Monday, August 30, 2010

Give your Website a Customer Facelift

Today I want to talk about a powerful tool that most companies are NOT using to their full advantage. It's sharing your customer successes on your company website. Try this. Go to your company's website and pretend you are a customer or prospect. How prevalent are customer successes on your main website and as you drill down into your website?

Here are some ways that you can give your website a customer facelift:
  • Customer Success Focus - On your company home page how many examples of customer success are there? Are there customer video testimonials on your main page? How about customer quotes? Make sure that on your website, it's easy to see that your customers are having positive experiences. Your company's number one goal is to hit more revenue and in this economy you need to make your company stand out against your competitors. Sharing your customer successes is one way you can do this.
  • Customer drop-down list or section - Make it easy for customers to find 'their' tools. This can include your video testimonials, success stories, community, reference program, ROI tools, etc. This also helps your prospects find out what they need to know to make buying decisions. "Research shows the number one thing that influences a customer to buy is a customer reference (2.5 more times likely to buy when company can articulate message with a customer reference). References validate the message a company is saying about their product/solution and references reduce risks." (Richard Fouts, Gartner Analyst) From personal experience it's not just customer references that help close deals but the sharing of customer success.
  • Customer quotes - In a perfect world, every single company web page would have a 'powerful' customer quote. What do I mean by powerful? I mean a quote that has real metrics around the improvement a customer has seen from implementing your product. For example "I saved $410,000 in just one year by implementing product x". Gather up your powerful customer quotes and put them to good use on your website. One place this works really well is on your product/solution pages/ For years companies have put the benefits of why a prospect should buy their product on these pages, but put some customer success quotes on these pages that point to a success story and then you are taking it to a whole new level of marketing!

These are just a few ideas but hopefully it gets you to take a look at your company website and think how you can use your customer's to sell your story. Nothing can tell your company story as well as your customer advocates can.