As enVirtua continues to develop the website aspect of our business we are learning more and more about how other businesses operate and the difficulties they face.
A regular issue we are striking is that businesses find it difficult to express to their prospective clients the reasons why they are better than their competition.
What we have been finding is that often prospective clients find it difficult to make the right decisions, becuase quite simply, they don’t know enough about your area of business.
You know that the tensile strength of your widget is greater than your competition and that this is why your widget is superior. But your potential clients don’t necessarily appreciate the importance of strength of widgets and are looking at the shape of the widget handle instead, which has no revelance to the operation right.
There are two ways of tackling this problem, telling people and helping people learn.
You can stand their and tell them till you are blue in the face that the stength of the widget is what matters and they will probably not believe you.
Or… you can educate your potential customers before they even talk to you, and this is where your website and your approach to your website can have a big impact on your business.
Most businesses we have been working and speaking with know huge amounts about their business sector. Their staff know everything about widgets there is to know, they know the history, the technical details, everything.
But their sales team then have to go teach prospective clients about the widget business before they can do business with them. Why? Because the customer wants to make informed buying decisions and not get ripped off.
However, often the only way to get some knowledge is to talk to lots of suppliers and try and seperate the sales pitch from the facts and compare info to find the most honest supplier.
Wouldn’t it be easier if your potential next customer knew that widget strength mattered, that handle shape was unimportant and that using adamatium instead of unobtainium was a wise desision due to the fact that unobtanium has environmental issues attached that could lead to hidden costs.
This would mean they would find your company with it’s adamantium widgets with great tensile strength and know that they are the best. Then they’d just want to get to know your company a little before placing and order.
So here is the idea, use your website to educate people about your industry (where appropriate).
On your website, share the story of the creation of the original widget. Tell them about that disaster back in 1866 when wooden widgets were used and broke because they were too weak.
Tell them about how your company moved to widgets with greater strength because you have this special machine that can build them stronger.
Share the experiences of how Jane in your office was involved in writing the ISO standard for your widgets becuase she is a world leader in the area of widgets.
Write about how your other customer Ajax Inc. is using your widget to raise the Titanic one crank at a time becuase your widget was the only one strong enough to do the job.
You might also want to tell them about the time you had a bad batch of widgets come from the factory and your QA department caught them before they went out to customers and then
worked through the night to make sure that all orders were sent out on time, with widgets tested by you.
Moving away from the widget analogy, consider the difference between a company website that has great information that teaches potential customers about your industry, your company, your products and
the website that just tells them that your sell products X, Y and Z. Which company seems like the expert in the field? Which one seems more worthy of your trust and your business?
The other issue we find when we explain the above ideas to businesses is that they often don’t appreciate how uniquely positioned their business really is.
The often can’t see where they have good information to share, good stories to tell.
This is where enVirtua can assist; we can help you identify where you can educate, how you can share that knowledge effectively; and importantly, how you can grow your business as a result.
We can help with design, technology and also with helping your business share and educate online. We can lead you through using your website, blogs, podcasts, youtube, twitter, FaceBook etc in effective ways.
enVirtua can work with you to plan out what you will share, how you will share it and help you create the content.
We would welcome the chance to speak with you about all these areas, just give us a call on 020 7193 8987 or drop us an email on sales@envirtua.com
