B2C, B2B, impulse purchases, straightforward purchases, considered purchases, nonprofit, lead generation…Your ability to persuade depends more on your audience’s key qualitative factors than on your business category and, many times, audience demographics. If you understand all the elements that make up your unique persuasive process — a marriage of how you sell and how your audience buys — and if you understand your audience’s needs, you’ll be able to create persuasive copy that dramatically improves online conversion.

Selling and Buying: “I Do”

A sales process includes steps to achieve a close. Not every business has a sales process, though admittedly some are more effective than others. Only you care about your sales process. It’s internal. It’s about you and your goals. It’s not about your audience and their goals.

Everyone in your audience has a buying process, steps people go through to satisfy their needs and feel confident they made the right decision. Sometimes this buying process happens in the blink of an eye. Other times it takes months. In some cases, it takes only one person to make the decision. In others, five different departments and a C-level executive have to sign off on the decision.

On top of that, not everyone’s in the same stage of the buying-decision process when she arrives. Some come to you during the late stage, knowing exactly what they want. Others turn up during the early stage, when they’re narrowing their choices. And some are in the middle stage; they’re not intending to buy just now, but they could be persuaded.  Continue reading my ROI Marketing column at ClickZ…