Content Marketing Today

The One Missing Ingredient That Can Doom Your Website

Imagine for a moment that every person surfing the web is wearing an identical baseball cap.  On the front of that baseball camp is not a New York Yankees or Boston Red Sox insignia but 5 capital letters: WIIFM

Those five letters enable you to do a bit of mind reading and may keep you from making a very serious mistake.  They stand for: “What’s in it for me ?”

You can bet your business life that unless your website quickly and obviously answers that question, your odds of converting those visitors into customers fall famously between slim–and none.  The rest of your content marketing strategy may be lost unless you can answer that universal question. That’s why you must include the too often missing ingredient.

What’s the missing ingredient?

The one thing that can save your website from marketing disaster is a strong benefit headline that answers the question, “what’s in it for me?” Of course, the answer needs to be specific to those visitors that you consider your most important future customers.

If you’re skeptical, think about your own efforts at finding solutions on the web.  You know just how frustrating it is to land on the site that forces you to slog through dense verbiage or wait through some completely meaningless flash animation without ever explaining what’s in it for you. Conversely, you know how gratifying it is when you land on a site that makes it brain-dead obvious how they can deliver a solution to your problems.

Here’s what you should consider when crafting your headlines:

• Define the most important issues facing your prospective customers.
• Describe succinctly how you can solve their problems relating to those issues.
• Write a headline, perhaps bolstered by one or more supporting subheads, that offers an attention getting benefit statement relating to the most important problem or problems you can solve.
• Deliver content on your page that supports the promise of the headline.
• Repeat this process on every page with content relating to your products and services.  After all, you don’t know what page your visitors will find first.  Therefore, each page must offer some indication of how you can help.

What’s in it for you? 

By making sure that your website provides consistent headlines that answer the question, “what’s in it for me?,” you will turn a tons of Web visitors into buyers.