Weekly Articles

Like it or not, the pace of the world we live in isn’t slowing down one bit. It just keeps going faster, and faster. Thanks to our wonderful friend Technology, the more empowered we are to be able to do things quicker, the quicker we want them done.

Before the telegraph, people accepted postal services as a reasonably fast way to communicate. At least it was easier than travelling to deliver messages yourself. Along comes the telegraph in the early 1800s and all of a sudden postal mail is inferior. So then in 1876 Alexander Graham Bell creates the telephone. Within a couple of years there are telephones all over the place and folks just can’t be bothered to use a telegraph—it’s too slow. The telephone evolves as switchboard operators are replaced by electric switchboards. But rotary dialling is too slow, so it’s replaced with touch-tone dialling. Trying to catch people when they’re at the phone is annoying, so answering machines and voice mail hit the scene. Finding a payphone when you’re on the road or being unreachable while travelling is such an inconvenience—it’s a good thing cell phones exist. But sometimes speaking isn’t good enough. You just have to be able to transmit written words. Well the fax machine was an amazing invention until the world wide web brought us electronic mail. And thanks to Blackberrys and other smart phones, the convenience of e-mail can be combined with the portability of a cell phone. And so it keeps evolving.

Where am I going with all that?

As people’s lives speed up, they become accustomed to spending less time doing each of the tasks they do. This poses a problem for advertisers.

Basically, it all boils down to a society of shortened attention spans. But there are a few solutions. The most obvious is to simply advertise more quickly. Short sound-bites on the radio, quick messages on billboards, simple newspaper ads with an emphasis on image rather than words, etc.

One of the greatest advantages to advertisers of the internet versus traditional means of advertising is the ability to present large amounts of information at a low cost. But this can be one of the greatest problems with trying to advertise using a website if it’s not approached smartly—with consideration for the aforementioned shortened consumer attention span.

Here are some suggestions for making your website an effective advertising tool.

(Note: This post is not about successfully driving people to your website. It’s about making their visit worthwhile to you once they’re there.)

1. Dynamic Content Done Right

What is dynamic content? It’s content that changes. It’s blog posts that are frequently updated. It’s photo galleries in which new photos are added all the time. It’s weekly specials and event notices and anything else that changes on a regular basis. How do you do it right?

Make it relevant. People won’t be fooled by posting rubbish to your blog. Last week I wrote about giving customer’s a piece of your mind. Do it on your website.

Make it interesting. Nobody wants to see photos of your office party, (unless it got particularly wild). But they just might be up for seeing images of your staff in action delivering your services or interacting with your community. Or of customers enjoying the benefits of your products. (Make sure you have their permission before you post them on the web.)

2. Prioritize Information Accessibility

Determine what information people might want to be able to find quickly, and make that easy. This might be pricing information, contact information, or product comparisons.

Websites allow you to go into great detail about what you’re offering. That detail should be just another click away. But by prioritizing your information, you allow visitors to quickly find what they’re looking for before they could lose interest, and you make them feel empowered by letting them choose when to go further and learn more.

3. Call to Action, Call to Action, Call to Action

If you want people to take action, you have to ask them to. Use words like, “click here,” “start now,” and “learn more” to implore visitors to take another step. As long as they feel like they’re still doing something, they’ll stick around. If they land on the site and there’s just a bunch of reading to do, they’re unlikely to stick around for long. But if they’ve being lead down a path toward an objective, they’re more likely to keep exploring.

4. Interactivity

Making your website feel interactive for your visitors doesn’t have to be difficult. You don’t need fancy flash animation or complex site applications.

Polls allow visitors to voice their opinion with a click of a button, and to find out how their opinion compares to those of others. They give the visitor something to do, which keeps them on your site longer and therefore thinking about you longer, and they can provide valuable statistical information for you!

If your website has a blog, let people post comments. This can get a dialog started that will give you ideas for future blog posts, or even for ways to change the way you do business to better serve your clients.

Forums can serve a variety of purposes. They allow people to express opinions, to seek advice, to debate, to share their expertise, and so on. Having a forum on your site can generate repeat visitors as people post and then come back looking for responses. A carefully moderated forum can be a great, unobtrusive way for you to interact with your visitors too.

Here are some other things you might want to include on your website to increase its appeal to visitors with short attention spans:

Videos or even just slideshows are fairly easy to imbed into your site. These types of multimedia presentations appeal to the senses of people who prefer to learn or gain information from listening or watching rather than just reading.

Customer testimonials and responses on your site help visitors to relax by making them feel as if they’re being shown how good something is, rather than just told. If you tell someone you’ve got a rockin’ good product, they’ll question your motive. If someone else says it rocks, they’ll be more likely to listen.

Now you have some ideas for how to get people to stick around on your website. But what good is that if they don’t take it to the next step and connect with YOU instead of just your website? I’ll talk about that next week…

Advertising has changed a lot over the years. It has had to. We’re so constantly bombarded by advertising that we learn to block out marketing messages. Once we realize we’re being advertised to in a new way, we train our minds to ignore or instantly refuse the tactic. We have to, because there’s so much advertising around us that if we took the time to digest it all, we’d have no time for anything else–and we’d likely own one of everything imaginable and have even more maxed credit than we already have.

This creates a serious challenge for those trying to advertise. How do you get your message out there when nobody wants to hear it? How do you sell your product when nobody wants to be sold to? This challenge requires constant creative effort. I say constant, because creativity just once won’t do. Yesterday’s creativity is today’s old-fashioned technique.

This month’s blog posts will focus on showing you some ways to be creative with your marketing and advertising. Today’s lesson? Adding value to advertising content…

Something for nothing. It’s an interesting concept, and one that most businesspeople try at all costs to avoid. They want to get something for their investment, whether its a monetary investment or just an investment of time. Naturally. But the fact of the matter is that most customers like few things more than actually getting something for nothing. Low prices? Good. Discounts on already low prices? Better. Free stuff? Best!

I’m not about to tell you to start giving away your products and services for free. While it might work to get people in your door, at the end of the day you’ve got to pay the bills. What if you could give your customers something for free, that costs you nothing? What if it didn’t cost you any more money than what you’re already spending or any more time than you’re already giving up?

Give your customers a piece of your mind. Wait! Finish reading this post before you take that the wrong way.

If you’re a business owner, you probably consider yourself an expert, or at least highly knowledgeable, about something. Whether it’s a product, a service, or a combination of both that you offer, you like to think that you know a lot about what it is you’re selling. Hopefully, you know more than your customers know about it. But if they’re your customers, or potential customers, they’re probably interested in learning more.

Add value to the content of your advertising by imparting some of your knowledge into it. Share what you know. How ever you’re already advertising, take that method and give it more value. You’re already spending the money on the advertising and you already take time to try to create successful advertising. So, in doing so, find a way to make your advertising valuable to your customer.

You’ve given your customer something before they’ve even made a purchase.

The benefits:

• You’re still advertising! You’re still getting your name out there just like you always were.
• Your customer, or prospective customer, will remember your consideration when they’re ready to buy. (Remember: Customers buy when they’re ready to buy, so you have to be ready to sell when that time comes.)
• You’ve built trust. Customers will recognize that you are a source of knowledge and that you’re willing to share that knowledge.

I’m wrapping things up…

At the beginning of this post I said that we’ve wired our brains to turn off in the face of advertising. The “hard sell” is the oldest advertising technique on the books–albeit the most used–so it’s the one we’re best at shutting out.

By adding some value to your advertising, you help to disguise it. It looks less like advertising and feels more like friendly advice or helpful hints. And, once your customers get used to your “generous” approach, their minds will be less quick to turn off or automatically shun your more direct advertising. Once they’re comfortable with what you’re “giving” them, they’ll become more receptive when you go for the sale.

Having to glean over all of the information, make heads and tails of the other person’s work just doesn’t appeal to me at all.  It is a constant struggle to make sure my additions fit in place with the existing design.  It’s like adding a modern kitchen to a one-hundred year old house–the standards for building are different, and things get complicated.

Keeping clean code has always been a practice of mine, whether it’s simply making sure tags are nested properly within each other or commenting code that could potentially be confusing to another party.  It sometimes can be an annoying practice, but I’ve ended up thanking myself in the long run (when a customer wants a change made and I had to dig through my code again).

Now, commenting code and nesting tags are only part of the equation!  When I begin a new project, I find it wise to have a firm convention for naming things ($camelCasingVariables, using_underscores_in_your_filenames, and adding relative id=”" tags for sections of HTML code).

Keeping these things in mind, I have cut my production time down significantly.  I have also cut the time it takes for a future examiner of my code to figure out just what is going on inside.  As a result, the customer can be served more quickly and efficiently whenever they make a request for changes.

The need for good naming conventions, nested tags and commenting code might be greek to most people, but the bottom line is this: when you’re looking for a good website developer, it’s important to find out a thing or two about the back-end of the work they do. What does their code look like? How easy is their work manipulated by other developers–future developers?

It has been a busy start to the new year at Canuka. We’re very pleased to have launched our new website and we’re excited about our new reseller program.

Over the coming months, we’ll be inviting local businesses and service providers throughout Atlantic Canada to partner with Canuka to provide our services to their customers. This will allow us to reach out into every corner of the region while maintaining our high level of customer service. We’ll also be able to help small businesses earn some extra income while increasing their service offerings. (more…)