Group items tagged

"I may have an answer to your questions."

Doesn't this sound hopeful? And you do. Whatever industry you are in, it is fundamentally your duty to understand your market's problems and to figure out how to solve them. The philosophy of content marketing is that teaching prospects about their problems is as important as teaching them about your solutions.

So, if you have some helpful knowledge that helps prospects solve problems, how are you letting them know that you're there for them?

Here are twelve ways to call attention to what you offer. Then you can let the content speak volumes for your solutions.

Bryan and Jeffery Eisenberg often say, "You can't read the label from inside the bottle." It means that you can't really see the solution to a problem if you're too close to it.

This may be a good argument for bringing in consultants for your most important business processes. After working with a client for a year or more, we often find ourselves inside the bottle with them and have to get outside influences to read the label.

Apparently, there is a firm psychological principle at work here that can be measured. What does the label say on your business bottle?

I love it when designers talk about hypotheses and tests. "I use this process to help teams frame their work as a business problem to solve (rather than a solution to implement) and then dissect that business problem into its core assumptions. We then weave those assumptions into hypotheses. Finally, we design experiments to test our riskiest hypotheses."

In their own words:8. Conversion Sciences Blog Conversion Sciences is another A/B testing conversion optimization agency that has stood the test of time (it was founded in 2007). In this blog you can find some remarkable and noteworthy ideas about A/B testing and conversion optimization. What to read: AB Testing JavaScript: Great Power, Great ProblemsHow to Avoid Mobile-Friendly Redesign DisastersAB Testing Inspiration: Using Emotional TriggersHow Google Reviews Drive Conversions for Local Businesses

Your brain works on two systems, one of which is the "adult" -- critical, discerning, investigative -- and the other which is "intuitive." While the intuitive just wants to have fun, the Adult shows up when there is a problem. If you are appealing to the intuitive with your website, don't do things that cause problems, otherwise, mommy will show up and ruin the fun.

If none of this makes sense, please just read this interesting article based on Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.

@sethgodin says awareness isn't a scalable problem to solve. As website optimizers, we couldn't agree more. He continues. "The solution lies in re-organizing your systems, in re-creating your product or service so that it becomes worth talking about." ...or in making your website so intuitive that it isn't worth complaining about. --Brian

The echo chamber is alive and well in the Conversion Optimization world. @richpage has noticed how few of us are searching for CRO and "conversion rate optimization" on Google. What gives?

To quote Bryan Eisenberg, "Most websites don't have a traffic problem. Every site has a conversion problem."

If you're waiting to put conversion optimization to work on your site, the least you can do is help us spread the word. Click through for some very interesting statistics.

Google Analytics can intimidate business managers, but it really is a tool to help business managers answer important questions. This overview from @lisabarone gives you  an idea of some of the good questions you can be asking your Web team to help you guide your online investments.

Forms are a key component of Landing Pages (in addition to Offer, Image, Trust and Proof). When a visitor considers completing a form — for lead gen, to subscribe or to purchase — it is the moment of truth.

So, it is sad that so many forms work to chase these ready customers and prospects away.

This article will give you some things to consider as you guide development of your website forms in these areas: Right time of informing about problems/success Right place for validation messages Right color Clear language

In my new book, I talk about the importance of having Marketing Batteries that store visitors attention for you to use over and over. The "Subscriber Battery" is your email list. The "Social Battery" will include your Twitter followers.

The problem with the Social Battery is that it discharges unreliably compared to the Subscriber Battery. As a result I recommend converting your social networks to email contacts. This charges your Subscriber Battery from your Social Battery.

Here is a great set of tactics to get more email subscribers from Twitter.

We can detect pages with low scroll rates using click-tracking software like CrazyEgg. When we see a page with poor scroll performance, we have two options: Move key content higher on the pageAdd cues to increase scrollingHere are some ideas for how to increase scrolling.

WORD OF WARNING

Use of animations and parallax should be used with extreme caution. Test into these treatments as they may detract from your content, and introduce technical problems on certain devices and browsers.

This article lists to the problems will be solving in 2017: marketers are stuck in data collection mode, and not data use mode; and that marketing software is too damn hard to use. We want to show marketers how to use data to make great decisions. And until the tools get easier-to-use, we provide the teams that know how to turn the knobs pull the levers and make these tools work well.

I love the phrase "Mystery Meat" for undecipherable icons used in mobile apps. Enjoy the read from Teo Yu Siang.

It's great to optimize  high-traffic websites, but the traffic brings it own set of analysis problems. In particular, the number of things you can test goes up, the amount of data goes up and finding insights becomes more and more difficult. Excel is a great tool, but I'm looking for some tools to help cut the analysis time. Here is a nice list of free tools that I will be exploring over the coming weeks.

If all problems are opportunities, then error messages and error pages are generally missed opportunities. Marketing should be policing the errors reported on their website, messages that are usually written by a techie in IT. John Ekman give us five steps toward writing error messages that say "Yes!" instead of making the visitor feel like an idiot.

We tracked the eyes of 22 people as they watched three kinds of video: Talking head video, webinar-style slide video and hand-drawn whiteboard-style video.

What we found out was that a human face is magnetic. Even when props were added, the viewers' gazes returned quickly to the face.

This article on how onscreen talent can hurt your product demo videos echoes our findings.

Yes, humans love human faces. We gaze at them and examine them. Unfortunately, this is a problem when we want someone to look at something else.

The Penn and Teller magic video in this article is worth the trip.

@pallavkaushish offers a nice check list for things to test. However, you should use this list to develop a list of hypotheses. Rather than just testing these, use your analytics to see if these might really be the problem.

I would add one more to the top of the list: headlines and copy around calls to action. This has proven more effective than testing CTA buttons for us.

Earlier this week, one of our partners sent over some copy for me to review. In one of the headlines, they had used the term "end-to-end," as in, "An end-to-end solution for your problem."

I told them that terms like "end-to-end" are cliche, and have basically lost all meaning because of overuse. My friend asked, "Why is that?"

This article from Copyblogger answers that question. Our brains are designed to filter out the familiar, the predictable or what is perceived as familiar and predictable.

Read on to find out how you can save your copy from the parts of the brain that keep your messages from getting in.

The key insight that I got from this @copyblogger post is that, regardless of our "resting" personality type, we are different when doing different activities. My Myers-Briggs type pegs me as generally an "Environmental" type. However, when I'm researching, I'm generally "Fantastical" (and I'm not just complimenting myself). When I'm writing I'm getting my "Structural" on. In short, we can't treat people as one personality type. We change from channel to channel. What are the four personality types when people are solving the problems your business solves?

Here is a different way of looking at the personalities of the people who are visiting your Web site. Remember, peoples' personalities change when they are problem solving on the Web. Don't think about their normal personality type. Think about how they are going to act when visiting your site in particular.