Historically, service value communication had a very limited range but was a fairly simple affair. If you sell ice cream or draw henna tattoos on a local beach, you still live in that world, but most industries moved on.
Fairly recently, people decided to contact you after pricking you out from an index of peers in a Yellow Pages-style listing. Some plumbers, accountants, translators, and even lawyers manage to cling to that model, but its returns are in a downward spiral. Most industries also moved on.
Today, most of us have to communicate our value to a “skimming” audience: B2B websites have an Average Time On a Page of around 82 seconds.
That’s how much your web page has to communicate your value – not to make you stand out from competitors, that comes later. First, you have to make sure you are not drowned in other ways the client could solve the problem, as suggested by various algorithms.
Many problems are technically solvable by blogs, books, opinions of random strangers, DIY checklists, YouTube how-to’s, mobile apps, and a whole lot of deliberate scammers trying to divert your client’s attention before it even reaches you.
Equip your communication fronts to be easy to skim and serve as waypoints, clear signs that the client is safe and on the right track. Reserve the competitive comparison for the 1% that opts to stay and read after the initial 82 seconds.