My ten-year-old son gave me a valuable lesson in content marketing today.
Sean has a good friend who, to hear him tell it, rarely changes his expression. It’s just who he is.
However, Sean was sharing one of this friend’s more interesting ideas: to build a tall building and put a catapult at the top of it to deliver packages around town.
“Was he serious?” we asked.
“Yes,” said Sean. “He had his explaining face on.”
Clearly, when this boy puts on his ‘explaining face,’ you had better listen.
Sean gives words to an attitude that offers all of us a way to make our content more helpful, more interesting and more engaging.
We just need to put on our explaining face.
Your Selling Face or Your Explaining Face
I’ve got my explaining face on right now. It is different from my selling face.
When I have my explaining face on, my eyes are wider, my eyebrows go up, my jaw is drawn back to help me enunciate.
When I have my selling face on, my eyebrows come down and my forehead furrows. My jaw jets forward. I’m in your face.
How does your content change when you have your explaining face on? Mine does.
A Face for Every Occasion
There is a place for each of your faces.
You should use your explaining face when you are participating in what I call an Attention-managed Zone. As I write in my most recent ClickZ column, an attention-managed zone is a place where we have curated the participants or content.
Our Facebook page is an attention-managed zone. Our inbox and our feed reader are as well.
When you are communicating within one of these attention-managed zones, put on your explaining face.
However, when you have drawn someone to your site, to a landing page for instance, you will want to put on your selling face and be more persuasive. Visitors expect to learn about your offering in these places where they have no control over what they will see.
Advertising in an Attention-Managed Society
Attention management is not something that people think about, but it is what we do when we curate places like our inbox, social news streams, and RSS feed readers.
As marketers and advertisers, we are bombarded with statistics that tell us there is a shockingly small supply of time in the world.
- “You only have eight seconds to catch a Web visitor’s attention.”
- “The average person is bombarded with over 5,000 commercial messages a day.”
- “Today’s multitasking Millennials are doing up to 10 things simultaneously.”
- “You have to do something surprising every 10 minutes during your presentation to keep the audience awake.”
I would provide citations for these statistics, but “Article writers only have an average of 15 minutes for research, down from 30 minutes in 2007.” I made that last one up.
We believe we’re dealing with the scarcity of our prospects’ time, and are acting accordingly. Too often, we’re getting “all caps” on our audience, shouting louder, shouting more often, and shouting through more channels. I call that tossing “Jenny” around.
What if we worked the other end of the equation? What if we helped our prospects manage their time better? Could we get nine seconds instead of eight? Could we cut our Millennials down to five simultaneous activities?
Unfortunately, attempts at time management have been thwarted in large part by the social part of our brains, the part that says we need to be laced into the lives of others like tangled doilies.
- “96 percent of Millennials have joined a social network.”
- “Social media has overtaken pornography as the number one activity on the Web.”
- While you read this, “100+ hours of video will be uploaded to YouTube.”
I can cite these quotes because they come from a “Socialnomics” video that is only four and a half minutes long.
The net of this is that we are spending more time on our digital social pursuits and less time on our commercial messages, such as those found in display advertising.
The Components of an Attention-Managed Zone
An attention-managed zone provides a cone of safety, like a playpen for our children. We check Facebook several times per day because it’s an attention-safe zone. The same is true of e-mail.
When my attention is focused on one of these safe places, I know that:
- It will be filled with offerings from people I have vetted at some level.
- I can use my time there to refine it, dropping and adding friends, groups, games, etc.
- It’s designed for a variety of moods. I can expect to find the informative as well as the entertaining.
- I can go there to relieve stress any time of the day or night.
- I can participate, helping others manage their attention.
Be Where Attention Falls
My good friend and client Maura Thomas, who is writing the book “Control Your Attention, Control Your Life,” has introduced me to a different way of looking at the time/attention equation that may benefit advertisers.
It seems that we are willing to “kill” time on social networks because it helps us manage our attention.
More and more, we rely on our social graph to keep us in the loop, often 140 characters at a time. Thomas puts this into the category of “attention management.”
The tools we choose and the people we follow make up our attention management strategy. Those places where we implement such strategies – Facebook, Twitter, and Groupon – are “attention-managed zones.”
“Attention wastelands” are those places in which we receive irrelevant information; places that are populated by people and brands that we don’t trust. Prospects must shun these wastelands lest their attention be squandered by fools.
Let me put on my selling face to help persuade you of its value.
Your selling face delivers what your business needs to grow and thrive. If you are afraid to promote your products your online marketing strategies will most likely fail.
Your selling face is a powerful, and you should put it on if you want:
- More persuasive copy
- Calls to action that deliver leads and sales
- A clear focus on reader benefits and less focus on you
If you want captivating headings and pages that turn visitors into readers and then buyers, then put on your selling face today.
Act now and receive a Thinking Face at no additional charge.
Signs that You’re Wearing Your Explaining Face
If you’re new to face management, here are a few signals that you have your explaining face on:
- You find yourself telling stories in your writing
- You prefer simpler ways to convey a point
- You look for more interesting and colorful words
- The writing is fun
- You feel that you’re helping someone when you click “publish.”
Ironically, these are also the markers of good sales copy, when you should have your selling face on.
Nonetheless, I recommend that you mentally put on your explaining face when you want to write for social media, for your blog or anywhere else that your reader has control.
Your explaining face content will give them reason to stay tuned in.
P. S. Don’t for get to read my ClickZ column Advertising in an Attention-Managed Society.
Keep Your Content Promises and Increase Conversions
Conversion Marketing StrategyThese four ways set a series of events in motion that result in our visitors feeling… dumb. Make sure to keep your content promises to increase conversions.
Treat your content as a product
“Have you seen my sunglasses?’’ I yelled out to my wife as I was heading out the door.
“In our room on the night stand,” she yelled back.
Little did she know that she was setting in motion a series of events destined to ruin a fine Saturday.
You see, she unwittingly set an expectation in my mind, an expectation that my sunglasses would be there on the night stand beside the lamp and the book I read before bed.
But when I got to the bedroom, they weren’t there.
The series of events that unfolded next are classic human reactions, reactions that you may be creating in the way you present your content.
I entered stage one: I got angry. Not “throwing things” angry, but “disappointed because I just want to get out and do some errands but I’m attached to wearing my sunglasses when I’m out” angry.
Stage two: I got self conscious, so I looked all around the nightstand. Nothing.
Stage three: I got self righteous. I climbed down the stairs down to my wife, building my self-righteousness with every step.
“They’re not there,” I said, my voice dripping with thinly-masked disdain.
She looked at me with a face and stance that would have made our teenager proud.
“Did you look on my nightstand, too?”
Stage four: I questioned my very ability to function in the world. I slinked back up the stairs, retrieved the sunglasses and snuck out the door.
It was no fault of hers that I assumed the sunglasses would be on my night stand, but website visitors are coming with expectations.
When we don’t consider what visitors expect when we offer them our content, we set the exact same series of events in motion. This isn’t good for our business.
Keep Your Content Promises: What is the Psychological Price for Your Content
Our invitations, be they found in an email, a status update or a blog post must promise something or there would be no clicks.
Visitors may be finding and consuming our content just fine, but we can extract a severe price by making things unintuitive. Just because someone finds your content, doesn’t mean they’re happy about it.
Here are some of the innocent things we do to make our visitors feel frustrated.
1. The Drill Down
If your content link is sending your visitors to your home page or to a “resources” page, you’re setting them up for stage one anger.
Most people expect a click to take them to the very place that content exists. Don’t let them down.
Sure, you may have a logical navigation strategy.
Visitors are saying, “All you had to do was put a link to it on the page you sent me to.”
My wife assumed I would look on both night stands. I assumed she’d have specified the “other” one if that was where it was.
2. The Scroll
For many many visitors, if the content headline isn’t above the “fold” on your page, then it doesn’t exist. Period.
What would push the headline down? Usually, it’s a BAH (big-ass header). The BAH is usually some large stock photo plastered across the top of the page. This is a common feature of websites and is found on both home pages and interior pages.
Bosses love this kind of thing, but it foils visitors.
3. The Unending Preview
Too often, one BAH isn’t enough, so designers have invented the “flash scroller” also called a “rotator box.” If you are employing one of these to present content choices, you are WAY over-estimating the patience of even the most interested visitor.
Don’t make us sit through a series of cross-fading options.
An image fades in, then we wait.
Another image fades in, then we wait.
Another fade, then we wait.
We won’t last long. I probably lost dozens of readers just writing those three sentences.
4. The Wall of Questions
One of the best ways to generate leads is to promise great content in exchange for contact information. However, you must look at this as a purchase, not a gratuitous grab for their email address. Don’t present them with a wall of form fields and ask them to fill out the form.
This page asks a lot, but doesn’t promise much.
You have to sell them.
To this end, a proper lead generation page will have the following components:
This is what is expected when someone clicks on an invitation to read or view content.
Deviate from this basic formula only if you must. Otherwise, visitors may leave your site questioning their very ability to function in a digital world.
Brian Massey
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Touchpoint Personas for Persuasion and Empathy
Conversion Marketing StrategyIn this post, I introduce you to Touchpoint Personas and identify their key components.
I will compare the concept of touchpoint personas vs buyer personas. If you are interested in user personas check them out on this article.
Personas are fictional representations of your customers designed to help you understand what to say to prospects and how to deliver content to them.
There is no better predictor of conversion success than the availability of personas.
The Anatomy of a Great Online Persona
Melanie is your market research with an attitude, your analytics in a skirt. Bill is the voice that rings through the headsets of your customer service support people, unwavering in his desire to get what he wants. Amy is that segment of your house list who got distracted before she finished ordering online.
None of these people exist, but they are powerful guides for any business that wants to grow in an age of digital content.
Melanie, Bill and Amy are touchpoint personas, and they can walk right into any meeting you have and “lay down the law.” They know what they want, and they are your ally in getting the resources you need to deliver.
Read on to learn why a touchpoint persona is so powerful and to figure out what information you should include to help you understand the customer.
Creating online Touchpoint Personas for increased persuasion and conversions.
How is a touchpoint persona different from a buyer persona?
Those businesses with the most effective content marketing strategies are using buyer personas as their guide. But, buyer personas have the following limitations when it comes to creating a customer journey and its implementation:
Creating online touchpoint personas: the 7 Components
Here are the components of the touchpoint personas that Conversion Sciences creates for clients. Much of this has been adopted from the book Waiting for Your Cat to Bark? by Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg.
1Demographics
Demographics play only a small part in the touchpoint persona. Age and gender give us an idea of their technical savvy and possible communication styles. Business role will be important for B2B and some B2C sales.
2Customer Commentary
The customer commentary answers the question, “Why are they coming to this site at this time in their lives?”
Unlike buyer personas, the customer commentary is written in the voice of the persona. This helps the marketing team empathize with the people visiting your site. It provides the proper vocabulary for writing and keyword research. Answer this question, and you will know exactly how to create content and ad copy for them.
3Mode of Persuasion
The customer commentary will tell you much about the way a certain kind of visitor is going to make a decision, from which you can identify their mode of persuasion.
Will they decide to take action quickly or slowly? Will they seek to decide emotionally or logically? The Eisenbergs outline four primary modes of persuasion to guide your designers and writers: Competitive, Methodical, Humanist and Spontaneous.
4Funnel Points or Customer Touchpoints
What is bringing the persona to this touchpoint, and where are they arriving?
List these scenarios here, and strive to get visitors close to their points of resolution as directly as possible. Don’t limit these touch points or funnel points to those currently in your marketing mix, but consider new outreach methods based on how these types of customers will find you.
5Points of Resolution
What are the important pieces of information this kind of visitor needs to feel comfortable and confident in taking action? This is your content guide, from which your editorial calendar will rise. Points of resolution may be as simple as “price and delivery” or as complex as “a full understanding of our manufacturing process.”
6Conversion Beacons and Conversion Points
The conversion beacon calls a visitor to action. A conversion point tells you that a visitor has taken action. In the online world, a big red button may serve as a conversion beacon, and a confirmation page may be the conversion point that tells you that a visitor has completed a form.
These map the visitors’ buying processes to the businesses’ selling processes. They also tell you which key performance indicators will gauge the success of your changes.
7Priority
Touchpoint personas are quite thorough and will generate more ideas than can be reasonably implemented, but one conversion beacon or one content item may have a significant impact on leads and sales.
The Eisenbergs recommend listing out the actions generated from these personas. Estimate the minimum time, positive impact and smallest effort for each of them on a scale from one to five. Add these three values together and start working on those with the highest total.
Keep your customer personas out of the drawer
Your touchpoint personas should influence your decisions, and they should evolve as you learn what is working and what is not. Don’t put them in a drawer when you’re done. Print them out and put them in your conference room or break room.
Consider placing them on a collaborative system so that the organization can change them organically.
Like Frankenstein’s monster, it is easy to create personas and customer journey maps, but it is more difficult to breathe life into them.
To thoroughly explore the power of touchpoint personas, I strongly recommend the book Waiting for your Cat to Bark? by Jeffrey and Bryan Eisenberg. For more on touchpoints please read Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day by David Evans.
Do you use touchpoint personas or something similar? If so, are there additional things that you include?
The Anatomy of a Great Web Persona was originally published on a post for the Content Marketing Institute
P. S. Get full access to the Lab when you join The Conversion Scientist email list.
Your Explaining Face Will Change Your Content Marketing
Conversion OptimizationMy ten-year-old son gave me a valuable lesson in content marketing today.
Sean has a good friend who, to hear him tell it, rarely changes his expression. It’s just who he is.
However, Sean was sharing one of this friend’s more interesting ideas: to build a tall building and put a catapult at the top of it to deliver packages around town.
“Was he serious?” we asked.
“Yes,” said Sean. “He had his explaining face on.”
Clearly, when this boy puts on his ‘explaining face,’ you had better listen.
Sean gives words to an attitude that offers all of us a way to make our content more helpful, more interesting and more engaging.
We just need to put on our explaining face.
Your Selling Face or Your Explaining Face
I’ve got my explaining face on right now. It is different from my selling face.
When I have my explaining face on, my eyes are wider, my eyebrows go up, my jaw is drawn back to help me enunciate.
When I have my selling face on, my eyebrows come down and my forehead furrows. My jaw jets forward. I’m in your face.
How does your content change when you have your explaining face on? Mine does.
A Face for Every Occasion
There is a place for each of your faces.
You should use your explaining face when you are participating in what I call an Attention-managed Zone. As I write in my most recent ClickZ column, an attention-managed zone is a place where we have curated the participants or content.
Our Facebook page is an attention-managed zone. Our inbox and our feed reader are as well.
When you are communicating within one of these attention-managed zones, put on your explaining face.
However, when you have drawn someone to your site, to a landing page for instance, you will want to put on your selling face and be more persuasive. Visitors expect to learn about your offering in these places where they have no control over what they will see.
Advertising in an Attention-Managed Society
As marketers and advertisers, we are bombarded with statistics that tell us there is a shockingly small supply of time in the world.
I would provide citations for these statistics, but “Article writers only have an average of 15 minutes for research, down from 30 minutes in 2007.” I made that last one up.
We believe we’re dealing with the scarcity of our prospects’ time, and are acting accordingly. Too often, we’re getting “all caps” on our audience, shouting louder, shouting more often, and shouting through more channels. I call that tossing “Jenny” around.
What if we worked the other end of the equation? What if we helped our prospects manage their time better? Could we get nine seconds instead of eight? Could we cut our Millennials down to five simultaneous activities?
Unfortunately, attempts at time management have been thwarted in large part by the social part of our brains, the part that says we need to be laced into the lives of others like tangled doilies.
I can cite these quotes because they come from a “Socialnomics” video that is only four and a half minutes long.
The net of this is that we are spending more time on our digital social pursuits and less time on our commercial messages, such as those found in display advertising.
The Components of an Attention-Managed Zone
An attention-managed zone provides a cone of safety, like a playpen for our children. We check Facebook several times per day because it’s an attention-safe zone. The same is true of e-mail.
When my attention is focused on one of these safe places, I know that:
Be Where Attention Falls
It seems that we are willing to “kill” time on social networks because it helps us manage our attention.
More and more, we rely on our social graph to keep us in the loop, often 140 characters at a time. Thomas puts this into the category of “attention management.”
The tools we choose and the people we follow make up our attention management strategy. Those places where we implement such strategies – Facebook, Twitter, and Groupon – are “attention-managed zones.”
“Attention wastelands” are those places in which we receive irrelevant information; places that are populated by people and brands that we don’t trust. Prospects must shun these wastelands lest their attention be squandered by fools.
Let me put on my selling face to help persuade you of its value.
Your selling face delivers what your business needs to grow and thrive. If you are afraid to promote your products your online marketing strategies will most likely fail.
Your selling face is a powerful, and you should put it on if you want:
If you want captivating headings and pages that turn visitors into readers and then buyers, then put on your selling face today.
Act now and receive a Thinking Face at no additional charge.
Signs that You’re Wearing Your Explaining Face
If you’re new to face management, here are a few signals that you have your explaining face on:
Ironically, these are also the markers of good sales copy, when you should have your selling face on.
Nonetheless, I recommend that you mentally put on your explaining face when you want to write for social media, for your blog or anywhere else that your reader has control.
Your explaining face content will give them reason to stay tuned in.
P. S. Don’t for get to read my ClickZ column Advertising in an Attention-Managed Society.
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Social Media Appending: How Far We Have Come
Conversion Marketing Strategy, Lead GenerationIn my most recent ClickZ column, I reflect back on my days as a marketing cog in the corporate machine, a time in which the practice of “appending” was considered “black hat.”
Appending is the practice of adding contact information to records in your prospect database. If you have someone’s name and company, you could “append” their email address and mailing address through a number of services that keep that kind of information.
Companies that sell mailing lists often provide this kind of service.
The thinking was that the prospect hadn’t given you permission to contact them through these other channels, and that it violated the “submit button contract” that is implied when they completed an online form.
Social Media Appending: How Far We Have Come. Source: Unbounce.
We’ve come a long way
Oli Gardner has an interesting infographic on the Unbounce blog. The graphic highlights a tool called FlowTown. This is a social media appending tool. Marketers can use it to find the social media accounts of their prospect list, and begin marketing to them through those social media channels like Facebook and LinkedIn.
This is where those of us who have been around the block groan, and then secretly cheer.
Social Media Appending: Why this is different
While appending has not been considered a best practice, it happens. In fact, the best way to do this is to send ask your prospects for permission after appending the data; sending them an email asking if they want email messages, for example.
Many social media platforms allow us to easily “unfriend” or block unsavory marketers. This puts the opt-out capability in our hands. So asking for permission ahead of time is less of a problem.
But there is a right way to inject yourself into someone else’s conversations. It’s called a Content-oriented Social Media Strategy.
If you’re going to jump into the social conversations, do it right, or it will backfire in a very public, viral way.
Visual Live Blog: Dan Zarrella on Twitter, Facebook and More
Conversion OptimizationSo I resorted to banal prose in my notes.
As a fellow scientist (Dan is the Social Media Scientist), I am happy to borrow from his work in doing my own. Here are my notes from Dan’ presentation at PubCon Masters Group Training. I was glad to share the stage with him.
Dan Zarrella Twitter and Facebook Optimization Notes.
Getting More Followers
“The best way to get followers is to follow people.”
To get more followers:
Twitter
The twenty most retweeted words:
Twitter Stats
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Visual Live Blog: Andy Beal Reputation Management
Conversion Marketing StrategyHere are my notes from Andy Beal’s excellent PubCon Masters Group Training on reputation management.
You can see Andy as well as an incredible lineup of talent at the PubCon Las Vegas Masters Group Training, November 8.
Reputation Management Infographic
Andy Beal: Your Google Reputation Stinks Infographic.
Andy Beal Reputation Management Favorite Excerpts
Six key tips from Andy:
When Under Attack
Be sure to get an early alert. Do a Google audit monthly.
Protect your online reputation.
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Conversion Alert: Invisibility Ray Hurts Email Open Rates and Click-through Rates
Conversion OptimizationEveryone who seeks to do good in the world will inevitably be challenged by an arch-nemesis; someone who’s view of the world is diametrically opposed to yours.
At Conversion Sciences we have Customer Chaos Labs, whose motto is:
They are an organization who seeks to lift their clients’ online Web success by simply bringing everyone else down. We see them as basically evil.
This week, one of our clients became the victim of a new Customer Chaos technology: an email invisibility ray.
The results are devastating.
Don’t fall victim to invisible emails.
Proof of the Invisibility Ray’s Existence
The folks at J’Tote Bags crafted a beautiful email, with professional photography, strong reasons to buy, and clear calls to action.
Then, J’Tote sent the email to eager prospects and customers. Somewhere in transit, many of these emails entered the range of the invisibility ray.
The invisibility technology rendered the email almost completely invisible to the human eye. Clearly, an invisible email is going to be read less, depressing open rates and clicks.
Conversion Sciences Defense Technology
Conversion Sciences has worked with the major email clients to develop a “de-cloaking” technology. For example, recipients can restore the email by clicking “Display Images below” in Gmail, or “Click here to download pictures” in Outlook.
Most email clients have implemented something similar.
The problem is that many recipients of your emails may not find a good reason to click on the de-cloaking links if they can’t see the email.
Clearly, this is not an ideal solution.
Defending Yourself Against the Invisibility Ray
A detailed analysis by Conversion Sciences has exposed some weaknesses in the invisibility ray.
It only works on images
Apparently, the invisibility ray doesn’t affect text, but only images. Thus a proper defense against this kind of attack is to use images more sparingly in your email and place text strategically around the email.
This will allow readers to understand the point of the email if the images have been inviso-rayed.
Image “Alt” Text is Sometimes Impervious
If you look closely at Exhibit B, you will see some text appearing in places where the images would have appeared. This is the images’ “alt” text and is created using the “alt” parameters in the HTML <img> tag.
Here’s an example:
<img src=”picture.jpg” alt=”Text that describes the image” />
Use the “alt” text to tell the reader what they will see if they click “Display images below” and invoke the de-cloaking technology.
This does not work in all email clients. Microsoft Outlook won’t show these cues, for example.
However, some email clients will actually allow you to format your “alt” text, making it different sizes and colors.
Conversion Alert: Don’t Fall Victim to Invisible Emails
Email remains one of the most effective online marketing tools available. No wonder the foes of good marketing have targeted it for disruption.
Let a Conversion Scientist review your email strategy. This will ensure that
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Mobile Marketing, Social Media and Conversion: Show me the Money (NSFW)
Conversion-Centered DesignJen Wojcik and Brian Massey at the Austin AMA
If you follow me, you know I’m not big on “safe” marketing.
I turn things up a few notches in this open discussion at the American Marketing Association.
I apologize in advance for my language.
Tom Myer herds the cats:
Yours Truly, the Conversion Scientist
Tom Hayden of Blue Clover and Jen Wojcik of Pinqued in a panel discussion entitled “Show Me the Money: Make Marketing Work for You.”
Tim was our mobile marketing expert, Jen handled social media. I just played Devil’s Advocate.
I hope you will enjoy the audio of this slide-free discussion.
Subscribe to the Podcast
Social Media Delivers More Than Just ROI, But I Don’t Care
Conversion OptimizationTell me your social conversion rate
“Social media is revolutionizing customer care.” Yawn.
“Social media is helping brands build awareness.” That’s sounds interesting (not).
“Social media increases the quality of the traffic coming to your site in measurable ways.” Now you have my attention.
Don’t Hate Me for My Myopia
It is my choice of career that has given me this singular focus when it comes to online marketing. There are other people to create brand image. There are smart, dedicated people trying to improve their company’s customer service.
I say “you go!”
But, I want measurable, tangible data on how social media gets qualified prospects to a web property, and how it helps me carry on a conversation with them making them more likely to buy.
I can already hear Qwitter messages landing in my inbox. I hate Qwitter personally, but it is a FABULOUS metric, the equivalent of email’s unsubscribe rate. So, I have to listen. It’s an measure of my social media Return On Investment, my social media ROI.
What is your social media ROI? Can you measure the increase in traffic quality coming to your site from your social media actions?
This Attitude is Good for Social Media ROI
How many times do you have a great conversation in the social space only to find the company’s website opaque, posing, and irrelevant?
Social media won’t work if we’re transparent in our social graph and obsequious everywhere else.
Let’s encourage businesses to put content out that draws people to their website. They will quickly begin to realize that certain content works (educational, entertaining content) and certain content does not (home pages with self-aggrandizing copy).
ROI is the great informer for these companies.
The Importance of Social Media ROI
There is a camp of social media digerati that believe social channels are not for promotion, that it is evil to advertise where conversations are the norm.
But, if conversations are going on around a brand or a company, why deny the social citizenry of a chance to own or use their offerings?
It’s just plain selfish to hold back.
When buying is an outcome of conversation, ROI tells a company how it’s doing in starting and continuing those conversations.
Online communities are arbiters and aggregators of ROI
Let’s face it. We want the support of companies as we complain and cheer about their products. We want them to hear us, to reply to us, and to see things our way.
And we are not above the occasional bribe.
How many times have you started a complaint with, “I spend $_____ with your company every _____, and I expect… .”
We regularly use ROI as a way to get attention.
Communities that raise their hand get more attention. They drive it, highlight it and can take it away. They should be rewarded for their financial contribution to companies with increased support, more say in product design… and the occasional bribe.
What do eBook Groupies and Designer Laptop Bags have in Common?
I’ve recently begun working with J’Tote Designer Laptop Bags, and heard a story that illustrates this concept perfectly.
It seems that the women of an eBook community have developed a love for J’Tot’e’s chic laptop bags. How do we know?
Visitors from this community stay on the J’Tote site longer than average, view more pages, and have a very low bounce rate (a measure of the number of visitors who leave immediately after visiting a site).
The folks at J’Tote now make it a priority to tune into the conversations on the forum, and are certain to give them warning when inventory clearing sales are imminent.
Companies speak ROI
It is the lingo of the bottom line; the babble of budgets; the conversation of the coin. If we want more companies to engage in social media for all the “right” reasons, we need to communicate with them in this language: more visits from interested conversationalists who buy their products.
We need to speak to them with ROI.
It’s one thing for a company to monitor our conversations attempting to gauge positive or negative sentiment. It’s quite another for them to know that their Facebook page is generating additional visits and sales.
There is a catch
Companies that don’t measure the ROI of social media won’t get the message. They’ll continue to ignore important communities, cut social budgets and generate plenty of negative social sentiment in the digital conversationsphere.
If you’re not measuring, you’re not listening.
J’Tote is listening. Are you?
On July 21, I’ll be showing you ways to measure your social ROI, and in particular, your social conversion rates.
Did you know there was such a thing as a social landing page? It’s nothing like your landing pages.
Did you know that there are six major conversions that happen when you add social media to your sales funnel?
My presentation is just one part of a spectacular Master’s Group Training being held in Austin by Webmaster World, the PubCon people.
Only, you don’t have to attend a full PubCon to go.
Not only will you learn from me how to measure your social media efforts, you’ll learn how to do the things that make social media work.
Oh, and there is also an search marketing track going on at the same time. Yawn.
We’re going to make people love your business through your website at The Conversion Scientist. Subscribe to learn the strategies and tactics that turn more of your visitors into leads and sales.
I want measurable, tangible data on social conversion rates, on how social media gets qualified prospects to an online property, and how it helps me carry on a conversation with them making them more likely to buy.
Read this article if interested in improving your social media conversion rates.
How Analytics Saved One Business’s Online Sales
Ecommerce CRORead this before changing your website.
It’s time-consuming to offer 45 minutes of my time to anyone who wants to improve their online sales conversion rates. I just can’t think of any better way to introduce businesses to conversion concepts.
And the people I meet on the phone are priceless.
One such person is Tom Jackson of Heliski.com. His is a rare and instructive look at the power of the written word and the ineffectiveness of standard design strategies when it comes to conversion.
Tom had two sites targeting the same audience, and getting about the same traffic. Both had analytics installed.
This was a rare opportunity to see how two very different approaches to website design performed out in the real world.
Which would you pick as the conversion winner?
Take a look at Tom’s two sites. Which would you pick as the hands-down winner? Which would you image would have cratered his income had he relied exclusively on it?
How analytics (and a session with the Conversion Scientist) saved one business’s online sales.
I did a complete evaluation of these two pages in my Search Engine Land column, and you might be surprised at my conclusions: strong copy beat slick new design.
From a distance the two home pages couldn’t look more different. HeliskiingReview.com uses non-standard layout. Text is knockout white on blue, usually considered more difficult to read than Heliski.com’s black on grey.
The newer site uses a more “image- or brand-oriented play, establishing its value proposition as “the ultimate heliskiing destination.” Unfortunately, you can’t heliski on the site, so this is an empty promise.
The body copy couldn’t be more different in approach. HeliskiingReview.com uses plain language with specific, value- and benefit-oriented points in easy-to-scan bulleted format. Specifics are almost always important for conversion.
A designer might say that the big star with “send me info” was “too TV.” However, it certainly does draw the eye to an important call to action.
and the conversion champ is…
HeliskiingReview.com had a conversion rate of 2.27% vs. Heliski.com at 1.99%. That’s 14% better. However, HeliskiingReview.com delivered much more qualified prospects. Tom was able to book trips for 15.29% of the HeliskiingReview.com leads. Heliski.com had a close ratio of only 1.33%.
What we can Learn from Tom (or How Analytics Saved One Business’s Online Sales)
The moral of the tale is that Tom measured his sites’ performance. He had the analytics in place, and was smart enough not to make changes to his site without being able to measure their effect. By leaving both sites up, he was able to rollback the changes.
I’m offering a two hour short course on June 11 in Austin entitled Web Analytics: Tools and Best Practices. This is an Austin Entrepreneur Network short course, which means that it’s only $25. We love our entrepreneurs.
Join me and find out how you can avoid huge mistakes – mistakes that rob you of leads and steal your sales. This is the second time I’ve done this presentation.
Or you can book your own session!
Read my full report on Search Engine Land, and I hope to see you on June 11.