Do you have a customer focused website?
It’s surprising how many businesses don’t.
Your website is of course meant to promote you and your business, but stop for a moment and think about effective promotion and what it looks like.
It’s not the person at the networking event who talks non-stop about themselves. It’s the one who asks questions. Who listens to your answers. Who seems genuinely interested, as if they understand and empathise with your challenges.
A customer focused website operates the same way. It doesn’t talk about ‘us the business‘ – it talks about ‘you the customer‘. (Or at least, you the potential customer!)
The customer-focused website test
You can run this quick test on any page of your website. Your home page is a good place to start. All the test does is compare how much you talk about your own business and how much you talk about your customer.
Here’s what you do. (Or if you’re a visual learner, just watch the video.)
- Navigate to your home page.
- Type Control+F (or Command+F) on a Mac to bring up the ‘Find’ box.
- To get your score for how much you talk about ‘you the customer’, do three searches:
- Type in ‘you ‘ (with a space at the end). Note the number of times this appears on the page.
- Type in ‘your’. Note this number too.
- Type in ‘you’re’. Note this number.
- Now add those three numbers together and you have your customer score.
- Next look at how much you talk about ‘us the business’.
- Type in ‘we ‘ (with a space at the end). Note this number.
- Type in ‘our ‘ (with a space at the end). This one’s a little fiddly as it will count both ‘our ‘ and ‘your ‘. To get the actual count of ‘our ‘ only, you need to subtract the number you had for ‘your’ earlier from this count.
- Type in ‘ us’ (with a space at the beginning this time). Note this number too.
- Adding these three numbers gives you a score for how much you focus on your own business.
Now all you have to do is compare your two scores.
Ideally, you focus twice as much on your customer as you do on yourself.
Sound complicated? It’s easier to explain with an example, which is why we made this video.
Making sure the test works properly
Please note, those spaces are important. They prevent ‘false positives’. For example, if the copy on your site talks about ‘website hosting’ – you don’t want it to count the ‘we’ at the start of ‘website’ every time. That’s why the spaces are there.
What if you’re a sole trader or one-person company? Just test on ‘I ‘, ‘my ‘ and ‘ me’ instead of ‘we ‘, ‘our’ and ‘ us’. If you do this, you won’t have to subtract the ‘your’ out of ‘my’ either – so it’s actually easier.
You may also want to look at how often you use your own company name. Once again, that’s talking about you!
Testimonials can skew results either way. If you have a lot of testimonials on the page you’re reviewing, it’s worth scrolling through and reviewing them. You may need to adjust your numbers.
What to do if you don’t have customer-focused website copy
First things first. Don’t panic.
You are not alone, or even in a minority. The three sites we picked at random to review in the video were all focused on themselves.
But you are missing a chance to shine, so the second thing you should do is fix the issue.
Go through your copy and look for options to rephrase from a customer point of view.
‘We provide the best xxx’ becomes ‘You deserve the best xxx’.
‘We work with top level companies who choose us because of our high standards’ becomes ‘You too can enjoy the high service standards which top companies demand’.
And so on.
Or maybe words really aren’t your thing? You do know that’s why companies like NoBull Marketing exist, don’t you? Get in touch and we can do it for you. Very affordably!
A final thought
You may or may not have heard of ‘power words‘. They’re words which trigger emotion, which catch the reader and pull them in.
‘You‘ is the ultimate power word. It speaks directly to the reader, listener or website visitor. That’s why this technique is so powerful. Don’t believe me? Pick your top three love songs and listen to the lyrics. I bet at least two of them use ‘you‘.
