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Blog
Create Compelling Service Offers for Your Website
So clients decide to work with you instead of your competitors
by Sarah Marshall
This article is for female entrepreneurs with service-based businesses who want new website copy because you are:
- starting a new business
- redefining your current offers
- adding new services
- changing the way you package your offers.
It’s written specifically for women who have already enquired about my website copywriting service. But it’s also useful if you want prompts to outline your service offers and what factors to consider when you present them on your website.
The article covers:
- Why you need to define your offers before I write your website copy
- What to include in every service offer
- How to separate your offers
- Three things to avoid in the service descriptions on your website
- The deciding factors for which details we’ll include on your website.
Why you need to create your offers before your website copy is written
Before I write your website copy, you’ll need to clearly define your services and your target audience.
Not all the details will appear in your website copy. But you need to have everything worked out and written down somewhere to make sure that you have fully formed services.
And that’s not just for your website copy. It’s because when a client makes an enquiry, you need to be ready to answer.
The advantages of packaging your services
By defining a range of distinct packages for different sectors or client types, you’ll be able to name their specific problems and show how each offer provides the solutions they’re looking for.
You’ll be better prepared to pitch your services to match the client’s current requirements. And knowing your rates for each package will make those money conversations so much easier.
Having clarity about your offers has the added bonus of making all your marketing much easier. You’ll feel more confident about your messaging and be able to repeat the same features and benefits on all your chosen platforms.
Why is it helpful to have clearly defined offers on your website?
Having well-defined offers captures visitors’ attention faster, builds trust and makes it easier for them to see at a glance what each option entails.
Presenting a limited number of options makes it easier for potential clients to decide which solution matches their current needs. Neatly outlined service descriptions also set expectations and save you from dealing with irrelevant enquiries.
If you present incremental service options (Local, Regional and Global, for instance), they’ll be able to imagine a clear path for their future. Or if you have tiered offers (e.g. Basic, Standard and Premium), clients might even choose a higher-priced package than they had in mind because they can see solutions they hadn’t even thought of.
ARTICLE
So, which elements should you include in your service offers?
Here’s a brief overview of the elements you might include in your service-based packages:
- a name
- what’s in the offer
- who might need this
- which problem it solves
- number, duration, frequency and time
- location
- price
- deliverables
- outcomes.
Not all the categories are relevant to all businesses. But I encourage you to define all the elements that are relevant to your services.
You don’t need to make your offers sound pretty, persuasive or clever, that’s my job. You just need to identify the bare bones and flesh them out a little with the specifics and the decisions that only you can make.
Let’s take a closer look at each section.
The name of your offer
Nothing fancy, just a clear descriptive title.
Make it easy for Google and your audience to understand.
What’s in the offer
A brief description of what the offer is.
What’s included.
What isn’t included. This is often overlooked but can be helpful to set boundaries from the get-go.
Who might need your offer
Think roles and situations.
What industry do they work in?
Do they hold certain roles?
What are they experiencing that might make them need your services?
Which problem your offer solves
Are your ideal clients trying to find something, solve something, learn something or do something?
Imagine what feelings they may have (fear, worry, doubt, confusion, uncertainty, etc.) about this specific issue.
Be descriptive, use emotional language.
If you’ve already had clients, think about why they came to you.
Number, duration, frequency and time
If relevant, note down:
- how many
- how long
- how often
- when.
Location
Make it clear whether your services are delivered:
- online, on-site or both
- within a certain distance
- within a certain travel time.
Prices
Know your rates, your fixed packages, your sliding scales and your nice-to-have extras.
On your website, too many pricing options looks confusing.
But setting a starting price helps to pre-qualify clients and manages expectations.
Deliverables
What physical or digital assets will the client receive?
Think workbooks, reports, videos, pages, word count, photos, pdfs, graphics, products, etc.
Outcomes
What can the client expect to have or feel?
In other words, identify the transformation from where they were before you worked with them and after.
Once you’ve identified all the elements, you might be unsure whether to package certain services together or separately. Here are some examples to help you untangle confusing cases.
How do I package the same service if I offer it to different clients?
If you have different target audiences for similar services, you probably need to define them as separate offers.
Take these examples for coaches, trainers and consultants:
- One-to-one coaching for corporate clients and for private individuals are separate offers.
- Training team members or high-level executives are separate offers that address either operational or strategic interests.
- Workshops at corporate training days or at personal development retreats are separate offers because your clients are seeking different results in different contexts.
How do I package different options for the same type of service?
It’s tempting to lump the same service into a single offer with scaled prices, but the outcomes can be very different for the client.
Sticking with the same advisory service providers as above, let me show you what I mean:
- One-to-one and group coaching have a different dynamic, so they are separate offers.
- A consulting power hour and ongoing consulting have different outcomes, so those are separate offers.
- If you’re a coach, there’s a big difference between what you can achieve in three sessions or ten, so they are separate offers.
You can offer bespoke packages as well. But first and foremost, make it super easy for prospects to see which option most closely matches their needs.
How should I package free service options?
If you offer a free discovery session or even a free service to build trust, it still needs to be clearly defined.
You want to give prospects a taste of the value you offer so they’re happy to commit to your paid services. So set boundaries. Be very open about what is and isn’t included.
This is especially important when you’re starting out. You want experience, you want some social proof, but you also want money. Create a finite offer that gives one or two clients great value for a limited period of time or with limited deliverables. Make the conditions clear to them from the start.
They are getting a great deal, and you are building your confidence. Do just enough to prove to yourself and others that your services are valuable and deserve payment.
Time to start working on your website copy
Now you’ve worked hard on defining your offers, it’s time to send me all the juicy details. We’ll complete your creative brief so I can really understand your business goals and who you’d love to work with.
Let’s start with the three things we’re going to avoid in your website copy.
1) Avoid vague offers that make potential clients do the work
It may feel generous to say “tell me what you need” but it puts too much responsibility on your visitors.
People want to understand exactly what you offer, how you deliver it, who it’s designed to help and how it solves their specific problem.
Imagine yours is one of several websites your prospect is looking at. Do you think they’ll take the time to tell you what they need and hope it matches what you can do?
Or do you think they’ll book a call with someone with three clear options that can be adapted to their specific needs?
2) Avoid presenting too many choices
When visitors are faced with an overwhelming number of options on a single page, they don’t know which one they need.
If you have several service options, it’s easier to split them into logical groups on different website pages. So we can start with a high-level choice to guide potential clients to the right page where they can see another limited range of options.
Incidentally, having separate website pages for your different offers is better for Google and AI searches too. More opportunities to use specific keywords and phrases.
As I said earlier, the simplicity factor applies to pricing too. You might not need or want to include your rates on your website. But if you do, we only need to include selective prices. Having too many options or ranges will create confusion.
3) Avoid too much detail about each offer
It’s tempting to include all the ins and outs of your offer. But while you see it as being open, helpful and clear, most visitors haven’t got time to read long descriptions and will lose interest.
However, this is only true when there are several options to choose from. Sales pages for a single course, for example, can benefit from a long, detailed description. The initial paragraphs cater to fast decision-makers, but some people need all the information before they can be persuaded to buy.
That’s a fine balance, isn’t it? So let’s dig into what you should include.
The deciding factors for what information to include in your website copy
When I’m writing website copy, I always keep two key questions in mind:
- What do Google and AI need to know about your offers to help your ideal clients find you?
-
What do potential clients need to know to get on a call with you, to book an appointment or to hire you directly?
In other words, I’m writing for two audiences: search engines and humans.
Keyword research, strategic hierarchies (meta tags, H1, H2, H3, etc.) and answering the right questions will help me with search engine optimisation. But for the purposes of this article, let’s focus more on the human responses.
I’ll cherry pick the parts of your service descriptions that:
- are most relevant to the problem your ideal clients want to solve
- make it very easy to compare your different offers
- make them curious and excited enough to take the next step.
The focus will change depending on the type of service you offer and your business objectives.
Let’s look at some more specific examples
Going back to our earlier examples for coaches, trainers and consultants, you can see there were some clues in the way I separated the service offers.
- For one-to-one or group coaching, the focus would be on the different dynamic, the problems that can be resolved and the different results clients can expect.
- For a consulting power hour or ongoing consults, the focus would be on quick actions for immediate transformation and relief versus long-term progress and more significant outcomes.
- For three or ten coaching sessions, the focus would be on addressing immediate needs versus deep transformation.
Notice that in these three examples the emphasis falls on the outcomes of your services rather than deliverables or price.
But if we take the Basic, Standard and Premium example, price might be the main deciding factor so the focus will be on what deliverables are included in each tier. These sorts of tiered offers work well for web designers, brand photographers and graphic designers, for instance.
Last points to consider for your website copy and other marketing
Once we’ve defined your offers on your website, I’ll use the same language for your offers on every page on your website. And it’s important you use the same terms in all your other marketing so search engines and your visitors, followers and clients recognise and remember your service offers.
If you use different terms, you might know it’s the same offer, but your audience will get confused.
You can always change your offers
We can spend a long time refining the details of our offers, worrying about being generalists or niching, pricing. But the reality is that our offers will shift and change as we gain more experience and really home in on what we want to do.
After all the detail in this article, obviously I’m not saying you should throw something together! But I am saying that it’s better to come up with one or two simple offers, test them on one or two clients and then refine them.
Once you’ve seen how they work in practice, you’ll be able to see:
- what problems clients really want to solve
- whether your pricing is realistic for the amount of work involved
- what needs to be edited out because there’s not enough time or because one element didn’t really work.
Then you’ll be able to create packages that are perfectly tailored to your audience’s true needs and priced well so that you make good money for your knowledge and expertise.
Next steps to creating compelling offers on your website
If we’ve already spoken, go ahead and define your service offers and let me know when you’re done.
For everyone else, if you’d like to know more about my website copywriting services, just click on the link below.
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