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September 27, 2007
I was reading a number of articles on the language used by marketing professionals and it made me think. Can a simple change of words result in effective communication? and can using words that resonate with your audience increase the conversion rates and response rates of your communication and email campaigns?
Quote from one of the articles:
"The difference between marketing language and real language is that
people don't think in marketing-speak. That is, their actual thought
processes don't include the words found in marketing language."
The following examples were some talked about in the articles I read:
- Think about your audience as opposed to verticals or markets
- Think user experience as opposed to features and functions
- Think memories as opposed to promotions
- Think of creating a lasting impression as opposed to generating interest
- Think of telling a relevant success story as opposed to listing testimonials
- Use real language instead of marketing language
My lesson to be learned from reading the articles is to take a moment to think every time you are adding content to your website. If there is a better choice of words or messaging that is more relevant to your target audience it could potentially increase the overall length of time a visitor is on your site, increase email campaign conversion rates, and generate leads for your company.
The best way to succeed is to test, adapt, and refine. Multivariate testing can be used to test multiple combinations of elements on a landing page. So you can swap about picture-1 with headline-2 and button-3 and see how it works against picture-2 with headline-4 and button-2, etc. Its basically just testing a bunch of different variables and see which combo is the most effective (e.g., yields highest conversion rate)
The answer to the title "Can a simple change of words result in effective communication?" is Y-E-S. Even a 1% increase in conversions can substantially increase revenue.
September 17, 2007
When I first heard about Twitter awhile back, I thought it was pretty limited in its use for both business and pleasure. It's the concept of microblogging where you send your network of contacts updates on exactly what you are doing at this exact moment. Since you are limited to 140 characters, your posts are very short. You can update your status via SMS, IM, or email. Taking a snapshot of some blogs on Twitter today, you can make posts such as:
"lamenting"
"going home see you all later"
"or was it Tom Cruise?"
"hope you feel better. a bad back is always a pain"
Sooooo I won't go as far as to say "asinine" as Mark Simon wrote on his blog (simply because this is a corporate blog), but I thought the idea would eventually die off. I see that Twitter and marketers are still grappling for ways to use this technology: It seems like "cool" technology, how can we turn it into YouTube success? The ideas that Jennifer Jones presents in her blog for Twitter just seem like a stretch. Wouldn't a simple RSS feed do the trick? I think it's great that marketers are becoming more open to using technology and web tools to initiate and continue a conversation with their audience. But people shouldn't be dazzled by the hype of new technology. Just because it's the newest thing doesn't mean it's necessarily going to apply to your business needs. Anyway, I will remain a skeptic until convinced otherwise. If you have any ideas for valid business applications uses of Twitter that cannot be achieved by a more simple, easy method then let me know.
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