Offer Series, Part 4 of 6: “Offering Offers On Our Site Wouldn’t Work For Us,” Excuses 6 – 9


Filed under: Business Website Tips

Continuing from Part 3 of our Offering Offer series, today we're diving back in to debunking the most common excuses we hear from people as to why they don't use free offers to generate more leads from their business websites. 

(If you missed Part 2 or Part 1 of this series, you may wish to go back and read those first.)

Excuse #6: “Nobody would be interested in any topic related to our product/service/industry.”

This excuse and its endless variations are probably the most common rebuttals I hear, and this exact concern has been voiced by our clients in industries ranging from custom furniture to landscaping to real estate to law.

I understand this concern.

What you do, how you do it, and your industry in general all probably feel a little… dull, right? Most especially for those who've been in business for a long while.

It’s true many businesses don’t offer products or services that are considered ultra-sexy, and other businesses offer products or services that are close to (or ARE) commodities. 

But that’s all okay.
It doesn’t matter.

Luckily, a little bit of creativity can birth fun, fascinating, and compelling offers—even for businesses in the most “boring” of industries. 

If a prospective customer is truly interested in a product/service/solution you offer—assuming your offer is compelling, well planned, and provides content of value—he will not think it's boring or uninteresting. Instead, he will likely be willing to exchange his email addresses for it (after which he become a lead, of course!).

Let me share a few quick examples of offer possibilities for business websites in different industries, off the top of my head.

  1. YOU SELL ORGANIC BUTTER
    Potential offer #1:
    The absolute, hands-down best, curated list of butterlicious recipes found anywhere.
    Potential offer #2: The horrifying truth of what’s happening to you and your family if you’re eating non-organic butter.
  2. YOU SELL SPORTS ACUPUNCTURE
    Potential offer #1: Actual case study sharing the experience of one of your patients who went from being injured all the way back to elite level competitor because of your services.  
    Potential offer #2: How to know if you need to leave your acupuncturist: a roundup of common, potentially harmful mistakes many inexperienced sports acupuncturists make that end up hurting their patients.
  3. YOU SELL STRUCTURAL ENGINEERING SERVICES
    Potential offer #1:
    A short yet comprehensive checklist of critical questions to ask a structural engineer before you hire her to ensure you hire the one that’s best for your needs. 
    Potential offer #2: Actually, I’m going to hit the pause button.  I just realized I actually don’t know enough about the structural engineering industry to provide solid suggestions. I’d need to spend a bit of time getting a better understanding of what people who hire structural engineers actually care or worry about before I could make another solid suggestion.

Remember: your industry may boring to you. But your potential customers don’t know what you know. That’s so important, I’m going to say it again:  Your potential customers don’t know what you know.

We too often take our own knowledge and expertise for granted. This is deadly. It’s what makes it so easy to use the “we can’t possibly offer anything interesting” excuse. 

For businesses in nearly every industry, with just a little bit of creativity, genuinely interesting content can be generated, packaged up, and offered to your website's visitors as an enticing piece of prospective-customer-bait.

Excuse #7: Creating offers is far too time consuming.

What’s “too much time”?

How are you calculating too much time against an increase in the quality and quantity of incoming leads your site generates? 

If your company is so successful that investing a set amount of time into online marketing is perceived as a waste, huge congratulations go you to you!  (Curious why you’re reading this article, though?)

(If you're unsure as to whether your best potential customers are even looking for your services/products online, investing in expert market research would be a smarter first step—you do need to have confidence in this before you invest in your website and online marketing. If this is the case for you, speak with us. We have an exceptional market researcher on our team.)

If you are sure prospective customers are looking for your products/services online, and if your company is committed to generating more online leads, you may wish to ask yourself 3 very serious questions:

  1. Is this excuse coming from the lazy part talking of the person at our company who'd be responsible for overseeing offer creation?
  2. How is our current online marketing efforts working for us?
  3. Is our desire and search for easy, instant, sexy results dooming us to a business life that parallels the lives of yo-yo dieters and fad-exercise-craze enthusiasts? 

Another thing: If you truly, deeply feel this tactic would take too much time, the goal of increasing the quantity and quality of your website's leads may not be that important to your company.

And you know what? If this is actually the case, it's totally, perfectly, 100% OKAY. We don’t all have the same goals. We all need to prioritize what’s most important to our businesses. 

If something is TRULY important to our businesses, we make time. If it's not, other things will always come first, and we won’t have time left over to address the remaining items that sit on our “It would be really great if we did this…” list.

For example, donating extra time to your community will come for your company if it's more important than increasing its website's effectiveness and generating more leads. 

And again, THIS IS OKAY.  

All the many, many things that others (including myself) insist are important cannot possibly all be important for your company. 

Before taking any actions related to online marketing, your company needs to first determine what's most important (and figuring this piece out can often be far more challenging than any of the work involved in creating online offers…). 

Here's the thing: if increasing the quantity and quality of leads that your company's website generates ties in with one of your company's most important goals, your company will make time or allocate an appropriate budget. 

A final thought on the concept of time:

If your company really, truly cannot stop clinging to the no-time excuse while also insisting that online lead generation is critical to the company's success, may I make suggestion? The appropriate people at your company may wish to invest a very small amount of money and a very small amount of time into reading the “Einstein Time” chapter in Gay Hendrick’s book, The Big Leap. (Nope, that’s not an affiliate link) 

If you do go this route, I’d love it if you came come back here and leave a comment below to share your thoughts.

Excuse #8 “We honestly have nothing worth sharing”

There’s really nothing about our company that's worth sharing.

This is actually just a variation of the “No one would be interested in anything in our industry” excuse that we touched upon above. 

The difference is that businesses using this excuse are actually thinking smaller here; they're thinking they need to share something about their company.  This isn't the case at all; in fact, it's a bit egotistic. Businesses should be sharing information that potential customers truly care about, and most often, that information isn't about the business—it's about them and their challenges or desires or goals. 

Spend just a little time brainstorming or talk to an expert web copywriter or inbound marketing consultant and you’ll be shocked at just how much there is for you to share that would be downright fascinating to your potential customers.

Excuse #9 “We don't know how much it would cost”

Oh dear.

You’re just being your own worst enemy now.

I’m going to ask a few questions here:

  1. Do you know how to email or call others who are experts at what they do and ask pricing questions?
  2. Do you know there are experienced consultants out there who can help you plan your efforts and guide you toward success? 
  3. Do you know you're free to reach out to the companies with websites on which you've seen interesting offers?

I’ll leave you to sit with those 3 questions.

——————————————–

Alright.

We’ve looked in depth—and exploded—the most common excuses and reasons businesses use when arguing why offers on their websites couldn't be realistic options for them.

Next week we'll cover tips, ideas, and suggestions to actually get your company moving from thinking about offering website offers to actually offering website offers.

Still think offers wouldn't work for your business?

Do you have a reason not covered in the past 2 blog posts as to why you think website offers couldn't help your company with lead generation? I’m sure there are many, many more excuses, and there are always exceptions to every rule—and you may have one of those exceptions. 

Please, feel free to take a second to share your situation in the comments below.  I'll respond.