Business is a competition so why don’t more of them try to stand out from their competitors?
Running a business of any size places a range of demands on everyone from the CEO down to the employees managing customer delivery every day. It’s crucial that systems and processes are in place and working efficiently to ensure administration tasks, non value-adding and non income-producing work is kept to a minimum. It’s even more critical for solo-operators and businesses that have 2-10 employees.
Specifically for businesses that rely on clients making appointments the key is to reduce the amount of interaction it takes to secure a booking. I’ve recently researched 20 business sites in a specific niche in a multiple suburban geographic area to get a handle on the tactics being employed to get a competitive advantage. I was disappointed to find that not a single one employed any unique selling points as they all seemed to be following each other.
Summary of findings from analysis of the 20 websites:
- Only 2 had an active blog.
- Only 6 had believable social proof via testimonials.
- Only 5 had a reasonably strong call to action.
- Only 5 didn’t show product price-lists.
- Only 4 had social share buttons.
- Only 5 had Facebook pages but only 3 of them had recent activity.
- Only 4 had any level of personalisation (images of real staff members, customers) but all of them had stock image content.
- None of them had a ‘real’ online booking facility. You can’t classify an enquiry web-form as a booking form.
So the question is ‘why don’t they try to stand out?’
I suspect that a lot of business start out with the best intentions of making their website the beating heart of their operations but they soon lose interest, lack the time or skill to keep it updated and it just becomes a place to show their phone number. Such a lost opportunity.
The niche I studied are ripe for the implementation of real online scheduling not just to save time and cost but also to achieve a competitive advantage by offering their clients a service that no-one else is currently employing.
Are you offering online bookings? If not – start now by asking me how.
