Have you ever watched a hummingbird? They move rapidly from tree, to flower, to bush in search of nectar or small bugs to consume. They do not linger in their search. If what they visit lacks what they are looking for, they move on quickly. Are your visitors consuming what you offer on your website?

Are your visitors consuming what you offer on your website?

In that respect, visitors to websites are much like hummingbirds. Visitors come to the web in search of knowledge, entertainment, and goods to consume. They click into a website. If it isn’t what a visitor expected, they leave as quickly as they came and are on to another site until they find what they want to consume.

For businesses, visitors who fly off websites take with them opportunities for conversion.  Whether you think about conversion as time on site, ecommerce purchases, sign-ups, or completing a contact request form, if your visitors aren’t staying, it’s a problem.

This is where content strategy comes in. Evaluate your offerings by reexamining your content. You have to offer what your audience members are looking for before you can convert them. Think back to when you set up your site. How did you decide what information to include?  Were you focused on what you wanted to say or on what your audience would want to find?

It seems like content should begin with the essential messages you want to communicate about your business, but that isn’t the best place to start. Businesses that begin focused primarily on what they want to say often miss the mark. It is essential to analyze and strategize your content according to your target audiences if you want to see conversion.

Begin this analysis by identifying various audiences, their respective needs, interests, values, and priorities. It also entails anticipating what your audience knows and the language they speak. Developing this detailed knowledge of your audiences will help you greatly in developing content to convert them. If you have multiple audiences, you will need to cultivate content for each of them. If you can’t convince your audiences you know what their needs are, you cannot expect conversion.

I had an experience with this as an audience member a few months ago.  I was exploring the idea of buying my first home and decided to get pre-approved for a mortgage. I had contacted a lender referred to me by my realtor. The lender had sent me the application and all the paperwork,. When I reached the section of the forms where I was asked which loan I was applying for, I was at a loss. So I went to the bank website expecting to see a description of each loan, the benefits of each, and a comparison to differentiate the products from one another.

But that wasn’t what I found. There were descriptions with interest rates listed, so I could see differences. Each loan listed its term length, but the rest of the description was technical. Filled with acronyms I was unfamiliar with, it didn’t give any information that indicated which loan was right for me. So I abandoned the site and instead emailed the lender for an explanation of their loan products. He then directed me back to the bank website, but I already knew it had nothing to offer me.

Neither the bank nor the lender I spoke with took into account that a member of their audience would be unfamiliar with home loans and the lending process. Despite a word-of-mouth referral from a reliable source, this bank lost my attention and an opportunity for conversion because it failed to think about what I needed. Its content wasn’t relevant to me nor was it easy to understand. Had they used a chart to detail the differences and included explanations for technical, the result might have been very different for them.

Content extends beyond just the information you are trying to communicate. Content consists of:

• what you say (your message),
• what you say it with (its medium– a picture, video, music, a website),
• how you say it (style and tone),
• where you say it (in print, at a conference, a social media platform, a website, a billboard),
• when you say it.

There is a lot to consider when it comes to tailoring content to one audience, let alone to multiple audiences. If you want to convert them, you have to offer relevant content in forms that resonate with each group.

The bottom line is that if your content isn’t relevant and readily available, audiences may fly away from your site. On the other hand, if you create relevant content, you’ll be in a good position to retain audience attention, garner their interest, and increase your conversions.

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I am fan of vegetables…not just the lovable pop culture staples (raw carrots w/ranch,  baked potato), but the hardcore, traditionally scorned, green vegetables.  Although their deliciousness can be a divisive topic,  few deny they are an important part of a balanced diet and essential to a person’s healthy development.

Disagree?…stay with me anyway – relevance to your organization can be found shortly below…

I credit my parents with my personal affinity for the fresh and green.  With my older sister, my parents took the “You can’t leave the table till you’ve eaten all of your peas” route. It turns out Kristin is almost as stubborn as my father, so by the time the vegetables were choked down and everyone had been fighting for a few hours, it left a literal and metaphorical bad taste in her mouth. She’s picky about vegetables to this day.

Mom and Dad tried a different method with me. I never had to stay at the table till my veggies were eaten – but they did ask that once every six months I give the vegetables I thought I didn’t like an honest try. I couldn’t just make a predetermined decision, stick them in my mouth and spit them out quickly. I had to take a few good bites and really give them a chance.  If I did, I was off the hook.

Little by little I came to like the idea of trying new things, and enjoyed the vegetables more and more.  I believe this same technique holds true for new media and organizational leadership.   It’s our job to guide and inform, not to force ourselves into what everyone else is doing.

As a business developer for MediaSauce, I meet with and speak to a variety of groups, in varying industries every week. Between and within vertical markets, there is a wide spectrum of understanding and adoption of online tools. Rapid Change, Industry Regulations, Technology Infrastructure, Liability Issues, Privacy Problems, Leadership that sees little revenue potential in new tools, and budget constraints are all cited as reasons for avoiding commitment to online as a communications strategy.

If your organization or industry requires that you be more cautious, or you are a later adopter, that’s ok! Organizations in every phase of innovation adoption have good reasons for being there, and there are advantages and disadvantages to each phase. However, much like vegetables, a great online presence is a vital part of a balanced communications strategy and is essential to organizational growth. It is good for you to be connected, and it is something any organization can learn to leverage.

Champions of new media sometimes hurt their cause by forcing the issue within the group, especially in organizations that are slower to embrace new technologies. Their reaction is to list others’ success stories, and when challenged with organizational bottlenecks the value prop doesn’t directly translate.  The trick (like with food) is in the context and presentation.

I encourage you to facilitate a high level conversation around the growth of online communication and how it will continue to affect your organization. Every six months (or more often if possible) bring your leaders together with the objective of simply having an open-minded discussion about the implications of an interconnected, online world.

The goal is to honestly consider costs and risks of pursuing something new, AND weigh them against the opportunities for success and potential for revenue growth. Think about some of the ways that you can use new tools to create relevance and value in everything you do. Consider the costs of maintaining status-quo. These are the conversations that connect and resonate with executives, board members, and organizational leaders.

What will be the outcome of these conversations? I can’t say. The reality is some of the available tools still will not taste right to your organization and that is ok. But, if you are approaching the conversation around costs and benefits, and making an effort to do so regularly, great steps forward will be a natural outcome.

Be careful though, or you may find yourself pleasantly surprised as a new fan of asparagus, organizational transparency, or Foursquare.

Questions/Comments? Please feel free to email me at brad.bierwagen@mediasauce.com or follow Brad at @bbierwag

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Brands are really just a fancy way to talk about a compilation of your customers’ experiences with your business. These customers experience brands a lot of different ways.

As customers’ interactions with companies (brands) are increasingly online, shouldn’t we shift our focus? Why do we still believe traditional marketers should control branding? Why are we afraid to put branding power in the hands of the digitally-driven folks? After all, for many current and future customers, your website is your brand. It’s the hub, the driving force behind all of the experiences customers have with your company. People are spending as much or more time online as they are watching TV these days – and that’s not just the teens and 20-somethings. Digital is already driving brands, whether we choose to acknowledge it or not.

Online-only businesses are obvious examples, but increasingly, traditional brick and mortar and B-to-B businesses are reaping benefits – and raking in sales – by creating digitally-driven brands.

Let’s review a familiar example: Best Buy. They’re still an electronics store with lots of semi-annoying helpers in blue. The face-to-face experience will never go away. It’s just enhanced by a bevy of online communication tools.

For example, customers can reserve products online (on a phone or a computer) and pick them up in stores.

Once they take products home, they can talk in real-time to Best Buy’s customer service folks through Twelpforce, a group of 2,200 Best Buy employees who answer customers’ questions and solve issues via Twitter.

If customers come up with grand ideas that would make their experiences better (a key component of branding), they can share them at Best Buy’s IdeaX.

Best Buy has tackled everything from creating a streamlined mobile site to customer and employee forums, blogs, and Facebook applications on their fan page. They’re all over digital branding. In other words, they create positive customer experiences through the tools, accessibility and information they provide online.

Now, I know you’re thinking: well of course she believes in digital branding…she works at a digital agency! And that’s fair. As an early adopter and digital marketing geek, it’s easy to see why I’d be a proponent. But there are plenty of people backing me up these days. And there is plenty of new research that supports the theory. An example? How about this Razorfish report about digital experiences driving brands. I think you might like it.

Slide 8 is my favorite:

• 65% of consumers have had a digital experience change their opinion about a brand.
• 97% of consumers say their digital experience influenced whether or not they eventually purchased a product or service from that brand.
  

So tell me: how do your customers experience your brand in this Digital Age?

Miranda McCage is an Associate Digital Strategist at MediaSauce. She’d like to hear about how you’re developing a brand with digital. Contact Miranda at 317-284-5683, on Twitter @mirandamccage or email her at miranda.mccage@mediasauce.com.

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A lot of businesses get caught up in the analytics game, looking deep into their site metrics to find trends, identify new referral sources and see how their site is growing. It’s easy to burn hours pouring over these reports – often the only tangible piece of data you have to judge your site’s success.

The problem is, the number of unique visitors, page views, or time on site is only an indicator of a site’s success. The real measurement is the number of actual conversions that happen on the site.

In this context, we define a conversion as “a prospective customer taking a marketer’s intended action.” These conversions are tracked through form submissions, data tracking and other methods that reveal to you insights about your visitor, their behavior and ultimately that they conduct some form of transaction with you.

Let’s explore a few different conversion concepts:

1. The form. The most simple and direct form of conversion on a web site is the use of a form. Often asking for a direct inquiry of the customer to your business, the form provides a direct method of a site visitor to reveal who they are and what they want. more

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Several months ago a client of MediaSauce challenged me to consider why he should tell his sales force they have to change following one of the Sales 2.0 seminars I give. As someone who has interfaced and challenged existing sales approaches for most of my career, I was zealous to give input on the topic. The result was a diatribe that finished with our client asking simply, “Could you write that down?”

I did, and later the manifesto was published in The Social Media Bible as part of the contribution MediaSauce made to this important book.  And now, I share it here with our readers of the MediaSauce blog.

Why do we sell the same way we always have? Because it’s safe and reliable. Because it’s what we know. Because we’ve become entrenched in thinking that what we have to say is what our customers want to hear. Because it has worked for the past (insert your number of) years! more

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Baby Boomers Kill TV for Internet

Baby Boomers are looking to kill TV subscriptions.  Now this is big news.  Granted it’s only a survey but to see people (Baby Boomers at that) start to shift their viewing habits away from TV and to computers should give advertisers a pause when it comes to the high rates of TV advertising.

“Among traditional TV viewers, an astonishing one-in-five (20%) say they’re likely to downgrade or cancel their current TV service package in the next 6 months. The likelihood of canceling is highest among Cable (22%) and Satellite subscribers (22%), and lowest among fiber-optic TV subscribers (7%).” – ChangeWave

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This post was published simultaneously on http://rallythecause.com. To view the discussion it generated there, feel free to jump over there after you finish reading the post.

Two Things You Need to Learn from this Post:

1. Character is at your core, image & brand are what you project to others, and reputation is how others perceive you. While you can control the first two, you cannot control the third.
2. The human mind is continually seeking to identify discrepancies between what others say they are and what they actually are. If the image you project is different than your character, the gap between the two will buckle and collapse under scrutiny.

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I recently spoke at Indiana Construction Roundtable and SMPS – Society for Marketing Professionals first joint seminar on “Social Media are Internet tools used for sharing and discussing information. Sites such as Facebook and Twitter help connect like-minded people, companies, and associations.”  They did a fairly quick interview with me that I would like to share with you.

I used a lot of my recent ISBDC conference information and you can check all those facts over here – stuff like Facebook being up 700% and how communication has risen 18% in overall time online.  Those are big numbers. more

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I get lots of questions about how I personally use social networks to market MediaSauce and myself.

And to tell you the truth, sometimes I think I know the answer to this question and sometimes I feel like I don’t.

Has any of my contacts through Linkedin, Facebook or Twitter generated business for MediaSauce.  Well, sort of.  But maybe it’s not the kind of direct correlation that advertising and marketing delivers.  Or that we think advertising and marketing deliver.

You see, you can’t argue with the facts.  Lots and lots of people are using these platforms.  The increase in usage is tremendous.

Facebook is up 700% in time spent and has over 200 million users – over 100 million unique visitors last month.

Linkedin is up 69% in time spent and has over 41 million users – over 12 million unique visitors last month.

And finally, Twitter, the marketing buzz word for the first six months of this year, is up a whooping 3700% increase in time spent and has over 32 million users – over 19 million unique visitors last month.  This is all from Nielsen, if you think I’m making it up.

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I don’t want to be negative about this.  I’m trying to change my ways when it comes to posting negative comments and blogs.  It’s not that I’m going to take away “FAIL” but I’m going to try and offer constructive criticism and maybe an idea or two on how they can change.

So the beef today is with DIRECTV and Sprint.  I’ve been a customer of both for a long time.  DIRECTV for the past five years and Sprint since I’ve had a cell phone (back in 1999).  That’s a long time, right?

I’ve defended both to naysayers and I’ve also pushed a lot of customers their way but I’m done.  I have to be and let me tell you why.

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