How do you know if you have a strong offer?

After all, you know all the different ways you can help and all the different kinds of customers who would thrive once they tap into your expertise — and you want them to know about it all. 

But casting a wide net is rarely a prudent strategy when it comes to landing the kinds of customers you truly want: your ideal customers. 

Take a musky fisherman for example. Sure, they could hit the bait shop and pick up a little of everything and toss it into the water to see what works. And he could toss it in the deeper sections of the lake and at the shallow end just to see what sticks. 

But a seasoned musky fisherman would never do that. 

First of all, he’d catch a whole bunch of stuff that he doesn’t actually want: sunfish, crappie, bullheads. And it’s going to distract him so much reeling all those other fish in that he’s not going to be able to focus long enough to land his ideal fish: that elusive musky. 

No — he’s not going to waste his time or his money that way. He’s going to buy the bait that he knows attracts musky (probably a flashy spinner), and he’s going to fish in the part of the lake that he knows they live in (a nice drop off, or a weedy patch of water). He’s going to set himself up for success, rather than follow up on lines that’ll never land him a musky. 

He’s made a strong offer to that musky — now it’s up to the musky to take it. 

A strong offer sells itself.

When you have a strong offer and you lead with it on your website, you provide increased clarity for any prospect that lands on your site. Within moments, someone skimming your website can tell what you do and how it could benefit them. This clarity lets your ideal clients know they are in the right place — and it will deter clients who really aren’t. 

This passive pre-screening process saves your sales team hours (if not days or weeks!) of back-and-forth, trying to communicate your benefits while deciding if this account is worth taking on or not. Clients who opt themselves out because they see they aren’t your target market saves your team time and marketing budget. Customers who opt-in can count on more personalized attention and faster close times, since both parties already know exactly what they are getting into. 

When you have a strong offer, you stand out in your marketplace. If you aren’t providing a distinct, strong offer that’s an extension of your brand promise, there’s nothing to set you apart from your competitors, leaving you to compete on price alone, eroding your margins and erasing your brand identity. 

What does a strong offer look like? 

One of the free services we offer is to conduct what we call an Offer Roast. In an offer roast we evaluate how well an offer is presented on a website using five different categories: 

1. Value Proposition. Your value proposition represents what you bring to your prospect–how you improve their life. It should clearly define the target market, the challenge that market faces, and the unique way your company addresses it. 
2. Lead Offering. Your lead offering is the product or service that has the greatest chance of turning an ideal prospect into an ideal customer. Having a clear lead offering significantly reduces the fatigue visitors experience from wading through too many offers and messages. 
3. Website Experience. Your website is the container for your offer and often may be the first place a prospect is exposed to it. So it’s vital that it’s designed in such a way as to attract visitors through SEO and speed them to your most important messages and calls to action.  
4. Call-to-Action. This test of your offer is conversion on your call-to-action. Having a low “cost” CTA that doesn’t demand much of the prospect and creating clarity of what to expect once acted upon will increase conversions.
5. Confidence. These are all the ways you signal that you can be trusted. Your brand promise, testimonials, logos, and case studies all work together to demonstrate your competence and trustworthiness. 

Taken together, these five components shape the way your prospect thinks of your offer. 

Roast yourself. 

While we’d be happy to roast your offer, you can also roast it yourself. Here’s some suggestions on how to roast yourself:

• Keep in mind that you are not your prospect. They will not be coming to your website with all the knowledge about what you do and how you do it. And they likely would not be willing to spend as much time on your website as even you would. So, play dumb (at least about you). This is one of the primary reasons to get an external, unbiased opinion.
• Ask yourself the following critical questions (It may be helpful to score each on a scale of 1-10 and create a composite total score):some text
  • How quickly can I tell what we do and who we do it for? And what benefit will they get?
  • What product or service is most prominent? 
  • How easy is it to see and navigate to important information about that offer? 
  • How easy is it to understand how to get started and what to expect when they do?
  • Based on what we present on the website, how would a prospect know that we can be trusted?
• Now, review your primary competitor websites with the same criteria. If you were a prospect visiting those sites and yours, which would you objectively be most drawn to and why? After visiting those sites, how would you alter the scores of your own? 
• Finally, for each area that scored less than a 10, jot down the reason you didn’t score it one point higher. Often, we have a harder time articulating what’s needed to make something perfect, but we instinctively know why we didn’t give it a higher score. Identify and implement the one change for each area that would increase your score by just one. 

Let us roast your offer. 

Now that you’ve roasted yourself, why not let us roast your offer too? It’ll cost you nothing and you’ll come away with specific actions you can take to get more conversions on your current website. 

It’s easy to get started. Just schedule an introductory call at offerroast.com.