How Small Business Owners Leave Money on the Digital Table (series)

A recent gig had me researching and pitching 500 different businesses, requiring a deep dive into 700 different websites and their digital stories. I gained a lot of insight into what small businesses are getting wrong with their digital storefronts. This blog series shares a few key takeaways to help small business owners evaluate and strengthen the performance of their sites.

I recently got a gig writing pitch decks for a high-profile events company out of Boston. It required me to visit 500 small business websites, drill down into each to consider what makes each business special, and then write a concise, compelling pitch for each.

These were notable restaurants, bars, conference venues, museums, vacation spots – anything and everything worth your time  -  eat, drink, think, play. Things we humans love to do!

It required me to unpack each business and deeply consider what made each singular and unique.

Easy right?

Consider how many steakhouses there are in Boston.

Or seafood restaurants.  

Or charming New England venues with unique history.

Now consider how to make each of those distinctly unique and compelling.

I was surprised to discover how many businesses didn’t convey this on their sites! I felt like one of those pixelated characters in my son’s Minecraft game digging for gold. Often, I had to find information from secondary sources - these were angles and pitches that I should have found on the businesses’ websites!

This is what I needed to know:

• What makes this business singular?

• Why should people spend their money on this business and not on the competition?

It was my job to make the business sound irresistible and get people nodding “Yes, I want that!”, oftentimes with little to go on.

Why is this worth knowing?

Because this is what your target audience is doing every day. Customers are looking for your products and services, and trying to determine which business is the best choice. Which one meets their needs? What distinguishes one business from another? Which is the “right” choice?

Businesses that fail to sell their unique differentiator are leaving money on the proverbial table.

They are losing warm lead - people who want your product or service.

People move on to the next brand.

Whoever tells their story best gets the business.

Failing to distinguish yourself from your competitors once people are on your site is a huge, missed opportunity. It’s a lost sale.

People find a business that does distinguish itself in terms that work for the customer.

Take a closer look at your Home page and your About page (the second most-visited page of websites). Are you telling your story? Is it unique? Are you conveying the benefits and transformation clients will get from your business?

Challenge Question: Does your business website provide its unique selling proposition ‘above the fold’? How hard would I have to work to understand what makes your business special and different from your competition?

Just Keep Swimming

I’ve been a writer my entire life, and at some points got handsomely paid for it (thank you Hollywood). When I became a copywriter I learned to stretch in new ways to use words like scalpels. While this aspect of my new trade was expected (I devoured my training and wished there were more hours in the day to do it), I learned there was a whole other side to being a freelance copywriter. A dark side, called a website. Which was connected to something even darker, a business.

As a part of my training and to widen my customer base, I joined small business groups and followed their postings with interest, always on the lookout for new clients. I kept a neat calendar to keep track of when I could post adverts for services. I checked back in occasionally, but always with an eye for selling my services (read: slow start to finding clients, sound familiar?). I felt like a new fish swimming around in an old sea, taking it all in.

Blink, blink. So many challenges starting up their businesses. Blink, blink. So many websites that don’t convert. Blink, blink. So many questions about how to build a website, how to promote their product.

It was like looking behind the curtain in the Wizard of Oz.

It was also like a dog looking in a mirror and slowly realizing he was looking at himself.

Small business owners had all the same problems I had – because I was one of them. It seems obvious now, but trust me, it was a revelation as a new freelancer.

I had just struggled for weeks building my website, sweating it out with Wordpress for an entire week before abandoning my efforts entirely for SquareSpace (which was way easier by the way). I learned more than I wanted to learn about launching a small business and building a website, curse words flying through the air as I persisted. If you have ever built a website, you know what I mean.

As I continued to read postings online, I also began to learn how small business owners, while being great at their business, were often at a loss about how to sell their businesses online. They had a great product or service, had set up an online storefront of some kind, but weren’t seeing the kind of traffic and more importantly, they weren’t getting the conversions they knew their product deserved. It was like seeing the tide come in and go back out again, leaving storefronts awash but untouched, products still on the shelves. And some were too far up on the beach to even feel the touch of the sea, beached fish flopping around.

And that’s when I knew I could help. This is where copywriting comes back in. Copywriters are trained to put together the words, the messaging, the reasoning, the stories, and the emotional journey of a potential customer, holding their hand at each step along the purchasing pathway.  The right words help them to learn about a product or business, make them feel known and understood, address their fears, help them to understand how their life will change by buying the product, and directly address their reservations. We help sweeten the deal, when we can and with the business owner’s blessing, with promos and freebies that help make that decision a no-brainer.

That’s when I knew we were in it together. I was running my own small business, but I had prospective partners, not clients. Partners who I could help. I knew with clarity and insight that I had a lot to offer my partners. I had the writing skills to swim next to them and give them the words, the messaging, and the story that their products or services needed to find their partners. They needed me and I needed them, and together we would create synergy with copy and product. We would get the right products and services into the hands of the right people —who are already out there looking for and needing them! I began to feel my place in the great ecosystem of the small business community. All I had to do was just keep swimming. Right alongside my partners. I knew that, together, we were in it to win it.

So, lets go!