image courtesy of Shutterstock.com

For the last little while I’ve been reading The Smashing Book. It has been a good read and a lot of great pointers and reminders in there. There was one area that impressed me since I’m in the middle of a project that deals with this. It is in the chapter, “Design to Sell: Increasing Conversion Rates. The beginning of the chapter talks about things that sell.

To sell effectively, you have to sell solutions, not products.

It talks about customers aren’t looking for services or features: they’re looking for a solution to their problems. When it comes to having a product that people are going to pay for, simply throwing up a list of features isn’t going to convince them to buy the product, it needs to show them how it is going to save them time or money or how they can benefit from the product.

One example that is brought up is the iPod Nano. Telling consumers that it has 16 gigabytes is one thing, but what does that mean? It would be more effective to say that it holds 4000 songs. That provides an easy to understand solution to someones problem.

There are so many reason for not purchase something and if there is not a good reason to move forward, visitors to your site will leave. It is important to grab their attention and then move them through the process and create more of a desire so you can eventually get them to act. I have worked a lot with direct mail and the process isn’t that different. You need to create a reason for them to pick up this piece of mail, grab their attention, show them how you can provide a solution to their problems and then get them to act by calling or going online.

In the book they go into the AIDA process, Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action. This is a great concept to remember when you are trying to sell anything. Also, it doesn’t stop there, you need to Satisfy your customers so they become advocates for your product.

Luckily, I’m in the early stages of this project and can help the client rethink the direction they should be taking.

I unfortunetaly don’t have an image of the billboard but it is as simple as a beautiful image of the back county with the text, “backroadsmontana.com” on it. That is it. Far to often, companies think they have to cram so much information on a billboard to get their message across when in reality, the opposite is true. The message of this billboard goes beyond the url, although, you know exactly what they want you to do–type in backroadsmontana.com and visit the site (which is also beautiful). The message is left open to inturpretation, escape, explore, having fun, see nature, what ever it turns out to be. Regardless of what you get from it, you want to visit the site.

As I also mentioned, the website is also beautiful, you go there and instantly know you are in the right spot. There is plenty of information and it is organized very well. There are also videos and maps you can download for the different areas.

The firm that did the marketing and design, and also convinced the Montana Office of Tourism to do this, gets an “A” from me. I hope it is successful for them and when you are out driving, try to notice the billboards and check out the website, www.backroadsmontana.com.

Listen to the story here.