Ever stare at a long takeout menu for minutes on end, scanning through every option, maybe wondering “Can everything on this be good?”, and inevitably just end up falling back on something obvious, or safe? But now you’re even hungrier and maybe a little cranky?
That can’t just be me.
But if you actually leave the house and go to that restaurant, the staff might ask you a handful of questions and point you to something you’ve never tried but now realize you always needed.
It’s that feeling of being presented with a bunch of equally-ranked and confusingly sorted options, and not knowing what or even how to choose. Versus the feeling of being guided toward making the right decision for you, based on a few critical questions.
Anyway, out of curiosity, what does the services page on your website look like?
Sorry, that was mean.
And, look, as my delivery bills testify against me, long menus are often not a deal breaker.
But they are definitely a deal slower. They slow the buying process down, sometimes all the way to a halt.
I’ve seen this a lot.
As is, in too many ways, obvious about me, I basically grew up in advertising. I was 20 when I got my first job in the advertising industry and, some incalculable number of years later, here I remain.
And in many years of working in ad agencies, I was in countless meetings where clients were presented with three or four options for the creative direction their ad could take. Usually, these were options of equal resolution or fidelity, presented equally.
(In my old days, printed out on real, actual paper and spray-glued to black poster board. Like on the TV show.)
Let me tell you this: If you want to see people consistently make bad decisions, present them with multiple options.
It strikes me as strange, these years later, that anyone thought that was a good idea.
Because people end up picking what feels safest, or least-wrong. Which rarely means best.
And, yes, everyone has once had the fleeting thought, “What if we presented two bad options and one good one?” but that’s just begging to have a bad option selected.
It’s curious, you know, that we expect people to suddenly become experts in something the moment they’re presented with options about it.
But... that’s not how it works. Instead, options of equal weight slow us down. We wonder if they can all be good. And we wonder if we’re about to pick the wrong one.
It happens on takeout menus and it happens on services pages: We stare and stare and scroll and scroll and try to guess what’s going to be good.
A lot of ad agencies and marketing firms like ours, these days, don’t do the multiple options thing anymore.
Because the impulse to present many options is actually often just a sign that the client wasn’t involved early enough in the process. Because it’s the marketer’s job to help their clients make good marketing decisions, not to just have them guess at which one that might be.
I bet that’s what you do for your clients, too:
In some fundamental way, your work is about helping your clients make good decisions based on your unique set of experiences, skills, and interests.
But, and you know I’ve got to ask: Is that how you’re marketing your work?
You know, some of it’s subtle.
For my business, we used to, essentially, market ourselves as “marketing message designers.” You need a marketing message, we got you. And it kind of worked? But it left a lot of prospects wondering, “Is that even what I need?”
But once we started asking, “Do you struggle to know what to say in your marketing messages?” everything got way easier. Because it let people make a choice to say yes or no, instead of leaving them with an option to idly ponder.
And some of it’s structural.
If you’re giving too many options, it might be because you have too many options. Ultimately, your process is your position: What you do is what you say.
So let me quickly ask you this: Of all the offerings on your services page, which single one, if removed, would eliminate the most value from your business (revenue, volume, margin, reputation, however you want to measure it)?
And, as a follow-up, is your marketing proportionate to that value? Or is everything kind of getting promoted, or listed, or described equally?
What I’m driving at here is that it’s tempting to think that if we do lots of things, and promote all the things we do, we’ll get more clients who need us.
But what ends up happening instead is the people who do want to work with a business like ours don’t see themselves in what we do. They just see lots of options.
That’s the same problem with presenting advertising clients with multiple, equal options:
They weren’t involved enough in the process so when it comes decision time, they might end up picking the wrong one or none at all.
But what would have worked better is helping them make the right decision from the start.
So take a quick gander at your website and ask yourself:
“Am I giving options? Or am I helping my prospects choose to make the right decision?”
Working with you.
Kelford Inc. is the marketing team that’s never at a loss for words. If you’re struggling with what to say and where to say it to attract ideal clients, we’ll show you the way.