Creating an offer that sells

Digital Marketing | Lead Generation

Everyone loves a good offer don’t they? I bet if I offered to mow your lawn and water the garden you’d bite my hand off (until you realised that I am good at neither of those things!).

Creating an offer that compels people to take action is an art form that requires skill and insight. A good offer will turn a window shopper into a loyal customer; it is foundational to increasing sales.

You can have a whole marketing strategy on point, but unless you have an offer that is attractive to your target audience, it is wasted. Understand your target audience and their pain points and you will be able to frame your service or product in a way that speaks directly to them.

What exactly is an offer?

An offer is something given in exchange for someone performing a specific action. “Buy 1 get 1 free” is an offer, if you take the action of buying one of something, you get the second free (we love you Morrisons).

In the world of Digital Marketing, it can be something as broad as giving a reason for using a particular service: “Our full-service office cleaning solution will save you money”. Or it could be something a bit more targeted like “book now for 50% off”.

Your offer is convincing the website visitor that what you want them to do will be valuable to them.

What makes a good offer

Not all offers are created equal.

My offering to cut your lawn might sound fine until you dig a little deeper and find out I have no tools, no experience and can only do it at midnight! Not that appealing really.

No matter what the activity is, if you are looking for your target audience to take action a lot of it will depend on how good your offer is, and how you have framed it.

You could have the best service in the world, but if it’s not expressed properly it is wasted and a competitor could swoop in.

Good offers speak to a person’s fear, anxiety and hope. For a good offer to work you have to understand what these things are. What problems do they have? What objections might they come up with? What is their aim and objective?

The offer should also promote your value. This moves the thinking from ‘Will this be a negative experience?’ to ‘How will this positively affect me and my business?’.

You can’t do any of this unless you understand your target audience – the people you are trying to sell to.

Want to understand and describe your target audience? Learn more.

Things to include in your offer

So, how do we go about crafting an offer that sells?

There are a number of ways to achieve a good offer and what it looks like and how you do it will depend a bit on what the marketing activity is. Below are some pointers.

1. Know who you are selling to

To ensure the right offer is in front of the right people, you need to get to know them.

It all comes down to knowing your target audience.

Your target audience is the group of people you are and would like to sell to.

It is more than likely that your target audience can be divided into different sections, all with slightly different issues and objections. Within those audience segments, individuals would need convincing based on where they are in their customer journey.

Spending time getting to know your ideal clients, how they think, what their objections are and what problems they have, is crucial to crafting a targeted message that speaks into their lives.

Do some user research, talk to your prospective clients, and spend more time listening. Not only does this have the benefit of giving you a better idea of the right offer, but it also helps to ensure what you are offering is actually what the target audience wants.

Want to understand and describe your target audience? Learn more.

2. Sell the benefit to the client, not the features

Too often we see messaging focused on the features of a service. It’s ‘me’ messaging not ‘you’ messaging. Let’s be clear, you aren’t going to be able to sell something based on who you are and what the service does.

I hate to be the one who tells you this but nobody cares about you, it’s not about you.

Instead the offer, in whatever form it takes, should be focused solely on the target audience and the problem you are solving.

It should be about them, when they read the offer they should feel as if you understand them and are one of them. This will lead to greater engagement.

3. The right message at the right time

To further complicate things (who said this was easy?!) not everyone is in the same place in their journey towards becoming your client.

Those at the beginning of their journey have very different feelings and thoughts from those further along in their buying journey.

What you say to them, how you say, what you offer can be very different.

For instance, a social media post that someone has seen for the first time should have very high-level messaging, asking questions of your audience, and inviting them to find out more. Someone who clicks on that advert may end up on a landing page where detail is given, maybe a video and the offer is a low-commitment download which moves people along the buying process.

If you now have their information this next set of your target audience can now be offered something more through a channel like email marketing. With an email marketing campaign, you will be able to use higher commitment offers to convert them into paying customers.

If it sounds like hard work, then yes, yes it is, but we love it.

And if you haven’t worked out already there is no shortcut to success, no secret formula to follow. Sorry about that.

4. Be obvious

There is something to be said for stating the obvious. Sometimes the problem we face in our industries is that we know them too well. We know the jargon and the acronyms and we expect everyone else to also.

Don’t forget most people wanting to use your service won’t know what you know, so it’s easy to confuse people by creating an offer that is full of technical industry terms and fancy letters. 

This is why we suggest selling benefits, not features.

Nobody cares if you are using a certain technology or piece of equipment. They care about the benefit to them. And when selling the benefit don’t use industry-standard jargon, your target audience won’t know or care.

Make the offer an obvious one so there is no guesswork involved. What will the result be? How will it help? Keep it simple, make it obvious.

5. Be authentic

People buy from people, so act like a real person!

With all the digital marketing channels you can use there is a danger that you sit behind a computer screen and put some content together which does not reflect who you are. It can come across as very corporate, very boring and won’t make you stand out.

We aren’t saying you need to be crazy goofy with your efforts, but write like a human being, and present your video with your personality on show. Buyers have moved beyond the smoke and mirrors of corporate nonsense, they are interested in doing business with like-minded people, people that know and care.

So if it’s a video presentation, a blog post or some form of graphic, allow your company values and personality to show. Don’t be a robot, be real, be genuine.

6. Make it more believable

There is such a thing as social influence. The idea is that we gather around something because others do. Like when there’s a small number of people crowded around something, you then get the urge to also go and see what’s being looked at.

That’s why reviews are so important. I don’t know if you are anything like me but often I’ll make a decision on an offer based on the reviews it has, the more it has and the better they are means I am more likely to move forward with a particular offer.

So what’s needed to make your offer more believable? The proof that others have taken you up on your offer and have benefitted from it. We call this social proof. Using social proof on your marketing channels is a big indicator to potential clients that you can do what you promise. You can be trusted, therefore risk is eliminated.

Adding social proof to your offers makes them a whole lot more believable.

So remember…

A good offer more often than not is the difference between your website visitor taking the desired step forward in your sales funnel. It may not seem a big deal, but it really is and yet it often gets overlooked.

Knowing your ideal client and targeting your offer are the two biggest factors in conversion, get these right and results will follow. So make sure you have really understood your target audience and you have spent time focussing your offer to be so attractive website visitors would find it hard to say no.

Make it about them, their needs and what benefit they get from you. This is the way.