A Day in the Life of a Persuasion Architect

AdAge on Viral Campaigns...

Scott Donaton's latest article over at AdAge touches on something I wrote a while back, after the Agency.com fiasco.  He astutely writes (emphasis is added):

As with ads in any medium, those that work are those that start with an insight, show an understanding of their target audience, and have an authentic, relevant connection to the brand. Those that don't smack of having been produced because someone wanted to do a viral video to please himself, his boss or his board. They're the commercial equivalent of YouTube videos of kids falling off skateboards.

I couldn't agree more.  Too bad the insight part is the key, and plucking those off trees isn't exactly a viable strategy in 2007. 

Some Google Advertisers Cutting Spending

From Dow Jones MarketWatch...

Keyword inflation, low conversion rates sending merchants elsewhere

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- A growing number of online advertisers are bidding a partial goodbye to Google Inc.

Frustrated by the soaring price of Internet-search advertising and diminishing returns from the ads they buy, mid-sized advertisers say they plan to reduce how much business they do with Google this year -- in some cases, significantly.

Last year, for example, eBags.com co-founder Peter Cobb spent between $5 million and $8 million to peddle suitcases, handbags and other carrying cases online. Google got 75% of that amount.

But this year it will get "significantly less," Cobb said. "The Google percentage has got to go down," he said.

In many cases, the cost of an eBags.com ad placed on either Google's own Web site or one of its affiliates now equals 45% of the price of the product it promotes. That's crimping the company's own profit margins and forcing it to look elsewhere to market its bags.

"We're testing print ads right now," said Cobb, whose company will spend up to $8 million on ads in 2007.  Read the rest of the article

The article continues...

Keyword search prices on many terms rose between 40% and 60% last year, according to advertisers like Dan Sackrowitz, chief executive of Bare Necessities, which sells lingerie online. He saw his Google ad budget soar 50% last year.

The problem is obvious, traffic costs are puffing up like a marshmallow in a microwave and advertisers are having a hard time finding ways to increase traffic and lower costs.  Simply put, Google advertisers are hooked.

Instead of looking for ways to increase return on traffic investment, the average marketer will  look for another traffic fix.  We've said before that the marketing battleground of the future is not traffic acquisition, it will be traffic conversion. 

The exceptional marketer is looking for ways to optimize their keyword and landing page conversion rates. 

Optimizing landing pages is something we've been doing with our clients for quite some time.  We are a premier channel partner with Google and their new testing platform Google Website Optimizer beta.  If you are interesting in our landing page optimization coaching service, we are going to take on a few  testers over the next few weeks to participate in this beta with us.  Contact us if you want to know more.

Are You Ready for Traffic?

It was on Fox.com’s “out there” page yesterday.

A local coin dealer in Dover, Delaware pulled off a publicity stunt that got him some pretty good national attention. He "spent" a penny worth $500 and announced it to the world, or at least to Dover. The world was listening however and he got more publicity than he probably imagined. A great investment of only $500, right?

This could be the end of the story, but I wanted to know more.

Call To Action - Take Two

We just noticed Amazon is now fulfilling orders for the softcover version of our bestselling Call to Action: Secret Formulas to Improve Online Results (it was due out the end of the month). This isn't just a reprint of the hardcover, this is more the book we wanted to write when we released Call to Action in May 2005, but had to rush it out early for our friends at WebTrends for their seminar series. We stripped out over 30,000 words and put back 11,000 new words. All in all, it is a much better book and we are certainly proud of the extra work Lisa T Davis and Bill Drew put into it to make it a more cohesive narrative.

Persuasive Scenario Analysis

One of our favorite software companies, Techsmith, just launched a fantastic new product called Uservue. Uservue allows you to conduct usability testing via the web, thus removing geographical limitations.

We decided to draft up a basic profile of a typical user and click through the site and see what kind of experience this profile would have. This is a very simplistic execution of what we do when we assemble a "PSA" for one of our clients. 

Watch the video.  (5 min. 29 sec.  11MB Flash)

(Kudos to our bud Betsy Weber, who does a fantastic job 'evangelizing' Techsmith products, we got to test drive the new Camtasia Studio 4 to put this video together, from what I understand the new version will be out October 17th, so if you do any sort of screen recording, get familiar with Camtasia Studio)

The Death of the Web Page

 

The Web page was pronounced dead on October 9, 2006, after a long bought with chronic irrelevance. A large group of marketers attempted CPR and other heroic resuscitation techniques. Witnesses present at the scene told reporters that despite a few minutes of chaos, the Web page's last moments were largely serene and peaceful.

"She was a quiet and powerful beast, and she died doing what she loved," states one observer.

"While Web 2.0 technologies and persuasive scenarios were certainly contributing factors, we have determined they were not the cause of death," said a spokesman for the Web page's care provider. "She was just too irrelevant, and she never quite recovered. She just couldn't keep pace or serve the needs of today's marketers any longer."  Read Bryan's Entire Article over at Clickz.

The Cat Whisperers

You've seen Cesar Millan, the infamous 'dog psychology' dude.  Cesar works miracles with unruly canines in 24 short minutes on the National Geographic Channel show "The Dog Whisperer". 

Now meet Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg, the Cat Whisperers.

The authors of "Waiting for Your Cat to Bark? Persuading Customers When They Ignore Marketing" have set forth an intriguing set of principles which they call Persuasion Architecture. The formula is not for the faint-hearted -- it involves hard work to navigate a complicated matrix of psychological, technical and demographic approaches in order to develop a customer-centric marketing focus. In the process, it requires a business to be willing to relinquish control of information about its product or service; indeed, transparency is key to the entire process. But the authors guarantee results, whether your target clients are individuals or other businesses. Read the entire review over at Wharton School Knowledge @ W.P. Carey.

Have an unruly marketing situation? Will travel.

Step right up! We can guess your Conversion Rate

The Shop.org Annual Summit is now underway.

Bryan Eisenberg will be presenting "Waiting for your Cat to Bark" on Thursday at 3:15. He will also be at the BazaarVoice booth Thursday at 1pm and again 4:15 signing books and kissing babies.

The folks over at BazaarVoice will be guessing conversion rates at their booth, if they can't guess yours, you get a prize.

Maybe they will get Bryan to get in on the guessing as well. But don't count on getting a prize if he guesses yours. :-)

The Future of Consumer Research

No sooner than Jeffrey Eisenberg posts his rant about the state of consumer surveys do we get another authorative glimpse into the future of research from our brilliant strategic partner Michele Miller.  Check out what she writes over at Inc.

Companies like Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO), Pepsi (NYSE:PBG), and Best Buy (NYSE:BBY)  now realize the methods they used to mine  for information in the past were often unproductive and inefficient. The pressure-cooker atmosphere of a group of strangers in an unfamiliar setting, combined with questions skewed to obtain answers favorable toward a product, is often a dangerous (if not deadly) concoction. Over the years, countless products that should never have been introduced made it to market, and vice-versa.

Today, major advancements in science, technology, and human-behavior studies offer new tools for studying consumers that are more natural and provide greater insight into what a customer wants. What techniques should you consider?  Read the entire article.

Internet Killed the Radio Star?

Contrary to popular belief radio is not dying.  It is, however, changing drastically.  What we are witnessing is the medium of 'audio broadcasting' being molded and morphed at the hands of a populice in more control of their choices.

Radio isn't radio anymore, it is now 'terrestrial' radio and it sharing more of it's audience (and revenue) with it's offsping; internet radio, podcasting, and satellite radio. 

Even as the populice is having influence on the radio universe many broadcasting sites remain irrelevant and downright yucky.  And of course 'terrestrial' radio is struggling to remain viable.  The answer to this? 

From Audiographics.com

Today, consider a few terms that will help; radio personas, predictive modeling, and persuasion architecture. Combining the three allow stations to build an online presence that delivers better results.

Building a radio persona will let you create predictive marketing that gives clues to how you should build your web site with persuasion architecture. Read the entire article.

  Interestingly enough, this conclusion came as a result of Bryan Eisenberg's 2 part rant over at ClickZ about the state of satellite radio's online efforts.  Read part one, then part two.

Paid Search Vs. Organic, which converts better?

According to a recent article over at Internet Retailer paid search has a slight advantage.  But before you start increasing your paid search budget, our CTO(Chief Thinking Officer) John Quarto-vonTivadar chimes in with his questions about these numbers and their implications...

Imagine that, if you will: given the tremendous amounts of money spent on paid search (huge! And costs are actually going up!), all it manages to do is achieve a Scrooge-ish +9% bump over organic search. On a dollar-for-dollar basis, you may well get a bigger conversion bang for the buck by investing in an organically planned architecture of scent, relevance and persuasion — which is what ends up scoring so well in organic search anyway — than in "buying" traffic for an otherwise cow-pathed site.

Hmmmmmmmmmm, very interesting.

Get into John's scientific head for yourself and read his entire post.

Creating A Customer Experience - The Online Advantage

I just ran across this article at USA Today.

Retailers know how you'll approach a store, where you'll hesitate, how to affect your mood, how to pique your desires, how to play to your aspirations. Everything in a store, from lighting to floor color to music to how goods are displayed, is meant in some way to get you to not just shop, but spend.

"It's like a Broadway musical," says Deborah Mitchell, a marketing expert at the University of Wisconsin. "Nothing was put into that musical that wasn't thought through. It's the same in a highly orchestrated retail environment." Read the entire article.

Here is a cold harsh reality: The most beautifully designed website, the most stunning 2D visual product photos or otherwise simply look weak compared to to a well orchestrated onslaught of your 5 senses at a brick and mortar retail outlet.  Online your visitors can't experience depth, texture, lighting, smells, noise ambience, and the list goes on.

Now don't take this as me telling you not to use images and pretty graphics, I am simply stating that focusing heavily on design may not deliver the conversions you hope for.

JPEGs, GIFs, PNGs, even flash presentations are still only 2d, flat, and when compared with a broadway musical, they are boring.

So why do so many spend so much time debating, and hand wringing about their site's visuals and graphics?  Maybe they haven't heard.

Your biggest advantage online is your ability to create atom-splitting mental images.

How?  With WORDS.

How much time are you spending with design vs. relevant copy?

What mental images are you building about your products/services in the mind of your visitors?  Are you using a series of planned mental images to create an online customer experience not bound by a physical reality? 

Novelists do it everyday,and the methodology exsists to plan this online.

What are you waiting for?

Improving Customer Experience- Howard Kaplan speaks with Peter Kim of Forrester

Our own Howard Kaplan recently sat down with Peter Kim of Forrester Research to discuss the customer experience online.. Some of the topics they covered...

• Ensure a positive brand experience online
• Stop customers from ignoring you
• Develop a customer-centric approach
• Use rich/multi-media elements to improve customer engagement on your site
• Track and analyze these rich media efforts

It was part of a Digital Lobby Program entitled "Improving Customer Engagement Online"

See the discussion here.

Godin asks "Are You Waiting For Your Cat to Bark?"

"How do you use search to introduce the right buyers to the right sellers when it's not a frequent transaction of a commodity?" The responsibility is the sellers! .  We invented Persuasion Architecture to present the answers the buyer seeks.  Chapters 19-21 of "Waiting For Your Cat to Bark" tell you how...

Planning Persuasion Scenarios is the core of Persuasion Architecture and it ensures that that seller  will leave a relevant scent of information based on answering each buyer's questions, addressing each need, each motivation, and even each buying preference.  Whether the sale is complex or simple, whether the buyer is late or early in the process, whether the buyer is knowledgeable or ignorant, high price point or low, it doesn't matter.  The seller must account for each customer segment and each angle of entry that customers may take as the need for your product arises.

It isn't easy, it's a lot of work.  Every touchpoint, every page, every keyword, every marketing communication must be accounted for . Persuasion Architecture handles this complexity. 

In today's landscape the seller is the only one with papable incentive to do the work of Persuasion Scenario planning, so it is unlikely that search or any other middle party will get too involved in solving this.  And sellers selling these types of transactions simply can't afford to wait for search technology to solve this problem for them.

Can you?

Read Seth Godin's entire post.

Landing Page Guidelines - Provide relevant and substantial content

If users don't quickly see what they clicked on your ad to find, they'll leave your site frustrated and may never return to your site or click on ads in the future. Here are some pointers for making sure that doesn't happen:

Link to the page on your site that provides the most useful and accurate information about the product or service in your ad.
Ensure that your landing page is relevant to your keywords and your ad text.
Distinguish sponsored links from the rest of your site content.
Try to provide information without requiring users to register. Or, provide a preview of what users will get by registering.
In general, build pages that provide substantial and useful information to the end-user. If your ad does link to a page consisting of mostly ads or general search results (such as a directory or catalog page), provide additional information beyond what the user may have seen in your ad or on the page prior to clicking on your ad.
You should have unique content (should not be similar or nearly identical in appearance to another site).

Starting with your ad, each interaction you have with your potential customers and customers should be geared towards building a trusting relationship. To avoid leading users astray:

Users should be able to easily find what your ad promises.
Openly share information about your business. Clearly define what your business is or does.
Honor the deals and offers you promote in your ad.
Deliver products, goods, and services as promised.

The above is not ground breaking advice from a Conversion Rate specialist. The above is taken directly from the Google Adwords help center.

Basic, common sense, and sound advice for any Adwords advertiser to increase their conversion rate, right?

All these guidelines sound simple, not impossible, and stir up a resounding "Duhhh, of course we should be doing that" thought in your head right?

But why are so few doing it?

Is it the Diet Coke diet phenomenon? Are some advertisers thinking that if they order a triple deck burger, super large fries and a DIET coke that they are actually on diet?

Is PROVIDING RELEVANT AND SUBSTANTIAL CONTENT really that hard?

Well improving conversion IS alot like dieting, easy in concept(eat less, burn more calories), but a little bit more difficult in practice. Planning relevant, persuasive scenarios from an Adwords ad(driving point) to the landing page(funnel point) on through to the final conversion process(conversion beacon) is tough, daunting, and often complex work. Anything worthwhile usually is.

Well if you just needed a little more incentive to improve your Google Adwords campaign, I've got good news for ya! Google is going to start charging you more for low quality landing pages.

Get relevant or get broke.

Different Kinds of Traffic

Seth Godin blogs...

Whatever your website, I think you want better traffic, not more traffic.

You want to figure out why the right people will come, not build a sideshow that attracts exactly the wrong people.

At trade shows, there's always a few booths with magicians, fire-eaters or bikini-clad models. And post-show, there's no evidence at all to indicate that the noisy attractions did very much to improve the actual metrics of the booth.

So, maybe it doesn't matter how your site does compared to a site in a different category. What matters, I think, is how your site does compared to last week or last month, and what's happening to your conversion.  Read Seth's entire post.

Agreed. We've been talking about his for quite a while.

Assuming your site's conversion rate is on par with the industry average(around 2%) be careful not to come to the conclusion that 98-97% of the traffic is the wrong people just because they don't convert.  Don't  run out  willy nilly and try to find the 'right traffic'.  Most of that good traffic might be right beneath your sniffer now.  No matter how much of the 'right traffic' you have, your sight has to be just as right to make sure that 'quality' traffic gets the information they need, the way they need it.

It's not just quality of traffic, and like Seth points out,  it's the quality of their experience with you and your brand.  The quality of your persuasion scenario planning is what bridges the gap between you and your traffic's potential. 

We've spent a few words in some recent ClickZ articles talking about persuasion scenarios.  Start with this article, then read this, and finally this.

Conversion or Persuasion- where in the funnel is your problem?

Today was a busy day in the office, and one in which meetings were back to back, to back.  I started talking with my CFO, took a detour to meet with a potential partner, and ended the day spending time with some new (and potential) clients.  Very different audiences, yet one common discussion kept popping up, and it comes as no real surprise, it comes up daily around us.  The topic you ask- the difference between Conversion and Persuasion.  The cognoscenti will recall we've been speaking and writing on the topic for some time, but it's worth reading Bryan's last article nonetheless.  Here's a tidbit:

The linear conversion funnel has its place. Though rudimentary and limited, it a great blunt-force beginners' tool for online marketers with little or no metrics in place (and there are far too many of those left)...

...Instead of considering the conversion funnel by itself, we should think of it as living at the bottom end of the buy/sell process. Conversion is no longer the biggest problem facing online marketers; persuasion is.

Without persuasion, there's no incentive for visitors to walk through your linear sales process.  Unlike conversion, persuasion isn't linear.  The conversion funnel is smooth and simple, but the persuasive resevoir that feeds it is as complex and non-funnel-like as your visitors are.

Want to keep reading?

Waiting For Your Cat To Bark - The Seminar

Aroung here things are ramping up to a formidible buzz, well on their way to a fever pitch.

The book is being printed, videos are being recorded(for the DVD insert that will come with each book of course), promotion plans are being cemented up, and we are all preparing for the big release in June.

We've shared bit and peices and sometimes full drafts of the book with trusted friends and respected colleques, each one of them telling us to expect this book to be a runaway smash.

Still, we wanted to extend our 'inner circle', and meet a few more mareting and selling pioneers. 

So right now Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg are banging out a new series of PPT files. They are creating a one time presentation, an abbreviated and  super fiery special edition of their Wizards Of Web Seminar( you know the one that is usually sold-out months in advance).

Here is the situation.  There is a limited number of seats available for this one time only event to be held at on the new Campus of Wizard Academy in Austin, TX  on May 9-10.  The cost is $1800 per person. (The 3 day course costs $3000, so that is a significant savings)

Not only will you get a cranium full of potent mojo to help you start thinking about Persuasion Architecture and what it could mean to your business online and off, you will also get a new preview copy of the book signed by the authors.  We'll also give you 100 copies of the book when released to indoctrinate your friends, family and cats. 

Basically you are buying 100 books and getting the seminar virtually free.  Swet offer huh?

We can put your name on one of those limited seats, but get it booked now, the seats never seem to last long.

GrokCast - How are the automakers doing?

You would be hard pressed to find a more competetive industry on the marketing front than automakers.

Automakers spend big bucks building their car brands and promoting offer after incentive to get prospects onto car lots to take test drives.

In this GrokCast we dissect and compare two different marketing campaigns.

Are these automakers getting their marketing money's worth?  You tell us.

Watch the new GrokCast (21mb Flash movie, 19 minutes)

If you fail to plan success in advance, how do you know when you've arrived?

Chief Marketer has an eye-opening for some, sad for others, (but hardly surprising from this corner) article on many CMOs utter lack of ability to measure what they must- marketing ROI, specifically that of the online variety.  We're getting tired of speaking over the dull roar of today's online successes, regaling tales of traffic cost inflation (btw, Piper Jaffray reports Online Advertising to top $55 billion by 2010), but if the shoe fits...

Citing WebTrends 2006 CMO Web-Smart Report, they report 84% of the CMOs surveyed rated their organization's ability to measure web marketing performance as having room for improvement, weak or non-existent.

“The challenge is due to a lack of consistent, goal-based metrics to measure reach, frequency, and conversion across all online campaigns,” said a spokesman for Web trends.

Another cause is “the inability to target customers with relevant marketing and messages due to siloed analysis; tools that only provide aggregated data such as page views and visits,” he continued.

Uhh, sorry, no.  Consistent, goal-based metrics?  Who's goals?  Report jockeys going to start creating more canned reports that measure my goal-based metrics?  Forgive me for being skeptical, but it's not often good things are found in a can. 

If that's not enough, they go on to blame the... tools?  Many web analytics vendors have created fabulous tools for reporting and measuring the data collected by the medium.  What other medium provides such ready access to a wealth of statistics?  Those who heard me speak last week at Ad:tech 1mpact heard the line often, clicks are people, links are decisions. 

These fabulous tools we have at our disposal measure the decisions our people/visitors/customers make when they engage with our persuasive system, or rather, our advertising, marketing, and website.  They're limited in that by definition, they cannot come preloaded with our customers' motivations included- after all, they're our customers.  We're responsible (by we, of course, I mean marketing not simply IT) to plan the experience each of our customer segments would prefer to engage in online.  What questions they would ask?  What information they would require?   How would they prefer to interact with our site?

In short, we're planning what a successful scenario looks like because it's amazing how much less of the problem these analysis tools magically become when we feed them the plan we built in advance.