You’re walking down the street and you notice a friend on the other side. You wave and shout at them. They see you, cross the street and are now in front of you. What should you stop doing? That’s right; waving and shouting. Because otherwise they won’t be your friend for much longer.
When someone arrives at your website you have already got their attention. Now you need to pay attention to their needs and give them what they came for. That’s why Google and Amazon and most great web brands are successful. They focus on helping customers to complete tasks. This is really important for you to grow as an E-Business. i.e. converting the web traffic in to sales with the use of simple, but effective methodologies. Otherwise your Websites' bounce rate will go up and ultimately you'll be losing a potential client and the conversion rates could go down drastically.
That is one of the reasons why the Flash intro has almost totally disappeared. Waving and shouting was always a fifth-rate attempt at creating a TV ad, and we know what most people think of ads, don’t we. Except for ads on Google – people don’t really see them as ads because they’re actually useful. If you search for “villa rentals”, the ads are about special offers related to Villas. They are related to the task you want to complete. They’re not trying to sell you something totally different. This is what we learnt in consumer behavior in Marketing. We can use the same theories and apply that in strategic manner using the technology. That's what Google has done through Adwords.
Isn’t it interesting that Google has become one of the most powerful organisations in the world by selling 17-word blocks of text? Google has never sold a single graphical ad on Google.com. What does that tell you? That the web is a very rational, literate place. Words really matter.
Forget traditional marketing words that talk about “solving tomorrow’s problems today”. This sort of waffle drives customers mad. When most customers see this sort of phoney “creative” language, they generally respond, “That’s marketing” – and they don’t mean it as a compliment.
Have you ever bought a product based on an ad you saw on the Amazon homepage? I’ve asked this from many international clients and I’ve yet to find someone who has. Have you ever bought something based on “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought”? That’s Marketing 2.0: don’t try to change the customer’s journey, rather try to expand and deepen it.
How many hero shots of smiling faces can customers be exposed to until they become immune to them? We already have banner ad blindness on the web. I also see the emergence of hero shot blindness.
For too long, most marketing has treated customers as emotional and irrational. The web is a different, rational space. It’s where we go to search, compare and find out more. On the web, treat your customers as intelligent strangers.
Web management is a process of continuous improvement based on the actual behaviour of customers. That's why we are always trying to convince the customers to go with a web maintenance plan with eDesigners, since we can improve the website from time to time by looking at the customer behavior and by analyzing the statistics reports we can tell our clients about the geographical locations where many hits have came in, so they can target that audience in a different manner rather than using the conventional approaches. There are many other things that we can do through these analytics. But I feel that the companies are not willing to get the maximum out of web, may be because they just have sales persons, but not strategic marketers who can think and strategies their business processes to bring the highest return to the company using this explicit knowledge( consumer behavior patterns and trends).
BTW the worst possible way to design a website is to have five marketers in a room drinking coffee. Marketers should embrace this new evidence based approach and stop whinging about the loss of creativity. On the web, old‑school marketing is increasingly sounding like a needy child. Marketing 2.0 is about being the helpful attendant.
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