Should we sell gains over pains?
How do you explain the value of long-term thinking when your customers want short term gains? This has been on my mind for the last couple of weeks, as I’ve been making more updates to EasySEO.
What we have is a tool that can significantly improve your website by recommending changes that add value to your users' experience. As a result, the users stick around and buy your product. What we have been selling so far was a tool to improve AI and search rankings, thereby making your website more relevant to potential users.
Sounds different, but it's actually two sides of the same coin.
The problem I had was this — To sell the SEO product, I have to sell to someone who buys into the value of SEO and is already committed to seeing that value grow. To sell to the end consumer, I need to sell to someone who’s got a dollar and wants to buy a can of soda, RIGHT NOW.
You know that feeling when you know that vegetables are good for you, but right now you want steak and ice cream? Same thing.
I think we’ve been selling this tool wrong this whole time!
I know this because I used our own tools on my own websites and it’s been great, but I wouldn’t be able to sell this long-term vision to my own self, only the instant gratification.
Breckworks.com for example, I implement 40+ changes recommended by easy seo. Some of them were blog posts, some of them were specific pages that target specific audiences with very specific calls to actions. For example, there’s a page for remote workers and there’s a page for families traveling to Breckenridge…etc. Those pages will capture different audiences with content that’s good for them. I loved it, and I would’ve spent hours contemplating on what to write. AI helped me in minutes!
Using our own tools, I got more traffic to the site and more interest. That was the immediate value that I was looking for. The fact that over the next six months I’ll get more traffic is nice, I think…
You see what I mean? The improvements to my website that I can see right now, that’s what would make me share EasySEO with friends, not the long-tail wins.
I may be right or may be wrong, but that's my theory right now. For the technical folks in the audience — we get so caught on in the details of what our superpowerful awesome tools can do, we forget the simple relevance to the end user.
Well, good news, this is an easy fix.
— Kirill.