To Close More Deals, Use Memorable Messaging to Control Your Buyer's Attention
When your sales cycle
is complex and lengthy, you might feel anxious that your leads will pull out at
any moment. After all, the B2B sales cycle lasts for more than half a year,
on average. And for SaaS (Software as a Service) businesses? It takes nearly
nine months for the delivery of a newborn deal.
That's a long time for your buyers to feel motivated about your
service.
Now sure, you have the essentials down: Your technical features
are impressive and your testimonials are glowing; and as for your marketing
and sales efforts, they're addressing your customers' needs—just as they
should.
But the question lingers: How you can you remain memorable during
the consideration stages?
Your product might well be strong, but that's not enough to keep
your brand memorable to buyers. Many SaaS companies "struggle to get
inside [buyers'] consideration sets. It's because they over-index on the
product and under-invest in messaging, narrative, and point of view," CXL's
CEO, Peep Laja, points out.
Therein lies the key: messaging is what gets you into
more consideration sets.
And to make your messaging more memorable, you'll need to start
with your most important touchpoint. It's the one usually visited at multiple
stages during your customer's journey: your website.
Yep, your website is the most important marketing channel buyers
use when forming their consideration sets.
OK, so your buyers visit your website. You want them to choose
you... but your product isn't enough. That leaves one question: How are your
buyers' decisions being made?
You can get a clear answer from Harvard Business School's Gerald
Zaltman: "95% of our purchase decision-making takes place in the
subconscious mind."
So if you want your brand to be memorable, it's time to climb
into your buyers' mind. Here are three ways you can get into more consideration
sets using persuasive and memorable messages.
1. Optimize your messages to
please a buyer's irrational brain
As humans, we're considered to have two decision-making brains:
the lizard, unconscious brain, and the conscious, thinking brain.
It's the unconscious brain that makes quick judgments. Your
buyers' attitudes toward you can be formed very quickly—often within 1/5th of a
second. In those first moments, they may reject or approve you. So it's true to
say that your prospect's first impressions can make or break your sale.
Problem is... your buyers will use mental shortcuts to save on brain
energy. Those shortcuts aren't always rational. And your buyer's unconscious
brain tends to reject anything that contradicts its irrational
beliefs.
So your buyer has an irrational brain that you need to please.
But how can you do that—without lying to them?
The answer: influence your buyers' cognitive biases. All
while telling the truth.
For example, when you use real before-and-after stories of past
clients—you're tapping into a bias known as Contrast Effect.
There's also the Status Quo Bias: We want to stick to our
current habits, rather than learn new forms of behavior. So if your solution is
complex, aim to delight your buyers' unconscious brains. Show how easily you
fit into your buyers' current workflows. And distract them from short-term
losses (like money and time) by focusing on longer-term gains, like your most
attractive outcomes.
Create an easy "yes" for your buyers' unconscious
decision-making brains.
2. Keep your prospects
interested by controlling their attention
Your marketing and sales team are fighting a battle for your
prospect's attention. With so many distractions in your buyers' life—including
your competitors, who can easily lure them away—you should keep them
focused.
That is, focused on your brand.
So draw your reader in with engaging and hyper-relevant
messages—speak straight to your buyers' interests.
You can find a goldmine of insights into your buyers' concerns
by conducting customer research—such as surveys and interviews—and reviewing
transcripts from sales calls and chatbots.
For example, learn how
your current users evaluated your solution during their buying processes. How
did they measure the success of your software? And who or what did they compare
you with?
But be careful with
competitor comparisons: "If the real alternative in the mind of a customer
is Excel, you can't say your product is easier to use unless it is easier to
use than a spreadsheet," positioning consultant April Dunford points out.
Know who or what your
real competition is—in the eyes of your buyer.
And use messaging that
focuses primarily on your prospect. Keep them engaged and excited by repeatedly
using the word "you." Otherwise, they may engage more half-heartedly
with your messages—and forget your brand.
A scientific
study found that when businesses spoke to prospects' concerns, attitudes
towards those brands were more positive; but when they didn't... fewer
marketing messages were actually remembered.
So keep your copy
razor-focused on your prospect.
Consider this example
from Flow by Pluralsight's webpage aimed at C-level execs:
The messaging helps
convince executives to consider the SaaS—by focusing on their biggest concerns.
You can create relevant and specific copy only if you do your research first.
3. Make it easy for buyers to
understand your value
When the service you
market is complex, you place more of a strain on your prospect's memory.
And our short-term memories are notoriously weak. Your C-level decision-makers
could struggle just to understand the descriptions of your service.
So consider how you
can simplify your copy while still showing respect for your prospect's
intelligence. Simplifying doesn't mean dumbing-down. Instead, aim to reduce
unnecessary jargon, shorten your sentences, and actually unpack what each of
your data points means.
Your website visitors
are often on a fact-finding mission. They seek certain nuggets of info that can
help push the sales cycle along. At the same time, your prospects likely have a
cognitive-dependent job role. They don't want yet another thing to think too hard
about.
So don't bury
important information within long paragraphs. I can't tell you how many times I
see SaaS websites make that mistake. Your web visitors are often scanners. When
you make it easy for buyers to understand and grasp your value, you're more
likely to persuade them.
In fact, UX study
participants had better memories of a B2B tech webpage when it became more
scannable (using bullets and boldface) and more objective (no buzzwords or unsupported
claims). The result: "The data showed that the rewritten version of the
site was 'better' for all four measures: task time (80% better), task errors
(809%), memory (100%), and subjective satisfaction (37%)."
You want an easy
"yes," not struggling to remember your value. And how your features
work. And how they can implement your solution.
No matter how educated
or successful your buyers are, they will have a limited capacity to process
information. We simply can't take every bit of communication and data into the
imperfect brains of ours. So we're efficient. We look for important
information... but only when we can actually find it.
You might think you're
targeting decision-makers. But it's more realistic to say that you're targeting
the decision-makers' decision-makers—their conscious and unconscious brains.
Aim to please both of those thinking models by using strategic messaging... and
you could have a more confident prospect on your hands.
It might be tempting
to overestimate your product's importance. And yet, as Peep Laja asserts, it's
"almost impossible to win [deals] by having an objectively better product.
But most anyone can win on brand (the sum of your story, messaging,
positioning, marketing), especially against the category leaders."
What an optimistic
idea: When you optimize your messaging, you could win more business—even over
rivals with bigger budgets.
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If you need help with your email, web site, video, or other presentation to promote your company, product, or service, please give me a call at 440-519-1500 or email me at john@x2media.us
Until next month. . . .remember. "you don't get a 2nd chance to make a 1st impression." Always make it a good one!!
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