Resolved, for 2008:
- Pay less attention to banner ads and more attention to landing pages.
- User! User! User! Keep the focus on the user.
- No web sites without specific goals.
- Get better clients
Banner Ads and Landing Pages
It is a frequent and cardinal sin, the tendency to buy online banner space but link it to an existing, non-specialized page on the site. First of all, if you can actually get anybody to click on a banner ad you should consider him or her a beautiful prize, a rare specimen that should be treasured and coddled. Goodness knows you won’t see too many of them. But most often, they are shunted off to the home page or at best a product page that seems to be completely disconnected from the banner that brought them there. What are they likely to do? Get the heck out of dodge—why waste their time on a site that doesn’t even make the effort to guide them to the specific topic in which they have demonstrated their interest. We need to maximize the experience of the user who DOES click through and get him or her the info they need, perhaps guiding them carefully, so that they remain interested in proceeding along the buying cycle.
I intend to spend more time worrying about the user who lands on the site, rather than how the banner ad looks as it animates, streams video, or pops up into a large size.
Focus on the User
It’s not about you, the seller. It’s about your customer, your client, your web site user; so quit making your site all about you. It should be about the user, what s/he wants and needs and has to be able to do in order to buy something from you. Even in today’s age, web 2.5 or whatever you want to call it, too many sites are basically org charts and catalogs. They contain tons of info about the company and its products, but very little about how those products can help the users or how the company can solve the users’ problems. I pledge to make sites that are all about the users, because those sites will prosper.
Goooooooooooal!
Whether or not you follow Latin American soccer and are familiar with the long, drawn-out call from Andres Cantor or other Spanish-language play-by-play announcers, you can certainly understand the importance of the goal. And yet so many web site planners have no clear objective in mind. Their sites can pack a lot of information and features, but to what end? Any web site should have a particular goal as a central part of its plan, whether that is to generate leads or make an online sale or guide users to a particular download or sign them up for a newsletter. That will not only provide a success metric, to help determine whether your site is doing what it should, but also help shape the content and the language and even the way of thinking about the site. I really want to help my clients understand this and to incorporate this planning into any new site effort in the New Year.
And finally…
I really need to get better clients. And I mean no disrespect to our current stable when I say this: our agency is full of “old iron” companies that have been around a long time, compete in closed markets where the amount of business is fairly constant, and have competitors that are also well-established and not particularly innovative. These clients are happy to trudge along with traditional media and marketing approaches that vary little from year to year. It is a hard sell to get them to think about the interactive channel in new ways, and difficult to demonstrate the value of expanding and refining their web approach when they remain convinced that “customers don’t use the web” and “our customers all want to pick up the phone to deal with us.” After a certain amount of effort, one is no longer interested in pounding that proverbial brick wall, and the desire becomes overwhelming to seek out new clients who do understand the value of interactive and who can in fact think about their business in new ways and allow us to help determine solutions that can leverage the enormous power and capability of the web.
So I resolve to find new clients, like I do every year.
Best wishes for a happy and healthy 2008!
