Chances are very good that you’ve been asked that broad question at many junctures as you’ve started your business and built your empire online. You might have a stock response to the question: You go into a short little blurb about what your research determined, laughingly saying, “I KNOW that sounds weird, but the numbers work, I swear!”, and noting slyly at the end that you’ve noticed that you have just the thing that they’ve needed all along without ever even realizing it! At the end of the conversation, if they have a good handle on what it is you’re selling there, you feel like you’ve done your job.
The concept is simple, but often it does not translate fully into the smaller aspects of the principle. We want to convey well to our visitors, or our friends what the site is about, when it comes down to describing what it is we’re selling to our prospective buyers.
When you’re talking to your friend about that great thing that you have to offer, or even that great thing that you’ve just purchased, do you do so in very brief sentences, or do you try and talk it up a bit, helping to convey just how great it was that you made the purchase? When my brother gets that fancy new iPhone, he doesn’t tell me “Yeah, its an Apple iPhone, new in box.”. He regales me with its awesome features. He can check his email with it anywhere; talk about convenient! He has an app that tracks how often he does this or does that. He is a happy customer; he is confident in his decision. Of course he’s going to try and share that enthusiasm with me, in the hopes maybe I’ll get one too!
The same is true for us online. What we’re presenting our buyers with is a chance to get something that is going to fast become indispensable. We’re not selling a simple item, we’re selling something that is going to make your life better just having picked it up. We want to convey that in our descriptions.
In an online world where overt advertisement is often frowned upon, a product description is our one place to flout that rule. People are looking to the description to sell the item to them. If it’s boring, or if it’s not descriptive, they’re not going to be sold on it. We want to make sure whenever we’re given an opportunity to really sell our item to our customer we take full advantage of it. If we present our item as mundane or hardly out of the ordinary, our buyers are going to feel the same… and so are our sales!
