Brochure Tips: The Confused Mind Says No
It can be easy to develop new products and services in your business because something appeals to you or someone asks for it, without an overall strategy or 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 nourishment they need to thrive. A recent lead with great success 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 site visitor had 47 possible choices to make. And that was just on the home page before moving on to the product or resource pages of the site, which had a similar number of links and options. Can you imagine how you would feel coming to a site like that, a site that has really cool stuff? Just too much great stuff, so much so that the site was not generating sales on the site.
Numerous clients over the years have expressed an intent to create a substantial series of advice booklets from scratch. While his enthusiasm is admirable, no strategy is usually attached to him. How many will be written and released in what time frame for what audience? Is success more likely by limiting the number of brochure titles or topics and expanding the delivery formats offered for each title or topic? How about making time constraints for each topic, putting things “back in the vault” for a defined period of time like a well-known mouse-oriented company does with their kids’ movies, temporarily removing certain products?
Is your information created and presented at a graduated level of difficulty or certain functions that make sense to identify the starting point for a new or advanced person or someone in management or marketing? Like so many situations, less is more. Giving a clear roadmap is also helpful in guiding someone who comes to you or your website so that they clearly know what step to take and when to take it. Put a “deadline” date on a genuine offer rather than a bogus effort to force a sale or extend it past when you say it’s available.
STOCK – Think about how you feel when you visit a website or talk to a provider that gives you too many options and/or lack of clarity about what they have that best suits what you need. You can ask a few questions, do some research, or you can run out of the situation as fast as you can, never to return. Looking at your site and how it speaks to current and potential customers gives you an opportunity to test what is working and what can work better to serve your people and your business. Any choice you make leaves room to make new decisions, to replace the things you remove and add new things along the way to minimize the confused minds that come to you and say no.
© 2015