Tell people how, great demo page, business blunders
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Morning folks. Let’s get right into it.
TIP: Benefit statements are great - but don't forget to tell people how you deliver on them.
EXAMPLE: Optoro does a great job of explaining the gritty details on their demo page.
THOUGHT: Why panicking over my empty pipeline led me to lose even more money.
Tip: don't forget to explain how it works
Telling people about the benefits of your product is a good thing. But you don't want to get carried away - I see lots of marketing material spend all its time on what the future can look like for a reader, and little to no time on how they get there.
This is an important detail! If you’re not substantiating your benefit statements with some nuts-and-bolts statements about how you actually deliver that benefit, then the benefit statements are a bit hollow.
So that’s today’s tip: have a look at every promise you make in your copy. Ask yourself “how does this get delivered?” If that’s not obvious, add some copy fleshing it out - because that’s what your readers are going to be wondering.
If you’re writing a landing page promoting a product, an easy way to achieve this is to bang in a “how it works” section. No need to get super-detailed. Just a quick outline of how you deliver on all those great benefits you promised in the headline, subhead and soforth.
This helps you to substantiate the claims you made about how great it is to use your product - not to mention give you an opportunity to highlight your differentiators. So don't forget to do this!
Example: Optoro tells us how their demo works
Demo landing pages are great examples of a circumstance where “how” messaging is important. People on your demo pages are pretty bought into your product - after all, they clicked that big “book a demo” button.
So to get across the line, they don't really need to be told more about how great your product is. Rather, they need nuts and bolts “how” messaging about what’s going to happen in the demo. Optoro has done a great job of this on their demo page. Check it out:
he two great bits of “how” messaging here are:
Telling us how long the demo is! You’d be amazed at how rare this is. But it’s a huge consideration. Telling people what type of commitment you’re asking them to make is going to help them picture the demo more clearly in their mind - and better-understand what’s expected of them.
The three bullet points giving us a bit of a syllabus for the demo. Again - this is classic ‘how’ messaging. You’re already bought into the overall concept of a demo. Now you need more detail about what you’re being asked to sign up for.
This seems obvious, but you’d be surprised at how many organisations do a poor job of this - rehashing their overall value proposition and benefit statements, without giving details of what they’re actually asking people to sign up for.
If you drive people to demo pages, compare yours to this one, because this one is a great example of demo pages done right.
Thought: panic at the pipeline
Last week, I told you how I made the expensive mistake of forgetting to prospect. Today, I’m going to tell you how I doubled down on that mistake and made it worse.
To recap: it's September 2021. I’ve just switched from 18 hours a week to 40 hours a week - creating a huge gap in my schedule.
First things first, I started doing the prospecting I should have done back in June. Contacting old clients, prospective clients I hadn’t heard from, etc.
October rolled around. Had had some good bites from my prospecting, but things take time to go from initial contact through to actual work. I was still at around 60% capacity.
So I took on some ongoing discounted work to fill the gap. Steep discount too! Around 50%. It kept me busy for about two days a week. This seemed like a good idea, because the alternative was earning $0 - 50% of something is better than 100% of nothing, after all.
But I was wrong about that alternative! By November, the prospecting I’d kicked off in September was turning into requests for work at not-discounted rates. But since I had committed a good chunk of my time to the discounted work, I had to turn some of this work down.
What I should have done
I should have just enjoyed the rare break in my schedule and had a bit of a holiday. I've been kept pretty busy for five years - there was no real reason this would be an exception.
Alternatively, I could have taken on discounted one-off projects, rather than tying myself up for a long period of time.
Instead, I panicked and did the worst of both worlds: long-term, discounted work that prevented me from taking on higher-paid work.
Expensive!
Next time, I’m going to talk about the last decision I made that reduced my income. Mercifully, this upcoming decision wasn’t a mistake, but rather a deliberate move.
That's all for today. Hope you enjoyed. As always, hit reply and tell me your thoughts. And if you really like what you read, forward this newsletter to someone. Someone who you think might be interested, of course - not just anyone.
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