Brochure Tips: Confused Mind Says No
It can be easy to develop new products and services in your business because something appeals to you or someone requests it, without a general strategy or a master plan on your part, but simply by reacting to the moment. Before you know it, your product line has grown too large, adding more and more and selling less and less. Now what?
Like a beautiful overgrown flowering shrub, it’s time to trim it back to maintain and enhance its beauty, to enjoy it again, and let the flowers get the nutrition they need to thrive. A recent lead, highly successful in certain parts of the business, was found to have 47 links on the home page of the business website. 47 links! That means any visitor to the site had 47 possible choices. And that was just on the home page before moving on to the site’s product or resource pages, which had a similar number of links and options. Can you imagine how you would feel when you got to a place like that, a place that had really cool stuff? Just too many good things, so much so that the site was not generating sales on the site.
Numerous clients over the years have expressed an intention to create a substantial series of advice booklets from scratch. While his enthusiasm is admirable, no strategy is generally credited with. How many will be written and published in what time frame for what audience? Is success more likely if the number of brochure titles or topics is limited and the delivery formats offered for each title or topic are expanded? How about setting time constraints for each theme, putting things “back in the vault” for a defined period of time like a well-known mouse-oriented company does with its children’s movies, temporarily recalling certain products?
Is your information created and presented at a gradual level of difficulty or certain functions that make sense to identify the starting point for a newcomer or advanced person or someone in management or marketing? As in many situations, less is more. Giving a clear roadmap is also helpful in guiding someone approaching you or your website so they clearly know what step to take and when to do it. Make a “by when” date on a genuine offer rather than a bogus effort to force a sale or extend it beyond when you say it is available.
ACTION – Think about how you feel when you visit a website or talk to a provider that offers you too many options and / or a lack of clarity about what you have that best suits what you need. You can ask a few questions, do some digging, or you can instantly escape the situation as quickly as you can, never to return. Looking at your site and how you talk to customers and prospects gives you an opportunity to test what is working and what can work best to serve your people and your business. Whatever choice you make leaves room for making new decisions, to replace the things you take away and add new things along the way to minimize the confused minds that come to you and say no.
© 2015