Elements of Successful Business Web Sites and the reactions they create for your business.
Can something as complex as online sales conversion be boiled down to some like a chemical reaction? The answer is yes, and these basic marketing reactions make it easy to create interesting new combinations.
Do you recognize this chemical equation?
Basic formula for developing a landing page.
It is the basic formula for developing a Landing Page:
Some Content, preferably persuasive in nature
An Offer
A Form to entice the visitor to action, which can be a simple button or even a link.
This shouldn’t be a revelation to any regular reader of The Conversion Scientist. However, you will see many pages that lack content, an explicit offer or both.
Of course, a landing page will not generate any leads or sales without something more.
Here’s the formula for a lead generation landing page:
Converting Traffic to Leads
This formula is important in that it highlights the fact that your landing page must generate equal parts Leads and Permission in order to continue the conversation with prospects.
Why? Because, we need Permission to satisfy this little equation:
The Email Conversion Reaction.
Combining Content with Leads for which you have Permission to communicate provides the components for generating effective Email.
Given an amount of Email, what reaction would you create to turn your email into Web Traffic? Find out in my post The Chemistry of Content at The Content Marketing Institute.
Hint: Consider what mixing an Offer with your Email would do.
Stay tuned to The Conversion Scientist as we explore the Elements of Successful Business Web Sites and the reactions they create for your business.
Here’s a preview:
Youranium: Elements of Successful Business Web Sites
Youranium is a powerful radioactive element derived form your knowledge of your visitors.
Sales: The Elements of Successful Business Web Sites
Brian Massey is a veteran online marketing strategist, writer and national speaker. His practice, Conversion Sciences is conducting experiments to determine how business Web sites can turn visitors into leads and sales. Follow our blog and put some science into your online marketing.
Tim Hayden is one of those dynamic idea guys, and knows how to execute for his clients. It was a pleasure to present along side him at the University of Texas McCombs School of Business Conference and Alumni Reunion recently.
He gave us a thought provoking presentation on the integration of the live, mobile and online life of our prospects and customers, including some important tips on the use of QR Codes and email.
Email is the currency of the Web.
Here is my Infograph of that presentation captured with Instagraph technology.
Mobile Social Intelligence
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The basic Conversion Rate equation is online sales or leads divided by traffic.
When you get a lot of bad traffic, your conversion rate drops, as would be expected. However, if you get traffic that is well qualified, you generate more sales, more leads for less effort.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of telling the search engines what your Web site is about, so that people who are looking for things you offer find you (and everyone else goes somewhere else). There are few online marketing strategies that deliver such highly qualified traffic over long periods of time with no advertising buy.
Carolyn Shelby took PubCon Masters Training attendees through the basics of SEO. She is one of the most respected speakers at PubCon, and if you get a chance to see her, I strongly recommend you sit in. She is the source for Chicago SEO.
Here are my notes from her presentation captured using Instagraph Infograph technology.
As a frequent speaker, I’m always impressed when anyone will pull out the old piano and treat the audience to a song.
David Pogue did in his PubCon Keynote after taking us on an energetic and entertaining tour of the technologies that have been and will be changing our lives.
And he finished it off with a live rendition of “I Want an iPhone.”
His topics spanned what he calls “app phones” (not Smartphones), Twitter, advertising and include plugs for the apps he loves best.
Here is what I learned captured using Conversion Sciences InstaGraph infograph technology.
Your conversion marketing practice is actually a “stack” of disciplines or online marketing strategy components each of which you will have to master or have some level of capability with.
Mastering all of these online marketing strategy components may sound like a tall order, and it is. However, if you are marketing online, you are involved with conversion issues by definition.
The Quintessential Guide to Online Marketing Strategy Components
You may be wondering if marketing automation is really worth the investment. But if you’re a performance-oriented marketer–focused on the science of turning prospects into future customers, always concerned about knowing exactly which of your marketing efforts worked and why – that’s like asking if you’re getting your money’s worth from Microsoft Word; it’s something you just can’t do your job without.
In this article, I’m going to walk you through the modern online marketing strategy components – a strategy that cannot be implemented without automation.
To automate something, we must first understand it. Performance marketers are focused on turning their online channels into lead generation engines or revenue streams. They focus on conversion.
“Conversion” is the term given to a series of magical events in the life of a customer,in which a stranger becomes a suspect, a suspect becomes a prospect and a prospect becomes a customer.
In online marketing, a marketer focused on converting visitors to prospects or sales must embrace a set of capabilities, each enabled by and depending on its predecessor. These steps create a capability “stack” (see Fig. 1) that is helpful in planning the implementation of the efforts that make conversion marketing possible.
Figure 1: The Conversion Marketing Components
The Online Marketing Strategy Components or Conversion Stack
Today, when one thinks of conversion marketing, one generally thinks of Website Optimization or Conversion Rate Optimization. These practices focus on measurement and optimization, and represent the top of the stack of capabilities that online marketers must master to outpace competitors online.
Before a business can begin measuring and optimizing a website or other online marketing strategy, the foundational issues of business goals, visitor profiles, content requirements, and delivery channels must be addressed.
Every business with a Web presence has invested at some level in the conversion stack. However, those companies that embrace these capabilities develop a momentum and velocity in their online strategy that allows them to accelerate past entrenched businesses.
These businesses use the conversion stack to leverage their marketing efforts, changing the math of marketing in their favor. The goal is to grow revenue while reducing real marketing costs.
Marketing automation helps marketers define and carry out each capability in the stack with a precision that would be difficult if not impossible to achieve otherwise, and therefore plays a crucial role in an organization committed to performance marketing.
Business Goals: The Base of the Marketing Strategy Components
Knowing exactly what you want your website to do for your business.
The digital space cannot meet all of the goals a business has for growth. However, your business can accomplish things online that are impossible or cost prohibitive through another channel, such as:
Improve the quality of leads, reducing sales costs and increasing close ratios.
Reduce inbound calls for information by moving interactions online.
Eliminate expensive marketing channels.
Reach prospects not found via other media.
Add online services that make your offering more valuable.
Increase cross-sells and up-sells.
Increase average sales price.
Steal market share and mind share from our competitors.
At this stage, we seek to define the integration points of our marketing automation system, and to establish our baselines performance metrics.
Defining Your Marketing Automation Integration Points
While we can measure many things with sophisticated marketing automation tools, it is critical that we focus on those capabilities that are necessary to our business goals, and ignore (or defer) those that are not.
If our business has a long sales cycle involving direct sales efforts, integration with a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system is crucial; it is how we track our leads through the sales process.
If we are tasked with reducing the sales cycle, we will want a two-way integration between our CRM and our marketing automation system so that we can monitor our success over time. Otherwise, a simple one-way integration may be sufficient.
Likewise, if we seek to increase the average sales price of new customers, we will need to integrate with our financial system to retrieve and measure that goal.
Choosing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
There is a metric that we can use to either define our success for each goal, or approximate it. For example, “reducing sales costs” means that the sales efforts are converting more leads into customers.
However, there is no off-the-shelf metric for “sales cost” reported by our marketing automation systems.
Instead, the close ratio – the number of leads converted divided by leads generated – would be a reasonable proxy for reducing sales costs.
Likewise, the success of cross-sells or up-sells may be measured by the frequency of repeat purchases or by the average lifetime value of existing customers.
There should be a small set of KPIs that define your top-level online business goals. All other metrics help you answer the question of “why.”
Don’t let the metrics drive your curiosity. Let the business goals drive the choice of metrics.
Defining Your Baselines
There are lies, damn lies and analytics, to paraphrase author Mark Twain. Analytics are rarely accurate.
You must instead measure changes in your KPIs. To measure changes, you must first establish baselines for each.
In most industries, a year’s worth of analytics data is necessary to fully account for seasonal changes in the marketplace, but don’t let this stop you. Implement your analytics tools and let them begin collecting data. In the mean time, estimate your KPIs manually, by gathering data wherever you can. Eventually, your analytics will determine your baselines.
The goal is for the current performance of any KPI to exceed its baseline. Proper reporting is done in terms of percentage increase or decrease. If a KPI consistently rests above its baseline, you have established a new baseline to beat in the coming weeks and months.
These baselined KPIs define your “dashboard.”
However, as you will soon find out, dashboards are unsatisfying because they don’t answer the question, “Why is this KPI changing.” We’ll talk about understanding “why” a little later.
Visitor Profiling: Aligning Your Business Goals with Visitor Buying Habits
Let’s review the second of the online marketing strategy components. Understanding the best visitors needs, the reason they are visiting today and the information they need to feel comfortable taking action. Traditionally, there has been a disconnect between the websites and the needs of visitors. Most business sites follow a “brochure” style approach, in which the site talks about the company and its products.
This is not what your visitors want.
They want you to talk about them and their problems.
Touchpoint Personas differ from traditional customer segments in one significant way: We are only interested in what they need at the moment they are interacting with our measurable online communications. This singular focus allows us to zero in on those things that a visitor needs. Touchpoint Personas are the important tool at this stage and you can click on the link to read my article on touchpoint personas and points of resolution.
These become the content that you will use on your website, in your outbound marketing and throughout your channels. As you will see, content allows us to answer the question “why” when our performance changes, for the better or worse.
Content Strategy: We are No Longer Marketers
What content will you create for these important visitors? Will it be articles, video, or audio? These are important considerations made easy from your touchpoint personas.
We are no longer marketers, but publishers. In almost any industry, any market, it is absolutely necessary that we provide information, guidance, education and entertainment to the marketplace. The Internet has turned our prospects into researchers, and we must provide them with the content that answers their questions.
Our personas give us a complete picture of those visitors that will move our business forward. We know why they are visiting and how they like to receive information. Their demographic profile will tell us which technologies they use and this helps us select the proper format for our content. The points of resolution tell us exactly what our content should cover.
At this point, our content strategy should unfold like the board game “Clue.” In the popular board game, we use a process of elimination to understand who committed a murder, which weapon was used, and where the deed was done.
In our game of “persona clue”, we create a list of similar actions. We deduce who we are targeting, which point of resolution we are addressing, and where this information will be delivered.
We might say, “Darla Decider will download ‘Ten Reasons Projects Fail’ as a white paper on our website.” What we have done with this step is change the conversation from, “Which landing pages do we need to develop?” to, “How can we make this important content available to our best prospects?” Content is the coal that will stoke the furnaces of your marketing automation system and one key ingredient of the online marketing strategy components you need to master.
Media and Channels: Mixing Media in the Right Proportions
How do your visitors want to hear from you? Where can your visitors be reached? Your choice of channels may include webinars, email, social media, blog posts and more.
If our content strategy is about giving prospects what they need, our media strategy is about placing content where our prospects can find it.
Touchpoint personas will be immensely helpful in identifying the right mix of channels through which to deliver and advertise content. Demographics will give you some idea of your prospects’ media preferences.
For example, prospects over 55 are still best reached through email.
Media selection is an evolving process, especially in a world in which so many new channels are appearing every year. In a few short years, we’ve moved from Web pages, email, and banner ads, to search marketing, social networks, RSS feeds, blogs, microblogs, and mobile applications.
It’s an exciting time to be a marketer.
This is where marketing automation becomes indispensable. It is your publishing and distribution system. It must help you manage a stream of content delivered through a variety of channels and track results along the way. Your investment in publishing automation will also allow you to test multiple versions of your content to see which affects your KPIs most positively.
Your System Should Be Easy to Use
You should be able to intuitively setup a variety of content campaigns and see the results. The days of the “launch and watch” website are over. In most industries changes must now come weekly or daily.
Your System Should Not Be a Silo
Producers will need appropriate access to create and stage new content. It should be easy for members of the team to check content and settings to ensure the campaign will launch successfully.
Your System Should Offer a Variety of Metrics
Each content format and channel will be measured differently. You must be able to track downloads of whitepapers. You must be able to track the conversion rates of email-based content. You must be aware of how often a link is shared on social networks.
Needless to say, you will need some help coordinating all of this activity and measuring the results. And this leads us to the another one of the online marketing strategy components. If you aren’t intimate with your marketing automation tool, you’re not doing performance marketing.
Online Marketing Strategy Components: Measuring and Optimizing
Putting the analytics and processes in place to measure the effectiveness of your efforts. This often means designing your online presence differently to enable tracking of visitor behavior. Testing your assumptions is the only way to achieve the high conversion rates that make you seem invincible to your competitors. This is how you reduce the cost of all online marketing efforts.
At the pinnacle of the online marketing strategy components is optimization.
Optimization involves making changes based on the metrics you’ve captured.
Every communication is a test.
Each time you send a communication, you are testing a set of assumptions – assumptions about what your prospects want and need in their buying process, about the format of the content, and about the places they want to consume it.
Every communication can tell us the “why” of our success or failure.
For each communication, you must devise a strategy to measure the effectiveness of the content. Each communication will have a set of primary KPIs.
An email newsletter may invite readers to purchase a new line of shoes, and to join your Facebook page as well. If the primary goal is to sell shoes, you must be able to measure the conversion rate of the email.
It isn’t sufficient to increase sales of the shoe. You must have a strategy to know how many sales were generated by this email.
Watch the Results
The final step of each communication – the step too often overlooked – is reviewing your results. When the communication has run its course, you simply look at the KPIs to learn the secrets desires of your audience.
Which articles are read most?
Which subject lines convert well?
Which discounts generate sales?
Which tweets draw the most visits?
Your marketing automation system should provide easy drill-down to the metrics that define the success of each effort.
The Online Marketing Strategy Components You Need to Master: Conclusions
You are sitting in the monthly executive meeting. You have created a slide deck with your top-level KPIs as reported by your marketing automation system. They are a summary of how your individual efforts have affected the bottom line.
When the questions come, you know the “why” and the “what’s next” for your marketing efforts. “Why did our conversion rates go down, but our revenue go up?” the VP of Sales asks.
You know the answer. You tick off the four or five programs that delivered solid results, and then list those that drew unqualified traffic to the site, stating that they will be modified or discontinued.
You’re a performance marketer.
The Business that Knows Grows
Each item of content you produce will have different versions, be available through multiple channels, and will be measured differently. Today’s online businesses won’t function without a useful marketing automation system, a tool that be used by many members of the team.
The Online Marketing Strategy Components aren’t linear, and businesses can expand their capabilities in any of these areas.
However, those businesses that dominate in their industry through online marketing will be proficient in all of the capabilities presented here.
To develop touchpoint personas, read “Waiting for Your Cat to Bark?: Persuading Customers When They Ignore Marketing” by Bryan Eisenberg, Jeffrey Eisenberg and Lisa T. Davis.
For designing measurable social media campaigns, read “Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day” by Dave Evans
Online Marketing Strategy Components: Don’t Worry
The good news is that the folks at SiteTuners.com, lead by the always brilliant Tim Ash have put together the Conversion Conference.
The attendees will be leading the online charge in each of their industries.
I can think of no better way to get up the many learning curves that your conversion practice needs than this two day conference.
Topics at Conversion Conference include:
Using Headlines, Copy and Graphic Design to Lift Conversion
You’ve likely read books written by some of the Conversion Conference Speakers, like Landing Page Optimization and Web Design for ROI. There’s no question that the speakers at this conference are the folks you want to be learning from. Check it out. You can even save $250 if you use promo code CCE650 when you register on the Conversion Conference website.
If you won’t be there, I pray that your competitors won’t be either.
To my digital natives and online tribesman everywhere:
What would you tell the printing industry if you had one hour with them?
Think about it: The Printing Industry has been communicating with the world for centuries. While you could argue that they seem slow in adopting digital channels, I would argue that we’ve completely blocked print from our consciousness.
There is an ocean between our peoples.
I have an hour with the Printing Industries of America when I keynote their Converge Conference 2010. Attendees are the boldest of their members, the ones who are looking closely at cross-media business strategies.
What would you tell the owner of a printing company?
How do you admire them?
What do you see that they could be doing better?
Ultimately, I want to understand where the missed opportunities are. When we cross that ocean, what magical happens?
Colonizing the Digital New World
Here’s the setup I’m using for our printing-side brethren:
Welcome to the Digital New World! I am an ambassador for the people of this land. You have traveled far, across the mighty Sea of Apathy to arrive in this place. You have proven yourself as brave explorers. I am here to welcome you and show you around.
We have studied your strange ways and have seen the devices you have that display content without batteries or plugs. I’m sure we seem strange to you as well. Our customs are very different, but we have the same goals: understanding and prosperity.
During your visit, we will examine the differences between us, but more importantly, we will find new opportunities to work together; to combine your “old world” wisdom with our “new world” technology and to build great businesses.
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Developing a social media measurement plan could be a bit boring. But we think it’s OK to take a scientific approach to social media. Here’s why it’s OK to be the Rainman.
In my last Conversion Science column I introduced you to the social media landing page. This landing page has the power to bring social media conversations to a measurable, business-building conversion. Let me show you how to develop the perfect social media measurement plan.
Social media is very important to us at Conversion Sciences. We know that education is the key to changing the web into a place where people find what they are looking for and reward companies for being so darn helpful.
Social media is a great way for us to share our educational and (hopefully) helpful stories, posts, columns and presentations. But to know how our efforts are performing, we need to create a social media measurement plan.
Why It’s OK to be the Rainman of Social Media
However, we aren’t really that good at social media conversations. It may come as no surprise that, as scientists, we are like the Rainman of social media. Like Raymond from the move, we are capable of amazing feats of insight and intelligence, but we often miss important social cues, especially when interactions occur 140 characters at a time.
“I’m an excellent Tweeter”
“I’m an excellent dancer.”
Given the fact that people like us sometimes have awkward digital interactions, you may not invite us to your swanky party. However, you certainly want us to participate in your social graph.
People like us provide an important service to the social spheres. Our content-oriented social media strategy feeds those who rely on social media for education and elucidation.
If you spend the bulk of your social time interacting with individuals, you are probably using a conversation-oriented social media strategy.
Choose the right social strategy
A conversion is more than just a conversation without the T&A.
In our studies, we have observed two broad categories of social media behavior:
Conversation-oriented social behavior
Content-oriented social behavior
While the posts, pictures and pokes that make up an online conversation certainly qualify as “content,” we distinguish conversational content from content that is specifically designed to educate, entertain or inform on a particular subject area.
This article is “content.” The comments you will inevitably leave are “conversation.”
We have found that content-oriented social strategies lead to more measurable campaigns. Plus, many conversion scientists don’t have the social skills to implement a conversation-oriented strategy.
Conversation-oriented social media
This strategy centers around conversations. It typically involves one or more personalities that interact with individuals in the social graph. This strategy is ideal for improving customer support, building awareness, personal branding and image marketing.
Conversations may involve content, but it is the interactions that are front-and-center in this strategy.
Results are typically measured using predictive metrics, such as friends, followers, likes, bookmarks, retweets and reach. These soft metrics are often more satisfying to us than definitive metrics such as leads, sales, and conversion rate.
I admire people like Kate Buck Jr. who make this strategy really work for their business and their clients.
Content-oriented social media
Unlike conversation-oriented strategies, this approach focuses on content as we’ve defined it here: communication that is designed to educate, entertain or inform. This strategy is ideal for lead generation, thought-leadership and building targeted social channels.
Content-oriented conversations don’t focus on the authoring brand or individual. Instead, these conversations circle around the content itself. This content will spur conversations, and ideally will be passed around, expanding our reach.
Of greatest interest to conversion scientists is that content draws visitors to social landing pages, where conversion beacons can drive business-building conversions.
Develop the Perfect Social Media Measurement Plan
It’s possible to automate and centralize the measurement of social media marketing efforts, in part thanks to a wireless tracking device that we attach to each status update, tweet and email that ties conversions to specific social conversations. Here’s how.
Step 1: Create some content.
The catch with the content-oriented strategy is that you must create content. Frequency is up to you. In a sixty-plus day experiment conducted here in the labs, five articles and seven blog posts drove 145 status updates, tweets, emails, Flickr images, etc.
We focused on articles that I write at The Conversion Scientist blog, that I contribute here at Search Engine Land and that I contribute at other venues such as ClickZ and the Content Marketing Institute.
Step 2: Devise a way to measure results.
To measure results, traffic must arrive on one of our instrumented pages. However, some of the content we used lived on other sites.
Our strategy was to create a social media landing page for each of our “off-world” articles in the form of a blog post. These posts teased the article and linked to it.
While we announce each new article through our social networks, the bulk of our marketing drove friends and followers to the blog post.
Right now, Google Analytics is our favorite single point of collection because of its content filtering and segmented reports.
For click tracking, Bit.ly still can’t be beat for its flexibility and integration with so many tools.
Step 3: Market each content item as if each was its own product.
Each of these content items gets a multi-network, multi-touch treatment designed to expose the maximum number of our friends and followers to this content. We maintain small but targeted social graphs on Facebook (<1000), Twitter (<2000) and LinkedIn (>1000).
On Facebook we did a single status post to my profile as well as “The Conversion Scientist” and “Web Strategies for Business” pages.
On Twitter each content item got between two and four tweets. We tried simply repeating the tweets as well as composing a series of unique tweets.
We did one LinkedIn status update, but did not post discussions on LinkedIn groups because the process couldn’t be automated. We’re looking for tools to help with this.
Several items got supporting posts on our predecessor site, the Customer Chaos blog.
All of this may sound like a lot of work. That is why we need tools to automate the process. Right now, Austin-based Spredfast seems to have the best support of the social networks we use, as well as one great collection point for analytics from across our social graph. Hootsuite is an alternative for those focusing on Twitter.
Note: We turned off all of our cross-network services, such as Ping.fm to implement this strategy.
Step 4: Attach a wireless tracking device.
This is real Hollywood stuff.
The most important feature of our measurement strategy is a wireless tracking device that we attached to each post, tweet, email and image. This is the secret sauce that enables the report shown above.
The URL builder provided by Google is quite unsatisfying for us, so we’ve developed a special Google Analytics link tagging spreadsheet that you can use to create and track your micro-coded addresses.
Next time, I’ll show you the queries and reports that reveal which content, social networks and conversations generate the most email subscriptions for us.
In the mean time, let me know the social media distribution and tracking tools that you use and love in the comments section below.
Article originally published on my Search Engine Land column “The Perfect Social Media Measurement Strategy.”
Brian Massey
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When we don’t consider what visitors expect when we offer them our content, we set a series of events in motion that results in our visitors feeling… dumb. Don’t let your content break promises to your readers.
These 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
When you invite someone to read your content, you are making a promise. Your promise is that you will help them solve a problem or entertain them.
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.
“All they have to do is click on the White Papers menu item then select Case Studies, then pick the one they want,” you might say.
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.
Your headline and first paragraph should start as close to the top of the page as is politically possible.
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.
A headline that is as identical to the promise of the ad or link as possible.
A picture of the product. Even an eBook can be formatted to look like a publication, and visitors get it.
Tell them very specifically what they will get when they complete the form. Don’t be afraid to lay some text on the page.
Your form should only ask for information you absolutely need. Your content may not be “worth” their phone number and address in their eyes.NOTE: If you must ask for qualifying information, explain how it will be used and why it is needed.
The text on the button should tell the visitor what is next. “Get Your Report” or “Subscribe” is much more clickable than “Submit”, especially if we aren’t sure to what we’re submitting ourselves.
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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Why do so many marketing departments have trouble turning personas into actionable marketing gold? I believe it is because traditional “buyer personas” are too broad in their definition.
In this post, I introduce you to Touchpoint Personas and identify their key components.
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.
“Your market research with an attitude, your analytics in a skirt.”
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:
They may not be found in every channel. A buyer persona that visits your brick and mortar store may never buy online.
They often do not comprehend the limits and strengths of individual channels. In the store, the salesperson is the primary way customers interact with your brand. Online, there are far more communication options.
The demographics associated with each are open to interpretation. What kind of home does a person making $175,000 a year live in? Some may say a mansion. Some may say a small ranch.
Touchpoint personas focus the team on one channel: the store, the website, the phone, the social graph, etc. The result is fewer personas per channel and more specific personas, which means a more consistent effort on the part of your production teams.
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.
Don’t muddy the water with demographics that don’t apply. For example, marital status may not be helpful in a B2B sale. If not, don’t include it.
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?
Did a referral drive them to type in your domain?
Did an online search bring them to your home page?
Did a banner ad or email bring them to a landing page?
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?
Getting a Reaction from Your Online Marketing
Conversion Optimization, Landing Page OptimizationCan something as complex as online sales conversion be boiled down to some like a chemical reaction? The answer is yes, and these basic marketing reactions make it easy to create interesting new combinations.
Do you recognize this chemical equation?
Basic formula for developing a landing page.
It is the basic formula for developing a Landing Page:
This shouldn’t be a revelation to any regular reader of The Conversion Scientist. However, you will see many pages that lack content, an explicit offer or both.
Of course, a landing page will not generate any leads or sales without something more.
Here’s the formula for a lead generation landing page:
Converting Traffic to Leads
This formula is important in that it highlights the fact that your landing page must generate equal parts Leads and Permission in order to continue the conversation with prospects.
Why? Because, we need Permission to satisfy this little equation:
The Email Conversion Reaction.
Combining Content with Leads for which you have Permission to communicate provides the components for generating effective Email.
Given an amount of Email, what reaction would you create to turn your email into Web Traffic? Find out in my post The Chemistry of Content at The Content Marketing Institute.
Hint: Consider what mixing an Offer with your Email would do.
Stay tuned to The Conversion Scientist as we explore the Elements of Successful Business Web Sites and the reactions they create for your business.
Here’s a preview:
Youranium: Elements of Successful Business Web Sites
Youranium is a powerful radioactive element derived form your knowledge of your visitors.
Sales: The Elements of Successful Business Web Sites
Sales is gold to a business.
You should subscribe to the The Conversion Scientist by email to find the reactions that create gold for your business.
Brian Massey is a veteran online marketing strategist, writer and national speaker. His practice, Conversion Sciences is conducting experiments to determine how business Web sites can turn visitors into leads and sales. Follow our blog and put some science into your online marketing.
Mobile Social Intelligence (INFOGRAPH)
Conversion OptimizationTim Hayden is one of those dynamic idea guys, and knows how to execute for his clients. It was a pleasure to present along side him at the University of Texas McCombs School of Business Conference and Alumni Reunion recently.
He gave us a thought provoking presentation on the integration of the live, mobile and online life of our prospects and customers, including some important tips on the use of QR Codes and email.
Here is my Infograph of that presentation captured with Instagraph technology.
Mobile Social Intelligence
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Success in a World of Influencers (INFOGRAPH)
Conversion Marketing StrategyI had the honor of presenting at the University of Texas McCombs School of Business Conference and Alumni Reunion along side some smart people.
These included Sam Decker, recently of Bazaarvoice, who gave the attendees three tips on how to succeed in a world of influencers.
Here is the infograph of his presentation captured with instagraph technology.
SEO 101: Good Traffic Converts Better (INFOGRAPH)
Conversion Marketing StrategyWhen you get a lot of bad traffic, your conversion rate drops, as would be expected. However, if you get traffic that is well qualified, you generate more sales, more leads for less effort.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of telling the search engines what your Web site is about, so that people who are looking for things you offer find you (and everyone else goes somewhere else). There are few online marketing strategies that deliver such highly qualified traffic over long periods of time with no advertising buy.
Carolyn Shelby took PubCon Masters Training attendees through the basics of SEO. She is one of the most respected speakers at PubCon, and if you get a chance to see her, I strongly recommend you sit in. She is the source for Chicago SEO.
Here are my notes from her presentation captured using Instagraph Infograph technology.
INFOGRAPH David Pogue Gushes About Disruptive Technologies at PubCon
Conversion Marketing StrategyAs a frequent speaker, I’m always impressed when anyone will pull out the old piano and treat the audience to a song.
David Pogue did in his PubCon Keynote after taking us on an energetic and entertaining tour of the technologies that have been and will be changing our lives.
And he finished it off with a live rendition of “I Want an iPhone.”
His topics spanned what he calls “app phones” (not Smartphones), Twitter, advertising and include plugs for the apps he loves best.
Here is what I learned captured using Conversion Sciences InstaGraph infograph technology.
The Online Marketing Strategy Components You Need to Master
Conversion Marketing Strategy, Conversion OptimizationMastering all of these online marketing strategy components may sound like a tall order, and it is. However, if you are marketing online, you are involved with conversion issues by definition.
The Quintessential Guide to Online Marketing Strategy Components
You may be wondering if marketing automation is really worth the investment. But if you’re a performance-oriented marketer–focused on the science of turning prospects into future customers, always concerned about knowing exactly which of your marketing efforts worked and why – that’s like asking if you’re getting your money’s worth from Microsoft Word; it’s something you just can’t do your job without.
In this article, I’m going to walk you through the modern online marketing strategy components – a strategy that cannot be implemented without automation.
To automate something, we must first understand it. Performance marketers are focused on turning their online channels into lead generation engines or revenue streams. They focus on conversion.
“Conversion” is the term given to a series of magical events in the life of a customer,in which a stranger becomes a suspect, a suspect becomes a prospect and a prospect becomes a customer.
In online marketing, a marketer focused on converting visitors to prospects or sales must embrace a set of capabilities, each enabled by and depending on its predecessor. These steps create a capability “stack” (see Fig. 1) that is helpful in planning the implementation of the efforts that make conversion marketing possible.
Figure 1: The Conversion Marketing Components
The Online Marketing Strategy Components or Conversion Stack
Today, when one thinks of conversion marketing, one generally thinks of Website Optimization or Conversion Rate Optimization. These practices focus on measurement and optimization, and represent the top of the stack of capabilities that online marketers must master to outpace competitors online.
Before a business can begin measuring and optimizing a website or other online marketing strategy, the foundational issues of business goals, visitor profiles, content requirements, and delivery channels must be addressed.
Every business with a Web presence has invested at some level in the conversion stack. However, those companies that embrace these capabilities develop a momentum and velocity in their online strategy that allows them to accelerate past entrenched businesses.
These businesses use the conversion stack to leverage their marketing efforts, changing the math of marketing in their favor. The goal is to grow revenue while reducing real marketing costs.
Marketing automation helps marketers define and carry out each capability in the stack with a precision that would be difficult if not impossible to achieve otherwise, and therefore plays a crucial role in an organization committed to performance marketing.
Business Goals: The Base of the Marketing Strategy Components
Knowing exactly what you want your website to do for your business.
The digital space cannot meet all of the goals a business has for growth. However, your business can accomplish things online that are impossible or cost prohibitive through another channel, such as:
At this stage, we seek to define the integration points of our marketing automation system, and to establish our baselines performance metrics.
Defining Your Marketing Automation Integration Points
While we can measure many things with sophisticated marketing automation tools, it is critical that we focus on those capabilities that are necessary to our business goals, and ignore (or defer) those that are not.
If our business has a long sales cycle involving direct sales efforts, integration with a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system is crucial; it is how we track our leads through the sales process.
If we are tasked with reducing the sales cycle, we will want a two-way integration between our CRM and our marketing automation system so that we can monitor our success over time. Otherwise, a simple one-way integration may be sufficient.
Likewise, if we seek to increase the average sales price of new customers, we will need to integrate with our financial system to retrieve and measure that goal.
Choosing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
There is a metric that we can use to either define our success for each goal, or approximate it. For example, “reducing sales costs” means that the sales efforts are converting more leads into customers.
However, there is no off-the-shelf metric for “sales cost” reported by our marketing automation systems.
Instead, the close ratio – the number of leads converted divided by leads generated – would be a reasonable proxy for reducing sales costs.
Likewise, the success of cross-sells or up-sells may be measured by the frequency of repeat purchases or by the average lifetime value of existing customers.
There should be a small set of KPIs that define your top-level online business goals. All other metrics help you answer the question of “why.”
Don’t let the metrics drive your curiosity. Let the business goals drive the choice of metrics.
Defining Your Baselines
There are lies, damn lies and analytics, to paraphrase author Mark Twain. Analytics are rarely accurate.
You must instead measure changes in your KPIs. To measure changes, you must first establish baselines for each.
In most industries, a year’s worth of analytics data is necessary to fully account for seasonal changes in the marketplace, but don’t let this stop you. Implement your analytics tools and let them begin collecting data. In the mean time, estimate your KPIs manually, by gathering data wherever you can. Eventually, your analytics will determine your baselines.
The goal is for the current performance of any KPI to exceed its baseline. Proper reporting is done in terms of percentage increase or decrease. If a KPI consistently rests above its baseline, you have established a new baseline to beat in the coming weeks and months.
These baselined KPIs define your “dashboard.”
However, as you will soon find out, dashboards are unsatisfying because they don’t answer the question, “Why is this KPI changing.” We’ll talk about understanding “why” a little later.
Visitor Profiling: Aligning Your Business Goals with Visitor Buying Habits
Let’s review the second of the online marketing strategy components. Understanding the best visitors needs, the reason they are visiting today and the information they need to feel comfortable taking action. Traditionally, there has been a disconnect between the websites and the needs of visitors. Most business sites follow a “brochure” style approach, in which the site talks about the company and its products.
This is not what your visitors want.
They want you to talk about them and their problems.
Touchpoint Personas differ from traditional customer segments in one significant way: We are only interested in what they need at the moment they are interacting with our measurable online communications. This singular focus allows us to zero in on those things that a visitor needs. Touchpoint Personas are the important tool at this stage and you can click on the link to read my article on touchpoint personas and points of resolution.
These become the content that you will use on your website, in your outbound marketing and throughout your channels. As you will see, content allows us to answer the question “why” when our performance changes, for the better or worse.
Content Strategy: We are No Longer Marketers
We are no longer marketers, but publishers. In almost any industry, any market, it is absolutely necessary that we provide information, guidance, education and entertainment to the marketplace. The Internet has turned our prospects into researchers, and we must provide them with the content that answers their questions.
Our personas give us a complete picture of those visitors that will move our business forward. We know why they are visiting and how they like to receive information. Their demographic profile will tell us which technologies they use and this helps us select the proper format for our content. The points of resolution tell us exactly what our content should cover.
At this point, our content strategy should unfold like the board game “Clue.” In the popular board game, we use a process of elimination to understand who committed a murder, which weapon was used, and where the deed was done.
In our game of “persona clue”, we create a list of similar actions. We deduce who we are targeting, which point of resolution we are addressing, and where this information will be delivered.
We might say, “Darla Decider will download ‘Ten Reasons Projects Fail’ as a white paper on our website.” What we have done with this step is change the conversation from, “Which landing pages do we need to develop?” to, “How can we make this important content available to our best prospects?” Content is the coal that will stoke the furnaces of your marketing automation system and one key ingredient of the online marketing strategy components you need to master.
Media and Channels: Mixing Media in the Right Proportions
If our content strategy is about giving prospects what they need, our media strategy is about placing content where our prospects can find it.
Touchpoint personas will be immensely helpful in identifying the right mix of channels through which to deliver and advertise content. Demographics will give you some idea of your prospects’ media preferences.
For example, prospects over 55 are still best reached through email.
Media selection is an evolving process, especially in a world in which so many new channels are appearing every year. In a few short years, we’ve moved from Web pages, email, and banner ads, to search marketing, social networks, RSS feeds, blogs, microblogs, and mobile applications.
It’s an exciting time to be a marketer.
This is where marketing automation becomes indispensable. It is your publishing and distribution system. It must help you manage a stream of content delivered through a variety of channels and track results along the way. Your investment in publishing automation will also allow you to test multiple versions of your content to see which affects your KPIs most positively.
Your System Should Be Easy to Use
You should be able to intuitively setup a variety of content campaigns and see the results. The days of the “launch and watch” website are over. In most industries changes must now come weekly or daily.
Your System Should Not Be a Silo
Producers will need appropriate access to create and stage new content. It should be easy for members of the team to check content and settings to ensure the campaign will launch successfully.
Your System Should Offer a Variety of Metrics
Each content format and channel will be measured differently. You must be able to track downloads of whitepapers. You must be able to track the conversion rates of email-based content. You must be aware of how often a link is shared on social networks.
Needless to say, you will need some help coordinating all of this activity and measuring the results. And this leads us to the another one of the online marketing strategy components. If you aren’t intimate with your marketing automation tool, you’re not doing performance marketing.
Online Marketing Strategy Components: Measuring and Optimizing
Putting the analytics and processes in place to measure the effectiveness of your efforts. This often means designing your online presence differently to enable tracking of visitor behavior. Testing your assumptions is the only way to achieve the high conversion rates that make you seem invincible to your competitors. This is how you reduce the cost of all online marketing efforts.
At the pinnacle of the online marketing strategy components is optimization.
Optimization involves making changes based on the metrics you’ve captured.
Every communication is a test.
Each time you send a communication, you are testing a set of assumptions – assumptions about what your prospects want and need in their buying process, about the format of the content, and about the places they want to consume it.
Every communication can tell us the “why” of our success or failure.
For each communication, you must devise a strategy to measure the effectiveness of the content. Each communication will have a set of primary KPIs.
An email newsletter may invite readers to purchase a new line of shoes, and to join your Facebook page as well. If the primary goal is to sell shoes, you must be able to measure the conversion rate of the email.
It isn’t sufficient to increase sales of the shoe. You must have a strategy to know how many sales were generated by this email.
Watch the Results
The final step of each communication – the step too often overlooked – is reviewing your results. When the communication has run its course, you simply look at the KPIs to learn the secrets desires of your audience.
Your marketing automation system should provide easy drill-down to the metrics that define the success of each effort.
The Online Marketing Strategy Components You Need to Master: Conclusions
You are sitting in the monthly executive meeting. You have created a slide deck with your top-level KPIs as reported by your marketing automation system. They are a summary of how your individual efforts have affected the bottom line.
When the questions come, you know the “why” and the “what’s next” for your marketing efforts. “Why did our conversion rates go down, but our revenue go up?” the VP of Sales asks.
You know the answer. You tick off the four or five programs that delivered solid results, and then list those that drew unqualified traffic to the site, stating that they will be modified or discontinued.
You’re a performance marketer.
The Business that Knows Grows
Each item of content you produce will have different versions, be available through multiple channels, and will be measured differently. Today’s online businesses won’t function without a useful marketing automation system, a tool that be used by many members of the team.
The Online Marketing Strategy Components aren’t linear, and businesses can expand their capabilities in any of these areas.
However, those businesses that dominate in their industry through online marketing will be proficient in all of the capabilities presented here.
Online Marketing Strategy Components Resources
For an explanation of KPIs read “Web Analytics 2.0: The Art of Online Accountability and Science of Customer Centricity” by Avinash Kaushik.
To develop touchpoint personas, read “Waiting for Your Cat to Bark?: Persuading Customers When They Ignore Marketing” by Bryan Eisenberg, Jeffrey Eisenberg and Lisa T. Davis.
For designing measurable social media campaigns, read “Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day” by Dave Evans
Online Marketing Strategy Components: Don’t Worry
The good news is that the folks at SiteTuners.com, lead by the always brilliant Tim Ash have put together the Conversion Conference.
The attendees will be leading the online charge in each of their industries.
I can think of no better way to get up the many learning curves that your conversion practice needs than this two day conference.
Topics at Conversion Conference include:
You’ve likely read books written by some of the Conversion Conference Speakers, like Landing Page Optimization and Web Design for ROI. There’s no question that the speakers at this conference are the folks you want to be learning from. Check it out. You can even save $250 if you use promo code CCE650 when you register on the Conversion Conference website.
If you won’t be there, I pray that your competitors won’t be either.
P. S. I do a complete writeup of the Online Marketing Strategy Components in The Quintessential Marketing Automation Guidebook, Conversion Stack: Marketing Automation for Performance Marketers. It is free and you should find it enlightening.
What Would You Tell a Printer in this Digital Age?
Conversion Marketing StrategyNatives viewing the new world.
To my digital natives and online tribesman everywhere:
What would you tell the printing industry if you had one hour with them?
Think about it: The Printing Industry has been communicating with the world for centuries. While you could argue that they seem slow in adopting digital channels, I would argue that we’ve completely blocked print from our consciousness.
There is an ocean between our peoples.
I have an hour with the Printing Industries of America when I keynote their Converge Conference 2010. Attendees are the boldest of their members, the ones who are looking closely at cross-media business strategies.
Ultimately, I want to understand where the missed opportunities are. When we cross that ocean, what magical happens?
Colonizing the Digital New World
Here’s the setup I’m using for our printing-side brethren:
Welcome to the Digital New World! I am an ambassador for the people of this land. You have traveled far, across the mighty Sea of Apathy to arrive in this place. You have proven yourself as brave explorers. I am here to welcome you and show you around.
We have studied your strange ways and have seen the devices you have that display content without batteries or plugs. I’m sure we seem strange to you as well. Our customs are very different, but we have the same goals: understanding and prosperity.
During your visit, we will examine the differences between us, but more importantly, we will find new opportunities to work together; to combine your “old world” wisdom with our “new world” technology and to build great businesses.
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Social Media Measurement Plan: Why It’s OK to be the Rainman
Conversion Marketing StrategyIn my last Conversion Science column I introduced you to the social media landing page. This landing page has the power to bring social media conversations to a measurable, business-building conversion. Let me show you how to develop the perfect social media measurement plan.
Social media is very important to us at Conversion Sciences. We know that education is the key to changing the web into a place where people find what they are looking for and reward companies for being so darn helpful.
Social media is a great way for us to share our educational and (hopefully) helpful stories, posts, columns and presentations. But to know how our efforts are performing, we need to create a social media measurement plan.
Why It’s OK to be the Rainman of Social Media
However, we aren’t really that good at social media conversations. It may come as no surprise that, as scientists, we are like the Rainman of social media. Like Raymond from the move, we are capable of amazing feats of insight and intelligence, but we often miss important social cues, especially when interactions occur 140 characters at a time.
“I’m an excellent Tweeter”
“I’m an excellent dancer.”
Given the fact that people like us sometimes have awkward digital interactions, you may not invite us to your swanky party. However, you certainly want us to participate in your social graph.
People like us provide an important service to the social spheres. Our content-oriented social media strategy feeds those who rely on social media for education and elucidation.
If you spend the bulk of your social time interacting with individuals, you are probably using a conversation-oriented social media strategy.
Choose the right social strategy
A conversion is more than just a conversation without the T&A.
In our studies, we have observed two broad categories of social media behavior:
While the posts, pictures and pokes that make up an online conversation certainly qualify as “content,” we distinguish conversational content from content that is specifically designed to educate, entertain or inform on a particular subject area.
This article is “content.” The comments you will inevitably leave are “conversation.”
We have found that content-oriented social strategies lead to more measurable campaigns. Plus, many conversion scientists don’t have the social skills to implement a conversation-oriented strategy.
Conversation-oriented social media
This strategy centers around conversations. It typically involves one or more personalities that interact with individuals in the social graph. This strategy is ideal for improving customer support, building awareness, personal branding and image marketing.
Conversations may involve content, but it is the interactions that are front-and-center in this strategy.
Results are typically measured using predictive metrics, such as friends, followers, likes, bookmarks, retweets and reach. These soft metrics are often more satisfying to us than definitive metrics such as leads, sales, and conversion rate.
I admire people like Kate Buck Jr. who make this strategy really work for their business and their clients.
Content-oriented social media
Unlike conversation-oriented strategies, this approach focuses on content as we’ve defined it here: communication that is designed to educate, entertain or inform. This strategy is ideal for lead generation, thought-leadership and building targeted social channels.
Content-oriented conversations don’t focus on the authoring brand or individual. Instead, these conversations circle around the content itself. This content will spur conversations, and ideally will be passed around, expanding our reach.
Of greatest interest to conversion scientists is that content draws visitors to social landing pages, where conversion beacons can drive business-building conversions.
Develop the Perfect Social Media Measurement Plan
It’s possible to automate and centralize the measurement of social media marketing efforts, in part thanks to a wireless tracking device that we attach to each status update, tweet and email that ties conversions to specific social conversations. Here’s how.
Step 1: Create some content.
The catch with the content-oriented strategy is that you must create content. Frequency is up to you. In a sixty-plus day experiment conducted here in the labs, five articles and seven blog posts drove 145 status updates, tweets, emails, Flickr images, etc.
We focused on articles that I write at The Conversion Scientist blog, that I contribute here at Search Engine Land and that I contribute at other venues such as ClickZ and the Content Marketing Institute.
Step 2: Devise a way to measure results.
To measure results, traffic must arrive on one of our instrumented pages. However, some of the content we used lived on other sites.
Our strategy was to create a social media landing page for each of our “off-world” articles in the form of a blog post. These posts teased the article and linked to it.
While we announce each new article through our social networks, the bulk of our marketing drove friends and followers to the blog post.
Right now, Google Analytics is our favorite single point of collection because of its content filtering and segmented reports.
For click tracking, Bit.ly still can’t be beat for its flexibility and integration with so many tools.
Step 3: Market each content item as if each was its own product.
Each of these content items gets a multi-network, multi-touch treatment designed to expose the maximum number of our friends and followers to this content. We maintain small but targeted social graphs on Facebook (<1000), Twitter (<2000) and LinkedIn (>1000).
On Facebook we did a single status post to my profile as well as “The Conversion Scientist” and “Web Strategies for Business” pages.
On Twitter each content item got between two and four tweets. We tried simply repeating the tweets as well as composing a series of unique tweets.
We did one LinkedIn status update, but did not post discussions on LinkedIn groups because the process couldn’t be automated. We’re looking for tools to help with this.
Several items got supporting posts on our predecessor site, the Customer Chaos blog.
All of this may sound like a lot of work. That is why we need tools to automate the process. Right now, Austin-based Spredfast seems to have the best support of the social networks we use, as well as one great collection point for analytics from across our social graph. Hootsuite is an alternative for those focusing on Twitter.
Note: We turned off all of our cross-network services, such as Ping.fm to implement this strategy.
Step 4: Attach a wireless tracking device.
This is real Hollywood stuff.
The most important feature of our measurement strategy is a wireless tracking device that we attached to each post, tweet, email and image. This is the secret sauce that enables the report shown above.
Bit.ly is the carrier for this wireless device. Google’s link tagging feature provides the micro circuitry.
Each post, tweet, image and email carries with it the following micro-coded information:
As an example, here is the fully instrumented URL for the link-tagging spreadsheet offered in this column.
The URL builder provided by Google is quite unsatisfying for us, so we’ve developed a special Google Analytics link tagging spreadsheet that you can use to create and track your micro-coded addresses.
Next time, I’ll show you the queries and reports that reveal which content, social networks and conversations generate the most email subscriptions for us.
In the mean time, let me know the social media distribution and tracking tools that you use and love in the comments section below.
Article originally published on my Search Engine Land column “The Perfect Social Media Measurement Strategy.”
Brian Massey
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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
21 Quick and Easy CRO Copywriting Hacks
Keep these proven copywriting hacks in mind to make your copy convert.
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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.