Waiting For Your Cat - Chapter Seven
By Craig Danuloff
Buying isn’t an event, it’s a process. This is what we learn in Chapter 7 of ‘Waiting for Your Cat to Bark’. Yet another observation that can and should change the way you create a website and structure your marketing communications.
When we think of buying as an event, we attack ‘it’ from all angles at once – here’s some general info, here’s the details, here’s our competitive positioning, here’s the price and value proposition, etc. But thinking of it as a process, we can very easily start to imagine the frame of mind and likely questions someone might have, and thereby structure our site/communications to directly address these issues.
Imagine someone who first learns about a recreational activity like kite surfing, and decides to investigate it as part of a summer vacation. Whether looking at a resort or at gear, this person is in the process of defining the problem they need to solve. What this person is looking for is very different during this phase of their buying process than it will be at some later time when they understand how the sport works, what are the attributes to consider in selecting gear or a good location for beginners, etc.
A great many websites completely ignore this phase of the buying process. At best they offer a condescending or simple-minded ‘FAQ’ document. Supposed I decide to go buy a kite-surfing setup, and imagine the very real possibility that I don’t know too much about what features, model, or even price range I’m looking for. A quick search gets me to this page at bestkites.com, where I am immediately blasted with models, prices, and screen shots. All great information but since I lack the knowledge to interpret these facts (I don't know what is important or why, nor do I understand the implications of choosing one vs another), I’m typically left to go find the forums where I can read enough conversations to ‘become smart’.
Note that there isn’t a single page of overview or summary information visible on this site. The fact is that the people who operate the site probably know an incredible amount about their sport and the gear it requires (probably the best spots around to world to sail at as well) but they haven’t taken the time or realized the importance of sharing one iota of that knowledge. Could I be the only person who ever visited their site and was early in my buying process? Of course not, and I wonder if when they look at their website analytics and notice the thousand of visitors who leave after only seeing a page or two, if they realize that many of those people wanted to buy but the told them, in effect, to go somewhere else and get smarter before you look at our products.
(Actually, I know they don’t do this, because their page source tells me that don’t even have a web site analytics package set up – so not only do they not know about my problems, they don’t even know about their problems.)
The stage of the buying process a visitor is at impacts the kind of information they’re looking for, as does the way in which they happen to approach any particular stage. Once I’ve got my gear and begin to look for the right resort to go give it a try, I might be very focused on some very precise fact that I read during my quick education, something like average wind speed. If so, a resort that presents that information (assuming it’s a common attribute that kite surfers often discuss, which in this case it might not be) may very well get my business just because they thought to present that information, while another resort that looks fantastic doesn’t provide it and so doesn’t address that particular aspect of my buying process. Another person equally read to ‘book a trip’ may care not a whit about wind speed but instead be very focused on the quantity and quality of the local nightlife.
In the book these are termed ‘handles’ and ‘angles’ and further the idea that if you stop and think about it in this way, you quickly realize that your site visitors aren’t a monolithic bunch but actually sets of people at different stages of a process with subgroups of each stage coming at it from a different angle and at a personal level perhaps even with a slightly different understanding of that angle. The typical ‘one size fits all’ website obviously makes no sense in this type of environment.
It isn’t just visitors who segment and fragment in ways that you may have not considered. The classic selling cycle also needs to be taken out of the business school books and worked into online communication design.
So your web site, and the pages it contains, are no longer trying to simply ‘sell something’ - they’re trying to accommodate a range of different people as they move through the unique stages of a their buying process while simultaneously passing invisibly through the phases of your selling cycle. Instead of looking at each page of your web site and thinking about how good it looks, or whether it directly conveys one point or another, you have to figure out the role it plays for different people engaged in different phases of two different processes. Yikes.
But rather than frightening, I find it liberating. There’s now a framework upon which to design a site and consider layouts and content suggestions. There are clear goals to accomplish and scenarios to test. Site design moves from a subjective to an objective exercise. Not entirely, but predominantly.
This brings up many new questions, but we’re only 1/3 of the way through the book, and it’s a safe bet that the Eisenbergs are carefully walking us through their own selling process and have a good idea of the buying process we’re experiencing on our side. The problem has been defined, our attention has been grabbed, and we’ve got desire for a solution. A bunch more steps to go.
:: This is part of a chapter-by-chapter review and commentary on Waiting for Your Cat to Bark, by Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg with Lisa Davis. Read the original review here. Reader comments are highly desired.
