Know-How Exchange : Strategy

I believe in data. If you do not already have it you need to install Google Analytics. It takes very little time and its not all that difficult to do.
Once you have analytics you can begin to understand what really brings customers to your site. Further, you can start experimenting with different wording and different landing pages to compare the results of each.
Many people fail to measure one page against another, one set of wording against another and fine tune their work.

can you provide some details?

Can you give us a link to your website? What is your product? What market are you dressing? Where are you located? What marketing have you tried so far? What are your competitive advantages? What are the benefits of your solution?

Dear Donli,

Regardless of your niche, and despite any limited budget or scant resources, you've got to create rapport.

To compel people to try your product, you must offer SOLID proof that it's worth their time and effort. Which means making every aspect of your product, your message, your guarantee, and your claims about the prospect, about his or her problem, pain, or issue, and you must ensure that the benefits, values, and reasons to buy outweigh and and all doubts, fears, or misgivings.

You do all this by suspending all interest in yourself, your company, and your product.

YOU DO NOT MATTER. You are irrelevant. The number of years you've been in business? Means nothing. Who your Daddy is or was? Meaningless. Where you went to school? Of no consequence.
The fact that your widget is the best in the world? No one cares.

The ONLY thing that matters is what's in the deal for the prospect or customer.

To ensure this you must ... MUST ... make your site visitors understand you and believe you and everything about your message, and you've got to create a real and compelling feeling that these people feel they've known you for years, that they like you, and that they can trust you.

That's your fist challenge.

Then, you've got to make people fall in love with your product, persuade them into firmly believing that their lives will be not just better but significantly better with your product, and you've got to
convince them to want to freely give you money in exchange for your product.

You do all this because you've reversed their fears through reasoned argument and compelling benefits and values.

You do this because you've debunked their doubts through authority reviews and real customer testimonials. You achieve this because you've erased their disbelief through your message, offer, rapport, quality, empathy, deadline, price, and promise, and you manage all this because you've confirmed their trust through an out of this world guarantee.

To achieve all this you must present your prospect's problem and gain their trust by sympathizing with them because you've been there or felt their pain in some way, shape, or form.

To do this you MUST tell the truth. You CANNOT lie. Ever. Got that?

To try things out as a challenge, offer customers a value-laden, limited-time, free-trial offer of 7 or 14 days. And something that uses a build in gift as an incentive.

Build the financial worth into your main offer, but make sure your offer conveys the value to the customer of trying your product for a limited time, thereby allaying any and all fear based on price.

After the free trial period, if the customer is satisfied, then you charge their credit card. If they're not happy or not convinced, the customer MUST be permitted to return the product free of charge, and the customer MUST be permitted to keep the gift as your way of saying thank you.

I hope this helps. good luck to you.

Gary Bloomer
Wilmington, DE, USA

Dear Donli,

Bug me whenever you need to, but bear in mind that Jay Hamilton-Roth, Michael Goodman, Frank Hurtte, telemoxie,
Randall at W.M.M.A, wnelson, SteveByrneBranding, Phil Grisolia, and several others have far wider experience and knowledge.

I can't always guarantee I'll have an answer, but I'll always tell you what I think. If I don't have an answer, I'll say so. But I'll do as much as I can to find out SOMETHING to help.

Gary Bloomer
Wilmington, DE, USA

After looking through your website and watching the video, I have a few thoughts:

* You haven't sold me that your app produces results any better than using a basic word processor. Yes, it's designed for note-taking, but I didn't see what would make me want to use it over the software that's already installed on my computer.

* Installed 3rd party software is always a risk for the computer owner. How can you ensure that the software is safe? How can you ensure that it won't lose my notes (especially on the night before a test)?

* You haven't lit a fire under me. After watching the video, it seems that you have something that may be interesting, but it didn't make me think that I should buy it NOW. You have some testimonials, but I'd love to hear about the students that used some other way of taking notes (Microsoft Word, for example) and instead tried out your software, saving time taking notes/studying and even getting better scores than before.

* You need to quickly tell the website visitor it's for Vista/XP, in case they're using a Mac computer.

* You mention "memex" in the installation instructions. Keep to the name of your product, don't introduce a new name.

* In the installation instructions, you mention it takes 1 minute to install, but elsewhere it mentions 20 minutes. Which is it?

I share Jay's issues about the lack of a compelling reason to download this software versus using my existing word-processing software. There's an element of the superior mouse-trap with your product - but the world isn't beating a path to your door. This is a typical, product-development led marketing problem where the marketing is being bolted on afterwards.

I think your video is too long, and you need be brutal about editing out some of the slow stuff at the start. The screen refreshes with the text supers are way to slow for me and the part where you are talking and typing your notes in slowly just makes me want to reach for the fast forward button.

Where the video starts to get interesting is where your product does have differentiation - where you talk about free association, links to online resources, and quantitative features etc.

I think your best bet here is to draw up a list of features you have that are either not in MS Word, or else are hard to find and use. Simplicity of screen layout and menu items is one big plus. Now, remake your video based on the differentiation, not the sameness. Knowing your product is as easy to use as a word processor package just makes me want to stick with MS Word.

Your selling video should be no more than a minute. Preferably 30 seconds. By all means have additional instructional videos for use after the sale, but cut to the chase and get the sale first!

BTW the landing page got me excited with the Mind Map /spider web drawing in the background, but I could not see where you support Mind-mapping techniques. Maybe I just put two and two together and made five, but if there is no connection between the illustration and the product, you might want to change the graphic as it could seen as being a bit misleading.

Finally, the installation instructions are far too daunting. Take the product to an IT guru and have them create a loading wizard for you. These instructions were enough to put me off wanting to download the product. After all the talk of the product being easy to use, I don't want to have to call my help desk just to install it!

Hope that helps.

ChrisB

What I meant by Mind Mapping is the methodology by Tony Buzan - see here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33PCtkSlEf4

Your landing page graphic is redolent of his technique. But I haven't see your software produce a similar map, that's what I meant.

On installation instructions - I thought they all looked a bit complicated. But especially for Vista. I'm just saying it put me off. Maybe other people aren't as easily put off as me? Anyone else have any thoughts on this?

Donli

Two posts up - yes, yes, and yes.

One post up: I think you'll lose them all if you send them there. It's just way too wordy.

What I find works is if you edit down the video and then take the user automatically to a squeeze page with the points you want to make, but rephrased in their language, not yours.

And every screen full or so give them an opportunity to buy. When you get them on the verge of buying, make them a bundle (study guide, how to use the software, 101 top study tips, how to get great grades, whatever) and then make them a once-off offer to buy the software.

Sell them just the basic version. When they commit, take them to another page where you offer the upgrade to the full/deluxe version for some crazy upgrade price ($5-10 difference, or whatever makes sense).

Hope that helps.

Chris Blackman