There is no possibility of creating an easy online business or brick-and-mortar operation without becoming a sticky business. Stickiness is the result of customer loyalty. That is, when your customers are loyal, they stick around your store whether online or elsewhere, because they believe it’s nearly an obligation for them to do so.
Yes, you read that right. Loyalty comes from a sense of obligation. People stick around because they believe themselves obligated to do what they think is right. If your website or brick-and-mortar business meets your customers’ expectation of what is good, legitimate, and true, then they will stick with it.
This is no easy feat. There is no easy way of building your business except by ensuring that people stick around. And this is hard to do, because what they believe to be right for them may not align with what you want them to believe is right for them.
Still, the more correct they think they are to choose you, the more loyal they will become to you.
Achieving this feat is even more important than being industrious at creating products or prolific at generating new material for your promotions.
In the words of film producer Samuel Goldwyn, be willing to settle for 50% efficiency if this gets you 100% loyalty.
Loyalty means people stick around despite some of your shortcomings. But there is a practical secret to this.
What’s The Easy Online Business Stickiness Secret?
The practical secret to creating stickiness is creating a solid unique selling proposition (USP). Because one of its 10 most crucial characteristics is a USP’s ability to secure your customer’s loyalty.
A well thought out USP produces stickiness because stickiness comes from simplicity.
Not only must you keep your selling proposition unique but also simple. Marketing is salesmanship and simplicity is good marketing. It’s the absence of gobbledygook. So, don’t offer a convoluted message to your customers or nobody will stick around to hear your elaborate your explanation. Keep it simple and you’ll make it sticky.
Gobbledygook is a word coined by a Texan lawyer back in 1944 during WWII to describe the cryptic language that his bureaucratic colleagues used in Washington DC to sound like…turkeys, in that turkeys go about “always gobbledy gobbling and strutting with ludicrous pomposity.”
In short, unless you want turkeys for customers, speak plainly.
How big of a problem is gobbledygook in business?
Back in 2006 David Meerman Scott from Marketing and Leadership Strategies demonstrated how pervasive the use of gobbledygook is among marketers. I’m sure you will soon sympathize with his experience.
Oh jeez, not another flexible, scalable, groundbreaking, industry-standard, cutting-edge product from a market-leading, well positioned company! Ugh. I think I’m gonna puke!
Just like with a teenager’s use of annoying catch phrases, I notice the same words cropping up again and again in Web sites and news releases so much so that the gobbledygook grates against my nerves and many other people’s, too. Well, duh. Like, companies just totally don’t communicate very well, you know?
Many of the thousands of Web sites I’ve analyzed over the years and the hundred or so news releases I receive each week are laden with these meaningless gobbledygook adjectives. So I wanted to see exactly how many of these words are being used and created an analysis to do so.
David used a service from a text analysis company called Factiva to analyze news releases from highly prominent publishers including Business Wire, Canada NewsWire, CCNMatthews, Commweb.com, Market Wire, Moody’s, PR Newswire, and Primezone Media Network. What did he learn?
The results were staggering. (See the chart below). The news release wires collectively distributed just over 388,000 news releases in the nine-month period, and just over 74,000 of them mentioned at least one of the Gobbledygook phrases. The winner was “next generation,” with 9,895 uses.
There were over 5,000 uses of each of the following words and phrases: “flexible,” “robust,” “world class,” “scalable,” and “easy to use.” Other notably overused phrases with between 2,000 and 5,000 uses included “cutting edge,” “mission critical,” “market leading,” “industry standard,” “turnkey,” and “groundbreaking.” Oh and don’t forget “interoperable,” “best of breed,” and “user friendly,” each with over 1,000 uses in news releases.
In short, gobbledygook reigns supreme among business marketers. Let this not be the case with you! You’ll be just like the rest of businesses out there.
Make and keep your message simple. This alone will give you great distinction in a sea of convoluted competitors. Just imagine where YouTube would have ended had Google kept defining it as “a consumer media company for people to watch and share original videos worldwide through a web experience,” as it did in its 10-K financial report when it acquired the company in 2006. Share videos through a “web experience”? You mean all kinds of people can watch my home-made videos online for free? Well, why didn’t you clearly say so, you turkey?
Keep it simple. You’ll make customers stick around. You’ll stand out. Easy online business and easy brick-and-mortar business success will come with the resulting customer loyalty toward you.