Creating a Desirable Offer
If you’ve been in the inbound marketing game for awhile now, you know that “the times, they are a-changin’.” Offers that were once desirable are no longer. The kind of information that internet users expect to be available (and for free) is different from what it once was. To learn about creating a desirable offer for today’s visitors to your website, read on.
Creating a Desirable Offer
What actually is an offer?
We’re leading with this question as a “just in case.” Just in case you think you know what an offer is, but need a little bit of confirmation. An offer is a “free” product or service that your company provides to website visitors in exchange for some type of contact information from them: name, email address, phone number, etc. There may be some of you reading this right now who are arguing that asking for contact information makes the offer not free. Yes, yes – you’re technically right. That’s why I’ve got “free” in quotes – see?
Because, while you could give the offer away for free free, what would be the point of that? The reason you’re giving away an offer is to collect information about site visitors so that you can follow up with them, lead them through the marketing sales funnel (we’ll talk more about this on Wednesday, so stay tuned) and, eventually, make a sale.
What kinds of offers are people looking for these days?
LiveScience found there to be 4.66 billion web pages on the internet as of mid-March, 2016. There’s certainly more than that now: “Every second, approximately 6,000 tweets are tweeted; more than 40,000 Google queries are searched; and more than 2 million emails are sent, according to Internet Live Stats, a website of the international Real Time Statistics Project.” (Read more about this interesting blog here.)
What’s my point? There’s a lot of content on the internet. So much so that most people can find what they’re looking for with relative ease. People don’t need to give their information to get the content found in your company’s ebook. It’s already available to them. The day of the ebook is over. You’ll need to create something more unique, more exciting if you want your offers to be successful.
Tip #1
Think about what kind of offer you yourself would be willing to put down your contact information for. That’s my first tip. Would you do it for a free consultation? Maybe, depending on how interested you are in the product/service. Would you enter your email address for a chance to win a trip to Mexico? Possibly, depending on the type of person you are.
Tip #2
My second tip is this: focus on resources. I’ve found that most internet users are interested by resources that save them time, money or some combination thereof. For instance, in the past here at RedMoxy, we’ve offered a social media scheduling template. We also offered a blog editorial template. We’ve offered worksheets, free icons and design items and monthly analytics templates. Without a doubt, those offers perform on our site much better than our ebooks and free guides.
Of course, the #1 rule of marketing continues to apply. If your target audience prefers ebooks, by all means, offer them. Creating a desirable offer is about understanding your audience and what they’re looking for. If you keep that truth in mind, your offers will naturally be desirable to your audience.