It’s really pretty funny. I’ll be walking back to the house from releasing the crackens, ehem I mean chickens, and if I stop a moment inevitably I’ll feel a bump against the back of my foot. I know who the culprit is. Roo Roo, as my children call her because of her rooster-like cockfighting moves, is always tailing us around the yard.
While the other chickens keep a relatively wary distance from us unless we have food, Roo Roo just sticks right behind us, bumping right into us if we stop suddenly.
She’s one of the chicks my kids hatched last year in an incubator. And we speculate that she may have imprinted on us. By imprinting, I mean the way that baby birds take the image of the first creature they see when they hatch and stick it in the box in their brain labeled “Mama”. And from then on that creature is their mother hen.
The way Roo Roo tags along and jumps onto my kids’ laps and shoulders indicates a level of familiarity beyond the average chicken-human connection. Imprinting is the only explanation, short of a bizarre chicken quirk of personality.
Now, as usual, there’s a great web writing lesson here.
Just like Roo Roo imprinted on us and follows along diligently, you want your website visitors to do the same thing.
You want to imprint your company – your image – in their brains in such a way that they place you in the box labeled “beloved source of vitamins” or “my home for healthy products”. Or best of all, “the only place I’ll ever go to buy . . .”
And then they keep coming back to you to shop.
How do you do this? Two things:
1. Imprint on Your Visitors With Good USP Use
Your unique selling proposition (USP) is key to your success. It’s what defines you from the rest of the crowd. It’s what makes your customers love you. It also may be what makes some people decide you’re not what they’re looking for.
And that’s okay.
You want to figure out who you’re selling to, who you can really help solve a problem and then focus on them with laser-like precision. When you do so, when you get specific about what you offer, you’ll make them feel like you really understand them and can really help them.
Inevitably some people won’t quite connect with what you’re saying. And the nice thing with the web with 1/5 of the world’s population buzzing around is that you can still find enough ardent fans to do very well.
So to define your USP ask yourself these questions:
- Who is my ideal customer?
- What is their primary pain I can help soothe or their burning desire?
- How does my service or product help them do this? Which features help it do this?
- How does my company do things differently? How do we make the shopping experience more successful, more of a pleasure, less rife with obstacles?
- How do I do this differently or better than my competition?
- How is my competition articulating the way they help and how can I define myself from this?
Consider the tone of voice, the personality you want to establish for your company. And what kind of relationship you want to establish with your visitors.
And then try to put this together in 3 sentences at the very most. Whew! That’s the tough one.
By doing so, you’ll define your USP.
But once you figure your USP out, don’t just rest on your laurels. Get it out there. Online conversion expert Bryan Eisenberg notes that one of the main strategies top converting websites use is making sure their USP is highly visible not only on their home page but on their internal pages as well since these may be the landing pages people come to first.
So scan your home page and make sure that in those 3 seconds you’ve got to make an impression on a visitor you can tell them why they should stick around.
And then look at your internal pages for similar references that keep your visitors with you.
2. Develop content that supports your USP beautifully.
Not only do you need to state your USP up front, but make it ring true. Now I’m not going to get into product formulation or customer service here since that’s not really my area of expertise.
What I can talk about is how you underscore your USP by providing information that both defines you and makes your customers and visitors happy and satisfied.
Solicit feedback from your customers, research keywords diligently, keep a close eye on Twitter and then simply make sure you provide quality, interesting, helpful, entertaining content on your website.
A couple months ago a potential client asked me, “With content, isn’t it more about quantity than quality?”
Unfortunately, grey hat SEO folks have pushed things more in that direction by using optimized content mills to get Google rankings.
But that’s changing now. Too many people were frustrated with searches that ended on top ranking web pages filled with semicoherent optimized babblings with no substance. Google picked up on this and shifted things with the new algorithms they introduced in May.
So be prepared to see better results for your good content from Google. But better yet, happy visitors who decide to buy from you and customers who keep coming back.
When you provide this kind of service that connects people to your solutions and their happiness, you make your USP more than just a few sentences. You make it your way of doing business and your presence on the web.
So develop your USP, make it visible and then substantiate it with more solid content. Before you know it you’ll feel a bump bump bump of all the visitors and customers who have been following you around and are lining up to do business with you.
Just like Roo Roo, our besotted cock-fighting hen does when the objects of her affection pause to look around.
If you want to improve your copywriting for both homepages and content in general, check out this great web copywriting course that helped me get going online.
What are your ideas about developing a USP? How has it helped your business and conversion rates? And if you have a Roo Roo-like story, please share it!