Hello, my name is Matthew Pfeifer with Windrows Digital. I have a question for you. We’ve all seen Simon Sinek’s ‘Start with Why,’ but why do so few people incorporate that knowledge into their website? You see all the time websites that talk about what they do, but not about why they do it, or that persuasive mechanism to make you connect with the brand. You can get away maybe with some service-area businesses, like a snowplow driver, saying, ‘We do snowplow services in Alexandria, Minnesota.’ But if you have an item or product where there are numerous other options for solving your problem, you need to talk more about ‘why.’ If you want to start selling yourself more, you’ve got to go ahead and put your reasons ‘why’ out there. That’s why people buy from you—’why,’ not ‘what.’

So websites, when you see them, often completely miss all the persuasive mechanics that good content should have. So, take a look at your website and try to understand if you’re just broadcasting at people, ‘This is what I do.’ You could be doing it a lot more effectively, with a lot more persuasion. For example, I’m going to use the idea of snowplow drivers. They offer a simple service, but if you sell it with a little persuasion, it makes it much more likely someone is going to buy from you.

A snowplow driver could say, ‘We move snow off your driveway,’ or they could say, ‘We will move a glacier off your driveway. We will make sure it’s scraped clean so that you can come and go as you please.’ By using figurative language, you create an image in people’s minds that they can remember a lot more than just, ‘Hey, we plow driveways.’

You could appeal to history or tradition. Maybe this is sidewalk plowing, and you say, ‘Don’t be that neighbor. We plow our sidewalk, and everyone else plows their sidewalks, so that we can all walk around in the winter.’ It’s an appeal to tradition, or this is how we do things.

There’s also an appeal to patriotism in the U.S. You might say, ‘We don’t just plow driveways; we plow driveways so you have the freedom to come and go as you please.’ Since freedom is a high ideal in the U.S., many people don’t want to not have freedom. By offering them freedom, you entice them.

An emotional appeal connects with people on an emotional level, even if the rationale behind it is a bit fuzzy. For example, as a snowplow driver, you might have a campaign that says, ‘We plow driveways so that during the holiday season your family can see you as much as they want.’ It’s highly emotional. You want your family to visit, and it creates that image in people’s minds.

There is, of course, a logical appeal. You might say something like, ‘Did you know that 86% of people break their hips slipping on icy driveways in Minnesota? Let’s get your driveway plowed.’ I don’t know if that statistic is real, but it presents a logical, ‘Oh wow, I could get hurt. Let’s get that driveway plowed.’

Then there’s the rhetorical question. You might ask, ‘Do you want to break your back on the ice? Get your driveway plowed.’ It’s a question that has one clear answer, and by using a rhetorical question, you can turn people towards persuading themselves.

Lastly, there’s repetition. Doing it tactically, you can use an emotional appeal here, a logical appeal there, some hyperbole here, and go through all the different kinds of persuasive tactics tactfully, so that people are always being persuaded one way or another, no matter where they look on the website.

Our goal at Windrows Digital is to do high-return storytelling. To do that, you need to connect with your audience, which means persuading them and knowing who they are—what they find funny, what logic will connect with them, and what emotions will connect with them—to get the product sold. It goes far above just saying ‘what’ we are, but saying ‘why’ you have to do it. We are experts in this. We’ve worked with over 240 clients and have a 94% success rate. Again, I’m Matthew Pfeifer with Windrows Digital, and if you’d like any help making your website go from zero to 100, let me know.