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.

 

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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!

 

Setting Marketing Goals

Setting goals is incredibly important. But why? Without clear goals, your department will be unfocused and is unlikely to take your business where it needs to go.

Goals are a tricky thing. If you are in a position to set goals for your department, you want them to be achievable, while at the same time not being an easy slam-dunk. Goals should encourage employees to stretch a little bit. You want to have over-achievers, not ‘business as usual’ experts. Tweet that!

The methodology of setting goals definitely varies by company. I’ve worked in places where the goals were simply ‘10% higher’ than the year before.  I’ve also had goals set through careful analysis of run rates to determine where the business has to be (and yes, those sometimes ended at 10% higher than the year before).  And, I’ve had goals set for me that look at run rates and go up from there.

I’m a believer that if you set goals too high, where you know the chances of them being achieved are low, all you end up doing is demotivating your staff. You really want the goal to be one everyone can get behind and strive to reach. I don’t mean easily reach by doing what they’ve always done, I mean stretch to reach because they are incented to do more, or to do things better.

While at AOL, I spent some time working in the Customer Retention department (no snickers please!).  My boss set the goals for the department, and one particular year he put a goal on ending customers, the number of total customers the company would have by year-end. He came to the number through analysis, gut, and the knowledge of programs we were launching to entice customers to stay with us. It was not an easy number but we all knew what that number was. We watched our monthly numbers like hawks to drive to our goal. And guess what? In a year where we had over 10 million customers by year-end, we ‘missed’ our number by 71. 71! We celebrated the huge win!

The point of that story is, however you set your goals, they should serve to motivate.  Most places I’ve worked have weekly meetings where sales numbers are reviewed. The reason for those meetings is to keep everyone focused and on track.

A colleague of mine decided to launch an initiative called ‘Leave no Customer Behind.’ It’s brilliant! Her group is totally focused on uncovering points where we lose customers, and closing those gaps. Not only is it innovative, it has given her staff clear direction on where to focus because there are goals associated with the effort.

Review what’s key to your business success. Is it sales, leads, cost per order, social sharing, hits to your blog? Create goals to achieve each important metric, make sure everyone knows what those goals are and work together to achieve them.

Good luck!

Please send me a message to let me know of other topics you’d like to read about.

Content Gold Mines

Most companies these days post on various social media, or keep a blog as a part of their website. And it can be hard to decide what to write about. Last year I wrote a post about great places to find inspiration for your content.  That article mentions sources like

• Talking to your sales team
• Talking to customer service
• Talking to other employees in your company

But there are other places to seek inspiration.

Senior Management. Interview senior management at your company and find out if it would add value to write content about something they know will be of interest later in the month/quarter/year.

Press Releases. Check press releases from your company and from your competition to see if there’s anything that would make a good topic for some timely content.

Twitter. Start participating in Twitter chats. You can search by subject for scheduled chats here http://tweetreports.com/twitter-chat-schedule/. You can actively participate in chats or you can just read the chat as it’s taking place. Twitter chats are a great way to learn about a particular topic and can also provide great ideas for content.

LinkedIn. LinkedIn groups are another great source for content ideas. By joining groups relevant to your business, you can read conversations taking place and gain insight into questions being asked.

Your competition. Do some web searching to see where your competition is turning up in the press. Perhaps they are participating in a ‘conversation’ where you also should be at the table.  Or maybe they do something really well. By writing your own post on that topic, you can start to position your own company as the subject matter expert in that area.

 

5 Sources for Inspiring Marketing Content

It’s not news that engaging, informative and interesting content is key to gaining readership. Many websites have blogs. In fact, the number of blogs in total has risen 25% since January 2015 to January 2016 to 276 million (source statista.com).

And there are plenty of stats about how blogging can help your business.

Just these three stats alone should be enough to convince you that you need a blog on your website. Sites with blogs that have continual postings:

Have 97% more links to their site

Generate 55% more site visits

Have pages indexed <by search engines> 434% more often.

So where do you get the content for those blog posts?

The Competition – What does your competition post about? Reading your competitors’ content can give you a good sense for how they are positioning themselves. And, it can give you some good ideas for your own content.

Customers – Put yourself in your customers’ shoes. If you were in the market for your product, what would you want to know about?  You can even take the step of asking some of your customers what’s important to them. All great fodder for future posts! Plus, your customers post on social media, sometimes about your company. Stay vigilant in tracking those posts so that you can identify topics that are of interest.

Your Salespeople – Ask your salespeople what objections they hear most often when they are on sales calls. Use those objections as a way to formulate content that counters them. You wouldn’t want to say: “Our customers say our product breaks after 3 weeks. But our studies show…” Instead you’d write a post about how you build your product using the top materials available in the industry.

Your Customer Service Staff – These people are on the front-lines. They talk to your customers every day and have great insight. They may be able to identify potential issues that may come up on their calls, and if you can tease them out, you can write a post that counters an issue before it becomes a real problem.

Other Bloggers – Identify bloggers who write about your industry and actively read those blogs. They will be a great source of information that you can write about yourself.