Please, won’t you talk to me?

This is a guest post by Naomi Niles. Naomi talks about conversion rate optimization and about how companies can connect better with their customers over at her site. She also runs a custom web design and development studio with her husband over at Intuitive Designs. We like how Naomi thinks about conversion, and we hope you enjoy this post from her as much as we did!

One of the biggest mistakes companies make with their websites and landing pages is that they try to please everyone all the time. There’s a small problem with this approach though.

It doesn’t work.

It’s much like the famous quote from President Lincoln, “You can please some of the people all of the time, you can please all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time”.

When you try to please everyone, the final result of that is often a boring, standard-looking landing page or website with design and copy that doesn’t excite anyone all that much. It’s kind of “meh”. Kind of “blah”. Kind of…. well, you get my point.

That’s because you’re not really speaking with your customer.

At least, not in an empathetic way. 

You may be putting the information there that they need to make a logical decision and a place to house it, but you’re broadcasting that info, not having a conversation. You know that guy at the party that likes to tell everyone about his birdwatching hobby, but doesn’t let anyone else get a word in edgewise? You don’t want to be that guy.

Persona development is a good way to avoid that.

I know, you’ve probably already heard about persona development or do it already. But, how useful are your personas? I’m not talking about making your personas pages and pages long. But, is the information you do have actually serving its purpose?

The thing about personas is that often, they only address a totally fictional character based on how we would personally like our ideal customer to be. While things like demographic data and identifying your target market are good in terms of helping you determine your types of offerings, it doesn’t do a lot in the way of addressing how you should connect with your visitors on a more personal level.

Here are some ways you can connect better with your visitors through personas:

Discover your customer’s real motivations.

What is the real reason why people buy what you are offering? Do your values align with theirs? What keeps them up at night (this can be either good or bad!)? Once you have that figured out, you can create a storyline in your persona based on the real reasons your people buy from you.

If you’re not sure where to start, try surveying your current loyal customers or interview your top sales people to see what they say about your customers. What kind of personalities do your customers have? Do they have some interesting stories to share?

By finding out what fascinates your customers, you can be fascinating too! 

This ties in with discovering your customer’s key motivations although it’s not the same. How can you spark your customer’s curiosity and keep them intrigued? Being fascinating to one person is all it really takes. You really just need one solid trigger and and to use it consistently. 

Try adding this sentence to your persona “Customer name is fascinated by….”.

Study their behavior.

By analyzing your analytics and visitor search queries, you can have a general idea about how people are using your site and what they are looking for. Is there a way to tie this information into your persona? How does a potential customer go from one place to another and why are they taking that path? What are their goals?

Also, by studying the metrics, you also have a little bit of scientific data to back up your assumptions, which is handy.

Discover trigger keywords and use them in your copy.

Have you ever went so far as to put together a list of keywords that speak directly to your customer? I think these make a great addition to a persona. They can later be used as a reference for the copy on your website, marketing materials, and ads.

Examples of keywords that might be compelling include: new, powerful, prestigious, personal, agile, alive, connect, etc.

Make different personas for different types of customers.

Do your visitors have different behavoir depending on the type of product or service they are buying or their own different personality types and values? You can address these things by making different personas and referring to them on an as needed basis.

There’s no need to go all crazy and make dozens though. Remember what I mentioned above about trying to please all people all the time? Target the top 20% of your customer base and you should be all set!

Your turn.

What other things can you think of that would help you develop a persona to use as a reference to speak with your customer and not at them?

Create your landing pages the way you train your sales staff

On Sunday I went out to purchase a new car. Things that my new car had to offer:

• Fuel efficiency
• More room than my Civic
• A sunroof

After doing some Internet research, I had my sights narrowed in on two cars from two highly competitive brands. 

Sunday morning I set out bright and early for a fun day of negotiations.

A good sales person is like a good landing page

During the course of the day I met a good sales person, and a bad sales person. The good sales person picked up on certain keywords I said and tailored his pitch accordingly, much like a good landing page. The bad sales person didn’t pick up on any of the clues, and gave me a general pitch much like a home page. Before you say that this person is more like a product page, let me qualify by saying this sales person talked mostly about the brand and little about the car itself at all! Yes, it was that bad.

The two cars I was looking at are highly comparable, and things could have gone either way. Needless to say I purchased my car from the great sales person who tailored his pitch.

I’m happy with my purchase, and sad for the sales person who actually said, “you probably know more about the car than I do. I guess I should do some research.” With an attitude like that, her conversion rate will always be low. Not only that but her lack of knowledge really reflects poorly on the brand.

A good landing page is like a good sales person

Your landing pages should be great sales people. Although they can’t physically hear what a prospect wants, they can pick up on keywords just like a human sales person. Your landing pages should tailor pitches like the guy I bought the car from using message match and dynamic content substitution or simple segmentation.

When the competition is fierce (and even when it’s not), going the extra step to customize your pitch will help get you the conversion.

A good landing page also reflects well on your brand. The design should match your brand standards, and the content should be rich and compelling. It should never say, “you know more than I do.” It should say, “here are the reasons why this will meet your expectations, take action now!”

Create your landing pages the same way you train your sales staff: show them how to listen, tell them to pick up on keywords, and tailor the pitch accordingly!

…Oh, and I got a 2010 Honda CR-V EX in Mountain Glacier Blue. I love it.

Four Kinds of Keywords that Convert

This is a guest post written by Elisa Gabbert of Wordstream, Inc.

Elisa is the Senior Content Development Manager at WordStream, a provider of Internet marketing software, which includes an advanced keyword research tool for conducting keyword research and organization.

Different types of keywords accomplish different goals. Some keywords are great for driving traffic, others for establishing authority. But if you’re trying to sell a product or service, keywords that convert at a high rate are an enormously valuable marketing asset.

Unfortunately, there are no keyword tools that specifically deliver high-converting keywords. The only way to find those magic keywords that convert for your business is to do your research, test keyword opportunities in your web content, and analyze the results to see what works.

As you track conversions—both sales and other worthwhile goals—you’ll  begin to see patterns, and you’ll be able to predict the type of keywords that will likely drive conversions in the future. Below are four kinds of keywords that convert well for WordStream and might work for you too.

How-To Keywords

If your company’s offering helps people do something (be it managing leads, making iced coffee, or cleaning a pool) how-to keywords could be a big winner for you. For example, WordStream sells keyword management software that helps search engine marketers find, organize and manage keywords for organic search and pay-per-click advertising campaigns; accordingly, some of our highest converting keywords come from people who are searching for something to help them accomplish those tasks. One keyword that resulted in a sale, for example, was “how to create keyword groups.”

How-to keywords are valuable because they reveal a high level of intent—specifically, they indicate that the searcher is looking for information or solutions. You can address this need in a number of different ways, depending on the type of business you run:

A keyword like “how to make iced coffee” will convert at a higher rate than “iced coffee” alone or even “buy iced coffee”  because it prequalifies visitors, ruling out people who are looking for brick-and-mortar coffee shops.

Long-Tail Keywords

How-to keywords are just one subset of the vast world of long-tail keywords that may trigger conversions. All long-tail keywords reveal more intent than so-called head terms, and as such, we can often find pockets of long-tail keywords that are more often used by people that are late in the buying cycle. Notice how the longer this keyword gets, the more we know about the searcher and what they want:

tea —> herbal tea  —> caffeine-free herbal tea —> buy caffeine-free herbal tea —> where to buy exotic caffeine-free herbal tea

Of course, not all long-tail keywords are necessarily going to work for you. A good way to find viable long-tail keywords is by using the broad match option in your PPC campaigns—just be sure to use negative keywords as well so you don’t waste a lot of money on irrelevant queries.

“Best” Keywords

We’d all like to believe that we’re the best at what we do, right? Believe me, your customers would like to believe that too. No one wants to feel like they paid good money for the third best product on the market, at least not at that price point.

A lot of people search for “the best” version of whatever product or service they are looking for. For example, one WordStream customer searched for “best free keyword organizer” – perhaps dispelling the myth that “free” keywords never lead to sales?

Consider working “best” keywords into your website copy and bidding on “best” keywords in your PPC campaigns. “Best” versions of the above examples might include “best way to learn AdWords,” “best CRM software,” “best hotel deals,” or “best cold-brew coffee makers.”

Brand Keywords

Maybe it’s stating the obvious, but your own branded keywords do convert—especially for organic search, but occasionally through paid search as well. When someone searches on your brand, they have obviously already learned about you, either through previous visits to your site, via your social media efforts, or via links, reviews, or testimonials on third-party sites. Whatever the reason, the searcher has decided they are ready to buy and want to go directly to your site to do so.

To turn brand searches into conversions, make sure you own the real estate at the top of the SERP for those queries. This is important, because searches for a particular brand can sometimes lead to conversions on a competitor’s site! You’ll also want to make sure that once a visitor arrives at your site from a brand search, there is a clear path to follow the desired course of action.

We would love to hear your thoughts. Leave a comment below or send a message to @ioninteractive and @wordstream!

#CROchat Community Buzz Weekly Summary

Last week we focused on Insightful Analytics at #CROchat.

The theme produced a lot of great discussion, and of course we want to give a shout out to our top contributors: @RobCGM, @VincentAmmirato, @Activelngreds, @GatzSEO, @SEOAudiocore and @Sarahd23.

Here are five great ideas that came out of the April 8th #CROchat:

• Some very important things to measure include: time spent on a page, registration numbers, behaviors (both that led to conversions and bounces), keyword performance, and number of pages per visit.
• Some key micro-conversions to track: downloads, social engagements and video views.
• To track conversions that take place offline you can use coupons, promo codes, and tracked phone numbers. You should also train your sales reps to track this kind of information.
• Getting the wrong people to bounce is a good thing!
• Test what you measure and see how that impacts the evolution of your campaigns. 

You can read the entire transcript here.

Also, don’t forget to sign up for our 15 minute Conversion Coffee Break webinar. This week’s topic is Using Segmentation on Your Landing Pages. Register today and you will be entered to win a Starbucks gift card!

Look for the bright spots to increase conversion rates (guest post)

The following is a guest post by Robert Brady, who regularly blogs at Righteous Marketing. Robert is a friend of ion’s and we liked this post because it focuses on the positive. What a great outlook! It’s easy to see the problems in online marketing, it’s better to look for the bright spots and optimize from there. 

Conversion rate optimization promises huge potential for your website, but often the project seems so large that you don’t know where to start. Your site has 5 different conversion types, 8 different forms, IT never does anything on time, your graphic designer doesn’t listen to your suggestions because it “cramps his/her creativity,” etc. How do you even get started?

Look For The Bright Spots

Run PPC reports to see what keywords/ads have good conversion rates. Check your analytics goal tracking to see what traffic sources are generating the most leads. Even if it’s only a couple keywords in AdWords or one referrer in your analytics, find what’s working RIGHT NOW!

Once you’ve found what’s working, ask yourself a couple of key questions:

• What is different about this keyword/page/traffic source?
• Why would this difference lead to better results?

In some cases the difference will be obvious and you will wonder how you missed it. In other cases you will have to look hard and may even need an outside opinion (I’m willing to help, just email me – robert@righteousmarketing. com). Once you’ve identified what is working now, you can spread the changes across the keywords/pages/traffic sources that aren’t working.

Personal Example

While analyzing my blog’s most read posts for 2009 I noticed that a guest post by Akin Tosyali of Clix Marketing was the most read post of the year. So what was different?

• The post was longer and included more images
• It was promoted by the author (and David Szetela, owner of Clix Marketing, who has a huge Twitter following)
• It was a case study with a great title

Therefore, in 2010 I have been trying to write longer posts and utilize more images (obviously still a work in progress). I have also been reaching out a lot more for guest posts. The variety and new perspective makes for great reading and you get the promotional double whammy provided by the author promoting their own piece. So what have been the results?

• 408% increase in visits from January-March this year over January-March last year
• 154% increase in visits from January-March this year over October-December of last year

What bright spots have you seen and how can they help you achieve better results?