January 29th, 2008 - Derek Miner, COO
In Part 2 of this series, we learned the two most common reasons people buy. Now we’ll cover a few of the less popular reasons and discuss how we can use these switches together to help us make a sale.
Switch #3: To make life easier
With the “save money” switch, we talked about how someone might buy an oven so they can make their own food and save money by not having to eat out. This switch is kind of the opposite of that.
In this case, somebody might decide to eat out, even though it costs more, because he doesn’t want the hassle of preparing his own food. It’s easier to eat out.
You’ve probably heard the saying, “Life sucks, then you die.” I always like to add, “but not before paying taxes,” to the end of that, but that’s another story.
Life is full of hardships, which is why we spend so much money trying to make it easier.
Switch #4 is, “to gain comfort and lessen pain,” but it’s very closely related to #3, so I’m going to skip it.
Switch # 5: To be more popular
This switch is actually also very closely related to the next one, which is, “to attract a potential mate.”
Everybody wants to be loved. Just look at all the dating sites that are out there and the huge amounts of money they all are making. If your product or service can help somebody get the popularity they crave, then you’re well on your way to making the sale.
People buy iPods over any other MP3 player, even though they cost more and in some cases aren’t as feature rich, because it’s the hip thing to have. People buy Harley’s over other cruiser motorcycles because you are shunned if you don’t. Men buy fast cars, not for their practicality, but for their ability to attract women.
I think by this point, you’re starting to get the idea of how you can apply these switches to your product or service. For a quick lesson from the experts, watch a late-night infomercial and count the number of psychological switches they are attempting to flip.
A new pillow can make your life better by helping you sleep better, but what else does it do for you? Count the ways and find out.
Here’s a list of the top dozen reasons people buy. The more of them you incorporate into your marketing, the better chance you’ll have of making the sale.
- Make money
- Save money
- Avoid effort and make life easier
- Gain comfort and lessen pain (closely related to #3)
- Gain praise and popularity
- Attract or impress a potential mate
- Curiosity
- Protect or improve the lives of loved ones
- Be in style and avoid criticism (closely related to #5)
- Emulate others
- Be individual (the opposite of #10)
- Improve one’s reputation (again, related to #5)
Be wise in your marketing. A new pillow that uses the latest in sleep technology can potentially improve your life. But can it help you attract a mate? That would be quite a stretch, and saying that it does may simply insult and turn away potential customers.
Look for ways to implement the above switches into your marketing, but don’t go overboard.
So what do you think? Leave a comment and discuss the ways to improve conversions with influential advertising.
Posted in Online Marketing, Making the Sale | 1 Comment »
January 16th, 2008 - Derek Miner, COO
As discussed in Part 1 of this series, people have very specific reasons for why they buy things. When a person opens their wallet and forks over their hard-earned cash, they are trying to satisfy some kind of need in their life.
In Part 2 of this series, we’ll briefly cover a few of the top “psychological switches” — the things that click in a person’s brain, telling them they should buy something. Once you know why people buy, you can cater your marketing to satisfy that reasoning.
Here are the most common reasons people buy.
Switch #1: To make money
It takes money to make money. We’ve been told that so often that we all believe it. Watch late night TV for a bit, and soon enough you’ll see an infomercial for a grand money-making scheme. Thousands of insomniacs whip out their credit cards and buy whatever it is that’s going to make them the next millionaire (or so they’ve been promised).
People also spend large sums of money to earn a college degree with the belief that it will land them a higher paying job. After entering the workforce, they may seek out additional training to help them in their career or to get a new job in a new field.
Businesses also spend money on all manner of items that they believe will help them increase revenues. This can be equipment (faster computers for example) that will help increase productivity, or it can be advertising to help boost sales. Money is also spent in research and development of new products, employee training, competitive intelligence, and so on. A nearly endless list of myriad items that the company believes will help them make more money down the road.
Switch #2: To save money
When people hear this, the first thing they usually think is, “People buy the item that is the cheapest.”
The reality, however, is that buying something because it costs less is much farther down the list of reasons why people buy. This switch is more about spending money now for something that will result in savings in the future.
Imagine a person who drives a 1978 GMC pickup. It burns a gallon of gas every 8 miles and is in need of repair more and more often. There’s a good chance that this person will determine that he has reached the point where buying a newer truck will be less expensive than maintaining his current one.
Take a look at your own life and you’re almost certain to find several instances where you spent money on something in order to save you money in the future. Sometimes it may not have been the main reason, but it may have helped you decide to make the purchase.
A more efficient furnace will save you money on your heating bill. A cell phone plan with more available call time will save you money by preventing you from going over your limit. A water filter saves you from buying bottled water. An oven lets you cook your own food, saving you money on eating out.
Businesses often hire consultants to analyze their business to find ways to cut expenses.
The two switches we’ve talked about here are far and away the most common reasons people buy. In Part 3 of this series, we’ll discuss more psychological switches and ways you can combine them to make for more effective marketing materials.
Posted in Online Marketing, Making the Sale | 2 Comments »
January 7th, 2008 - Derek Miner, COO
Getting people to your website is just one small part of having a successful online business. Assuming that you’re in business to make money, and that you make money by selling a product or service, then the goal after getting someone to your site is to convince them to buy something.
To make a sale, you need to first understand why people buy things. What is it about a particular product that causes them to say to themselves, “I’ve gotta have that, and I’ve gotta have it now!”?
In this series of articles, we’ll discuss the psychology behind the sale, helping you to create a website that is conducive to converting lookers into buyers.
Sell the Benefits
The very first thing you should understand is that people don’t buy something because of its killer features. People buy something because of what those killer features can do for them. A speed freak doesn’t care that a sports car has a 500 horsepower, 6 liter V8 engine. He cares that when he steps on the gas pedal, it goes really fast and he can smoke everybody off the line.
And that, my friend, is the difference between features and benefits. A feature is descriptive of what the product is. A benefit is descriptive of how the user benefits (thus the term “benefit”) from using it.
You can look at features as what creates the benefits:
Feature: A processor that has a super-duper high clock speed.
Benefit: Super-duper productivity from your employees.
Feature: Clothing made from the fabric of Superman’s indestructible cape.
Benefit: You’ll never have to buy new clothes again.
Sometimes the benefits of a particular feature can be less obvious:
Feature: An SUV designed by a world-famous rock star.
Benefit: Make your friends jealous.
As you look at the features and benefits list above, you might think to yourself, “Gee, some of those benefits aren’t really important to me.” That’s an excellent point, and a very important discovery that you’ve made regarding selling the benefits.
Not everybody buys a certain product for the same reasons. The person that buys the super-duper fast processor might be a gamer who just wants to build a gaming computer that’s faster than his buddy’s. If he’s not a business owner or manager, he probably isn’t that interested in increasing employee productivity.
In selling the benefits, keep your target market in mind. What is it that they want in a product? Teenage girls want to be cool while their mothers want practicality. But depending on the product, it could be the other way around. Get the idea?
In Part 2 of this series, we’ll cover psychological “switches” that tell someone to buy. Flip the right switches, and you virtually guarantee yourself a sale.
Posted in Making the Sale, Features and Benefits | 1 Comment »
January 2nd, 2008 - Alex McArthur, VP of Search Optimization
These days, it seems everybody is an SEO expert attempting to implement their own brand of SEO. And yet we see time and time again as companies implement their SEO strategies to exiguous results.
While there is no dishonor in attempting in-house SEO, it can cause a great deal of harm if one is not careful. At the least, you won’t get sufficient results from your efforts. At the worst you can destroy your company’s reputation.
Following, I cover the 10 most common and most significant SEO mistakes that I see on a daily basis.
- Trying to Rank for Keywords That You Really Shouldn’t
A small niche shoe website shouldn’t target “shoes” or “fashion”. There is simply far too many websites, many of them very well established, that you must beat out for such a commonly used word. “[Niche] + shoes” or “[area] + shoes” or “[style] + shoes” is a far better strategy, and a much more realistic goal.
- Not Taking Full Advantage of the Title Tag
The title tag is the most important place to be putting keywords. It’s the title of your document, and should therefore reflect what the document is about. Too many companies choose instead to use a generic title, such as their company name, for every webpage.
Just as harmful, if a webpage is not about the keyword you’re targeting, then you should not use the keyword in your title. Doing so will result in your webpage not ranking as well as it should.
Be sure to use your target keywords in your title, always putting the most important keywords first, only repeating keywords if natural, and using every keyword in your title within the webpage’s content. Any information that doesn’t help you rank, such as your company name, should be put at the end.
- Not Using the “nofollow” Attribute to Your Advantage
Some companies don’t use “nofollow” at all, while others use it on every link. In both cases, you are making poor use of the nofollow attribute. The nofollow attribute of an anchor tag is used as a way to meter out “link juice” – the value given to a link. By using nofollow on any given link, you are giving it less juice, thereby creating more juice for other links.
- Using “nofollow” on the Wrong Links
Remember from the previous point that nofollow is used to meter out the value of your links. Links that are insignificant search wise – such as your site map, user agreement, privacy policy, and so forth – are good pages to use the nofollow attribute when pointing to. This creates more juice for your more important webpages.
- Not Optimizing the Landing Page
So you’ve done everything else to get ranked and are now getting lots of traffic. If the landing page isn’t optimized to convert, then all that great traffic will be wasted.
- Misuse of Flash
Search engines have absolutely no way of indexing Flash content. Websites that use Flash for a majority of their content are missing out on the major benefits of SEO. Some sites will even use Flash to display large amounts of text, all of which remains unseen by the search engines. Flash should be used sparingly, and should never be used if it’s possible to use plain text.
If you must use Flash, consider creating a separate page that contains text which is indexable by the search engines.
- Keyword Stuffing / Hidden Text
I know this gets get talked about a lot and many think no one does it anymore. You’re wrong… it happens all the time.
Keyword stuffing is the practice of overusing a keyword or several keywords to the point that your content doesn’t make sense because it is unnatural. Hiding text is making text invisible to users by making the font color the same color as the back ground. This allows a webpage to be stuffed with keywords without making it appear unnatural to the user.
However, the search engines are able to easily spot keyword stuffing and hiding tactics and will penalize you for it. Plain and simple: don’t do it! It will only harm you in the long run.
- Not Targeting Keywords That Actual Shoppers Use
Sure it’s easy to rank for the keyword phrase “guacamole colored orangutan statuette dancing in a corn maze,” but nobody will ever search for that. On the other hand, getting ranked for “guacamole” might get you a lot more traffic, but no conversions (unless that’s what you’re actually selling).
Do your research and find keywords that will provide you with enough traffic to make your efforts worthwhile, will bring customers that convert, and are realistically obtainable. As noted in point #1, ranking for “orangutan” might be unreachable, whereas “orangutan statue” or “dancing orangutan” might serve you better.
- Misuse of JavaScript
A lot of JavaScript is client side, meaning it runs after the browser loads the page. This means that search engines only see the JavaScript code (or the call to it), not the results of it. If you are hiding links or other text within JavaScript code, then the search engines won’t see it, nor will they follow the links.
To solve this problem use server-side scripts, such as PHP, that allow search engines to see the output of the script rather than just the call to the script itself. If you must use JavaScript, place code inline anytime you are creating links rather than making a call to the code. This allows a search engine spider to see the link location and follow it.
- Bad Link Building Campaigns
Building up inbound links is a time consuming task. If you’re going to do it, make sure that you are chasing after quality links that will build up your website’s reputation.
There are plenty of ways to create a lot of inbound links without adding any value. Don’t waste your time accomplishing nothing for your website.
Have something to add? Feel free to comment on my post.
Posted in Online Marketing, SEO Marketing | No Comments »