I’ve seen it all over the ‘Net lately. Website owners that resell products or services are completely missing the point and they are losing sales as a result. What’s their tragic error? Strictly promoting the company they resell for and neglecting themselves.
For instance, when doing a copywriting review for a client who is a reseller for a notable home security company, I noticed the copy only addressed the security company and not the reseller. Then, when reading a case study on Marketing Experiments (one of my favorite sites!), I saw the same thing. A reseller of knives only had copy that dealt with that particular brand of knives. There was nothing about the reseller.
“Why is this important?” you might ask. Because I – as a customer – need help to decide which reseller to buy from. Yes, the entire collection of knives your online store carries might be a duplicate of the knives another reseller stocks, but that still leaves a very important question for the shopper. “Why should I buy from your site instead of the 962 other authorized Swiss Army Knife resellers online?”
Do you have a good answer? If not, you’d better come up with one and quick!
In my previously written article, Making It Easy for Customers to Choose You, I give several ideas for developing differentiating factors for your company.
Before you get lost in a sea of click-happy surfers, take some time to figure out why you are different and/or better than the competition. Then make that perfectly clear in your copy so your visitors will have an easy time identifying you as the perfect place to buy.
