Your website isn’t about you, it’s about them

Your website isn’t about you. Or, at least, it shouldn’t be.

Your website is about your clients and visitors. Your prospective clients. And their pain and problems, their hopes and dreams.

When you make your site about them, you give people a reason to stay. And maybe come back. But when you make your site all about you, well, to paraphrase the book, they’re just not that into you.

Marketer Mark Nagurski calls companies’ penchant to write mostly about themselves Ain’t We Great (AWG) Syndrome:

AWG is a naturally occurring problem whereby a business focuses on itself in its marketing communications and completely ignores the prospective customer.

“We were established in 1965″

“We supply industry leading widgets to widget retailers nationwide”

“We believe in world domination”

That kinda thing. Anyway, the long and the short of it is that nobody cares. Customers, quite rightly, are focused on what’s in it for them. They want to know how you’re going to make their lives better, wealthier, easier, safer, sexier, more rewarding - whatever. They just don’t really care all that much about you.

Don’t take it personally. They don’t care about me either. Or any other company.

When you visit Mark’s full article, be sure to click on his link to Drew McLellan’s article, too. Drew’s story and solution for AWG syndrome are worthwhile…and Drew’s co-editor of the forthcoming marketing book, The Age of Conversation 2, to which I’m a contributing author.

Odds and Ends

A quick thanks to those of you who wrote to ask about my long silence here at Mediator Tech and to find out if I’m ok. Yes I am! Rod and I just moved to a lovely new home in Peterborough, NH, home to the MacDowell Colony and where Thornton Wilder wrote “Our Town.” Now it’s our town, too. Blame my silence on all those moving boxes staring me down.