve these goals if the visitor's goals are achieved first.

Imagine you are selling a program to help managers reduce stress in the workplace. It's a four-month program and the investment is considerable. The manager who visits your website is unlikely to sign up to this program on their first visit to your website, they may have never even heard about your program before or maybe the saw something on LinkedIn that piqued their curiosity.

In this instance, your website content should primarily be educational. Talk about the problem of stress in the workplace so that the manager is nodding along, thinking yes, that's exactly the problem I am facing. Explain your solution to this problem and how this is going to change the manager's life. Wear your teacher hat, not a salesperson hat. It's not that you don't ask for the sale, just don't ask for it on your homepage or after the first paragraph of text about your program. This customer will not be ready to buy just yet, so your website content needs to acknowledge this. Put the customer's needs first, which in this case will be the need for more information, to build trust in you before they decide to buy.

How to do this? Invite them to learn more on your blog, or by subscribing to your newsletter; give them access to a video about the product, give them an ebook, direct them to a dedicated sales page that includes a comprehensive FAQ or invite them to book a Discovery Call. The goal then is to keep them coming back for more, building up that trust in your expertise, grateful for how much you've helped them so that when you do ask for the sale, they are confident that they are making the right investment for them.

Back to my original point, I recommend that there should be cohesion between your website content strategy and your LinkedIn content strategy. One should inform the other and both should put your prospective client's needs first.