“We need to drive people to our website.”
Truth is, you really can’t drive people to do anything short of using coercion, as shitty a long-term business model as you can imagine.
All successful businesses are founded on the principal of solving a problem. They fulfill a demand. People with needs don’t need to be driven to do anything. They are looking for (or at least wondering how) to rid themselves of their problem.
So if people aren’t flocking to your site/store/door, you may have a problem that goes far beyond market demand, or say, SEO.
It’s probably your attitude. Remember: it’s the customer experience that signs the checks.
As humans we’re hard-wired to think about ourselves and our own needs, much as we’d like to think otherwise. For a marketer, empathy is the core skill that allows us to think of our prospects first, to see through their eyes. Constantly ask yourselves whose needs, whose perspective, you are writing to. Empathy is like a muscle. You have to use it to develop it. Care – give a damn about what you do and the value you deliver.
People just don’t feel right when the message isn’t about them; isn’t focused on their best interests. They may not think it, but they feel it. It’s a trust thing.
A great many messages blow up right here, straight out of the gate. It’s so common that if you are able to fight this most human of tendencies to put yourself first (implicitly as well as explicitly) in your messages, you’ll likely have a leg up on your competition straight away.
