This is part of chapter 23 of Louis Gudema’s Bullseye Marketing book, which is available on Amazon

There is perhaps no more common saying in business than “our people are what make us great.” That is certainly true when it comes to marketing. No matter how much marketing technology you implement, or data you acquire, the difference between failure, meh, and great success is always going to be who is using them and how.

The quill pen is one of the easiest writing devices to use, but it was how Shakespeare used it that made all the difference.

When I asked CMO Jeanne Hopkins, who was interviewed in chapter 3, “You’ve got all these issues around the search marketing channel, online advertising, social media marketing. And then you’ve got offline things: you’ve got print, and direct mail, and radio, TV, and everything. So where do you start?”

Without hesitation she answered, “So that is a phenomenal question. And I think you have to start with the team.”

So invest the time and effort to hire the right people, and give them the support they need to succeed.

The skills needed

The marketing team today needs a wider range of skills than ever before. Many of the skills are new, but they don’t replace earlier ones. They are additive.

Marketers have always needed to be good at:

  1. Understanding the customer’s motivators and emotions
  2. Planning how to reach customers with messages
  3. Writing and developing creative
  4. Graphic design
  5. Events
  6. Project management
  7. PR and other corporate communications

Expertise might also include marketing channel knowledge, such as how to excel with print, direct mail, or billboards, and how to manage partner and channel marketing and other programs.

A modern marketing team also needs expertise (occasionally or always) in:

  1. Website design and development
  2. Conversion rate optimization
  3. Email marketing
  4. Marketing automation
  5. Remarketing
  6. Account based marketing
  7. Online events
  8. Analytics

And that’s just for the center of the Bullseye!

In the second phase you’ll need to add skill in search advertising and other intent-based programs. And in Phase 3 add skills in social media, deeper content marketing, display ads, other channels and attribution modeling.

Some team members will come to marketing from the traditional creative-first side, whereas others will be much more comfortable and experienced with technology and data. It’s important that you create an environment of mutual respect. Both have much to contribute, and for your marketing programs to succeed people with both backgrounds – and blends of the two – must feel comfortable and respected when contributing.

Staff, agency or consultants?

Unless you, or someone on your team, have very deep, modern marketing experience, it should be clear by now that you shouldn’t attempt to do all this, or even lead all this, on your own. You don’t want to spend months and months trying to learn what others have taken years to learn — and repeating their early mistakes. Either hire a head of marketing or an experienced marketing consultant to get you started.

It’s common now for companies that are just ramping up their marketing programs to use an interim head of marketing for 6-12 months, or longer, to develop and begin to implement their strategy. This may not necessarily even be a full-time person. In a small company, a one-quarter or one-third time person may be able to produce results, build confidence in the program, and help hire a permanent person to head the effort.

Initially, you may not want to add many people to your headcount and so may want to use more part-time consultants. Many experienced consultants are available in most major cities. You also can find experienced people with marketing skills on Upwork.com, Guru.com, and similar sites. Be sure to go with people with excellent reviews by many clients; let others check out the newbies. You can ask people questions before you hire them, and how helpful they are in this stage may predict what they will be like to work with, too.

You may want to keep creative positions, especially writing, in-house so that the people doing them can learn more about your customers and offerings and improve their work over time. As your program scales, you may need full-time employees, contractors or agencies to manage specialized programs such as managing search ads or large scale email programs.

Culture eats strategy for breakfast.

Management guru Peter Drucker once wrote, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” And it’s true. The best plans will go nowhere if your people aren’t behind them.

You may not be able to change your company culture overnight, but you should be able to help build a great culture in your group. Some of the elements of a great culture include:

Values

The company should have values beyond “make a profit.” Let your people know why you exist and what you plan to achieve. Many people care more about the Why than the What.

For example, Apple is about more than creating computers or electronics. Steve Jobs’ vision included developing tech products that are easier to use and more elegant. Walmart’s Values include:

  • Service to the Customer
  • Respect for the Individual
  • Strive for Excellence
  • Act with Integrity

These values should be incorporated into your marketing narrative, too.

Collaboration and Camaraderie

Hire people who not just can work together, but enjoy working with others. I can remember just one time when I got a bad reference for a potential hire. I asked his former boss, “Would you hire him again?” and, after a pause, she said, “No, no we wouldn’t.” When I asked why, she said, “Because what he really wants to do is sit off by himself and write code all day, and we need people who can work in a team.” So did I; I didn’t hire him.

This camaraderie isn’t simply “let’s play foosball” or “let’s get a drink after work,” although those may have their place. I’m talking about people who respect one another and work together to achieve common goals.

Here’s a few possible interview question:

  • Describe a scenario where schedules shift and the applicant won’t be able to meet all of their deadlines; then ask them what they would do in that situation. Don’t accept “I’d work harder”; it’s not going to be possible to get everything done. The answer that you’re looking for is something like, “I’d go to my boss, explain the situation, and ask how they want to prioritize the work.” That’s the answer of a team player.
  • Ask who was the best boss they ever had and why. Their answer to the “why” may tell you if they are going to work well with their boss at your company.
  • Ask about the best workplace teamwork that they ever experienced, and what made that team successful.

Learning

All companies need people who are committed to life-long learning, and that’s especially important in marketing. In your job interview, you could ask what they are studying and how they go about keeping up with advances in their field. Develop a culture in your team in which failure is not only accepted but expected – zero failures means that you’re not trying anything new. But people need to learn from their failures; what isn’t accepted is failing in the same way twice. Your company should also support learning with stipends to take courses or attend conferences.

Responsibility

You want people who take initiative and responsibility.

Here’s a possible interview question related to responsibility: Ask the person to describe something that they did – in or out of work – that they’re especially proud of. Then ask them to describe something they did that failed and why it failed. (Don’t accept, “I can’t think of a failure that I’ve had.”) In their answer, they should describe, without you prompting it, what they did wrong to contribute to or produce that failure. If instead, they blame the failure on co-workers and clients, that’s a bad sign.

Your company may have other values than these. Make sure that your policies and incentives align with your values, and that you look for people for your team that appreciate and support those values, too.

How Jeff Bezos changed the culture of The Washington Post

In October 2013, Jeff Bezos bought the unprofitable Washington Post.

Within three years its Web traffic had doubled, subscriptions were way up, and their smaller staff was posting far more online content than The New York Times and even BuzzFeed. And they were profitable. Licensing their new, speedy content management system to other newspapers was being considered as an auxiliary source of revenue, similar to how Amazon Web Services (AWS) produces revenue for Amazon.

Central to this turnaround was a change in the culture of The Post. It’s very hard to change a culture.

CIO Shailesh Prakash and Director of Product Joey Marburger offer many insights into how the company changed in a Columbia Journalism Review interview

Culture: (Marburger) It’s been three years since Jeff bought us. I’d say we’d probably be where we are maybe five to seven years from now. And who knows if we would’ve done half of what we’ve gotten done. But Jeff didn’t just reach down to the newsroom and say here’s a brand-new culture, here’s a bunch of things you should do, here’s what Amazon does, so you should copy it. The sheer thought of him spread throughout the company. Overnight, we thought there wasn’t much we couldn’t do

Compensation: (Prakash) The number one criteria that grows our compensation used to be operating income. Did you or did you not hit the operating income target that was agreed upon at the beginning of the year? It was crystal clear whether you got your bonus or not. We were all in it together. When revenue was slowing and operating income is the target, then what do you do? You cut costs. There’s no other way out.

When Jeff bought us, within about six months, he threw that out. Now there are three other criteria. It’s basically: How fast do you move? It’s very subjective. The second one is that there are no sacred cows, to push experimentation. The third thing is debate, but commit. So you can argue all you want, but once we agree, then there’s no undermining. Those are the three things that now very subjectively drive the compensation.

Technology: (Prakash) It’s been proven over and over again that speed matters. In some industries, the correlation is more direct, like in retail. You have a site and you change nothing except it becomes much faster, you see the sales change.

If you’re used to a lot of other slow mobile sites out there, specifically news, and you come to us and it’s significantly faster, you may be more likely to come to us on a regular basis. And you’re more likely—which we see already in the data—to consume more content, hit the subscription meter faster, consume more ads, you name it.

User Experience: (Prakash) It was Bezos who brought this up. He said that when Amazon made the Kindle, they didn’t think, ‘Let’s get rid of the book and come up with a new way to read books.’ Their whole approach was, ‘How can we keep everything that’s fantastic about a book and also add in the gifts of digital?’

Market focus: (Prakash) We had for a very long time a tagline that said ‘For and About Washington.’ One of the big changes and explicit changes in strategy has been to go after a national and international audience. One of the things we’ve tried to do is to look at platforms we might be able to over-index on to get there faster. Take Facebook. One in seven humans visits Facebook every day. It’s not possible to grow nationally and internationally if you say, ‘I will send them 10 articles.’ If we want to grow nationally and internationally it is really not an option to just ignore that platform.

Build a diverse team

I already mentioned the diverse skill set needed on a modern marketing team. You should also strive to have a team that’s diverse in other ways. If you’re not fully taking advantage of the skills and potential contributions of women, people of color and older workers, you’re missing out on well over half of the labor force. That’s tying more than one arm behind your back.

When “blind” auditions were introduced for orchestras, where the performer sits behind a screen so their gender, race, and appearance are hidden, the number of women winning competitions for open seats dramatically increased.In a study of thousands of companies, those with a significant number of women in top management tended to be much more profitable.

Diversity is likely to bring in knowledge and positive attitudes that a homogeneous culture doesn’t, and is more likely to make a company better able to take advantage of what everyone can offer. A diverse workforce will have greater insights into the increasingly diverse customer base, too.

I once heard a simple formula for hiring. When you’re hiring there are only three questions that you really need to answer:

  • Can the person do the job? (Do they have the skills, experience, etc.?)
  • Do they want to do the job? (Are they enthusiastic about this job and your company, or are they just looking for a paycheck?)
  • Will they fit in?

And of the three, the last question is the most important.

The last question is the most important when it comes to diversity, too, because having a narrow definition of “fitting in” is the difference between a homogeneous and a diverse workforce.

If you consciously or unconsciously define “fitting in” as people of the same gender, race, class, and age – and similar non-work interests (Go Cubs!) — you will be severely limited in your hiring options. But if you define it as people who share your team’s values and goals and skills, then the future is yours.

As a six-foot, five-inch tall friend of mine says, the fact that tall people make more money than short people shows how far we still are from being a true meritocracy.[iv]

Hire slow, fire fast.

At my marketing agency, I started out hiring fast and firing slowly. Over the dozen years that I ran it I learned to reverse that. Many business leaders believe in “hire slow, fire fast,” too.

So take your time in hiring. Do multiple interviews including several people on your team. Check their references. Give them tests, if appropriate. Be thorough. Get it right. And admit your mistakes quickly when you get it wrong, terminate the person and get the right person in.

That doesn’t mean that if the new hire makes one mistake they’re out the door — unless it’s a really bad mistake. You can give them two or three strikes before they’re out. But explain to them if they do mess up how you do things at your company and what your expectations are. Also, praise what they’re doing well. Famed UCLA basketball coach John Wooden said, “I can’t begin to coach until the player does something right.”

But if it’s clear that they’re not right for your company, then act fast. You don’t have time for underperformers, and your team will appreciate it. A players want to work with other A players,

The vast majority of U.S. companies are privately owned. And when owners decide to sell, they often find that their company doesn’t elicit bids as high as what they want to sell it for. One SMB M&A specialist recently told me that half or more of her clients overestimate the sale value of their company. What’s an owner to do? Continue reading

The evening after Donald Trump was elected president, Teresa Shook got some friends near her home on Maui to show her how to create an event on Facebook. Although usually not very political, she was so upset with Trump’s election that she decided that there should be a march on Washington after the inauguration to protest it. When she went to bed she already had about 40 people coming and 40 maybes. When she woke the next morning it had exploded to 10,000 coming and 10,000 maybes. Continue reading

A few days ago the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus announced that it is closing down. The combined circuses have been operating in one form or another for 146 years.

There was a time when they and other circuses were a big deal, showing their audiences animals and acts from exotic places that they could only dream about. They had a great PR stunt of parading into the town where they were to next perform. Continue reading

This is part of chapter 6 of Louis Gudema’s Bullseye Marketing book, which is available on Amazon.

Conversion rate optimization is one of the most important elements of a Bullseye marketing program. Starting serious marketing efforts without first optimizing your website for conversions is like turning on a spigot and trying to fill a bucket that’s full of holes.

You should always have an objective for people coming to your website. At a minimum, you want to get their contact information and permission to send them updates (aka market to them). Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the practice of constantly improving the rate of people completing your desired actions, whether it’s making a purchase, downloading an ebook, signing up for a webinar, or something else.

The logic of conversion rate optimization is simple: it’s much easier, faster, and cheaper to get twice as many of the people who are already coming to a website to do something than it is to double the number of people coming to the site.

As you’ll see, doubling your conversion rate is not as hard as you might think. And when you do double it, you’ve also cut in half the cost of those web leads or sales. Do I have your attention now?

For example, ecommerce companies know that the vast majority of people who come to their site won’t actually buy something on their first visit, but their lifetime value as a customer will be several times higher if they can get that site visitor’s email address and market to them. So right on their home page many ecommerce sites will interrupt the first time visitor’s buying experience and give them an incentive to provide their email address or text information.

Staples home page

Of course, it’s even better if the site visitors also buy. So ecommerce sites run countless tests regarding pricing, images, colors, layout, and so forth, to encourage that, too. Those all are part of conversion rate optimization.

Direct Marketing Success Factors

Many digital marketing programs are forms of direct marketing. And, in order, the three most important components contributing to the success of direct marketing campaigns are:

  1. List or audience
  2. Offer
  3. Creative

Before going deeper into CRO and other marketing tactics, let’s consider each for a moment because they will impact much of what we do.

List: A direct marketing list is traditionally just that: a list of thousands or millions of people and their addresses and other information. In large-scale consumer direct marketing programs, marketers enrich those lists with such additional information as the consumer’s approximate income, credit rating, type of car that they drive, magazines that they subscribe to, and so on. In a B2B campaign, additional data may include the size and location of the prospect’s company, company’s industry, previous business relationship with the company, title of the person, and much, much more. Some direct marketers add thousands of data points to each profile and use advanced analytics to target their messages.

I’m generally using the term “list” more broadly. I consider a list to be that traditional kind, such as for email marketing and direct mail, but also more broadly your audience. You need to get in front of the right people and get them your website to have Bullseye marketing success.

It’s not always easy. You need to know which industry sites, social media channels, conferences, blogs, magazines, and other communication channels that your customers use. With today’s fractured media landscape, that can be difficult to find out. When interviewing customers about where they get their professional information I’ve had more than one answer, “Google” or “Twitter” – not real helpful.

Offer: Once you’ve found your audience, you need to get them to act. To get people to give up something you value (their money, or their contact information), you need to give them something that they value. That may simply be your product or service, but often it is a discount, information, entertainment – value comes in many forms. You need to understand your customers to know what will move them to act. You then use calls to action — such as “Click here to do X” or “Take advantage of our 10% discount; offer good today only” — to get them act on your offer

Creative: Direct markers have always tested different creative: messages, colors, photos, layouts, and so on.

Just changing the color of a button, or changing the button text from “Submit” to “Download your free ebook” or adding the word “free” to a headline, or redesigning your landing page can make a significant difference. Superior creative can double your conversion rates, or more.

Your landing page copy can make a big difference. Some tried and true techniques are:

  • bandwagon effect (“Being used by 150,000 people!”)
  • halo effect (“Brought to you by the people who made [last year’s great product, movie, etc.]”)
  • scarcity (“Only X left!”, “Offer good today only!”)
  • social proof, such as reviews and testimonials
  • use the word “you” in your copy
  • describe benefits not features
  • use the word “because” – studies have shown that providing even the feeblest reason increases cooperation
  • include emotional trigger words

Doubling your conversion rates with better creative is huge, of course. But getting in front of the right audience with a superior offer can produce conversion rate improvements of several hundred percent.

And that translates into dropping the cost per lead by 75% or more.

Now let’s look at a few specific CRO opportunities.

Website conversion rate optimization

You need to get the most from the people who are visiting your website. That’s a core principle in Phase 1 of Bullseye Marketing.

But most people who visit your website will come and go without leaving a trace. It’s not unusual for only one percent or fewer of site visitors to do something. We want to significantly improve on that.

Most people will start on your home page or a page that’s especially well optimized for search. In my experience, the three most popular pages for a corporate site are

  • home page
  • top product/service pages
  • the careers page.

Since we’re concerned with marketing and revenue, we’re not going to worry about the careers page. But if someone has enough interest in you to come to your site and go to one of your product/service pages, it’s a good idea to do what you can to get them to start interacting with you.

To do that, you need to spread offers and calls to action all over your site.

Here are a few companies that demonstrate how.

Jeff Bezos knows more about Internet business than anyone. When he bought The Washington Post it was losing money, partly because it was giving its great writing away for free. So he put up a paywall. This is what the home page looks like now if you’re not a paying subscriber.

Washington Post website home page with 20% off offers

Conversion optimization is not subtle, although it is not always as in-your-face as this.

But it worked: within a couple of years The Post was once again profitable.

For a company like Slack that delivers its software via the Internet, it’s a no-brainer: let people buy your software, or at least sign up for the free version of your software, right on your home page.

SaaS software companies are one of the few types of firms that can use their home page as a prime, CRO landing page.

Dell EMC sells high-end computer memory and other systems; a single deal can be worth tens of millions of dollars. They think that getting people to their conference is so significant that they will sometimes devote their entire home page to promoting it.

Dell EMC home page promoting its conference

A primary marketing goal for many medical institutions is to get more appointments scheduled with new patients. So Cleveland Clinic, a premier institution, on most website pages provides multiple ways for people to move the conversation forward:

  • A phone number
  • That orange appointments button
  • Live chat
  • Email
Cleveland Clinic web page with contact options

Even subtle changes to a regular web page – like an orange button versus a grey one — can make a big difference. Or the location of the Contact Us button: make sure that there’s one at the top of your page, it will produce far better results than one in the footer.

The key point is to make it as easy as possible for people to connect with you in whatever way they prefer.

Chat pop-ups are proving to be a very effective way for companies to start to engage one-to-one with people visiting their websites, especially with those people on pages that suggest stronger buying intent like a pricing page.

And some companies are automating at least part of these conversations with chatbots. The chatbots can be programmed with branching conversations to qualify a visitor and move the appropriate ones on to a live salesperson, or save the salesperson’s time and get the visitor the information that they need instead. Or direct them to support if that’s what they need. These chatbots only cost a few hundred dollars a month, making them far less expensive than a person, can be trained quickly and don’t mind working 24/7.

Many companies use pop-ups to promote their next event or latest offering. Gartner is a leading tech analyst firm; it serves many large companies who buy its reports for thousands of dollars apiece, or pay tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for a subscription. Here it uses a home page pop-up to promote an upcoming conference.

Often pop-ups are launched when a person is about to leave your site. These can be triggered by the cursor moving toward the URL address box (presumably to type in a different site) or, if they just arrived, to the Back button. These “exit intent pop-ups” display a “Wait! Don’t go yet!” offer such as this one:

While you may not use these devices on every page of your site – you might exempt your career pages, for example — they can significantly increase business from people who are showing real interest in the products and services that you’re offering.


Landing Pages

Landing pages are a special kind of website page. They are the pages with forms that you direct people to from your website buttons, ads, social media posts, direct mail, and other calls to action.

When people come to your landing pages, often at considerable expense to you, you want them to fill in the form with accurate information, immediately do business with you, or give you permission to market to them. That is the sole purpose of a landing page.

Several guidelines for the creation of effective landing pages are:

  • The landing page should make it easy for the person to take advantage of the offer that the person clicked on to get to the page (they may have also come from a direct mail piece and typed in a URL, and possibly even a personalized URL or PURL).
  • Usually, the landing page will have a prominent headline with explanatory text on one side and the form on the other side; pages with the text on the top and the form below tend not to perform as well.
  • Only one subject and offer per landing page. Don’t try to do too much. You can experiment with secondary offers far down at the bottom of the page, but don’t make them so prominent that they’re competing with your primary offer and goal.
  • You should not have the website navigation on the landing page. Various studies have shown that you’ll get a higher conversion rate without navigation giving the person an easy way to move on to other parts of the site. Only the company logo should be on the top and clickable to get to the full website.[i]
  • You can test such creative options as:
    • including a phone number
    • different wording, images, and colors
    • different call-to-action button colors, designs, and text (for example, Get your free ebook” instead of “Download”).

This basic landing page checks the boxes.

 

These days some marketers get quite cute – even taunting — with their button text, such as this on a form offering a free industry report:

Landing page buttons

I also recommend that you ask people to provide an email address and then send them a download link or other information, rather than giving them all the information online after filling out the form. First, for you that guarantees that they’ll put in a valid email address, not something like a@a.com; and for them they’ll have a link that they can use to download the materials to their desktop and mobile devices – wherever they want to read them – and even do so more than once.

Test, test, test. You may be surprised at what can make a difference – digital marketers usually are!

You’ll also want to test to make sure that your landing pages look good and work well on smartphones. Since the mobile screen is so much smaller, you have far fewer options. The first absolute rule is that you need a mobile-ready website, typically a responsive site. The mobile landing page text and form fields should be large enough that they’re easily read and completed.

On the left is what an Oracle form looked like on its site before it was responsive, and on the right is the mobile-friendly version of the same form. The latter is far easier to deal with on a small, smartphone screen.

Oracle original and responsive website forms

And one part of the tips I outlined above may be changing: increasingly sites use an initial page with the information, offer and a big yes button (of some sort) which then takes the person to the page with just the form. Shouldn’t that cut responses in half? Maybe not: it’s often intended to create a superior mobile experience and eliminate the need for the person to scroll down to a form on their phone. The extra click is easier.

A rough rule of thumb is that landing pages usually have a conversion rate of only about 3%, but if the creative design, wording, etc., are optimized you can double that to perhaps 6%. Right there you’ve doubled your leads while cutting your cost per lead in half.

However, a superior offer can dramatically improve on that with some companies reporting 50% or higher landing page form completions with great offers.

 

How much information should you ask for?

If you’re asking people to fill out a form, how much information can you ask for?  At what point will you drive them away?

It depends on the value of your offer. If people think of it as a very valuable offer, they may be willing to provide quite a lot of information. This form by tech analyst firm Gartner requires a dozen pieces of information to get their report.

Gartner landing page with many fields

I once worked with a company that needed a lot of information for the first sales call. I wondered if we couldn’t pre-qualify prospects, and speed up the work of the salespeople by asking prospects those questions in advance of a call. So I created a form with over 20 fields to it. These were detailed questions about what they wanted to do, how soon they needed it, etc. etc. It would take a person at least 5-10 minutes to fill out the whole thing.

And many people did. Just in case someone didn’t want to bother, we gave them an out at the very top: we told them that they could call us (phone number provided) or use a link to go to a much shorter form and fill that out — but few people did. We got four times more qualified leads from that very long form than from the short one.

Why?

I think a major reason was that we called it a “fee request form.” Many people probably thought that if they filled it out, they would get a proposal or information on our fees; that was our offer. And they may have thought that they would not need to talk with a salesperson; lots of people don’t want to talk with a salesperson.

From a sales point of view, we knew that if someone was going to take the time to fill out our very long form they were probably fairly serious.

So my recommendation, based on industry data and my experience, is to go to the extremes. Either use a very short form – possibly only initially asking for just their email address — to get lots of signups to build your database, or use a very long form that by its very nature will put you in touch with only the most serious prospects.

A third option is to use progressive profiling. With progressive profiling, you start with one or a few questions and each time the person requests something else from your site you ask just a few more questions. Over time you build up a rich profile of the person. Many marketing automation programs provide progressive profiling.


Marketing apps

Interactive marketing apps are an advanced form of conversion optimization. They are based on the idea that people may value an experience with your company that is more enjoyable than filling out a form. You only have to look at how many people take and share Buzzfeed quizzes to realize how much people like interactive content.

Marketing apps bring a kind of gamified experience to marketing and can include quizzes, assessments, configurators, ROI calculators, games, interactive infographics, graders, and more.

When WordStream was sold, founder Larry Kim wrote on LinkedIn, “My most spectacular growth hack is the AdWords Grader. We showcase the product by grading AdWords account performance.”  People used the HubSpot Website Grader over four million times,making it one of their strongest lead generation tools.

 

Thank You pages

Once the person has filled out a form and submitted it you’re done with them for now, right? Wrong! You’ve got a very interested person in front of you. Offer them even more.

The Thank You page is a great opportunity to say more than “Thank you, the webinar registration information has been emailed to you.” You now can give them more information, show a couple more offers, even provide a “Would you like to talk to a rep right now?” button.

Thank You page with new offers

You can also include social sharing buttons: make it easy for people to tell their friends about the valuable offer that they were smart enough to take advantage of.

Call tracking

So far I’ve focused primarily on the digital conversion experience, but of course there are other options such as business reply mail envelopes, postcards, and a telephone number.

When a prospect calls your company, they are likely to be more highly motivated than if they filled out a form. Call tracking is a way for you to improve the call experience over time and to understand which of your campaigns are generating leads.

With call tracking your company gets a pool of unique phone numbers. You then use different ones throughout your campaigns: one for mail, one for billboards, one on your website, and so on. You can even dynamically include unique numbers on different AdWords ads and track responses at the keyword and ad level. The numbers all forward to your regular sales or customer support lines, but you have reports on which channel they came from.

That’s the campaign analytics part. The conversion optimization part is that you can record the calls (“this call may be monitored or recorded for quality assurance purposes”). You then can use the recordings to review how your business development reps — the people who answered the calls — did, and to train them to improve in the future.

 

Now that you know some of the most effective ways to improve your conversion rates, you’re probably going to be looking at website, offers, landing pages and even business phone calls differently than before. Great! There’s a lot to gain by being critical and running many tests to see what actually works for your company.

This is part of chapter 5 of Louis Gudema’s Bullseye Marketing book, which is available on Amazon.

There are countless types of websites:

  • corporate (IBM, GM)
  • social media (Facebook, Pinterest, TripAdvisor)
  • ecommerce (Amazon, Walmart, Wayfair)
  • SaaS software (Slack, Trello, Optimizely)
  • non-profit (Red Cross, Partners in Health, Human Rights Watch)
  • schools and colleges
  • entertainment
  • games
  • blogs, personal expression
  •  

So there’s no way that in just a few pages I could successfully describe how to create any type of website. That said, here are 10 tips that should help.

1.     Establish goals

What do you want to achieve with your website? Generate leads? Sell products? Build your personal brand? Attract donations? Volunteers? Provide a platform for social connections? For personal expression?

You need to define your goals before you put much effort into the messaging, information architecture, technology, and so forth.

2.     Speak to the customer

The home page is the most-visited page on most websites, and most website visitors are first-time visitors, so make sure that you have a single, compelling, customer-centric message on your home page that quickly communicates who you are and why visitors should care.

Having a single, compelling message means that you should not use a carousel — those slide shows of several images and messages that change every few seconds. Instead of conveying several messages – the hope of people using carousels — carousels dilute all of your messages and frustrate your visitors. In 2013 the shouldiuseacarousel.com website was created, and it well communicates the case against carousels.

Here is the before and after of a website home page for a client of mine that prints custom labels for food companies. Their customers include major brands like Whole Foods, Williams-Sonoma, Wegmans, and Dunkin’ Donuts, but you wouldn’t know it by looking at their original website, which was very cluttered.

former home page with poor design and no calls to action

After the redesign, they presented a strong message around their core service, and their website was full of conversion opportunities that made it easy for companies to order from them. Their new website is also mobile-ready, unlike their old one.

3. Information architecture and navigation

The information architecture (IA) of a site is how it is organized. The navigation is the on-screen menus and similar devices that people use to move through the content.

When developing your IA keep in mind what your visitor is coming to the site to do, and make it easy for them to do it. Also remember that many of your visitors – maybe a majority — are looking at your site on a phone, and you need an experience that will work for them. Because of its small screen, developing for mobile is more challenging and less forgiving. Start with the mobile experience and work out from there to small tablets and then desktops –what website designers call “mobile first.” 

My philosophy of navigation is to keep it simple and to use Web-standard conventions like having the main desktop navigation across the top of the page. Maybe a game site could create a different navigation experience, but for 99.9% of sites, you’ll want to make it as fast and easy as possible for people to do what they want to do and get to your content. Cars can be as different as a Hummer, a Ferrari and a Smart Car, but they all have the steering wheel in the front seat. Save your creativity for your content.

In your navigation, avoid drop-down and fly-out menus: they clutter up the screen and get in the way of other content. And they aren’t easy for search engines to analyze.

4. Chunk your content

You should break up your content between pages, and within pages.

One contemporary website design trend is long, multi-topic scrolling pages. The only problem is people don’t like to scroll down long, multi-topic pages. Heat maps show that on almost any web page the farther down content is, the less it is read. That’s why when Google is indexing a page it weights the content at the top of the page more heavily than that farther down.

For one client I re-engineered their website from long, scrolling pages into many shorter, single-topic pages with a traditional navigation at the top. The average time-on-site for a visit immediately jumped up 50 percent.

So if you have content that you don’t care if people read, feel free to put it at the bottom of a long, multi-topic page. But if you think that all of your content is important, break it up into shorter pages and make it easy for people to navigate to them.

There’s nothing wrong with having long, single-topic pages of content; some studies have shown that blog posts with 2,500-3,000 words get higher readership and sharing than shorter pieces. But make it easy for people to scan and take in what you are saying by chunking your content.

  • Break your content up into short sections with headlines and subheads to guide the reader and enable them to scan a page to see if they’re interested.
  • Use numbered and bulleted lists.
  • Use images to emphasize important points.

5. Segment and personalize content

In 1998 Jeff Bezos said, “If we have 4.5 million customers, we shouldn’t have one store. We should have 4.5 million stores.”[i]

That vision was way ahead of its time, but it has come to pass. Today Amazon has hundreds of millions of customers and hundreds of millions of home pages. They personalize based on previous purchases, browsing, and other factors.

You don’t need to have an ecommerce site to create a personalized website. Leading marketing automation and experience management platforms, and even lighter solutions aimed at smaller sites, let you personalize content based on such factors as which pages the person has previously visited, their geolocation, how often they visit, their relationship to you (customer, partner, etc.), what other site they were referred from, their corporate domain, and others. You could personalize the home page message for each known visitor.

Home page personalized by company of visitor

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Ut elit tellus, luctus nec ullamcorper mattis, pulvinar dapibus leo.

Optimizely customized their home page experience for 16 market segments, including key accounts that they were targeting with an account based marketing program. With targeted home page messages they caught the attention of visitors and achieved significantly greater engagement.

6. Provide calls to action

Your website should have many calls to action (CTAs) throughout it encouraging site visitors to do what you want them to (those goals you started with).  You can offer visitors the opportunity to sign up for upcoming physical and digital events, register for a free trial, access content, make a purchase, make a donation, join, volunteer, and much more.

Pay special attention to the next chapter on conversion rate optimization for all sorts of tips on using CTAs and increasing conversions.


7. Include social media buttons

Of course, you want social media and email buttons on your website. But what do you want them to do?

Buttons for Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites

On many corporate sites the social media buttons are low on the page – maybe even in the footer – and take you to that company’s Facebook, Twitter and other social media accounts with the hope that you’ll then follow them.

On news and ecommerce sites the social media and email buttons are often high on the page – sometimes at the very top – to encourage people to share that page’s content with their social media followers.

Which purpose is more important for your company?


8. Make your site accessible

Companies need to make their websites accessible to the visually impaired. Over three million Americans are blind and many use screen reading software to access the Internet. Other people are color blind: think of reading a subway map with color-coded lines when you can’t distinguish between colors. Companies may need to provide text explanations for critical color-based information.

Some of the things you need to do to create an accessible website include:

  • Structure menus and pages so screen readers can navigate and read them
  • Use descriptive alt tags on all images (alt tags are read by the screen readers to explain what the image is/says)
  • Provide transcripts for your videos and podcasts

If you don’t want to make your website accessible to help the two-to-three percent of people who are visually impaired do business with you, or to be nice, you need to do it the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requires it.

Enter the attorneys.

Hundreds of class action lawsuits have been filed to require organizations to make their websites accessible. For now, these usually target larger companies with deep pockets: retailers have faced the most suits, as have restaurant chains, universities, banks, and other industries.

These suits charge that not only do the inaccessible websites stop the plaintiffs from doing business with the organization, they also make it impossible for them to apply for jobs. Most defendants settle.

Better get on it.


9. Optimize for Search Engines

Of course, you want your website content to be read by as many people as possible, and so you need to optimize your site and content for high rankings on Google and Bing. Be sure to read the search engine optimization chapter in Phase 3 and apply its recommendations to your site.


10. Use the right technology

You should plan to update your site regularly, if for no other reason than that Google likes sites with fresh content. And you don’t want your IT department to be a bottleneck. So you will need a content management system (CMS) to empower many people to make website changes. Some vendors these days call their CMS an “experience manager.”

There are hundreds of content management systems available. Some are tailored for particular uses such as community sites or ecommerce sites or educational institutions.

If many of the people in your organization who will be posting content to the site don’t have deep tech experience, then you need a CMS that’s easy to use.  When considering a new CMS don’t just watch demos, but have the end users in your organization try the contenders out for themselves.

The CMS should also have a permissions structure that enables you to say which parts of the website each person can edit, and what their level of privileges are. For example, some people may be able to create and edit, but not publish without it first being approved by another person.

Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, is known for sales, lines and crazy shoppers. Except at REI.

Last year recreational equipment retailer REI announced that they were closing all of their stores on Black Friday, giving employees a paid day off, and encouraging them and everyone to take the day to get outside and do something fun. They promoted it with the hashtag #OptOutside Continue reading

This is chapter 24 of Louis Gudema’s Bullseye Marketing book, which is available on Amazon

Omni-channel marketing – being present on all of the channels where your customers are hanging out– is critical today. In just the simplest example, product research often starts on mobile and then moves to desktop; people may move back and forth between mobile, desktop, tablets and in-person for some time. Or consider the retailer who has a customer in the store ready to buy, but that customer is going to do further research on their mobile phone before making that in-store purchase. Or the customer who is “showrooming” – looking at the item in the store before buying it online.

In more complex business purchases the customer may consume information on the vendor’s website, social media, review sites, blogs, YouTube, trade shows, podcasts and other sources before making the purchase – a decision made in concert with several other people who are also consuming many pieces of information.

The omni-channel approach that the Bullseye will lead you to ultimately provides for consistent experiences and messages across all channels and interactions with the customer. They can interact with the company in the way that is most convenient for them and know that what they do on one device will be reflected if they switch to another.

One version of the Domino’s pizza home page lists many of the ways that you can order from them:

Domino's Pizza homepage

Consider all of the potential media interactions that an airline could have with customers:

  • TV ads to build brand awareness
  • search ads when people are searching for airfares to/from cities that the airline flies to
  • reservations website
  • third-party reservation sites
  • email and app reminders for an upcoming flight reservation
  • digital check-in a day or two before the flight
  • text notifications of flight delays or other significant news
  • Eticket on app or phone
  • in-flight entertainment and Wi-Fi
  • in-flight magazine with articles promoting other locations that the airline flies to
  • posting of the experience with the airline to social media, and how the airline responds to that.

The full omni-channel customer experience with the airline goes far beyond those media interactions to include

  • ticket/bag check kiosks and people
  • boarding process at the gate
  • flight attendants and how they handle the boarding and safety talk (Southwest uses humor)
  • the in-flight drink and meal service
  • on-time arrivals
  • deplaning and getting bags (for those who checked them) at the destination
  • how passengers are rebooked if a flight is canceled

Each of these is a customer touchpoint: a moment of interactions between the customer and the airline when the customer has an expectation and will come away from the touchpoint feeling delighted, satisfied, or annoyed. Some of these touchpoints are more critical than others and can make or break the relationship.


Over time you can build a rich omni-channel program that not only gets the right message to the right person at the right time, but also provides them with an excellent experience on all of their interactions with your company.

Nothing that I’ve written in this book should be taken to denigrate the third phase programs. It’s not that advertising or inbound or social media or content marketing are always ineffective; in the long run they may be tremendously valuable. Rather, the Bullseye approach outlines a way to prioritize the least expensive, fastest programs for a company to start with, to get quick wins, build support, and then move on to longer range programs.      

Ultimately do everything that works for your business.

Bullseye with many darts

Brands market around many holidays, and Halloween is a leader. And it’s not just about selling hundreds of millions of miniature candy bars.

Of course each holiday has its own particular emotional resonance, and commercial opportunities. For Halloween the emotion that brands typically go with is “scary fun”. Continue reading