Think bigger

A website is ultimately about a conversation – with clients, employees and potential customers. And while a team of skilled designers and programmers can build you an interactive website based on tested brand strategies and innovative design, it’s all for nought if the copy, or content, doesn’t engage your customers and fulfil their needs.

Today’s blog post is a guest piece by our mate Frank Gibson.  

I asked Frank to contribute because holes exist in the commerical strength of numerous websites due to poor content (sadly, many of those we’ve made too).  Thanks from all at FM for shedding some professional light on the issues…

Glen Johnson

Frank continues…:

As they say in the classics, “content is king”.

Potential customers might enjoy the impressive graphics and ease of navigation of your website but they have to find it first!

The right combination of words will not only help sell your product, but will help optimise what the search engine sees. When the impressively named Googlebot crawls your site to determine its ranking it looks at the content of your pages – which is why the actual copy is so important.

Keys to effective copy

Writing effective web copy is the art of integrating succinct, informative content with intelligent and tested keywords, while channeling prospects to make a purchase or to respond in some way.

Content

While you may have a lot to say about your company or product, nobody really wants to read it all online. Customers want concise information grabs that lead them on to the next important point. As in any conversation, your copy needs to be a logical journey without all the waffle.

Bullet points and highlights are very effective as they:

• Focus on the key points
• Are easy to read
• Stand out on the page
• But don’t make them too long… or they won’t get read!

Provide high-quality content on your pages, especially your homepage, and update the content regularly. This is a vital part of any SEO and will deliver a greater site ranking and increased traffic. Just throwing in keywords will do you more harm than good.

The more useful information your pages contain, the more visitors they will attract which will entice webmasters to link to your site.

Structure

Your copy has to be concise, but it has to make sense and always be going somewhere. If you want to go into depth about a particular point, add a link to another page.

Establish your structure early so you and your reader know where you are and where you are going. Start wide, then focus down to an end point. Each page should lead you to the same end point, whatever that may be.

Conversion

Whether you are seeking a donation, making a sale or just gathering names for a database, you want an outcome (or your website is just a very expensive notice board).

Direct marketing perfected the “call to action” years ago.

Act Now! is a powerful motivator. Don’t be afraid to tell your customers what you want them to do next. Register today! Just make it easy for them to take the next step. Click here!

If you have the right content and structure in place, and you gently lead your customer to the checkout, the final outcome, or conversion, should be a breeze.

Conclusion

When developing a website, the content has to be a major priority –  so you should consider the SEO implications from the very beginning. They should inform your keywords and your copy, all of which will help you create a logical flow that leads more customers to your site and increases your conversion uptake.

A word of warning: While nobody knows your business better than you, it doesn’t mean you should write your own website. That’s what specialists are for.

I met with an up-and-coming designer yesterday.  Young guy, plenty of enthusiasm, passion for design, but missing some of the fundamentals and bones of design.  We discussed having a rationale for design, creating solutions that were driven by synthesised ideas; be they observations of nature, life, or process…

Basically, I tried to express that there should be a philosophy behind his work and that he needs a body of evidence regarding that in terms of an expression of applying that philosophy.  It was a pretty heavy set of advice but I had hoped to get him on track at a root level.

Anyway, after chatting for a while he mentioned a new group that had been forming in the north of Tasmania for Web Professionals and that the group had asked “are there any real web strategists in Tasmania”?  To which my young associate had said “yes, I know one”.

It reminded me that we’re thin on the ground here in Hobart.

Considering the designer in front of me and how he’d arrived at calling himself ‘a designer’ it occurred to me there’s a number of ‘web strategists’ or ‘digital strategists’ popping up too.  And, I’d argue with a great weight of evidence in my pocket that these self-proclaimed ‘web strategists’ suffered from the same founding issues as the designer in front of me.

It sounds cool to be a digital strategist doesn’t it?

Sums it up pretty well really.

The emergence of web strategists / digital strategists

This is not a new title.  Go back in time to big tech companies of the last decade and they’ve been around for ages.

I remember meeting with a director of a recruitment firm 4 years ago and said to him “keep an eye out for the emergence of a new role that will become very important in the crossover of marketing to digital – digital strategists”.  I stated that there would be few but they’d be of high demand as media convergence became common place.  I expected a bit of gold fever by the end of last decade.

Where there’s a gold rush the mining experts (or should I say hopefuls) emerge.  And, with there still being limited web education processes I haven’t seen a Web Strategy Degree being offered at Uni.  We have to piece the role together through specialisation in certain areas.

Is web strategy and digital strategy just gobbledegook for online marketer?

There are plenty of people around that have been commercially involved with the web for some time now and the role is often bandied about and usually in the context of marketing.

But is a digital strategist just about marketing?

What I’m observing at the moment is this:

1. Ran a website before
2. Been involved in planning a website
3. Taken a website from concept to go live state
4. Done a bit of digital marketing i.e. ran a few SEM campaigns in Adwords
5. Created a facebook page or similar
6. Maybe worked in or ran a project team

Done those things more than once and you might call yourself a digital strategist.

Well to the low end of the market you’d clearly know much more than the average bear.  But you’d fall well short of my view of a digital strategist.

What characteristics and experience do we look for in digital strategy development people?

Strong depth of knowledge of the following:

1. Business process, business models, and business fundamentals including budgeting and financial flows
2. Marketing process, brand development, brand strategy, path to market, value propositions, productisation and product / service segmentation, market trends, direct marketing, digital marketing, and convergence of media platforms.
3. Creative direction, visual differentiation, market relevance, marketing platform integration and cohesion
4. User behaviour, usability testing, demographics, recruitment of test subjects, focus group management and unbiased processing of user feedback
5. Technical development, web technologies, mobile technologies, understanding the software development lifecycle
6. Systems integration, database development, data warehousing, and back-end platforms such as CRM and core business software.
7. Project Management, stakeholder management, methodologies such as agile, communications strategies, risk management, and governance.
8. Social Media, influence, viral, and touch points.
9. Conversion methodology, persuasion architecture, design optimisation.
10. Reporting metrics; not just traffic and conversion but behaviour interpretation, and how to leverage this
11. Consulting frameworks and processes for extracting organisational needs and converting them to digital roadmaps.
12. And more I’ve probably looked over…

And if you really want to set all that apart: 

1. Innovation capacity, ability to distil concepts into commercially applicable but boundary pushing results, an ability to step back and see the big picture and the trends
2. Hands on experience in architecting, designing, developing actual solutions
3. Leadership capacity to drive multiple stakeholders, teams, suppliers, and resources to common goals.

Lastly, how much experience is required?  How did the ‘web strategist’ earn their title?  What body of work shows their credibility?

That’s up to you to decide.

So is digital strategy all about marketing?

In many ways I’d have to say yes as sales drive organisations BUT sales don’t equal profits.  Profit comes from so many other areas such as effectiveness of support, service costs, consumer relevance, transactional and operational flow awareness etc.  And, whilst digital strategy work may be seeded by marketing types I believe a proper digital strategist is a helluva lot more than a marketer.

How can you be a master of all these trades I mention?  Won’t they be jack of all and master of none?  Potentially yes.  More likely you’ll find strength in only a handful of the areas I look for.  The ones that can cover all areas well are incredibly rare.

…so, coming back to my young design friend.  He can ‘do’ design but does he have what it takes to put together a design with a rationale and strategically justify how it will work for the client and hence minimise their risk in releasing it?  Not really, and this is what worries me about the emerging ‘web strategists’.

“..if your experience is mostly in offline marketing and you’re about to deal with the web then you need to understand that it’s a platform, it’s like an investment in software, and it needs plenty of work that you may not be used to.”…

Remember the agile approach: test and learn, tweak and try again… Well it’s back on the agenda this week with a new angle.  Sadly the throw away society mentality is ripe in so many organisations. 

Blame the platform rather than the users of it.  Sound familiar?

Point in case : Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra

After more than a year of agreeing to sponsor the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra (TSO) at significant cost to the employees and shareholders of Future Medium, and not to mention the scheduling delays our paying clients experienced while ‘we did good’ for Tasmania, the website has gone out to redevelopment because it doesn’t meet its targets.  See case study.  Incidentally we won’t be bothering to respond and wish the future supplier good health and prosperity.

So back to an old chestnut: selection criteria for web projects and specifically in this case ’being realistic about expectations within your budget’.  This might seem like a rant and a rave  (ooh a party…) but hopefully this comes across as a coherent reaction to this recent experience.

What makes someone throw a functional website away?

Working with the TSO and witnessing a change in marketing management after site release and seeing some ongoing gaps in terms of utilising the platform (that we built) has given me a very close and unfortunately negative experience with sponsoring an organisation’s web needs.  As sponsors we wrote the brief ourselves and did what we thought mattered (validated of course by TSO staff and external marketing consultants…)

So why does a project just go in the bin after such hard work?  I’ve seen this many times before but typically in state government (possibly because there’s a strange detachment from budgets and commercial return backed with a number of I.T. egotisms)… don’t shoot me for saying what we all know to be commonplace.  Private sector tends to view expenditure as an investment, not a bucket that needs emptying each 1/2 FY.  So where does that leave a charity / not-for-profit in terms of asset development?  Somewhere in between or worse than public sector?

Anyway, witnessing this ‘throw-away’ has reiterated the importance of setting criteria and project goals and building a staff and supplier relationship to keep adjusting outcomes towards emerging / previously unknown goals rather than:

STOP, THROW AWAY, and START AGAIN.

So getting back to setting website project expectations

How do we quantify our selection criteria for a website if we’re a traditional marketer and the web has forced upon us new demands as a business?  And, how do we convert that into a logical and reasonable brief for our suppliers?

I’m not going to to claim that any of this thinking is tested, definitive or even logical but merely a bunch of thoughts about the inside of a ‘marketers’ head when it comes to web criteria.  Notice I haven’t said ‘web-marketers’ criteria:  I’m questioning “what goes through the mind of an old school marketing person when they think web”?

First of all let’s pretend we know nothing about technology, have no grounding in the complexities of data storage, end user devices, or any idea at all how to build a website (‘cos that’s someone else’s issue) but we have been charged with the responsibility of pushing out products & services through the web as one of our channels.

What would our agenda be?

Image (right content, product, and style) + flexibility (ability to change at will and in any way my marketing heart desires)

If we get those right (and our product is desirable) and we use our traditional thinking of getting people to look at it then we’ll get a financial return right? (well maybe not…. but bear with me and assume so)

How important is ‘image’ to my market segment?

Let’s question the ‘image’ criteria; it brings all sorts of things to mind:

• Brand,
• Photos,
• Style,
• Content,
• Copy-writing,
• Dynamism, and
• Interactivity

What does our market segment want? Or what will they accept if I can’t give them all the bells from Christmas or the lights of Las Vegas?

I like to work on continuum’s when I conceptualise something and let’s work from ‘trash-to-great’.  What is acceptable for our market segment?

How much flexibility does my market segment need?

I need to be able to be up-to-date and changing.  My market will typically expect that – remember this is the web - it’s the saviour of all print’s failings in terms of currency of data.  But I’ve got a problem…

Image and Flexibility are inextricably linked

You can’t have a progressive web image without changing to align with market needs, inspiring the market etc., and of course this means flexibility. But poorly managed flexibility will probably damage your image so what’s the right balance?

 

The Axis of Greatness

So if image and flexibility are inextricably linked and I’m certain that these criteria will drive my marketing effectiveness, and thus financial/economic return, then all that needs to be considered is my investment:

(yes it looks like a penis … I meant that).

So in this line of thinking the more I invest (resources: cash and people time) then the more flexible my solution can be and the better my solutions image will be … OK.  Seems fair.  So really it looks like this:

 

The website challenge: injecting the right resource skill and commitment to achieve greatness

So if money were no option and I could buy all the resources I needed and commit them to the project could I achieve greatness because I could have a great image and be flexible?  Yes probably, in fact no reason why not if you know how to manage them to that outcome … but for most of us money is an issue isn’t it.

OK so I’m not Microsoft, GE, or Coke … boo hoo.  but there has to be a sweet spot right?

I believe in the law of diminishing returns (heck, I do up classic cars for a hobby and no - the last 1 extra BHP isn’t worth chasing), so somewhere on our continuum from ’shit’-to-’awesome-infinite-love-and-happiness’ (which of course has a relationship to resources) I reckon we can find a way to balance out our suppliers and internal capabilities to get a good compromise … I mean result … sorry.

Defining the sweet spot in resourcing our project to achieve greatness on the web

I want brand integrity, quick time to market, good cost/return ratio and great user interactions.

At this point I’ll switch out of being the marketer looking for a website solution and tell you specifically what drives each of these:

Integrity: comes from being consistent and of course ethical and transparent - which would involve being ‘on message’ and not pushing other agendas than the one I’m known for.

Quick time-to-market: comes from systematising all known characteristics of business needs using tools, processes and matched resource allocation (maintenance and burst capacity).

Return on investment: is driven by so many aspects and I’ll assume that traffic is being generated, social media is being harnessed to drive qualified leads, and that offline media is busting its unquantifiable, expensive balls to throw a wide net (full of holes),and that with all those things being sorted my ROI focusses squarely on production effectiveness and management prowess.

With all other ducks properly in a row then we get left with the supplier relationship.  It’s a plant in your organisations garden and it needs the same water and nutrients that all your other plants (staff etc.) need.  If you feed your plant (supplier) different food, only some of the food, or give it less light and less water then it won’t be as great as it should be, it certainly won’t be harmonious and well … you get the picture.  You might even create a weed (certainly something you don’t value).

If you want a mushroom then stick it in the dark and feed it poop …  Presumably you don’t want a mushroom so focus on cultivating something greener and more attractive!

Great user interaction is going to need MORE THAN all the market knowledge you’ve got in your office filing cabinet.  It needs the experiences of all your customer-facing staff, it needs independently verified external opinions to give objectivity, yes it needs management input and it needs a committed approach to building the right tools (functions) and keeping it in tune.  This will never be right first time but you can tweak it and keep testing and learning.

Also great user interaction isn’t solely the job of your supplier.  The supplier gives tools to work towards this but if you truly want customer engagement then you’ll need to push your staff to keep this on the boil. Or engage someone to do that as an outsourced channel manager.

So how good are your staff at fulfilling that role?  Remember you’ve got to allocate someone to the job and if you don’t ask a supplier to specifically do that you’ll get a weak outcome.

Summing up

Is it fair to expect image and flexibility to create results or did we miss out on the solid process, planning, supplier relations, and investment required to create a great result?

My point here is that if your experience is mostly in offline marketing and you’re about to deal with the web then you need to understand that it’s a platform, it’s like an investment in software, and it needs plenty of work that you may not be used to.

If you’re aware of your skill gaps then you need to trust your suppliers.  Obviously back to the example of our sponsorship deal with the TSO we didn’t get that bit right.

Anecdotally, in closing, what can we expect from spending little if we’re a not-for-profit?

The grass is always green ‘there’ isn’t it ? Even if you are for-profit?

We all want to love the outcome but are all limited by cost; unless you’re a charity and get sponsored.  If someone sponsors you and gives you the solution you’re in a rare situation and presumably you ‘needed the help’.  Ironically those who don’t pay tend not to value and in this case an investment in the web may not be seen as a platform from which to build on.  Does sponsorship give rise to the luxury to throw it away and ‘dream again’?

When you wrote your project brief and criteria did you think ‘this is the be-all to end-all’ or did you think this is ‘a journey I’m starting on and I’ll keep investing, testing, tweaking my people and my processes to the outcome I want’?

How far does the agile methodology have to reach to get commercial results?  I’ve learnt from this sponsorship deal that both the client and the supplier need to embrace agile from the start.  Not in part or on one side.  And, trust has to be the basis for the working relationship.