Does Your Content Have the Right Attitude?

Your content may be interesting, engaging, and captivating, but are you packaging it the right way? Are you selling an attitude and a lifestyle with your content? If you’re not, you are missing one of the most powerfully effective e-commerce solutions available to you. And it gets worse when you try to sell an attitude that contradicts the attitude your product communicates. When you do that, you end up with customers that are confused about what they’re buying, and 9 times out of 10 they will buy from your competitors who have their ecommerce marketing strategy together.

Content Plus Attitude: The Wrong Way

If you don’t take a hard look at your site, looking at it as if you had never seen it before and you didn’t know much about the content, you might end up like Zack’s CD Shack in Port Myers, Georgia. He was a young white kid trying to sell specialized underground rap CDs out of his home. Since he was young, he thought he needed to maintain a more adult presence on the web, so he had his teachers at school help him design a site. What they created was a very carefully laid out design, with big labels for all the CDs, descriptions of all the records in terms that the teachers could understand, impeccable standard grammar, clear fonts, pastel colors, and a smiling picture of a mid-twenties teacher. Not surprisingly, Zack made only a few sales off his website. His personality, and the personality of his wares didn’t show through on the website, and he had no credibility for selling.

The Right Way

After 8 months of trying to make this model work, Zack decided to overhaul the site when one of his friends told him, in the appropriate lingo, that it was “wack.” He made extensive changes, writing personal statements about why he loved each one of the CDs he was selling, getting rid of the pastels for a more stark black and white theme, putting pictures in of the various artists, and even putting his own picture up with a biography. He wrote in a much more informal style. And, with little surprise, his sails began to grow. Soon, Zack was writing a blog and interacting with his customers and starting to turn a tidy profit.

So, be like the older, wiser Zack. Make sure your site reflects your personality or at least the personality you’re trying to project, and don’t try to fit some ideal. Authenticity is the best custom web design strategy.