Lingo, Lingo, Lingo, Mighty, Mighty Sales Bingo

Posted on | February 5, 2008 |

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B2B keyword search absolutely depends on getting inside the mindset and lingo of your potential customers. As described in the previous post, potential buyers are not really interested in you and your product per se - but they are extremely and often urgently interested in solving their own particular problem. Let’s say that again - customers really really really really really don’t care about you. You and your business could vanish tomorrow in a gigantic meteor crater, and their main thought driving home that very day will still be “I wonder what we should have for dinner?” They don’t care about you, or your lingo, or your product specs, or your “way of doing things”, or your clever page layout, or snappy ad copy. They don’t want to have a relationship with you - and if they are looking for a relationship, there are plenty of sites out there for that. No, if they are searching on Google, what they care about is solving their own problems, usually in a hurry! A big hurry.

So, once you have managed to step inside their problem filled, pain filled moccasins, and developed some Adwords or organic links that people actually click on, what type of a landing page should you take them to? Well - at the risk of offending your refined and complex marketing strategies, or offending your highly talented graphic artist, I suggest you may want to take some inspiration from the world of the television infomercial where the “problem - solution” communications meme has been honed to a business generating perfection. For example, let’s take a look at Mighty Putty. There are three great and tremendous things to point out about the layout of this site. First of all - the brand promise - “Fix, fill, seal, and repair fast” - is emblazoned across the top of the site. No mystery, no looking around the page to figure out what’s going on. There it is right from the start. The next two central elements are a compelling “problem - solution” video on the left, and a gigantic call to action area on the right hand side of the screen. Watch the video, and pay attention how a wide range of problem sets are shown in a fairly detailed fashion, and then compellingly solved with the product. By the time the video is over, you almost wonder if the Space Shuttle astronauts should take some Mighty Putty on their next mission in case some tiles go missing! Video is over, and I’m ready to take the next step. What do I do? Again - no mystery. There it is - gigantic phone number OR online order form.

Guess what? It may not ever win any advertising awards, or be written up in the Harvard Business Journal, but you won’t be surprised to learn that Mighty Putty sold out of over a million tubes in the first two weeks the commercial ran!

So, we can now summarize today’s lesson: Urgent, Well-defined Problem + Effective, Compelling, Clear Solution = Big Sales. The degree to which your online campaign heeds this formula will absolutely determine your sales success. It is that simple, and that difficult.