Your corporate website needs to become a trap
By Chris Abraham. Filed in Internet Marketing, Social Media Marketing |Tags: AWeber Communications, Constant Contact, E-book, eBook, Facebook, linkedin, List of Deputy Chairmen of the Federation Council of Russia, MailChimp, RSS, Seth Godin, social media, StumbleUpon, twitter, Unison Agency
I just started as Director of Social Media at Unison Agency in Washington’s historic Georgetown. One of my perks is getting to work with Executive Director of Strategy, Andrea Fabbri. He’s a strategist’s strategist. During a meeting on Friday he quipped, “a website is a trap — or should be.” I had never thought about it that succinctly. It’s true! “It’s Wabbit season, and I’m hunting wabbits, so be vewy, vewy quiet!”
Charities know it takes seven touches to garner a donation. Big brands know they need to fill the skies with advertising ack-ack if they want to get into our consumer heads. Parents know that repetition is the secret to teaching their kids. The same thing is true when it comes to your website.
Everyone’s obsessed with drawing visitors to their sites and online social media properties through advertising, SEO, marketing and PR; however, when the stars align and someone actually clicks through and comes into your sphere of influence, do you have a collections strategy? Do you have methods for trapping these valuable, pre-filtered, and already-interested prospects? Well, you should, because you can’t expect someone who’s doing an initial reconnaissance of your work and services to necessarily remember to come back later when they’re ready to take the leap and hire someone. Bookmarks are passé and our memories are addled with too much to do, too many sites, and too much information.
When someone finally takes your bait and lands on your site, having the perfect site is only the first step. The next step is to trap them.
When I talk about trapping your prospects, what I mean is offering them a compelling method for keeping in touch that’s stickier than a contact form or a hyperlinked email address.
There are a number of traps you can lay — and you should consider them all if you have the commitment, time, and resources to maintain them all.
1) Email List/Newsletter — Are you subscribed to any newsletters? I am subscribed to the newsletters of Seth Godin, Chris Brogan, CC Chapman, and Christoper Penn. They’re all kings of the email newsletter — and I am never disappointed. I can’t tell you how many of my blog posts were directly inspired by morning emails from Godin and Brogan. I have never started one myself as this method demands full commitment and full seriousness. Each newsletter, even if it’s “just” a blog-to-email newsletter, needs to be insightful, germane to the subject, and valuable. Why? Email is a hot-potato and can never be abused or it’ll be ignored, spam-boxed, blocked, reported, and — in the best scenario — unsubscribed. With a newsletter, you need to become the best parent possible: your newsletters need to go out exactly when you say they will, at the frequency you promise, and with a consistency of quality, voice, generosity, and vision that cannot be done in half-measures. At the very least, you can use Feedburner as a way of offering up your blog posts as subscribable by email; or, if you’re really willing to commit to the newsletter as a method of keeping in touch, MailChimp seems to be the way to go these days; however, AWeber and Constant Contact seem to still have strong market shares. Chris Penn is a maestro. I just popped over to check out his personal brand site and after reading one post, up popped a request to join his newsletter, Almost Timely News:
2) Valuable Content Offer — Instead of a content-based newsletter, many sites offer white papers or exclusive content from their sites. This can be useful; however, it suggests to visitors that they’re soon to receive an aggressive sales call from a sociopathic salesman. It may well be too much commitment for the casual peruser. It might be something you might want to add for the serious visitor; however, don’t make this a barrier to seven touches. And, if you have no activation plan and are just collecting name, company, email, and phone number, then you have a block to your marketing plan. Plus, since you don’t even have a tacit agreement in place as to how you’ll be contacted in the future, how often you’ll be contacted, and what you’ll be sent, you need to err on the side of under-messaging. Whatever the offer is, the visitor needs to perceive a value-for-value trade between their contact information and the lure you’re proffering. So, for example, if you have an eBook or White Paper that you’ve charged for in the past, you might re-purpose that document as an incentive for your visitors to share their personal information. I must warn you to err on the side of being too generous. Give ’til it hurts. When it comes to boring corporate websites, there’s really no such thing as a freeloader. Everyone who visits is there for some reason, be it doing initial recon, due diligence, or even competitor analysis. So, no matter what your gift “costs” you, it’s a worthwhile investment in your sales channel and business development strategy. I would say it’ll win you more income, over the course of its life, as a free incentive on your website than it ever would as an eBook on Amazon.com.
3) Social Media Subscriptions — If you’re doing social media right, you’re using social media as a powerful way of both remaining in the minds of those who have dared to cross your path is the past but you’re also working on building a trust relationship with each and every friend and follower — and they are paying attention. Social media is a trap. And if not the trap, it is a lure that is an essential part of the path to the seven touches towards conversion. But you need to learn to detach yourself from the outcome and just spread out as many toys as possible, stand back, and don’t be surprised when your visitors turn meter sticks into swords and cardboard boxes into forts and don’t remotely follow your well-laid social media plans at all. It’s our job as strategists to adopt, populate, maintain, and respond to as many social media platforms and services as possible — including YouTube, Pinterest, and Slideshare in addition to the usual suspects — and then see, over time, what works best for you, bearing fruit, and what just shrivels on the vine, time after time. The true results might surprise you — your best performers may well not be Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, as you may expect. Personally, my biggest performers are, strangely enough, Pinterest and Slideshare. Who would’ve known? In the past, it’s been StumbleUpon. Wouldn’t have seen that coming. Be sure to spread broadly across quite a few social networks and sharing platforms — and spend the time and resources to do it right — before choosing your favorites. Be sure to allow your web metrics and and referrer data to define which platforms those are and not just the ones you like using the most — that’s hubris.
4) RSS Subscription — At the very least, your site should have a news section. Most companies do a pretty good job of posting all their wins, news, press, and announcements onto their site. Sadly, too many of these are static updates. New announcements could offer the same tools as a blog: RSS feeds, subscribable via newsreader, are a good way of creating content that is accessible and readable to both passing visitors as well as Google’s indexing spiders and bots. In addition to being easy to subscribe to, having your publicity accessible via RSS also means that it is subscribable via email by using an RSS-to-email service like Feedburner’s email subscription service (there are a lot of services like this, most free). Finally, if you turn your static News section into blog-like posts, you can easily add social media share and submit buttons, extending these news items from just site-based brags and updates to social media-shareable content that is nearly frictionless to share via Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, reddit, digg, Newsvine, StumbleUpon, or even Tumblr. “Who would want to share my press release to social media?” you ask? Well, that’s not your concern. Your concern is making things as easy as possible. Don’t forget: you’re laying down traps here and there’s no guarantee that all of your prospects love cheese. It’s essential that you not only make everything simple, painless, accessible, interesting, compelling, and fun; but, you also need to make sure you’re not to attached to how your visitors are going to behave.
5) Retargeting Code — I don’t know enough about retargeting — and everything I know I learned from Adam Viener of imwave. What I know is this: you can procure a bit of code from Google AdWords that you can embed on your sites and blogs that will insert a cookie into the browser of everyone who visits. That bit of code keeps tracks of where you are, for Google, and you can then target ads to all the people who have visited any of the sites you have installed this code on. So, when you spend your ad dollars, your ads will only display to those who have visited you, effectively stalking them across potentially any and all online content that serves Google ads. Additionally, you will only pay for the clicks as they are displayed to the visitors who have been to your sites at least once. And you should input that code onto your sites and properties even if you don’t plan to use them right away as they can have a life cycle of over a year. So, put them in now, as acquired on your Google AdWords account, and then try some experiments over the course of the year. You can have different code snippets for different sites or you can have different retargeting ad campaigns. If I remember correctly, you can implement logic to your retargeting campaign, targeting different ads after different behaviors are performed such as buying something, filling out a form, or whatnot — and each time another step into the trap made, the ads can change according to where they are or how close to converting to clients they are. It’s really quite amazing and is responsible for all of the times you have been online and have felt like a particular ad for a particular pair of shoes has been following you around all over the Internet: you’d been retargeted!
6) Blog — Blogs are not dead, though there are way fewer corporate blogs than there had been. This is good for you. It’s sort of like the New Year’s resolution everyone makes to go to the gym, clogging the gym for January and February. Soon, though, people lose their motivation and drive and the gym mostly clears out. The blogosphere might have cleared out some but not because blogging has become passé but because people are lazy and uninspired. The Internet is littered with failed attempts at corporate blogging: it’s a ghost down. Why is this good for you? Well, the environment is less competitive for being read but is a thousand-times more ravenous for interesting and shareable content: your blog! As a result, there are folks all over Facebook, Twitter, Fliboard, Pinterest, Google+, LinkedIn, and Tumblr who are looking for things to share to show how smart they are to their followers but no longer blog themselves. So, they poach and poach and steal and share, hoping that what they share reflects their intelligence, insight, and taste. If you play your cards right, you can be one of the links they share on their own profiles as a way of showing how current, insightful, and modern they are — they’ll use your words and insight to prove their mettle — it’s a brilliant trick and an amazing trap. If you play your cards right, your competitors might very well become your best sales force. That’s enough reason to blog: social media runs on the links of other peoples’ content. Make that content yours.
All in all, it is essential to be strategic with your corporate website. It’s surely not simply not a brochure any more — there’s no reason to allow your corporate website not to be constantly working for you, on your behalf, even when you’re not there. I didn’t even add widgets and services that allow you to live chat with visitors or allows them to call you from the website — it’s beyond my social media focus. That said, it’s time for you to take another look at your website to see how many opportunities you have just left on the table because your website has spent too much time being informational and beautiful and not enough time being useful or sticky.
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Tuesday, February 5th 2013 at 5:51 pm |
I 100% agree, I’ve been explaining corporate websites to clients as “mousetraps” forever!
http://www.confluentforms.com/2012/08/website-redesign-fresh-start.html
Everything about your website should function as if your aim were to catch a mouse.
How can you get the mice to your site,
How can you encourage them to take the bait, and
How can you snare them in your trap
The other way I’ve described content strategy is as chumming, bloodying the water to attract the fish and sharks.
Nice post!
Wednesday, February 6th 2013 at 9:46 am |
This attitude has no place in modern marketing.
In a social world, trapped customers scream loudly enough for everyone to hear.
The short term gain and the thrill of “we got one” is rapidly replaced by a dearth of future prospects.
The mindset needs to move from “a sale” to a “long-term partner and advocate for what we do”.
Short-termism is out.
The thing is – companies who think like that actually find that their clients give them business without tenders and often at a higher price. Their sales people become pre-sales advisors, doing useful work and building relationships with clients, rather than hassling people. And these happy clients spread the word.
This is called sphere of influence marketing. And it is waaaay more effective than building deceptive websites.
Wednesday, February 6th 2013 at 10:17 am |
I disagree, Peter. Chris is not suggesting to be deceptive and if you are familiar with his body of work, I don’t think you would have taken it that way. Influence marketing is quite important but without using a direct marketing focus where you capture attention and you measure results, you won’t know whether your marketing is effective or not. And those techniques need not be focused on a single sale–long-term relationships do have their first sale in there somewhere. I think, Peter, that you and Chris actually agree way more than you disagree but maybe you didn’t understand where he is coming from. It is a good discussion, though, because others might have felt the same you do, and it is good to clarify.
Wednesday, February 6th 2013 at 12:22 pm |
I think you’ve not read the post very closely and I understand your knee-jerk response and how indignant you feel; however, I also think that “modern marketing” is defined by pretending you already have lots of money and don’t care.
The bottom line for businesses is money and not to be your best chum.
When I say “trap” I just mean that you need to offer anyone and everyone who visits you the opportunity of not forgetting you — even more, of remembering you.
Like I say again and again, being pretty isn’t good enough.
What I am saying is that while you’re being modern and acting like your work is a pleasant hobby, other companies who have a strategy, a plan, and have all their properties set up to “trap” clients will always end up eating your lunch.
The good news about all of this, Peter, is I wrote the article and the title with the focused intent of being controversial and bombastic so if you hadn’t replied with indigence and rage, I surely would have been disappointed.
Thanks, Mike, for getting my back! You rock!
Wednesday, February 6th 2013 at 1:04 pm |
The is a pervasive attitude in sales in the US, personified by Danny DeVito’s tin man – the hunter, out to persuade people to buy even if they don’t want to.
This is the marketing equivalent. A trap is for the unwary, someone who doesn’t want to be caught.
Prospects have become wise to it, however. They don’t google customer websites, they google reviews, comparison sites and knowledge sites. They read what other people have posted, ask questions online and share knowledge.
Part of that gaining knowledge and seeing what is out there is visiting vendor sites to see what they offer, what features they think are important and what they think it is worth. They want to do that unhampered by being retargeted for the next six weeks, not joining someone’s email list to be spammed for the next ten years and not having to tell people their age or shoe size just to read a PDF they don’t even know will be useful.
As you say, your website can’t be a brochure any more. Most important thing about a Vendor site is credibility. That company needs to show that it knows what it is talking about, that its prices are reasonable and – most importantly – that it isn’t trying to trap, but is providing sustainable value for lots of contented customers.
Few decisions are made alone. Put something on an agenda and within ten minutes everyone has googled it and found vendors, reviews, prices, people in their network who know someone and at least one horror story. Just one of these people could kill the whole project, or your involvement in it. Don’t forget that most of them will also have made their mind up way outside of any formal buying process and once made, that it very hard to unpick.
So you can spend your time making traps which will almost certainly be spring by at least one of the team. Or you can focus on making a site which is actually useful to them in making their buying decision. Which will help them qualify themselves out if the product isn’t right for them. Which will make it one-click easy for them to be involved if they do want to ask questions, see a demo or whatever. You have a short window of opportunity to delight your potential purchase influencer and turn them, even if they don’t buy, into an advocate of your company and your product.
That is much more valuable to your company than a single sale.
Trapping is for weasel companies. For companies with bad products who want to get lazy sales without doing the work to make it competitive. But that is a strategy which will always fail.
Wednesday, February 6th 2013 at 2:44 pm |
OK, Peter, I get it. You don’t like the word “trap.” Other than that, I think you and Chris actually agree on everything. He didn’t actually suggest spamming anyone, but I think we all understand that contacting people with content of no value doesn’t lead to relationships or sales. If you think that needed to be clarified, thanks for doing so.
Wednesday, February 6th 2013 at 2:56 pm |
I am just tired of saying “honey pot” or “opt in” or anything like that.
I also realize that the first image is Elmer Fudd with a shotgun a-going wabbit hunting during rabbit season. I could see where you could get detoured by that, for sure! We all know that Elmer really wanted to hunt down and kill tat rascally rabbit; however, we all know that, like Bugs Bunny, hunting rabbit isn’t as easy as it might have been in the past! Especially with Google!
Next week I am going to use a real hunting analogy because I really love getting comments in my blog posts and I look forward to your commenting again.
The only way you can “snare” someone in your trap is if they sign up for email newsletters. The only way you’ll collect their contact info is if you offer a value-for-value proposition AND/OR your sweet sweet review lure of happy happy nice unicorns and flowers reviews draws people to your site in the first place.
Then what? So what? You do all these nice things to lure the Unicorn to your Maiden Fair and when he arrives, gently lays his head on her lap, then when?
Happy thoughts?
No! Do business! Make things happen.
Are you from family money, Peter? ;) Just kidding.
Dude, did you even read the post or did you go from “ah, trap! What an awful, awful man” to “I really need to comment now!”
Doth thou protest too much?
I am sure not doing a very good job of convincing Peter that I we’re on the same side, am I Mike?