If you want to make your website do its job of attracting and converting visitors….
You first need to understand these two vital human motivations all your visitors will share.
Number 1:
At the basic level – from our reptilian brain – we all want to survive and thrive.
Number 2:
Our bodies want to conserve calories.
So, we want to make sure that we are safe. We make sure people are not out to get us.
Also, we conserve calories. Maybe that’s why so many of us get a membership to the gym in January, then never go for the rest of the year. Our bodies want to conserve calories!
First; What Not To Do.
So, if we look at the following website from this point of view:
We can see that, from this from this standpoint; this dentist’s website isn’t well built at all. It doesn’t tell us anything about thriving and surviving in a context of a dentist.
And…
It certainly doesn’t help me to conserve calories. Because I’m trying to figure out what I’m looking at here. I don’t even know what this is.
If I hadn’t told you that it was a dentist, would you have known?
Maybe not.
For someone looking for a dentist, a brief glance at this website would cause a headache to go with their toothache. So, this is clearly not the way to go.
And, then all these people say things like;
“We have a beautiful site with lots of information about who we, are which is good.”
These are the same people who put their mission statements and vision statements on their about page, or worse, their homepage.
The problem with this approach is that it’s way too wordy to do that. Nobody is going to read a site like this. I mean, really…
Nobody is going to read this.
Even the guy’s wife would probably tell him that she had read everything on his beautiful website when she hadn’t even bothered. She may have just glanced at it and said;
“Good job honey.”
This is pretty much what a wordy site is going to leave us feeling.
It is not the way to go.
Next; Daydreaming.
Now, one of the things I want you to understand is that human beings spend 30 percent of their time daydreaming.
30 percent!
So, we have to ensure that our website does not take them into one of those daydreams cause then they’ll never take action.
For example:
Looking at that last dentist’s website, I can say that it’s the perfect recipe to get people daydreaming; wondering when the last time was that they went to the beach or where they should go on holiday next. This is exactly what we want to avoid.
What To Do
The best products and services are those which are communicated the clearest.
It’s the clarity in the communication that wins every time. Many of us lose a lot of business. Not because of the quality of our products or services…
However, because we don’t clearly communicate the value of our products and services.
The same goes for your website:
If people land on your website but don’t get a clear idea about what you are trying to communicate to them within the first few seconds, they are going to move on.
People will not burn the calories it takes to try to understand what you are offering.
It costs less for them to click elsewhere to keep looking for something that they know for sure will help them thrive and survive.
Yes, this is how we conserve calories.
You have to remember:
People aren’t going to spend the time deciphering whatever it is you are trying to say. Instead, it needs to be super clear.
One of the ways we have been doing this for millennium as human beings is by telling stories. We love stories. There is nothing better for human beings.
Sitting in a restaurant with friends, around a living room after a Thanksgiving turkey, at the end of the day when we are with our spouse: we tell stories.
Stories are the foundations of communication, and that has never changed.
A cave dweller told stories by painting on a cave wall, and now we share our stories on our Facebook wall, and Instagram feeds.
The moral of this story:
When you redesign your website, make sure to:
- Show your visitors how you will help them to survive and thrive
- Keep it super clear to help viewers conserve calories.
- Try to tell a story through your website.