The Power of the Story: For sale, baby shoes, never worn

By Sue Brady

“They Laughed When I sat Down at the Piano – But When I Started to Play!” John Caples

This headline, written in 1926 by John Caples is still quoted as one of the best advertising headlines of all time. Why? Because it promises a story. It lures the reader in. And that’s really the key to effective marketing. After all, who doesn’t like a good story?

Taking a ‘story’ approach when you write your next piece of content, commercial or ad is almost certain to deliver more success than presenting your product as, well, a product.

Stories are relatively easy to write in marketing. A good story has a beginning, middle and end. The steps to create a story are:

1. Establish the setting and introduce your character(s)
2. Set up the problem
3. End with the solution

Here’s an old fashioned example:

Establishing the setting: Mom or Dad come home from work and enter the kitchen
Setting up the problem: The kids are hungry and the parents haven’t had a chance to figure out dinner

Providing the solution: Hamburger Helper to the rescue!

Michael Brenner, a great content marketing strategist, says that great marketing story telling accomplishes three things:

1. Establishes your brand
2. Turns your brand from a product into an experience
3. Lures the reader into that experience so that the consumer wants to “build your product into their lives.

When you search for brands that have mastered this technique, you’ll find Nike, Budweiser, Dove and even Google.

Nikes are just gym shoes, no? Hardly. Air Jordans are the top selling sneaker of all time. How did they get there? Michael Jordan actually almost ended his contract with Nike because he wasn’t pleased with the first two iterations of Air Jordan. But ‘shoe architect’ Tinker Hatfield had a eureka moment. He realized that the shoes could tell the story of the greatest basketball player ever. He used what he knew about MJ to create a shoe he knew Michael, and the public, would love. It told a story and had style. And it worked.

Try writing some headlines for your product to make it an experience. You can create your story from there. It’s great practice. Here are some examples (not originals!):

Product: iPod

Experience: “An iPod is 1000 songs in your pocket.”

Product: Soap

Experience: “Dove. Be your beautiful self.”

Product: Beer

Experience: “For all you do, this Bud’s for you.”

And I leave you with perhaps the best short story ever written: For sale, baby shoes, never worn.*

*This story’s origin is an urban legend, with likely false attribution to Ernest Hemingway.

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Verbs are Your Friends – The Importance of Call-to-Action Buttons

By Sue Brady

Call-to-action buttons, or CTAs for those in the know, are the buttons a user clicks on from your website to complete an action. Typically, it’s to complete an action you want the user to complete, like ‘BUY NOW,’ and that’s why they are so important. in fact CTAs are probably the most important thing on the page. It’s critical to test your CTAs to figure out what will work best for your site.

Elements Worth Testing

• Message – Does it call on the user to do something specific?
• Appearance – Does it blend in or stand out?
• Size – Again, does it blend in or stand out?
• Color – Hmm, does it blend in or stand out?

The message. Text can be short or long, but make sure you include a verb. Action words will get users to take action. Funny how that works. Most experts who write about button text will say that shorter is better, and they are probably right. But you won’t know until you test it yourself, on your particular pages. And make sure you are directing the user to do something you want them to do. For instance, if your CTA is simply ‘Learn,’ a user might not understand why he should click. Retailers seem to have figured out that a button that says ‘Add to Cart’ is universally understood as the next step needed when someone wants to make an actual purchase. Your own CTA should be just as clear.

Appearance. It’s a mistake to make the user have to work to figure out where they are supposed to click. If your button blends in so nicely with the look and feel of your site, it will be difficult to find. Test something bold and different. Make sure the button is ‘findable’ without having to scroll. And also, reversed out white type works just fine against a bold button background.

Size. Big and bold. This relates back to my previous statement about making sure the user doesn’t have to work to know where to click. With a big and bold CTA button, the direction to the user should be obvious. If someone sees nothing else on your page, you want them to notice that CTA button.

Color choice. Way back when I first started working with direct response websites, I remember someone telling me that I shouldn’t use red on my CTA buttons. That advice makes sense. Red means stop and has a negative ‘feel,’ but you won’t know until you test. When I worked at AOL, where we tested everything often, orange was frequently a clear winner in this type of testing. That was many years ago, and I still see orange used a lot, but I also frequently see green and blue.

Remember, verbs are your friends. Please share this post! 🙂

5 obvious things you should be doing on your website, part 2

Part 1 covered some very obvious tweaks that you can make to immediately improve your website.  Here are 5 less obvious, but equally important tips.  Remember, your website is the window into your brand’s world, but it won’t do you any good if your visitors don’t read what you want them to, or take the action you desire.

Assuming your website goals are engagement and conversion, here are some things you should do:

1. Images. Images on a website are of course important. The key is to make sure they have the desired response. There are several things to consider:

Images of Humans. The risk with showing people is that a visitor might immediately think that they are nothing like the person on your site, so your product cannot be of interest to them. We tested this a lot during my days at AOL, and almost without exception, showing people depressed response.

Faces of your images. If you are showing faces, make them work for you. Make sure your photos of people are looking where you want the consumer to look. I’ve read about companies who have tested this and it certainly appears to be true. One example is illustrated in this KISSmetrics article . It show that when a baby’s image was moved so that rather than facing front, he was facing towards the copy, viewers tended to read the copy (and spend less time on the baby’s face).

2. The Rotator (aka sliders or carousels). Rotators look great and tons of sites have them. But they don’t work. Consumers don’t like them. This is not new information. Web experience users have been saying this for years. Here’s a good article on the subject written by Shane Melaugh, aptly titled “Why Sliders Suck” that quotes several web experts who have a lot of experience in this area. Generally, findings show that sliders are ignored or annoying, and click-thru rates are awful. He also includes a list of marketing, website and user experience optimization websites that don’t have sliders, just to further illustrate the point.

3. The text.  Break up the text. There are so many studies that have been done that prove that readers like bulleted or formatted lists, rather than straight type. Typical consumer behavior is to scan websites to find relevant information. Make it easy for your potential customers to do that. And only use text that’s necessary. Shorter is almost always better. And small, easy-to-understand words are your best choice. Unless you are writing for a highly technical audience, keep it simple.  I’ve been marketing Internet products of one kind or another for many years, and I still have to convince others in my industry that over 50% of consumers do not know what the term broadband means. We know what it means because we’re in it everyday, but the average person understands ‘high-speed Internet’ much better.

4. Search Engine Optimizaion (SEO). There are several things you can do to improve your SEO, and they are not difficult.

• Sitemap. Make sure you have a site map on your home page. It can be in the footer of the page, and it can be in smaller sized type. Basically, Google can find you more easily if you have a site map.
• Page titles or meta tags. Each of your webpages has a title that’s searchable by search engines. Use keywords in your title, as well as your company name. You can read more about that here Link.
• Keywords. You should have some of your important keywords visible on your home page. Don’t overdue it, but use your real estate to help make your site searchable.

5. Breadcrumbs. Consider testing breadcrumbs on your site. Breadcrumbs allow your visitors to know exactly where they are on your site. They can help with your bounce rates (rate at which users leave your site) and seem intuitively to be a good thing. There are two kinds: Path-based and Attribute-based. Path-based provides an easy method of navigation for a user because they can see where they are and easily click back to a prior page.

Attribute-based  follows various specifications a user has made while traveling your site and is more common for ecommerce sites.  The first is more common and easy to set up, the second, not so much. You made need help setting up that method because it can cause problems with search engines and duplicate content.

 

5 Obvious Things you should do on your Website

It’s easy to overlook the obvious. So here’s a few helpful hints to help remind you of some basics to make sure your website is all that it can be.

1. Ask customers to take the action you want them to take.

Buy now.  Learn more. Add to Cart. Checkout.If you don’t tell your customers what to do, they might not do it!

2. Make it easy for your customers to take an action. The harder they have to work for it, the least likely they are to do it. I was on a well-known site yesterday and really wanted to add a photo book I’d created to my shopping cart. I couldn’t do it.  I could clearly see the quantity button and the price (I drew the green arrow in the picture), but there was no ‘add to cart’ button. I had to completely exit out and come back in through a different set of commands before I was shown the ‘add to cart’ button.

3. Make your action buttons large enough so that they stand out on the page.

4. DO NOT USE REVERSED OUT WHITE TYPE IN YOUR BODY COPY!! Yes, this is one of my pet peeves, but it should be yours as well. Reversed out white type is hard on the eyes when used on more than a line or two of type. And if your web pages are hard to read, your potential customers won’t read them. This has been tested and proven time and time again.

5. Have a mobile version of your website. Seriously, you should have done this years ago, but if you somehow haven’t, make it your next project. The time spent on the Internet via a mobile phone has surpassed the time spent on the Internet on a desktop computer (Mary Meeker KPBC Internet Trends Report).  Consumers now expect sites to be mobile friendly and will leave your site if it’s not. Plus, having a mobile friendly site helps you with your Google organic search. When a user is on a mobile phone, Google gives preference to mobile friendly sites non-mobile friendly sites.

• Publish relevant content on your website. When a prospective customer comes to your site, they are looking for information. Make sure you have well-written content. Make it easy to understand what your company does, what your product does, what your service is used for.

Obvious tips, but so often overlooked!