How To Sell Products With Faces
I’m a big fan of Roger Dooley and his Neuromarketing blog with its practical examples for marketers about the natural condition and function of the brain that justify the modern day marketing.
His piece on using faces, particularly the focus of face, to direct viewers attention to areas of importance on a website really highlights the subtle things that can be applied to help sell products on your website. Whilst I have yet to implement this feature into my own site design, I will definitely be be looking to employee it in future site designs and I’m very eager to see how it performs in practical experiments.
Here are some of the finer points on the results of the experiment.
When the subjects were presented an ad with the baby looking straight out of the page, the heat map below shows that viewers fixated on the baby’s face, and gave quite a bit less attention to the headling and ad copy:
No big surprise, perhaps, but watch what happens when a side-facing baby image is positioned to “look” at the ad’s headline:
We see that the baby’s face is still a major hot spot, but now the ad headline and copy get far more attention! Breeze concludes, “In advertising we will look at what the person we see in an ad is looking at. If they are looking out at us we will simply look back at them and not really anywhere else.”
Why Your Conversion Optimisation Is More Important Than SEO
ShoeMoney
I get emails every day from people who rank in the search engines for their keywords but are not getting any leads from it. When I send them a list of like 20 things to do to improve their conversion they tell me “but could this affect my keyword ranking?”.Annoying…
Continuing on from the previous post – Is Your SEO Focus Destroying Your Sales Conversions? – too many online marketing campaigns are focused on SEO as their internet marketing solution rather than just a small part of the equation.
Diminishing Returns of SEO Optimisation
Whilst the click through rate difference between 1st and 10th can be as much as 1500% there comes a point where SEO won’t yield the return on investment that optimising a site design for conversions or integrating optimised landing pages into PPC campaign will. Often refining the average site design to convert better can produce just as significant a ROI, if not even more so, than SERP ranking improvements in addition to giving you a longer term strategic advantage over unoptimised competitors in paid traffic mediums.
Over Reliance On Google
Also far too often people forget that Google is a law unto itself, it’s not obligated to rank your site for anything, and if all your eggs are in the SEO basket be prepared for some tears and a business model break down. If your online success is over 70% dependant on Google that’s a single point of failure if I have ever seen one. Now I’m not saying Google and SEO shouldn’t make up a very important chunk of your online marketing campaign, but it’s not the be all end all that many SEO companies sell. Rather it should be seen as the very healthy bonus to an online marketing campaign.
Poor Conversion Optimisation Helps Your Competitors
Aside from over reliance on SEO and Google, the reality is with your competition just a click away users don’t waste time trying to work your site out or spend too long trying to find the products and services they are looking for. They literally conclude in a couple of short seconds whether you have what they want. Failing this test they will be browsing your competitor’s site seconds later.
So not only are you missing conversion opportunities you’re giving your competitors a bite at the cherry, not to mention that in our fast paced world empirically it’s been shown that customers first point of contact is many times more likely to make the sale than following points of contact. So making it simple to get find the information they need then proceed down a sales funnel and/or get in contact with you is vitally important.
You need to remember that in the world of business, sales are more important than potential prospects. So keep your website focused on best serving your customer, rather than focusing on primarily serving Google.
Plan For The Future Of SEO
The web is the most competitive place for businesses to compete and having a site unoptimised for conversion will hurt you more in the long run than having a site that is unoptimised for search engines. With Google’s algorithm constantly evolving many top search engine marketing experts are speculating that websites that engage their users as well as continue to build an aging link profile are gaining a first mover advantage if/when Google decides to build user based data into their their ranking algorithm.
Internet Marketing Darwinism – Survival Of The Fittest
With SEO many feel search engine traffic is free therefore conversation optimisation of it isn’t essential, but the reality is every visitors that leaves without buying, subscribing or clicking an ad is a missed opportunity that you may not get again, or worse is gone to the competition. If your competitors utilise their opportunities better than you, it doesn’t matter if you out rank them today because Darwinism is alive on the web and the fit, strong and flexible organisations and individuals using best practices will eat into your market share and increase user retentions which will indirectly lead to eating into your rankings well over the longer run.
Sell Because People Want To Buy
Many site owners fear being overly focused on conversion optimisation or being “too aggressive” in selling themselves, but at the end of the day the strong will rise to the top and weak will be filtered out of the web like any other competitive system.
Plus when was the last time you visited a random site and went “man I’d love to be friends with the owner of this site?” That’s right, never. Your visitors don’t want to be your friends, they want you to help solve their problems.
And when was the last time you said “wow this site provides great value, but I hate the fact that the owner had the nerve to place ads on his site.” Once again, rarely.
So remember that people have come to your site to solve a problem, make that as easy as possible for them, and if you can cost effectively solve that for them, you’ve created a win win situation which is the principle under which business is done. Don’t be afraid of selling to people who want to do business with you and don’t get caught up on SEO – it’s not the primary part of your business.
Is Your SEO Focus Destroying Your Sales Conversions?
ShoeMoney
I get emails every day from people who rank in the search engines for their keywords but are not getting any leads from it. When I send them a list of like 20 things to do to improve their conversion they tell me “but could this affect my keyword ranking?”.Annoying…
ShoeMoney’s above comment reminded me a little of my own online story which engaged me to review the topic which I have split over two posts, this being the first, the second being Why Your Conversion Optimisation Is More Important Than Your SEO.
Once upon a time I too was guilty of being too focused on the traffic side of the revenue equation and the penny didn’t really drop for me until 2006 when I found the real secret lay in striking a balance between SEO and increasing ePV (earnings per visitor).
The “It’s So Simple It’s Stupid” Online Revenue Model
Producing online revenues in it’s simplest form is just a function of “visitors x ePV”. It seems so simple, yet the vast majority of people running websites online neglect one or the other.
Most businesses websites have a good product focus that’s complemented by good copy and prominent calls to action as a result of their experience with traditional marketing formats like print media, but still lack the know how to drive visitors to their site nor are they aware that they should be employing an internet marketing agency to help drive visitors to their site. Most have just bought into the “build it and they will come model” purported by their web designers who claim to offer well SEOed site design with Google doing the rest.
On the other side of the coin you have many passionate bloggers and hobby site owners who find their sites have outgrow their own ability to maintain on a part time basis as popularity follows their passion to produce quality content, products or services. In most cases if these hobby sites and blogs were better monetised it would justify a greater commitment from the webmaster, ultimately producing a better user experience for the visitors and everyone would win.
Finding the Balance Between SEO and Conversion Optimisation
When it comes to finding the balance between SEO and conversion optimisation eyeballs are more important than earnings in the beginning. However with the diminishing marginal returns of SEO coupled with the rising opportunity cost of neglecting on page conversion optimisation there comes a tipping point where a greater ROI can be achieved through focusing on extracting greater value from each visitors.
This turning point is different for different sites and different business models. For your typical blogger blogging about their passion monetizing their site primarily with Google AdSense the turning point comes around the 500 visitor/day mark when a serious analysis of revenue optimisation should be undertaken.
For a local business website the turning point occurs at much lower levels of traffic due to the higher margins of selling a tangible product or service. For many business websites a serious conversion optimisation review should be done when receiving in excess of 50 visitors/days. Additional consideration should also be given to businesses competing in auction based advertising markets, like Google AdWords, as they can better compete over the long run if their website produce higher rates of conversion than their competitors justifying a higher profitable max bid.
Evolution Of The New Internet Marketing Firm
There seems to be a large gap in the market within Australia (my local market) for firms that produce quality, usable web designs, that are well optimised for search engines yet still have a focus on conversion. Moving forward it is difficult to not see major SEO, PPC, web design, copy writing firm converging into one stop shops of online business presence given their mutualism.
It would seem that at this stage most small businesses continue to primarily gauge the success of their business website almost holistically on traffic and as such almost exclusively pursue methods of increasing search rankings. This is perfectly highlighted by the fact that there are over a 1,200,000 results when searching for “search engine optimisation” in Australia, but less than 15,000 results for either “conversion optimisation” or “landing page optimisation”. In the not too distant future the smart small business operators will not be solely looking for SEO services alone rather a more comprehensive internet marketing service.
The moral of the story is to know what you’re in the game of optimisation for; sales not traffic – Why Your Conversion Optimisation Is More Important Than Your SEO.