Training End Users About Targeted Traffic
One of the benefits of being out with the non-domain investor or tech savvy crowd daily is that I get to educate the small business owner about the value of targeted traffic received through search engines and the value of selecting the right domain name for their business website.
One issue we as domainers and also technology people in general have is the fact we like to speak about the technical aspects of a subject rather than the business and marketing benefits of a subject. It is good to step back at times and think about the customer you are approaching and determining what types of examples or terms they would find useful when trying to understand a subject. As much as we all like to show off our great knowledge of keyword analysis, link building, domain selection, etc at the end of the day the only thing the customer cares about is what will it do for me and how does that translate into DOLLARS in my bank account.
Let me give you an example, I had recently been working with a customer who happens to be a large commercial real estate group in Missouri. Since we as a company do more than just offer ads on Missouri.me we were speaking to the customer about various options around our services and an interesting discussion came up about one of their current advertising partners who they were spending thousands of dollars a month with, after speaking a bit further with the manager in charge of this decision it was fairly obvious this person had purchased this advertising based on one thing and one thing only, the fact that their advertising partner had millions of hits a day. Now keep in mind, we were not even talking about advertising at this point as something we were offering, we were talking other services. Based on this little bit of information and knowledge we were then able to show why they were paying more than they needed to for traffic that had little chance of converting and had no targeting to the regions they were located in. Keep in mind this is a large commercial real estate firm who understands location and useful foot traffic as well as anyone so the next step was for us to tutor them on targeted traffic on the web.
Although I do not want to give all the secrets away, we were then able to use real estate terms to explain that they were paying for traffic that had zero chance of converting for them which they then admitted had been their worst performing advertising. We gave examples based on search term analysis, etc of traffic that would convert better for the terms they wanted traffic from, they understood that targeting buyers and not browsers was much more effective. In otherwords, 5 million visitors that do not care about what you are offering does nothing for you, although 20 that are specifically targeted, well, those are much more valuable.
None of the above should be too earth shattering, but when you are targeting end users with your domain sales make sure you think about terms they understand and do not focus on the technical details of what we want them to know. Use terms that make sense to them to tutor them on the value.