What’s An Interactive Website?

One way to classify websites is the degree to which a visitor can affect the content which is presented to them.  Those websites which ask for a higher number of visitor clicks (interactions) are termed to be more interactive.  Just like a conversation, when a salesperson talks at a prospect nonstop and hardly takes a second to understand what the person is looking for, that can be a described as a non interactive conversation.  The same applies to a website.  An interactive website is like a good sales call where the salesperson starts with some qualification questions for the prospect and continues to seek some feedback throughout the conversation.

The Ultimate Data Opportunity

Interactive websites represent the ultimate opportunity to generate valuable data about your visitors.  By taking full advantage of the click activity required on an interactive website, a company can create an environment which simultaneously delivers more targeted information to a visitor while capture the behaviour to build profiles of visitors to the website.

Websites are often built with design and messaging in mind first and then analytics is added at the tail end to allow for site performance data to be captured.  In our client projects, we bring the analytics decision making into the earliest stages of the website design to incorporate the needs of our clients for data about prospects.  Client actions can then be added into key content areas to create more data points for analysis.

This data is useful beyond just website fine tuning — its usefulness extends to all areas of your marketing decision making where a lack of data can make meetings painful and driven off of perceptions rather than fact.  One of our clients recently said that he looks forward to our regular analytics reports more than his management meetings now for getting a pulse on the state and direction of his business.

How is a tagline perceived?
Its given more importance than another short  statements in your marketing materials or website.  Visitors realize that takes a higher commitment to the idea to put it in your tagline, so they’ll put  more importance on your tagline than other  statements.

What does a tagline really do?
On your website, it sets the tone (creates a starting  point) for the “conversation” that takes place on your  website.  It plants a thought in the visitor’s head –  one you want there — so they will look for proof of  what the tagline suggests about your company.

Its Value to Your Business

1. Positioning – a tagline can quickly establish your  positioning in your marketplace relative to  competitors as well as on your own.
2. Shortcut – it creates a shortcut in one area of  your marketing content, by placing an ending  conclusion first.  If the visitor trusts your company,  you may save yourself some sales time.
3. Foundational – it creates a strong foundation for  the rest of your marketing pitch.  A well chosen  tagline can create momentum in a sales situation  and create faster understanding of your unique value  proposition in the eyes of the visitor.

Creating A Tagline – Your Selection Process Needs To Be Complete
Most companies dive straight into creating a tagline  without considering the foundation on which it  should be based.
Consider how these taglines (examples) can solve a specific  business challenge:
1) Not your average ____ company (breaks the  perception of your product being a commodity)
2) Helping _____ business to grow (breaks the  assumption that your product / service is only for the  “other” types of businesses)

Why does your selection process need to be complete? Otherwise you’ll waste some incredibly valuable real estate on a catch phrase that doesn’t'  address your most significant sales cycle gaps.  Here are some key steps:

1. Consider your competitive landscape
2. List your company strengths
3. Analyze your customer segments
4. Give yourself options prior to debating which is  the best one

We’ve seen it work
In many client situations, we seen the tagline  building process bring a much broader focus to  clients online efforts.    Armed with a large number  of ideas and a framework for choosing between  them, AftertheNet has witnessed management teams (or single managers) produce highly focused and  powerful taglines which have a big impact at the  start of a visitor’s successful flow to conversion on their  website.

So what are the dimensions of trust for a prepaid card prospect?

• Company: We’re talking about handling people’s money and moving it internationally (in some cases).  The strength of your company and its affiliations to known banking players is a key dimension

• Support: Most people have some experience with banking and card products and they have experienced challenges at some time or another.  The critical factor for them has been the level of support they have gotten from the company when the problem did arise.
• Fees: Hidden or surprise fees are an accepted fact of financial services products and the assumption among buyers is that the “price is not the price”.  The question is: how bad will the hidden fees be?
• Ease of Use: An often used benefit of prepaid cards is the significant convenience gain as compared to conventional money transfer products.   The buying public is justifiably skeptical of such claims having fallen prey to other services which promise a better experience but instead replace one weak spot with another.

Building Confidence in Context

The trust question which arises in a potential customer’s mind is not all encompassing.  Usually, the focus on trust lies in several critical subareas of the overall buying criteria for the customer.  A couple of examples will convey the idea more quickly:

Example 1: International Money Transfer

A resident of the U.S. sends money regularly to his brother in Europe to help in the early stages of setting up a new business.  Until now, he has been sending the money via a bank and has been frustrated with several aspects of the service.  The issue which is foremost on his mind is the unreliable delivery times of international money transfers.  He wants to get the money to his brother on a regular schedule.  Everytime he gets paid on the 31st of the month, he wants to send his brother the money for the office rent by the 2nd of the month.

A prepaid card company promises faster delivery (within 24 hrs via direct credit to a prepaid card account).   He’s interested in this benefit but has heard similar claims from his current bank provider also.   The trust challenge in this case is to create confidence in the fulfillment of promised benefits.

Example 2: Parents Funding College Student

When parents send their kids off to college, the challenge of providing support while maintaining spending control is  always a big one.   The promised benefit of prepaid cards is the ability to rapidly and regularly provide money to your child at college.    This confidence is required to displace less convenient but know systems like regular bank account deposits.

In this context, the key factor is rapid availability of funds.  A potential customer (parent) will look for reasons to have confidence in your claims of instant or rapid availability of funds.

Understanding and Adapting to Buyer Context in Building Trust

Total trust and confidence is a loftygoal which is neither possible or required to achieve for most companies.  Experience has show that buyer confidence in prepaid card companies is based upon each individuals hierarchy of needs from the prepaid card product.   Context is created by the unique combination of needs / pains of a specific subset of customers.   Before seeking to address the trust issue, it is important to understand the context and where to focus your trust building efforts.

AftertheNet pushes clients to treat their website the same way as their “real world” sales pitch.  While everyone recognizes that a website is not the exact same as a personal call or meeting, a lot of the same rules apply.   If  you expect your website to provide you strong leads, it needs to create trust among potential buyers that you can deliver whats important to them.

Your most precious resource in any marketing situation is customer attention.  With the goal of saving time, a prospect will only give you a limited amount of time to deliver enough information to convince them your prepaid card is valuable to them and that they can trust you to deliver as promised.   If your website doesn’t pass the early relevancy test, you won’t get the chance to deliver your whole sales pitch.

Focus your efforts in trust building on the context and segment that each part of your website is focused on.  Too wide an effort will dilute your message and cost you the prospect.    Any new purchase from a company has a certain amount of risk and buyers recognize that.   Companies need to meet a minimum standard of relevant confidence and trust with a new buyer to get them to absorb the risk of dealing with a company which is unknown to them.

The Web Strategy Company will continue to publish this ongoing series of articles about how Prepaid Card companies can achieve a higher level of sales results.   Stay tuned for more articles in the series.

We’ve written on the subject of packaging before but we wanted to bring the issue of pricing and packaging to the forefront for companies.  The tendency to think of packaging as a way of offering discounts without cutting your prices reflects the narrow thinking we find in many companies.

Packaging has power far beyond discounting.

One of the things that pricing experts will tell you is that the first goal of pricing and packaging is to shift the customers perception from a cost mindset to a value mindset.

So what’s the trick?

We’ve successfully used a combination of segment targeting and packaging to create a higher pricing opportunity.

The game here is to get as close as possible to the centre of a prospects value “nexus” … the needs or pain areas which they are most focused on and are willing to spend the most money to fix.

In a training context, often a single course or program will only represent a partial solution to an overall challenge faced by a prospect.

The right approach: multi course packages targeted to specific market segments and their specific “pain” areas.

The question is how should you segment and how should you package.  We’ll touch on the packaging part here and get into segmenting in another future article soon.   Here are few steps that will help in your packaging process:

1. Start with your segments (industries, job roles, other)
2. Identify their critical pain areas
3. Create packages of courses which will more completely address those pain areas
4. Price with value to customer in mind rather than cost + or a discounting mindset

The central power of this approach to packaging is that it shifts your packaging mindset towards solving prospects problems rather than giving them unnecessary or excessive discounts.  I always notice clients are surprised to be told of this approach to packaging and they quickly find that it empowers them to overcome the initial defensive position on price that prospects try to put you in.

For most organizations, positioning can play a big role in creating advantage when competition is a key issue.

Many times, a prospect is not just looking for a single product.  They are also looking to engage and test a relationship with anorganization for more long term needs.  This is a critical type of prospect for your company: they have long term revenue value and provide greater margins over time as selling is no longer required (like any returning customer situation).

While working with clients, AftertheNet helps them explore the right strategy for positioning their company in the market place.

The factors which affect positioning decisions include:

• competitive situation
• pricing point of products / services
• critical features for their customers

Companies have a difficult choice in positioning their brands in the marketplace.  They often avoid positioning out of fear of narrowing their customer base and thereby reducing their opportunity.

Our approach is to treat your brand positioning as more of a voyage rather than a one time tactical step

Consider this new angle on your company branding:

Is there a particular area in which your company excels:

• The customer service part
• The delivery of product or services
• The post purchase support side
• Anything else

Consider putting that strength front and centre in your tagline or opening branding statement.

Why is this important?

If you have larger competitors, often you’re the second or third company that people are looking at.  Immediately, your company is on a defensive footing in the sales process — struggling to stand out in a comparison shopping situation.

Creating a strong positioning statement around your core advantage area will give your company some of that control back:

• By creating a clear picture of your distinct advantage in the marketplace
• By connecting more strongly with those prospects who regard that area of strength most highly

This approach to positioning doesn’t narrow your company’s market opportunity –  it only creates a stronger starting footing in a competitive sales process.

But generating business growth requires reaching beyond product features or service elements to what affects customers in their daily lives (work or personal). Framing the benefits in that mindset is what we (AftertheNet) do for clients on a daily basis and  companies can greatly benefit from that approach.

Using a pain based selling approach, you can engage potential prospects who are not connecting your offerings to their critical problems.  Key goals are met by this approach:

• Gaining access to new segments which you have not previously had strong presence with
• Connecting the most emotional / critical pain areas of your prospects
• Increasing the value perception of your products

Here’s an example:

A technical training program for IT managers is offering courses about building Custom Content Management Systems.  In the past, the training organization has marketed to companies which currently use or are planning to use  CMS’s.

The focus has been around increasing the effectiveness or extending the capabilities of the CMS.  There’s a big missed opportunity here: direct marketing to the IT managers.  IT managers are always under pressure from the threat of new technology, the implementation of hosted technology (which don’t require internal IT) or outsourcing of the IT function.

This disempowerment creates both a morale and negotiation problem for IT managers.  An advance Customized CMS course can be marketed to IT Managers as a way to influence the direction of their company’s technology that is good for the company but also favours them in building their importance in the organization.

Once a custom CMS is implemented, the dependency level of the company on the IT manager with expertise and direct knowledge of the custom system will have increased exponentially.  This value to an IT manager can be tens of thousands of dollars of increased pay annually.  Hence greater inquiries to your company from IT managers for their own self interest.

These types of quantifiable association to salary negotiation power is an important marketing angle for training companies to reach companies whose management doesn’t see value in a particular program.

Direct access to a potential student’s personal career goals can play a big role in increasing the value perception and interest level in a particular program.

So how do you grow your average customer value?

Remember, your customers are not ultimately looking for products or services, they are looking for solutions to their problems. Most companies we talk to focus their packaging efforts on offering volume or multi-product discounts.
In part, this is the result of poor competitive positioning, but also reflects a lack of understanding of the power of packaging.

Taken individually, your offerings may only represent a part of the solution to a prospect’s challenges. But packaged together, several of your offerings can represent a complete solution to a defined problem of a prospect.

Lets look at an example

• A company decides to send an employee for Adobe training to a local training organization
• An internal challenge with creating campaign landing pages as add-ons to their website was affecting the effectiveness of outbound marketing
• Several weak spots were identified ranging from visual design to creating interactive functionality on landing pages

The company had translated this problem into a photoshop and dreamweaver skills deficit.

One of our clients told us that in this situation, they would sell a combined Dreamweaver and Photoshop training package with a 20% volume discount.  We asked the question back: why not create a premium course package: which includes Photoshop, Dreamweaver and a Javascript course into a new mini program:

• with a package name like Landing Page Design Essentials
• selling points focused on the pain areas associated with creating strong landing pages

Suddenly a higher price can be charged for the packaged set of courses
A much lower package discount is required because the prospect company sees a closer fit to their specific needs.
We’ve helped clients to build packages like these into their existing marketing efforts.   Leveraging industry or busiiness situation based packaging empowers the company to create a clearer value perception among prospects and (by extension) higher pricing and a raised average customer value.

You’ve had an SEO expert optimize your site and you’re getting traffic but the conversions on your site are way below your targets. Congratulations – you’ve impressed the search engines — now its time to impress your prospects

Getting traffic to your website is a fairly mechanical exercise in optimization (meta tags on your web pages and keyword rich content are two big factors).  But getting that traffic from landing to conversion (contacting you or purchasing online) is a completely different challenge.

The same rules apply online as offline:

• a visitor needs to see content which connects to them directly — either via needs, pains, features or product needs or their demographic / industry.
• Most importantly, the perception of value must be built and the obstacles to conversion must be removed

Creating the value perception among website visitors is an exercise in targeting each segment’s unique needs, perspectives and doubts with precise and time efficient content.  If you look at your website visitors, one way to divide them up is by their relative knowledge of your product category, company and products.  Depending on their level of awareness and connection to your products, visitors will need varied treatment and content.

On the surface the most knowledgeable visitors would appear to be the most promising prospects.  But they come with a price — a competitive sales cycle.  Prospects who already know what product type they want will typically already be talking to competing companies when the reach you.

To avoid the pressures of competitive sales, reaching prospects when they are searching for a solution rather than a specific product can represent a less competitive scenario.  Converting that traffic can take more time and a more targeted and optimized online experience.

Using an approach which we call targeted value selling, our company creates separate envrionments on clients’s websites for each key customer group. Taking advantage of more specific buying criteria for a specific segment, we create a deeper understandng of the value proposition, brand strength and compelling reasons to convert for each customer group.

At that point, our clients are putting as much effort into impressing their prospects as they’ve put into impressing the search engines

Lets look at a specific scenario
You’ve decided to incorporate offers on your website and in your overall marketing pitch.  Your key team members on the marketing and sales side are gathering at a meeting to discuss what the offers should be the first to be used.  You’ve scheduled a 1 hour meeting with three key managers and the first part of the meeting is used for each manager to suggest an offer which they feel would be effective

You can already picture this meeting:

• a set of very distinct and unconnected ideas for offers are generated based solely on the memory and experiences of the managers
• When the time of decision comes, a great deal of difficulty arises in coming to agreement
• Each manager is adamant about their offer being the right one and
• Time starts running out with no clear decision or plan being be formulated

So what went wrong
Having been through this exact meeting scenario on several occasions, our team can share what we see as missing in the process.  Any gathering of managers, particularly ones with considerable experience in the business will quickly fail to generate decisions if the strength of the options is too low.

The reason: managers’ experience and instinct will tell them that the right answer hasn’t been put on the table as an option

A better approach
Based on years of experience with these types of meetings, we’ve focused on a two stage methodology for successful decision making meetings:

Stage 1: We use research and brain storming to generate a list of options for the decision to be made (example a list of potential offers for prospects).  We also organize and rank each option based upon the impact it will have specifically on the sales cycle and for whom it will be effective

Stage 2: A structured management meeting, where additional ideas are added based on managers’ input and then ranked in the same way as the other ideas.  Then a systematic shortlisting and selection process is followed to determine the final preferred option.

This approach:

• Starts from a stronger place (more options fully analyzed)
• Allows a smoother decision process
• Yields a much higher level of consensus and buy-in and most importantly success rate

Its now a standard part of our work with clients on their web and marketing strategy: providing an engine for more ideas/options for key management meetings.  We’ve seen it consistently delivery better results and that’s we have  a dedicated research function to provide those options to our clients.

Your website is the great leveler in a competitive situation.

Unlike in the real world, a few smart decisions and you can start to look as strong as your bigger competitors without a massive budget outlay.  Try doing that in an offline ad campaign.
What advantages does your website give you in competitive situation?

• You can target your key customer segments more closely using your website
• You can spend more time educating prospects on your unique company and product advantage.
• You can set the tone in a sales process

Two key website tactics for competitiveness:
Targeting:
Give your key segments a more tailored experience, with content and branding information that more precisely meets their needs.  Its tougher for bigger competitors to narrow their brand and sales focus because they usually have to worry about the “don’t turn anyone off” problem.
Positioning:
Using its visual and word combination, your website is the ideal vehicle for creating a strong competitive positioning perception with your prospects.  What do we mean by “competitive positioning”?  We’re referring to creating an understanding in your prospect’s mind of where your company fits in your industry.

Impact of Positioning:
Pricing resilience: If your positioning is stronger for your key segments than your competitors, you can create a situation in which a (moderately) higher price doesn’t deter them from buying from your company.

Trust: Lost sales and pricing pressure are often attributable a weak brand / positioning perception. Buyers are always looking for reasons to trust a company and how they can extract greater value from their offerings.

What are my options for positioning?
Your company has a number of different directions it can go in choosing a positioning approach. Through a defined process, you can prioritize the following factors:

1. competitive strength
2. differentiation
3. sales efficiency
4. close rates
5. pricing pressure

Based upon that, you can consider a positioning strategy which best addresses your key concerns in your sales and marketing process.

We’d suggest that you take this opportunity to more clearly position your company in your industry.  Done correctly, its impact on key parts of your business in 2010 can be dramatic.