The $40,000 Website Nobody Wanted to Read

0:00Hello, this is Mark Satterfield and welcome to the Velvet Rope Playbook. Tonight's chapter, The$40 ,000 Website Nobody Wanted to Read. A few years ago, I met a guy I'll call Richard. Richard was a successful consultant, smart, experienced, and very good at what he did. He wanted to attract more affluent clients, and he'd recently spent somewhere around$40 ,000 completely redesigning his website. Now, the website looked terrific. beautiful photography, elegant topography, expensive-looking design. It also had all the language we've come to expect from expensive websites. Bespoke, transformative, holistic, proprietary.

0:44Everything about it suggested that Richard ran a very sophisticated business. There was only one problem. After spending about five minutes on the site, I still wasn't entirely sure what Richard did. So I asked him. And over the next few minutes, Richard explained his business to me. Suddenly, it made perfect sense. He helped owners of successful family businesses prepare their companies for sale. If you're 62 years old, have$15 million tied up in a company that you've spent 35 years building, and you're beginning to think about what happens next, well, that's a pretty important service. So I asked Richard a fairly obvious question.

1:25Why doesn't your website just say that? He thought about it for a moment and said, well, it's really more nuanced than that. And there's the problem. Richard believed that because he was trying to attract sophisticated affluent clients, his marketing needed to sound sophisticated as well. So somewhere between what he actually did and what appeared on his website, a very clear and compelling idea had become complicated. I see this all the time in affluent marketing. People assume expensive services require expensive-sounding language. The words get longer, the concepts become more abstract, and eventually the prospect has to work pretty hard just to figure out why they should care.

2:08There's an assumption that if your audience is sophisticated, your marketing needs to sound super sophisticated. I think the opposite is often true. Affluent people are busy. They're accustomed to dealing with specialists, and they have plenty of people competing for their attention. They don't need you to demonstrate your intelligence by making them work to understand you. They need to quickly understand why you matter. Richard didn't really sell, quote-unquote, strategic enterprise transition advisory services. He helped successful business owners deal with a much more human concern. How do I get out of this company without making a terrible mistake on one of the most important financial decisions of my life?

2:52Now, that's considerably more interesting because now I understand what's at stake. And this applies to almost any business trying to attract affluent clients. If you're an interior designer, you could tell me that you create elevated environments through integrated exploration of form and function. or you could tell me that you design extraordinary homes that look beautiful, function beautifully, and feel unmistakably like the people who live in them. If you're a wealth advisor, you can talk about your comprehensive multi-generational wealth management methodology or you could explain why you help successful families make sure the wealth they've spent a lifetime creating doesn't become a source of confusion for the next generation.

3:38The expertise hasn't changed. The client hasn't changed. You've simply made the value easier to understand. So here's a simple test. Go to your website and read the first paragraph out loud. Then imagine you're explaining what you do to an intelligent 14-year-old. Would they understand who you help, what problems you solve, and why somebody might want your help? If the answer is no, there's a reasonable chance your prospective clients aren't completely clear about it either. They may understand every individual word you're using, but that's not the same as understanding why they should care. And that's an important distinction because affluent prospects aren't looking for more information to decipher.

4:20They're looking for people who demonstrate that they understand their situation. Now, here's what's interesting about Richard. When we stopped talking about his marketing and started talking about his actual clients, he was fascinating. He told me about one business owner who'd received an offer for his company and was prepared to accept it, until Richard helped him uncover something that substantially changed the economics of the deal. He told me about another owner whose biggest concern wasn't how much money he'd received for the company. His real concern was about what he was going to do with himself after he sold it.

4:56Those were compelling stories, because they revealed something about Richard that his website didn't. He understood what his clients were actually going through. And there's a useful lesson in that. Some of your best marketing material that you'll ever create is probably already sitting inside the conversations you're having with clients. Listen to the questions they ask. Pay attention to the things they're worried about. Notice how they describe the problem before you start explaining it in your professional language. Then use more of their language in your marketing because chances are your next prospective client is thinking something very similar.

5:36So try this with your own marketing. Pull up your homepage, don't redesign it, don't change the photographs, and don't start worrying about the font. Just look at the first thing a prospective client sees and ask yourself, would the right person immediately recognize that this is for them. Then ask yourself something else. Does this sound anything like the way I would explain what I do if my ideal client was sitting across the table from me? If it doesn't, try rewriting it the way you'd actually say it. Make it simpler, but don't confuse simpler with dumber. There is considerable difference. In fact, it usually requires much more understanding of your value to explain it simply than it does to surround it with impressive language.

6:22So Richard eventually simplified his messaging. He talked less about the process and more about the situation his clients found themselves in. He used fewer words to explain what he did and more of the words his clients actually used when describing why they needed him. And that's the point I'd leave you with. If you're trying to attract affluent clients, Don't make your marketing sophisticated simply because your clients are sophisticated. Make it clear because your clients are sophisticated enough to recognize value when they see it. Your objective isn't to have someone visit your website and think, gee, this person sounds impressive.

6:59You want the right person to think, this person understands exactly what I'm dealing with and I should probably talk to them. That's a much higher standard for your marketing and ultimately a much more profitable one. And if you're looking at your own marketing and wondering whether you're communicating your value as clearly and persuasively as you could be, that's exactly the kinds of things I work on with clients personally. Sometimes we need to take a look at your entire client attraction system. Other times there's one particular piece, your positioning, your website, your offer, your follow-up, or simply the way you're explaining what you do that's holding everything else back.

7:39So if you'd like for me to take a look at your business and help identify what would make the biggest difference, visit GetWealthyClients.com where you'll find information about working with me one-on-one. This is Mark Satterfield. I hope you found this chapter of the Velvet Rope Playbook to be helpful. I'll be back at you soon with something new. But until then, bye for now. Thank you.