How To Increase Sales By Using The Right Language (Vernon Riley)
Dec 2, 2008
When you are busy promoting your product or service it is easy to assume that you are using the same language as the people that might buy your product or service. This is potentially an expensive mistake to make.
People use their own language, not yours to describe a problem or need they wish to satisfy, whether this will be done by a product or service. This is one of the reasons for using the internet to do careful 'keyword research'. This is often thought of as a technique used to assist in search engine optimization, but actually has importance far beyond this specialism.
You may get lots of information from past correspondence and conversations with your current customers. Emails and other questions placed on forums or support areas for instance can be a very valuable resource.
Doing your own research
You also can do your own research using the names of companies or organisations that sell products or services that address the market segment in question. Using a web browser you can visit the pages they offer for the product or service and look for the key words or phrases used to describe the product. You can also use View Source inspect the text that makes up the page. Search within this text and you can normally find TITLE,META name="description", META name="keywords" and H1 'tags' ( Note this isn't intended to be a strictly accurate or inclusive statement of what SEO practitioners should do ). These tags will probably contain clues to page content and the significant phrases. The search engines often use the content of these tags to produce the 'listing' on their results pages.
If you then search these terms on Google the pay per click adverts on the page ( top 3 and on the right hand side ) will also give clues as the advertisers will have tried to use words and phrases that are popular with the target market.
Whilst this process is relatively slow and painstaking it can give you lots of ideas.
Buying access to search results
There are also a variety of services on the internet that offer Keyword Research. These have different characteristics but all try to provide the user with some access to the search terms used over a period in particular search engines. This is helpful, but beware reading too much into the results as there are all sorts of statistical vagaries. The total numbers of internet searches done per day is truly vast. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft account for most of these and offer limited access to their source data. Some other services use a 'small' ( in percentage terms ) sample of internet searches and then extrapolate the results to try and predict the total effect.
The challenge is that many of the searches are unique and therefore historical records of searches are only of partial help in predicting the future.
Despite the challenges these activities can help you establish what words and phrases groups of potential customers use to describe what he or she wants. You can then structure the descriptions your product of service to fit buyer concepts more accurately. The results can then be of use in
- advertising
- sales letters
- outbound communications
- mission statements
- slogans
- conversation & scripts for telemarketing
- any other forms of marketing communication
By any or all of these means you can expand the potential user base and appeal to multiple 'target markets'. Doing this will increase your sales.
About the AuthorVernon Riley is a founder of KKSmarts. KKSmarts makes the internet work harder for its customers and covers all aspects of Website Promotion and conversion techniques..