Six Ways to Sell Your Expertise Online

Posted on August 9, 2017 by brendanr

Many of my clients over the years have been in the business of being “Experts.” Some are consultants, some are advisors, and some highly-skilled professionals within their field. The challenge with using Digital to market one’s expertise is that the online world is full of charlatans, and most people who’ve hired a few “experts” have had at least one of them not live up to their claims.

Selling expertise face-to-face is quite a bit easier. The true Expert’s skills come across in their body language, their confidence, their humility, and how they carry themselves. Most of this non-verbal communication isn’t accessible online, so how can you use the Web to market and sell your expertise?

Here’s six ways I’ve seen work, in no particular order:
1. Persuasive Copy – One of the biggest (unspoken) challenges of selling expertise is persuading the prospect that it’s OK for her to give up control. How do you know that the Expert will make you look good to your bosses instead of bad? No one wants to feel stupid, and no one wants to lose face, so overcoming this objection online is very tricky. Persuasive copy is probably the best way to solve it. Look at this copy from Jeff Sexton:

p.s. Once, a very long time ago, when I had just gotten my license, I was with my father in a rather [expletive] of a snow storm in the mountains of North Carolina in my new car. The weather was awful and I was scared to death… and I’m not ashamed to admit that. We were seriously in danger of sliding off the edge of the mountain. Then, I remembered something he had told me years ago when I was a kid.

He taught me that if you’re ever in a situation where you happen to be traveling in a DANGEROUS situation, give the controls of that vehicle to the person with you who is most skilled at operating a vehicle under those types of conditions. That means you should not necessarily take control yourself… or to give them to the person that’s been driving the “longest”… or to the person that has the most driving “certifications”…

You should give the wheel to the person who is BEST at navigating that car through that particular dangerous terrain.

So, rather than let my pride possibly take my car away from me:

I gave the controls to my new car in that dangerous situation to my father!

In this situation… ask yourself… “Who should I give the navigational controls to?”

See how the copywriter used a parable to let prospects learn it’s OK to give control to an expert who can handle a particular situation?

2. Video Testimonials – Text-based testimonials are intrinsically “fake-able,” and some skeptical prospects may dismiss them as less than real or authentic. I’m not sure why more companies aren’t leveraging video testimonials, which are a lot harder to fake. When someone believes in their heart that you’re an Expert, and they’ve placed their trust in you, that emotion should come across in a good video.

3. Search Engine Optimization – Let’s face facts…buying a Pay Per Click ad to tell me you’re an expert isn’t very persuasive. Seeing you (or even your name) a few times on the first page of organic search results is. There aren’t many businesses that don’t need to be working on their SEO, but if you’re selling expertise, you’d better be putting some resources towards showing up organically for your target keywords. NOTE: Proceed with caution – overly-aggressive search optimization practices can hurt your credibility with searchers AND search engines!

4. Have a credible web presence – there’s a whole field of study around online credibility, so I won’t spend much ink on this, but it’s worth mentioning that the credibility of your design, content, and even your social networking accounts will definitely have an impact on your ability to market your expertise.

5. A Good (Accessible) Track Record – Maybe this one goes without saying, but make sure your prospects can find your “track record” — your case studies, before and after comparisons, etc. And please don’t make them submit a lead form to get to them. Put the content out there, and if they’re interested, they’ll reach out to you.

6. Publish or Perish – Somewhat related to numbers 3-5, what I mean by “publish or perish” (apologies for jargon from Academia) is that you have to be constantly proving and re-proving your expertise. Especially in the technology space, just because you were an Expert 18 months ago doesn’t mean you are now. So make sure that your case studies stay fresh. Keep updating your website to deal with hot topics in your field, and when you don’t have time to do either one, you’d better be blogging or micro-blogging. If you give out a strong, consistent signal, prospects gravitate towards you. If you get lazy, they’ll flounder around for a bit, then follow the newer, stronger signals.

In summary, it is absolutely feasible to sell your expertise online, but the skills you have as an expert won’t necessarily allow you to sell that expertise in a digital space. You may need to rely on the expertise of others!

[A version of this post was originally published August 19th, 2009 on GrokDotCom.com, an award-winning, but now defunct, Marketing Optimization blog.]

Buying Stage Mismatch In Your Customer Experience

Posted on June 21, 2017 by brendanr

Every visitor comes to your site in their own “stage” of their individual buying process. The buying stages are actually a wide spectrum, but I generally break them into Early, Middle, and Late buying stages:

Early stage means that the visitor has a problem, and is looking for a solution. They may not know who you are, or that your product/service solves their problem.
Middle means that they have an intention to buy a product or service that solves their problem, but not necessarily from you.
Late means that they’re persuaded to buy from you, and intend to “close the deal.”

Sometimes, websites seem to be doing everything right, but the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) just aren’t as high as everyone expects. Their sites are functional, accessible, usable, and intuitive. Their look and feel is credible, and their content is high quality. So why do their visitors not behave as we expect? Why do well-planned and well-executed scenarios (e.g. PPC ad → landing page → lead generating form → thank you page) not always convert?

You guessed it: Buying Stage mismatch.

Buying Stage mismatch is when your selling process doesn’t jive with the visitor’s buying process. It’s when your conversion funnel is designed for a buying stage that the visitor isn’t in. Take a look at your site’s conversion funnel…it’s most likely designed for Late Stage buyers, right? Take a look at one of your PPC campaigns…are you showing Early Stage searchers a Middle Stage ad that sends the visitor down a Late Stage funnel? Poor visitor 🙁

The key point is to be aware that multiple buying stages are traversing your designed scenarios. It’s fine if your funnel is fine-tuned to Late Stage buyers, but do you have easy navigation paths to let an Early or Middle stage visitor branch out and get more information? It’s fine if your PPC landing pages are perfect for a Middle Stage searcher, but can an impatient Late Stage searcher “Buy Now”?

How do you identify buying stages to improve your scenarios?

A few ways, using basic analytics tools and skills, are:

Look at your keyword lists (in-site search, organic keywords, and paid keywords) and start segmenting by buying stage. Guessing is OK.
Look at click paths and navigation (which pages would be attractive/informative to the various stages?)
Look for those who bail out of conversion funnels (it could be that they’re not ready to buy)
Look at entrance sources (organic vs. PPC vs. referrals vs. direct visits)

[Originally published February 18th, 2009 on GrokDotCom.com, an award-winning, but now defunct, Marketing Optimization blog.]

Do Your Landing Pages Leverage the Rebuttal Approach?

Posted on January 8, 2013 by brendanr

business cat meme image captioned "I beg to differ." I’ve written a fair amount over the years about using the 3 stages of the decision-making process as a framework for doing analysis and Optimization. At each stage of the process, the prospect’s mindset and needs are different. Therefore, your tactics for persuasion, testing, and Optimization should be different.

Today I’m going to focus on “Middle” and “Late Stage” prospects, and on one crucial tactic for converting prospects at these stages of their conversion journey. The tactic is more often used in B2B (and especially SaaS) marketing, but I believe it can be applied effectively in B2C scenarios as well.

I call the tactic for this post the “Rebuttal” Approach. It’s a borrowed legal phrase which is also used in politics; especially in debates. A rebuttal is an expected opportunity to counter-argue known points that your opponent has made. In political debates, an opponent is often given, say, 30 seconds to make a rebuttal argument against a specific point just made.

In Optimization, the Rebuttal Approach is your chance as a marketer to make a counterargument against your competition in order to convert Middle and Late Stage prospects. This is a crucial tactic because prospects tend to engage in a lot of comparison research or shopping before they make a decision. A prospect on your site in Middle and Late stages is almost always conducting some sort of comparison between you and your competitors. Continue reading →

Copy Matters: 30 Minutes for a 10% Lift

Posted on November 29, 2012 by brendanr

Pad of Paper & Pen One of the more common excuses I hear for marketers not conducting experiments on their websites is a “lack of resources.” This generally refers to not having designers and developers at their disposal to create new versions of site pages, new graphics, new layouts, etc.

However, that is not an excuse from testing. That is perhaps an excuse from “radical redesign” testing. But there are still ways to run tests and get conversion rate lifts without tapping those resources. If you have access to a copywriter, or can write a bit of copy yourself, there’s plenty of testing (and learning) you can do, and I’ll give you an example in this post. Continue reading →

3 Signs Your Personas Are Broken

Posted on October 17, 2012 by brendanr

Last month, the venerable Bryan Eisenberg wrote on his blog about Content Marketing Personas. The article was a good reminder for us that there are a lot personas out there in the marketing world, and many of them are sub-par if not dangerous.

I especially liked his suggestion that readers explore his “conversion trinity” on paid ads and landing pages using existing personas to see if they were up to the task of helping optimize a landing page experience. He has promised us more columns about “getting personas right” in the future, so I recommend you keep an eye out for those.

Coincident with me reading Bryan’s post, I was doing an on-site consulting engagement with a new client. They were looking to redesign a microsite with the goal of boosting lead conversion rate. I was relatively unfamiliar with their marketing efforts, so I asked if they had marketing personas. They answered, “Yes,” and I was delivered an 8Mb PDF with a professional layout, high-quality stock images, and content that was backed by legitimate research.

I deleted it minutes later.

Why did I delete these personas, choosing to “start from scratch” instead of leverage a document that had obviously taken many hours to produce?!? I won’t answer that specifically about this client’s personas, but it’s my segue into my 3 warning signs that your personas may be toxic. If the personas you’re using to do Optimization (or any Marketing) show any of these traits, you may be shooting yourself in the foot. Continue reading →

Whoa! A Digital Agency Gets Their Homepage Right

Posted on August 28, 2012 by brendanr

When it comes to web design that “converts,” i.e. efficiently persuades prospects to take a desired business action, the websites of digital agencies haven’t typically been high on my list for praise.

Often times, the sites of digital agencies have over-relied on flash, high-resolution imagery, or inventive navigation to persuade their prospects that they should engage with the site and eventually take a desired action.

Further, the philosophy of “creativity for creativity’s sake” pervades many agencies, and the web designs they provide to clients often under-perform in terms of business KPIs like conversion rate and revenue.

Hence, many practitioners of Conversion Optimization distance themselves from traditionally “creative” agencies, instead testing their way to designs that are often aesthetically plain (even boring), but convert well.

Note: this isn’t always the fault of agencies. Their clients are often fixated on aesthetic design and aren’t thinking enough about website business performance. And, as we know, the client is always right when you work at an agency.

All of this contributes to my bias. Enter the homepage of POSSIBLE, a digital agency that I was introduced to recently. I was surprised to see that their homepage is doing some things really well that we can learn from in terms of persuasion and conversion optimization. Continue reading →

Brendan Regan's Digital Marketing, Conversion Optimization, and Marketing Optimization Blog

My personal take on the rapidly evolving world of digital marketing and how to optimize our efforts as marketers.

Category Archives: copywriting