Stop Losing Customers

In terms of promoting your exhaust cleaning business, the biggest mistake I see as a digital marketer is that your website does almost nothing for your visitor. How many of you have something like this on your home page:

• Welcome to our website…
  
• We’ve been in business X years…
  
• We serve the X community…
  
• Meet our team…
  
• We’re located at….
  
• We are certified in…
  

I’d bet most of you reading this blog post have one, if not more, of those statements on your home page followed by a lot of other content about your fabulous company. For some reason, I see this mistake a lot among KEC businesses. Do you notice a common thread in all those statements?

All of them are about you, not the visitor. NEWSFLASH: Your customer doesn’t care about you. They care about themselves. Sure, you want to use your website to promote your company a bit, but that shouldn’t be the primary purpose.

Think about yourself as the consumer for a moment. When you go to a supplier’s website to look for product, do you care about how long they’ve been in business? Do you really care about their “team?” No. You’re looking for the product. In other words, you want your needs fulfilled. In the marketing business we refer to consumer needs as benefits.

You’ve probably heard that you should sell benefits to the customer and not features. Features are about you. Benefits are for the consumer. Yet, as a web designer/marketer, I see websites promoting features more than benefits all the time. I see it everywhere, at a rate of almost 10 to 1. And that statistic is even higher in the kitchen exhaust cleaning business.

Contractors often do not promote themselves very well. That’s because most of you are not computer geeks like me. You’re running a business or crew. You don’t have time to be goofing off on the computer, learning all this technical marketing mumbo jumbo.

I have an HVAC contractor client in San Diego that won’t go near his computer. He hates it. He has almost never seen the wonderful website I’ve made for him, but he gets the calls. Why? Because I address the visitor needs on the site. I do it right on the home page and all the landing pages. I even do it on his Yelp profile page and Facebook fan page.

Here’s what you should look for on your landing pages:

It’s About Them

How many times do you use words like we, ours, us or my? Now compare that with the number of times you use the words you, your, yours. If it’s disproportionately in your favor, you’re doing it wrong.

Nobody Cares

How big is your logo? ANOTHER NEWSFLASH: Consumers don’t care about your fancy logo so make it small. Sure, it’s important to brand yourself, but unless you are Disney or Ferrari, most consumers are probably not seeking you out by name. They want to know what you are going to do for them, first.

What do they really want? Give it to them.

If you’ve been in business long enough, you know the primary concerns of your customers. Is it to remove violations? Is it cleaning to bare metal ? Is it your price (hint: it shouldn’t be)? Is it that you can clean deeper with power washers and your competitors clean by hand?

If you don’t know what your customers really want, then you need to ask them. Find out why they use you instead of another company.

Call-to-Action (CTA)

Somewhere on your landing page, you need to tell your visitors what to do. Have your web designer create some kind of button or feature that tells them to Call to Get Your Free Quote, Remove Violations Now, Schedule a Consultation, anything to compel them to take action. Notice that we don’t use the generic Click Here, Call Now or Submit? These words are meaningless. You need to give them a powerful reason to contact you. Here’s an example:

Remove Your Violations

Well Even File the Paperwork for You

Call (619) 555-2121 for an Immediate Quote

You may have a call-to-action that is much more powerful, but I think you get the idea.

Bullets and Headlines

Most people will not read a whole lot of text on a page. They’re comparing you with all the other KEC companies they find online. If there’s too much work involved, they’ll hit the back button and go on to the next contractor. Visitors need to easily find the information they came for. They don’t want to figure anything out. They just want it, and why not? If you don’t give it to them there are plenty of other options just a click away. There have been books written about this very topic. One in particular called, Don’t Make Me Think. The title says it all.

Keep your content pithy. Don’t get too cute with it. Use bullet points to outline main ideas so the reader can skim and still get the information they need. Use headlines and titles to highlight important points.

Make it Flow

Your landing page should be easy to look at. Your colors should be easy on the eye. Readers start at the top left corner and work their way diagonally across the page (a few inches down from the top), then back to the center of the page and straight down, typically. Your CTA, then, should be on the right, a few inches down from the top because that’s where their eyes are generally going to go.

How you should style your page is a bit difficult to describe in words, but you know a good page when you see one. Look at other websites and ask yourself which ones are easy to read. You should feel comfortable looking at them and most of all, you should be able to easily find the information need.

Oh, and one more important, if not obvious, point; make sure you are easy to contact. Your telephone number should be in several, very visible, places on the page—at the top, in the CTA and in the footer. That’s minimum.