3 Ways to Activate Your Website

Business person using laptop with icons of website, email, customer, data, marketing automation for PROSAR blog

It’s common practice to check out a company’s website before deciding to use their product or service. We all do it; either to learn specific information about the product/service, gain further insight into its use, or simply to feel more comfortable with the company before making a purchase or commitment. This is true for both B2C and B2B, online and in-store purchases, packaged goods and professional services.

Understandably, companies are doing their best to create websites that engage with targeted audiences. Savvy organizations are:

  • Presenting what they do in a stylish and easy to navigate manner.
  • Making their website easy to use on tablets and smartphones.
  • Ensuring their website is accessible for people with disabilities (a legal requirement for some organizations).
  • Incorporating meta information and strategically worded content to build a solid foundation for SEO.
  • Engaging readers with relevant and interesting information.
  • Positioning their brand with messaging and imagery for greater impact.

So, let’s assume you’ve done all the above and have a good looking, informative website that provides a good user-experience on any device. Good for you… however, you can do more. If you expect your website to play an active role in your marketing, it needs to go beyond passively presenting and further engage your audience.

Here are three areas where your website can play a more active role in increasing awareness, improving your message and brand, and facilitating growth. Note that PROSAR is a SharpSpring Partner, so naturally we recommend SharpSpring as a cost-efficient and comprehensive marketing automation solution, but there are many good automated marketing platforms such as HubSpot, Pardot, Marketo, etc.; and software specifically for email such as MailChimp.

 

Automated Emails

Going beyond an auto-reply email greeting when someone completes a form, your website can assist in nurturing relationships and prompting conversations when people have indicated an interest.

In their pre-purchase research, consumers may visit several websites looking for something specific or simply wanting to feel comfortable before they commit. Most consumers don’t announce that they are ready to buy, but they do provide signals. Wouldn’t it be ideal if your website could help identify those potential customers and reach out to them?

  • When a known user returns to your website within 24 hours or visits specific pages, a personalized and customized email could automatically be sent them. Perhaps providing details on the products they were looking at, informing them of an incentive (price, warranty, added value, etc.), suggesting an appointment, call or chat to answer questions… there are many ways to engage and determine how you can help them.
  • When someone downloads a resource from your website it can trigger a scheduled series of personalized and tailored emails with tips, related products/services, articles of interest, other relevant resources.
  • On an e-commerce website, an abandoned shopping cart or product comparisons could trigger a series of emails designed to provide information and insight, or bundling cost advantages on the specific products.

Workflows are series of emails crafted in advance and triggered by prospects’ specific behaviours. The flowchart can be as simple or complicated as you wish, with every if-this-then-that sequence of decisions triggering different emails. The prospects’ actions control what emails are sent to help them with their purchase decision.

Notifications should be added to the workflow so that marketing and sales staff can be alerted when and how a prospect would like information or assistance. Notifications can even alert when a prospect is on the website browsing.

Automated emails are not an excuse to force your information on unwilling recipients; the objective is to provide information to those who are seeking it. Harassment is not good business, the Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL) imposes strict and sensible regulations on how a company can engage with people via email, you can read more about CASL here.

 

Dynamic Content
On your website, as in your daily life, what you say and how you say it matters. When we speak, we typically cater our words to the audience we are addressing. Most websites are static in nature (ours included these days!). They are filled with relevant, but generic content. Many larger companies have people dedicated to their website and social media accounts, so content can be updated, making it more relevant and topical. However, it is typically focused on a single targeted audience, or worded to address as large a segment of the public as possible.

Personas are being used more and more by organizations to better understand and target specific audience segments. SharpSpring tools enable different versions of emails and website pages so that headlines, text and images can be customized for specific audience segments. When the website identifies a user, it will present the content that relates to that persona. One of the underlining benefits of marketing automation is the ability to target your ideal customer personas and treat them as individuals.

Dynamic content facilitates more appropriate and persuasive communication with targeted audience segments. It also improves SEO by tailoring versions of your content with specific search terms. Such strategically worded content impacts being found online, effectively presenting your message, and converting leads to customers.

 

Conversion Process

Combining personas, dynamic content, workflows and email campaigns with tracking, lead scoring and a full CRM tool (Client Relationship Management) provides a platform to nurture and convert prospects. This complete package is how things come together to more effectively (and efficiently) manage prospects and customers. By tracking user behaviour and notifying marketing and sales staff, your website plays an important role in supporting your customers and identifying prospects.

Marketers can identify trends and create customized content and workflows (emails and landing pages) to address them. Salespeople are notified of potential interest and reminded of customers who have not been active, triggering workflows to engage and retain lapsed customers.

Your website can be more than a 24/7 online brochure. It can be actively participate in the marketing and sales process by attracting, engaging and converting leads, as well as maintaining existing customers. Unlike social media, your website is a stable hub that you control. It is an ideal resource to go beyond passive information presentation and effectively engage with your targeted audiences.

 

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3 Steps to Implementing Personas

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Personas are more than a buzzword, they help you to define and cater to a company’s multiple audiences. While audience segmentation is nothing new, marketing automation tools and content-based marketing (with heavy analytics integration) has made personas a powerful tool for maintaining customers and getting new sales. The more you integrate personas into your marketing automation processes, the more likely you are to speak directly to your audience segments and connect with them, directing your messaging specifically for them.

If you haven’t started using personas, what are you waiting for? Using them is as easy as 1, 2, 3!

 

1- Determining Your Personas

Determining your personas involves a mix of looking at your ideal audience and your actual, established audience. Even if you have a large client base already, have you really taken the time to figure out who, exactly, it is your serving.

This is a good opportunity to see how well you’re serving your market. If your ideal audience and your actual audience are too far separated, you might want to re evaluate your marketing plan.

You’ll want to gather data in generally-homogeneous groups, but what those groups are is up to you. Depending on your market, you might divide it by job title, age, relationship status, company size, or industries that use your product.

It’s important to not limit the number of personas you use, but don’t over segment your audience either. You want to look for groups that have similar buying patterns and product/service needs.

 

2- Persona Templates

There are as many persona templates as there are CRMs. If you have a platform like SharpSpring, you’ll want to follow their template.

Be mindful to make the persona template as usable as possible — you will, after all, be using these to guide your marketing strategy and content. This means that beyond demographics, you’ll want to focus on USPs, Motives, and Pain Points.

USPs, or Unique Selling Propositions, is the objective the persona is looking to fulfill. Their motive is why they want it, and what will drive them to eventually buy it. And pain points consider possible problems/barriers they have that you can help them solve.

Other pieces of information — like their overreaching price-sensitivity, the length of their sales cycle, and what they value in a product/service (including the level of customer service they want, how much they want something to solve their problems) — are also important to keep track of. That data is going to influence how you speak to your personas, and can help you figure out how many audience segments you have.

By honing these elements down to something that is unified across market segments, you get an idea of who your clients are. You can then adjust your content accordingly, and take one more step to increasing conversions.

 

3- Using Personas

Once you’ve determined your personas and completed your templates, you need to start applying the insights you’ve gained.

If you have a CRM or automated marketing platform with dynamic content, personas are the way to segment them and help reach your audiences more effectively. This allows you to have a single piece of content that speaks to each persona, helping to create relationships, increase conversions and lower the amount of campaigns you need to run.

Dynamic content also applies to digital campaigns, as most online platforms allow you to segment by demographic information, interests, how much they’ve interacted with your company before, and a lot of other metrics that allow you to have a dynamic content experience.

Beyond dynamic content, personas can help focus your content strategy for your campaigns, website text, social media posts, and more. Once you’ve created your audience segments, you can start speaking directly to them with your content and structure what pre-existing content you have into categories that allow each persona to find the content they need without fuss. Personas should influence your website content, blog writing, whitepapers, landing pages, and any other marketing efforts you create. Some of your content likely already fits your personas (it’s how you got your current clients, after all), but refining it is a prime way to help draw more people to your website and conversion process.

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Does Your Content Go the Distance?

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With exponentially more content available to your target audiences from myriad sources, your content had better be performing. Follow the A, E, I, O and U principle.

For all organizations — large and small, corporate and non-profit — content marketing has become a more complex activity. It’s no longer adequate to drive traffic to an information-loaded, passive website. Today’s digital devotees are responding to curated content, presented with their perspective in mind, thoughtfully packaged in accessible and easy to absorb (and share) formats. Successful writers and editors have expanded their skill set and become veritable content engineers.

Enticing such a savvy audience requires a professionally branded online presence (website, appropriate social media and content) along with strategically developed content resources that will Attract, Engage, Inform, Offer and Understand.

 

Improve SEO and Engagement with Relevant Content Encourages Action

Writing content designed to attract, engage and inform seems to be the goal of most good writers. Material that improves organic SEO and interests the reader is key to good content, but the goal post should be moved further. Every organization has motive for publishing/posting content; that goal is to persuade the reader to take some specific action: buying a product/service, registering for a seminar, joining an association, signing a petition, etc. Creating awareness is a critical first step, but on its own — without the offer — it has achieved little value for the organization.

To be successful, the offer needs to be of value to the reader, and should therefore be appropriate for where the content is in the sales funnel. For example, an association looking for new members shouldn’t necessarily ask a reader to join simply because they registered for a blog article. An invitation to download more detailed, or related, information would be more appropriate. On the other hand, a reader on an HVAC site, who has visited several product pages on air conditioners and downloaded “10 Things You Need to Know When Buying an Air Conditioner,” may be ready to book a sales appointment in the showroom.

The take-away here is that interesting content with the right keywords is not the end goal; you should include an offer associated with the content to move the reader further down the funnel.

 

Create Personas and Content Strategy for Better Results

The next step in the process of attracting, engaging and converting readers is understanding. Hopefully, you have already created personas for your target audiences and you have a solid understanding of their perspective, needs and wants. Now is the time to demonstrate that knowledge and try to develop a relationship. People are relationship driven and we choose to deal with those we trust and those that show they care. The best way to develop and maintain a trusting relationship is via the content you produce and the communication you have directly with the reader (which is, after all, more content).

The reality is that most of your readers will not engage with you. (I know, it hurts.) Even if they liked what they read, most will be hesitant to move further with your relationship attempts. Understanding their point of view and the type of information that interests them allows you to provide more information and other offers that help you gain trusted relationship status. Welcoming readers further along your funnel with relevant content and thoughtful offers is part of the nurturing process, as well as an important aspect of actively maintaining customers.

Back to the content engineering: doing it right is a lot of work. Developing strategy, researching and defining personas, creating a content plan, developing topics, themes and keywords… this all happens before the actual research writing and editing. Then you have the actual implementation monitoring and responding. If you’re taking advantage of marketing automation you’ll also need to develop emails, landing pages and strategic workflows to nurture your interested readers.

Whether you contract out these tasks (which will still require some significant time from you and your team), or handle it all internally, you’re best advised to budget time and money to be successful. Either way, ensure to use a comprehensive process that will attract, engage, inform, offer and understand your readers.

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5 Considerations for Your Unique Selling Proposition

Unique Selling proposition hand-written for PROSAR blog

What are the unique characteristics that make your organization valuable to potential customers? If you had the classic 15-second elevator ride with a key prospect, what would you say to them?

Most likely you would struggle with a muddled sense of what your organization does but fail to present a cohesive and compelling introduction. How convenient it would have been if you were ready with a well-crafted Unique Selling Proposition (USP). A good USP accomplishes several objectives:

  • Differentiates your organization
  • Identifies the benefit(s) of dealing with your organization
  • Supports your brand
  • Engages the listener and creates interest

The concept of a Unique Selling Proposition goes back to the 1940s and has been used ever since to help marketers and salespeople focus on key statements that could influence potential buyers. Whether the buyer is a consumer or a business, and whether they’re searching for a service, a product or even an association to join, a USP can be instrumental in influencing their decision. Regardless of what you’re selling, the ability to communicate clearly and persuasively will help you be more successful.

A well-crafted Unique Selling Proposition is very powerful as it guides your marketing content and tone. It typically finds its way into your advertising copy. And moving beyond words, consider how you could incorporate your USP in processes and procedures, influencing the organization’s culture.

Here are five key points to consider when crafting your Unique Selling Proposition.

  1. Be Specific: You don’t have time for a backstory; immediately hone in on the benefits you offer that distinguishes your organization. Remember that the point is not simply to enumerate why your organization is good, but why it is UNIQUE. Specify what makes you ideal in comparison to others.
  2. Be Succinct: Clearly and quickly state your case. Your audience doesn’t need a description of how you do what you do (unless that is what makes you unique), however they do need sufficient context to determine any relevance for them. Include the context they need within your simple and short statement.
  3. Be Compelling: It’s essential that you grab them right away. What’s in it for them? If they don’t care, they won’t listen, not even for 15 seconds. Consider not only how your service/product is relevant, but how it will make their life better. Present it in a compelling manner to give your statement more impact and grab their attention.
  4. Be Consistent: Support your brand and organizational raison d’être. Not only does this make sense to positively position your organization, but if there is a disconnect between your USP and your established branding, or way of doing business, it can cause confusion and mistrust.
  5. Be Honest: You want your statement to have impact and even be a little dramatic, but this isn’t the time for hyperbole. If your USP is not genuine it will sound like a sales schpeel, and that won’t interest anyone. If prospects don’t feel they can trust you, they won’t be interested in hearing any further from you. (And don’t forget that if you are successful, you have to deliver on what you’ve promised.)

Your organization may require several USPs to effectively address distinct audiences for different services/products, or for different market segments. You won’t be able to be specific, succinct and compelling if you’re trying to talk to many different audiences at the same time. It would be more strategic, and successful, to customize your USP for each targeted market segment.

This can be quite a process and it may take some time to hone your USPs until you feel they properly represent your organization. After you have internal consensus, I suggest vetting your draft USPs with clients and suppliers. Do the hard work and you’ll be ready to start riding the elevators with anticipation of that perfect prospect to walk in. Admittedly, that may never happen. But you will be involved in sales calls and networking when you’ll definitely have the opportunity to succinctly and compellingly state your organization’s value. And you’ll shine — you know what they say, “Luck favours the well-prepared.”

3 Strategic Considerations for Your Website

PROSAR Blog on Effective Websites Stylish image of laptop with Effective on screen

When we ask, “Is your website part of your marketing plan?”, most organizations affirm that, indeed, their website is an important part of their overall marketing. But often, they’re wrong.

Many websites are simply an online brochure with little more than some background and a listing of services/products offered. Oh, and a Contact Us page with a form inviting people to “Contact us!” That isn’t marketing, it is informing. Information isn’t a bad thing, but on its own it’s rather passive and unproductive.

The goal of marketing is to effectively communicate with a target market to align perceptions and reinforce or change behavior. ­Essentially, if you say the right thing in the right way to the right people at the right time — you should see some positive result. What results are you getting from your website?

With the great functionality available online, websites are an opportunity to do so much more than simply inform. By presenting information in engaging ways and using marketing automation tactics to build relationships, your website can complement and contribute to your marketing plan. To help make your website an active part of your marketing initiatives, consider the following suggestions.

 

Provide Content with Context

Go beyond simply presenting facts. Certainly, you should be factual and include details, but also provide context to make it relevant to your main audience. Why should they care, what’s in it for them? Marketers learn that Features explain what something does, while Benefits describe why it matters to the user. Then they can internalize and personalize material, making them more likely to act on your information.

Regardless of what your organization does, you’re selling something: products, services, memberships, ideas, etc. — there is a persuasive purpose for your website. Making your content meaningful to the user and helping them visualize how it makes their life better or easier, will have greater impact. Take advantage of your website to effectively position your organization and its message with persuasive and contextualized content. [Read more: 5 Reasons to Use Content Marketing]

 

Try to Interest and Engage

As you add relevant (and contextual) information, consider how to present it in an interesting manner. Infographics, animations, video, etc. make information more fun and often more memorable. People learn differently, so providing more than one way to interact with your information can improve the strength of your message.

Providing different formats also makes your information more shareable. Encouraging sharing and integrating your social media accounts with your content is a powerful conduit to reaching a larger audience and creating more meaningful ties.

Explore non-frivolous ways for the user to interact with your website. Polls, forms and other interactive online tools are important to gain information about your users and even start a dialogue. This can guide more effective communication, perhaps with dynamic content, and even lead to sales conversions. Use different and dynamic formats on your website to engage your audience. [Read more: Improve Conversions with Dynamic Landing Pages]

 

Create a Continuous Plan

Kaizen is the Japanese philosophy of ongoing improvement that North American businesses embraced in the 1980s. Some are still working at it (which is, after all, the point). It is a smart strategy to consider for your website, since your site is never “done.”

Most organizations realize the importance of keeping their website up-to-date and adding new content (including different media formats). Some companies go further and integrate promotions with emails and create new landing pages for each campaign, others track behaviour on their websites and make subtle changes to improve the user-experience or take advantage of high traffic pages.

Your website is a never-ending story, an evolving presentation that welcomes old and new visitors to drop in at any time. A plan that involves routine updating and analyzing, integrates communications and promotions, and facilitates the sales process, will maintain your website as an effective marketing tool.

It’s easy to treat your website as a constant, but that shouldn’t make it static. Ideally, it is constantly evolving and growing to better communicate with your target audiences and continue to provide the information and experience they are looking for. Consider and practice these three points; this process can reward you with business growth and loyalty. [Read more: Using Growth Driven Design to Make Existing Websites Perform]

5 Reasons to Use Content Marketing

PROSAR content marketing graphic on blackboard

Content Generation and Content Marketing are current buzzwords and part of a leading marketing trend, but the concept has been around since the dawn of commerce. Content marketing is simply using information strategically to communicate with your market. What has changed since the first messaging merchants is the complexity and scope of that communication and its delivery. So buzzwords or not, a more focused and strategic approach to getting your message out is now critical.

Here are five reasons why you should be taking a structured approach to your content marketing.

 

1. Myriad Touchpoints

The ad guys in Mad Men had it comparatively easy; they could focus on a killer ad campaign knowing that a high percentage of their market would absorb their newspaper, TV and radio ads. Since the halcyon days when a campaign brainstorming required a brain-numbing amount of whisky, the Internet has given the information and communication world a whole new environment. This new landscape is vast, cluttered and omnipresent.

A minority of small companies are treating their websites as strategic communication hubs (unfortunately most are still virtual brochures with a link to their dormant Facebook page). And even if you are paying attention to your website, simply keeping it up-to-date isn’t sufficient. Blogs, online communities, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+… there are myriad touchpoints where your existing and potential market could connect with you. A strategic content marketing plan will determine which are best for your company and what needs to be done to properly support them.

 

2. Consumers Want More Info

The Internet has empowered consumers like never before. They now expect to easily find online all required info about any product or service, as well as reviews, user comments, instructions, how-to videos… in essence they want it all and they want it now. A strategic plan helps you to determine how you can most effectively provide that information in a compelling way.

Early advertising guru David Ogilvy understood the importance of content marketing. He maintained that “the more informative your advertising, the more persuasive it will be.” Ogilvy helped the industry to appreciate the value of understanding your market and providing the right information in an appropriate manner. And even in those simpler times, this Mad Man realized that “Every advertisement should be thought of as a contribution to the complex symbol which is the brand image.” The fact that the communications and marketing world has become all the more complex underlines the importance of Ogilvy’s insight.

 

3. Open Lines of Communication

In addition to providing you with countless ways to connect with your market, social media and blogs also enable a two-way communication. This may seem daunting but it can be an incredible opportunity. A dialogue with consumers is a direct means to learn from your market and gather valuable information.

Ensure that the bulk of information about your organization online is under corporate stewardship.

 

4. Your Brand is Linked to Your Content

While you are putting good content out there, it is important to also listen to what is being said about you. Scanning the web for mentions and responding swiftly and appropriately has become an important aspect of brand stewardship. Whether you are thanking someone for kind words or a helpful suggestion, or addressing a misperception or mistake; dealing with it publicly and honestly helps you earn loyalty.

Essentially, it all reflects on you (or your organization if you really don’t want to take this personally). I believe that a company’s brand is now formed as much by the unofficial and/or unpaid content online as it is by the paid media and carefully crafted PR. Online, everyone hears you scream — the Internet hears everything said about your company and saves it for anyone to read. Your brand is living 24/7 online and you are probably unaware as to how it’s doing.

 

5. Much of the Content Online is Crap

This proliferation of information on the Internet has bred a lot of poorly researched, badly written and pathetically self-serving crap. (Yes, yes, there is also a ton of really good content, but when you research a purchase online, what percentage of the information is both helpful and well-written?)  So users need to sift through the garbage to find what they are looking for. If you’re churning out less than stellar material, you could be doing more harm than good and actually tarnish your brand.

Conversely, if you are actually producing relevant and readable material, you can help to define your brand as trustworthy and a valued online resource. This positioning moves you a whole lot closer to a buying relationship.

Writing compelling content is not easy, heck, just writing good informative content is challenging. With professional guidance, a strategic plan determines what content you should be producing, what you should be writing, what your staff can do, and what professional marketers/writers should create for you, as well as a schedule to make sure it actually happens. And this structured process makes it much easier to deliver good content.

What would you add to my list of reasons to approach content marketing in a professional manner?

Photo Credit: Getty Images : Cacaroot