You’ve spent thousands on a gem of a website. Beautiful images. Catchy content. You’ve done everything right. Followed the instructions provided by yet another marketing guru. And yet, sales haven’t increased. In fact, it feels like you’ve hit the snooze button as far as business growth is concerned. There’s a simple remedy to what ails your sleepy sales numbers. The answer lies in the bones of your online marketing strategy – your website.

What’s Wrong with My Website?

It’s not so much about what’s wrong with your website, it’s more about what’s right? What about your website attracts customers and engages them long enough to convince them that you have the answer to the problem they’re trying to solve? You might be shocked to find out that beautiful websites don’t sell products. No matter how talented your web designer may be, their talent is graphic design, not sales. Images catch the eye, but words catch the sale It’s all about the words. Words are what tells the story of your product. Web designers don’t study the words that sell. So, what you get is a website that can only hold a viewer’s eye for a second. If you’re curious how well your website works, try putting it through the Grunt Test.

Can You Make a Caveman Grunt?

One way to determine how well you’re telling your story is to imagine telling it to a caveman. Cavemen are typically thought of as primitive brutes who communicated in a language of grunts. Whether you believe that or think they had a more advanced language, just play along for a minute. Remembering that cavemen lived in a world free of digital chaos, think about how a caveman would react to the content on your website. Would they even know what they’re looking at? Don’t be offended when the caveman grunts once and moves on in frustration. If your viewers can’t answer the following three questions in the first five minutes on your site, you could be on the way to solving the puzzle of low sales and lack of interest in your business.

What Do You Offer?

Be clear. It doesn’t matter whether you’ve included clear and beautiful images, if those images don’t tell the story of what you’re offering, they’re worthless. Make sure a viewer knows immediately what product you offer. Get rid of the other chaos on the website. Pictures of you, your kids, and the family dog belong on Facebook, not your business site. That may sound harsh, but your customers really don’t care about your personal story. Personal stories are only important if they’re the main character. That’s called a testimony. They won’t have one if they don’t first buy your product. Show them what you’ve got and tell them why they need it.

How Will it Make My Life Better?

No customer wants to buy something that is guaranteed to do nothing for them. Sounds simple, right? Then why are so many websites full of information but never get around to sharing with the viewer how the product is designed to make life better? Customers want to know what’s in it for them. They want to know that you care – about them. Show them the love. Give them proof that you care. How do you that? You talk about them. Give them the stakes. Tell them what they’re losing if they don’t do business with you. Appeal to their FOMO (fear of missing out). No one wants to miss out on something that everyone else is enjoying. But don’t just talk about will happen if they don’t – tell them what will happen if they do.

What Do I Have to Do to Get it?

Don’t be illusive. How does the customer buy your product? Give them clear instructions with an obvious call to action. Cute and clever might work in children’s stories – and even that is questionable – but it doesn’t work in the world of sales and marketing. Viewers live in the Fastlane of the digital highway and don’t have time to muddle through the mess that many business websites contain. So, get rid of the clutter and give them a direct route to purchasing what you’re selling.

If you can answer these three questions in five minutes, so can your customer. If not, help is on the way with a 5 Minute Marketing Makeover.