Are you using the right words?

Words can be immensely powerful little buggers. Finding the "right" word can mean winning prose and hugely successful marketing copy. The wrong word can be mediocrity and zero sales.

Too often we don't spend enough time finding the right words AND we forget to check back in on our copy and make sure the words we've chosen are actually singing for their supper.

I was reminded of this yesterday when looking at visitors to various pages on an event website I'm managing. I had one of the main header/menu options as "sponsors". Once you got to that page, you also learned the sponsors were also going to be exhibitors.

Looking at the low traffic to this page, I realised my fatal mistake. I was thinking in terms of words from my perspective, not my audience's perspective.

The audience (conference attendees) is not really interested in who's sponsoring the event. But they ARE interested in who'll be exhibiting, because this directly affects them.

So with this BFO (blinding flash of the obvious) I changed the menu item. And watched the visits to the page DOUBLE today. (Yes, and smacked my head for taking so long to get it!).

[Added 1 August: You may be interested to know that I kept and eye on this and last week got TRIPLE the visitors to this page compared to the week before I changed it from 'sponsors' to exhibitors.]

Now I have much better results to report to my other audience - the sponsors - and the conference attendees now more about the event they'll be attending.

So have you done an audit lately of your website - or other communications vehicles lately - and ensured they're written for the right audience? Just a page here and there so it's not too daunting a task.

This happened to me again recently, when I made the change on a menu item of another client's website. We switch from the common but vague "What we do" to "Why choose us". Now it's more about the visitor than the website owner. Small change, big impact.

So it's a lesson worth learning over. And over. And over.

It won't cost you anything, so it's very "zero budget marketing". And you will find that a LITTLE tweak here and there will can make a BIG difference in the way your communications are speaking to your audience.

So repeat after me: "It's all about them, not all about you!"

Then maybe it will sink in for all of us :)