[Inconvenient Truth] The Biggest Reason the Web Pages and Articles You Spent Time Making End Up Wasted

From ACIDHOUSE, INC., this is Tetsuya Ashida.

I sometimes get questions like this from small business owners who have websites.

We built a landing page and we're updating our owned media diligently. But it isn't leading to numbers at all. I want to pin down the biggest reason and fix it. What should I do?

This article should help anyone with that question.

What to work on is not the content but the "first impression"

Many people try to start by improving the content, but in fact it's exactly the opposite. Customers drop out at the first thing that catches their eye.

These are far more important than the content that follows.

"In most advertisements, the headline is the most important element. On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. Changing the headline alone can make a tenfold difference in sales."

David Ogilvy

In other words, looks and first impressions over substance.

It sounds like something you'd hear about romantic relationships, but it applies to web customer acquisition too.

How do you make a good first impression?

Catch the customer's interest.

I know I need to catch the customer's interest. What's hard is knowing what will catch their interest...

If that's what you're thinking, rest assured: there are key points to catching customers' interest too.

It speaks for my worries. And the answer is right in front of me

That is exactly the key point: if you can make them think this, you've succeeded.

As a premise, in the world of copywriting there is something called "the three NOTs".

The three NOTs are:

In addition, people are essentially interested only in themselves.

So you have to name their worries so precisely that they wonder, "Can they see right into my head?", and create a moment that jolts them into thinking, "Maybe if I look at this, there's a solution."

"Enter the conversation already taking place in the prospect's mind."
"There are all kinds of books about fishing, but in the end the most important thing is knowing which bait the fish will bite."

Robert Collier

Express it in terms of benefits

What catches customers' interest comes down to "It speaks for my worries. And the answer is right in front of me," but let's dig a little deeper.

The key point is what the copywriting world calls expressing it in terms of benefits.

A benefit means "profit," "advantage," or "gain," and in marketing it refers to "the good effects a customer obtains from a product."
When people buy products or services, they are buying not the product itself but "what using that product brings them." For example, someone who buys a drill can be said to be buying not the drill itself but the hole it can make.

Marketing Glossary (ferret)

Let's push the "drill" example from the quote above even further.

It's even better if you can make them feel it to this extent.

That's because humans are animals in the first place, and strong desires for survival and for the prosperity of their descendants work at the genetic level.

Most sales pitches in the world are expressed through the features of the product or service, but that doesn't click with customers. It's important to look all the way to the level of fundamental desires.

The angle of "not wanting to lose out"

It is said that humans feel losses twice as strongly as gains.

For details, please google "prospect theory" or "loss aversion bias," but what matters is making them feel "gain from buying the product > loss from buying the product".

Following the earlier talk of drilling a hole and installing an air conditioner, it means hinting that "If you don't buy a drill and make a hole, someone might die."

How to level up your "first impression"

It's a commonplace conclusion, but... it comes down to repeated improvement and testing.

The basic theory can be learned from technical books on copywriting.

However, doing it exactly as written won't necessarily work, so the idea is to change things while holding your own hypotheses and verify the effects.

There are many recommended technical books on copywriting, but for catching customers' interest, I think the following cover it in particular detail.

If you're interested, please check them out.