Walk up to a vending machine and you don’t get a particularly engaging experience. Walk into a banquet and just the opposite is true.
Most banquets are memorable. You don’t remember a vending machine. A banquet is interesting, a vending machine is boring.
Where does your small business marketing fall in the vending machine – banquet continuum?! Hopefully more banquet than vending machine.
How to make your small business marketing less boring and forgettable and more interesting and memorable:
Understand who your customer is and why they are attracted to you. The more relevant the content, the more engaging and memorable. How to understand your customer? Talk to them. Ask them how they looked for a firm like yours, what criteria did they have, how you stacked up against the others they looked at and why they selected you.
Quick, look at your website or brochure. What’s your first impression? Ask your spouse. What does your website or brochure look like when you put it next to three others? Interesting? Or too much the same?
Banquets look alive, colorful and interesting. Vending machines don’t.
What kind of experience does a user have on your site? Don’t know? Use a session recording tool. Watch user sessions. You’ll be shocked. there’s a wealth of information there.
In case your marketing for your small business isn’t as close to banquet as you’d like, the good news is you can change it. And the process is easier and less expensive than you think because you don’t have to change everything to start seeing results; you can just start chipping away!
Your website is a great place to start:
Add video. People would rather watch a website than read it.
Add some color.
Change your header.
Simplify your forms (Do you really need all that information?!!)
Put your phone number on every page.
Put a response form on every page.
And about 29 other things you can do to go from boring and forgettable to more interesting and memorable. But you have to start. So, start!!
