Why You Need Industry Pages On Your Website

There are two schools of thought when it comes to whether or not you should have separate website pages for the industries your enterprise serves.

One camp believes if you list out the industries you serve on your website, visitors who do not see their industry will assume you do not do work in their field and move on.

The other camp feels if you do not provide industry-specific pages, you are missing out on an opportunity to provide more in-depth information to potential customers that is geared specifically to them.

I think both sides make a great point, but I tend to feel there is a solution that renders both arguments mute. I propose there is a way to list industries on your site, but still provide an impression that if a visitor’s industry is not listed out specifically, you’re still equipped to handle their business. This can easily be accomplished through a link to an “Other Industries” page at the bottom of your industry list.

Go ahead and create an industry page for up to seven main industries, but then list out some of the work you’ve done in other industries on your “Other Industries” page. If you craft your message properly, in just a few sentences, you can show visitors you are equipped to handle either their specific type of business, or better yet, any new type of business that comes along.

Let me walk you through the process. First, let’s address the industries you should actually list out on your site. Spend some time researching which industries drive the most revenue for your company and which industries you anticipate will drive revenue in the future. Once you have a clear picture of which industries they are, generate a list of the top seven. Then, proceed to develop copy, images and other content that speaks specifically to the people in those industries. If you have done your research properly, this should cover a significantly large portion of your existing and future customer base. This should all be pretty easy to accomplish and most likely something you’ve done numerous times before in some capacity.

Now, let’s create your “Other Industries” page. Don’t simply put up a list of additional industries beyond the seven you’ve already listed, but instead, provide a clear and concise message about your experience in other industries and let your audience know you are confident you can translate your success to their challenges, too. Just remember to keep your messaging customer-focused and speak to learning more about their specific industry’s challenges once you have discussed their specific needs.

If possible, try to get some quotes from customers who are not in your seven main industries that can demonstrate how you helped them overcome some very specific challenges. Be sure to feature those quotes on your “Other Industries” page. If you can obtain some quotes that speak to how quickly you learned customers’ industry-specific challenges, even better. Be sure to develop content based on your individual company’s products, services and experience.

By following these simple content creation steps, you can have a robust industry-focused section of your website that not only highlights the main industries your company serves, but also lets prospects whose enterprises do not fall into those industries know you are more than capable of helping them solve their specific challenges.

Image created using ButtonOptimizer.com

Does Your Marketing Content Focus On Your Customers?

Do you think pro golfers with a spare Sunday relax by hitting the links? Think a professional racecar driver can’t wait to jump in his car and head down the coast? Think a content creator spends some of his spare time reviewing mass quantities of other people’s content and collateral material? Guilty as charged.

But when you love what you do like I do, you tend to find yourself doing it in your spare time. These spare time activities have provided me with great insight into the vast amounts of marketing content out there, and as an avid researcher, I have discovered an epidemic plaguing the marketing content of most American companies, especially smaller businesses that really can’t afford or are not yet ready for a large marketing team. To put it bluntly, American enterprises, so much of your marketing content is not focused on your customers…it’s focused on you!

Now, don’t get me wrong, you have a role to play in your marketing story, and you definitely want to tell your customers about you, but you have to remember that when a customer is searching for a product or service, they are mostly interested in how you can address the challenges they are facing. 

I want you to do me a favor and pull out your most widely used piece of marketing content, then read it while keeping these key questions in mind:

• Is your customer the star of that piece, or are you?
• Does the first sentence of the piece start with your company name?
• Do a lot of the rest of the sentences in the piece also start with your company name?
• Do the main points of the piece talk first about how you do something and what you know, then address how you can solve a customer’s challenge only after you’ve talked about yourself first?
• Does the piece tell your customer which of their challenges you can help them solve and how you will do so, or does it tell them all about your company, your team, what your team knows, and how great it will be for the customer if they choose to work with you?
• Is your content riddled with all of the fancy product, team and department names you’ve so cleverly come up with over the years?

See, if I’m your customer, what I care about is how you can solve my challenges and how quickly, effectively and reasonably priced you can do that. I don’t care what you call your product, teams and departments, how many degrees your executives have, or where they worked before joining your team. I don’t care how many offices you have, that you can trace your company’s roots back to the 1960’s, or how much fun your employees have working there. All I want to see is content that tells me what you can do for me. 

So, if you read your marketing content and find your customer and how you can solve their challenges is not the true meat of the story you are telling, it might be time to re-write that content so it focuses on your customer and their needs, not you and your story. Put yourself in your customers’ shoes as they read your marketing content and ask, “Why should I care?” 

Photo by Karolina via Pexels

A Much Bigger Issue With Auto Financing

I recently read a local news article with the headline, “Toyota Must Pay $22 Million for Charging Minorities Higher Interest Rates”. The article went on to explain that the U.S. Justice Department and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau reached a settlement with Toyota under which Toyota agreed to pay out the large sum to resolve allegations that it “discriminated against black and Asian/Pacific Island borrowers in auto lending.”

The article also stated: “The agencies contended that the average African-American victim was obligated to pay over $200 more during the term of the loan, and the average Asian/Pacific Islander victim was obligated to pay over $100 more, because of discrimination.”

While I am definitely an advocate of equal opportunity and believe that one’s skin color or racial origin should in no way shape or form have an effect on the interest rate they would pay on a loan, the purpose of my article actually stems from the local news article’s second paragraph:

“Through the settlement, filed in Los Angeles federal court, Toyota agreed to limit the discretion of its dealers to charge interest rate markups on Toyota loans. The company also agreed that it will not increase the interest rates it quotes to car dealers in order to fund additional non-discretionary dealer compensation.”

I’ll explain that a little better in normal, understandable words in a second, but first, let’s also take a look at two additional paragraphs from later in the article which I’ve combined into one here:

“Toyota’s business practice, like most other major auto lenders, allows car dealers discretion to vary a loan’s interest rate from the price Toyota initially sets based on the borrower’s objective credit-related factors. Dealers receive greater payments from Toyota on loans that include a higher interest rate markup.”

So, what does all of this mean and why is this even more important than the settlement about racial discrimination in auto loan interests rates? Well, what this amounts to is the fact that Toyota, like many other auto manufacturers, provides a company-sponsored financing option for customers through their dealers. I’m sure you already knew that, right? What you probably don’t know is that Toyota’s financing arm provides a baseline interest rate that they want as compensation for making a loan to customers, but then, allows the dealer to add points to that interest rate, essentially raising the rate, at their discretion, and in fact, on top of that, provides dealers with incentives to charge customers higher interest rates.

Do you see why this is an even bigger deal than the race issue in this story? If not, go ahead and go back and read the previous paragraph again.

I am willing to bet that when you purchased your last car at a dealership and sat down with the dealership’s finance guy, when you were presented with an interest rate and a contract that showed all of those thousands of dollars in interest you were paying on your auto loan, you thought your rate was based solely on your credit score. I bet you had no idea your interest rate included additional points added by the dealer based on their perception of you, or any other factor the dealership decided to take into consideration.

Do you see what this means for the auto finance customer? If the dealership has hit hard financial times and needs more profit, they can charge you more in interest on your loan. Does the dealership owner need to put in a new pool at home so his kids stop bitching at him about being bored all summer? Well, then he can charge higher interest on your car loan to pull in some extra cash. And, of course, as the article reports, it was this discretion of adding additional points to the auto loan interest rate that gave the humans writing and approving the loan paperwork the ability to charge you more interest if your skin was a certain color, or if you had a certain last name or eye shape, or really, add additional interest if anything about you led them to feel you would have more difficulty paying back the loan.

Would I have paid a higher interest rate had I walked into the dealership in flip-flops, board shorts and a tank top instead of a suit, regardless of my credit score? Would I have paid more in interest based on whether I was sold the car by the salesman who was not my same race, or by the salesman who was my same race? Would I have paid more in interest at one dealership as opposed to another based on the color of my skin or the ethnicity of my last name? What this article and this settlement are saying is….yes.

I know the car buying process can be long and stressful, especially if you take the time to get the best price, look at a lot of different options, makes and models, but what this article tells me is that not only do we need to consider a car’s features, options, color, longevity, gas mileage, and repair and service costs, but we must also ask some very important questions of the dealership when it comes to financing as well. Ask the dealership what the rate from the manufacturer is and what their mark-up of that interest rate is, and be sure to ask them why there is a mark-up. Know your credit score BEFORE having the dealership run your credit and contrast and compare the interest rate that your credit score is earning not only with different manufacturers, but also different dealerships. Look into whether or not you can secure your own financing through your own bank so your interest rate is not at the whim of the manufacturer, dealer, finance guy, or salesman.

While it is nice to see that Toyota is trying to take steps to stop discrimination and dealer incentivized rate increases in the lending process, the fact remains that as long as the major auto manufacturers continue these types of captive loan practices, consumers have a very real prospect of paying higher interest rates for reasons that are not disclosed to them.

I am hoping that after reading this article, the next time you finance a car, you’ll do a little digging on the reason behind your interest rate before signing that contract.

Photo via Pexels

The Origins Of Data Visualization

Towards the end of 2014, I wrote a couple pieces on data visualization and as I was researching some additional related topics, I stumbled across a couple very early examples of data visualization. This got me thinking about the history of data visualizations and how they came about. After doing some more digging, I found some very interesting facts that I put together in an eBook.

Click here to read The Origins of Data Visualization.

Photo by Janeb13 via Pixabay