With over 22 years of experience in interim CIO roles, strategic planning/alignment management, contract negotiation and critical program execution, Mark is the right person to direct our ongoing strategy and technology initiatives.

- congratulations Mark!

When folks are having fun they feel they can let their hair down and put aside their inhibitions. Marketers rarely talk about fun directly, but in designing digital offerings that promise an “experience,” or when focused on building customer relationships, the covert subtext of most advertising should be aimed at creating the feeling of fun.

How do you use the universal desire for fun and relaxing leisure time?

FIVE FACETS OF FUN

1. New. A key word in the experience of fun is “new.” People often have fun when having new experiences, learning new things, meeting new people.

2. Going beyond expectation. To have fun requires going beyond the routine or familiar, to meet what people call “something extra.” Surprise (something new) and the unexpected (something not habitual) contribute to a feeling of the non-ordinary.

3. Feeling open. To have fun people need a sense of “becoming,” wherein nothing is pre-scripted and the end is unknown at the beginning; here there is an unfolding and an exploration.

4. No. Fun often requires the absence of things. In this case, no analyzing, doubting, pressure to conform, pretense, restrictions, judgment.

5. Freedom. Choice and independence are undercurrents of fun. People interpret this as doing what one wants, when one wants, and doing it at one’s own pace (“finding your own rhythm”), without any external demands. This is often called “me time,” which people now deem a luxury.

Ads Should Help Folks Have Fun

One strategy to grow your ecommerce revenue is to spin-off a subset of your product line onto its own website. With this “sub-niche” website, you can focus your branding, ads, and presentation to the customer who is looking for what you have to offer.

The article talks about using an existing successful site and focusing on smaller or more narrowly focused sub-niche. I think this information can be equally useful for a first-time seller who wants to market to the specific needs of an under-served community or who has a more narrowly focused expertise

A successful sub-niche website depends on identifying a particular product line from your main site that (a) has high enough search volume to drive significant traffic, and (b) is substantive enough that you can build an entire website around it. Products from a certain manufacturers, or products for a particular purpose, are excellent candidates. For example, if you have a costume website, 1970s-vintage costumes could be a sub-niche worth focusing on. Or if you sell pond supplies, you might want to make your name as the go-to site for a particular manufacturer of pond pumps and related accessories. Taking your main product line and targeting it at specific geographical areas is another strategy that could make sense in certain cases.

The Case for launching Sub-Niche Websites

I emailed the company to ask if they could tell me what the problem was. They couldn’t. “The volume was up to max when we did the final compilation,” was what I was told. “It can’t get any louder.”

That’s a real problem. Why? Because – while the images were super – the words were what mattered. Just watching a talking head at the top of the sales page wouldn’t do anybody any good unless they knew what was being said. The information – the persuasion – was in the words.

Graphics Heavy, but Copy Light

I find this happening a lot online. Site owners and marketing directors put all the weight of conversion on an image. Product pages are graphics heavy but copy light. Don’t get me wrong: images are wonderful. In fact, they add quite a lot to the page.

However, just looking at a photo of a laptop computer doesn’t come close to informing the customer of the full range of features and benefits this machine offers.

Does copy need to be long to be effective? No. A well-written, 60-word product description on an ecommerce site can effectively communicate what the reader needs to know to make a buying decision. (Optimal phrase: well-written.)

When setting up your online store, don’t skimp on the copy. You’ll end up like I did – with a page that’s nice to look at, but doesn’t accomplish a thing!

Want to learn how to write great SEO copy for your site? Check out Karon’s Step-by-Step Copywriting Course. Visit Karon’s copywriting blog to get her free ebook, Copywriting Makeovers.

Gathering real-time information about your industry, your competition and your business is the topic of a very informative article on E-commerce Times.

“Real-time intelligence data can be accessed immediately so marketers can focus on information about trends, news, events, products, contacts, fans — and when they’re interested in you, qualified prospects.”

The article continues to list three ways business people can leverage the potentially vast amounts of information available.

“Following are three ways business marketers can use real-time intelligence to align with sales, maximize online efforts and impact your company’s bottom line:

1. Identify and Leverage Industry Trends: Real-time intelligence reveals trends, and it allows marketers to create or build content and messaging associated with those trends. By staying up-to-date on industry news and trends, marketers can increase site traffic Planning for the next peak season? Ensure your website is fast, secure and available 24/7. Click here to learn how. and brand awareness, strengthening the “attention” phase of the purchase cycle.
2. Convert Visitors into Leads: Customers are looking for you — no matter what your industry — to be a thought leader. Just sharing what you see on the Web that’s interesting can be enough. Working in real-time, you can tune your outreach and see what’s working.
3. Close the Deal: Knowing when to call a lead can make the difference between success and failure. Real-time intelligence tells you when a lead is ready to move from decision to action. If you consider a certain page on your website as an indicator for a lead’s readiness to buy, you can set internal alerts to notify marketing and sales when a specific lead hits that page.

Marketing will always be a merger of art and science, but technology and real-time intelligence provide the ability to tune your message and contact the right person at the right time. A concise and targeted message and a timely call to action can make all the difference in the world during the purchase or action stage of the sales cycle. “

Afarin Bellisario in Entrepreneur asks the most important question – Why Serve a Niche Market?

Niche players share a common set of traits. These include a deep understanding of their customers and their customers’ needs and the ability to stay engaged with those customers. Ideal niche market companies should consistently produce quality, innovative products and possess a genuine regard for the well-being of their employees. Serving a niche allows companies to focus on meeting the needs of a smaller group of customers without compromising their chance to increase the appeal to a broader market.

The article continues by listing four reason why serving a niche can be profitable as well as a smart strategy for newer businesses. Along with these reasons, examples are given showing companies who have either made their success by serving a niche, or have expanded beyond their initial market and now serve wider markets.

Why then do so many landing pages fail miserably? Most often, it’s due to one of five errors. And, thankfully, all five are easily fixed.

• 1 Not understanding what a landing page is best used for. Yes, as I said above, a landing page *can* be any page of your site. But keep in mind I also said that was only true *if* the visitor was being sent to the page from some prearranged campaign. Joe Public who clicks to your Services page because he found a link in his buddy’s blog post does not equal someone visiting a “landing page.” However, if you place PPC ads about your service offerings and use a special URL for a specifically created page to greet and persuade your visitors, then you have created a landing page.

• 2 Failing to coordinate your campaign copy and your landing page copy. Site visitors click to your landing page because they saw something in your email, postcard or PPC ad that interested them. Sending them to a generic page that doesn’t coordinate with the promotion they saw is a deadly error.

If you send an email with a special offer just for World Wildlife Fund (WWF) members, then your landing page needs to make clear that WWF members have found the place they are looking for. If your PPC ad promotes free processing for one month for all new merchant account customers, your landing page needs to clearly and quickly communicate that. Visitors won’t tolerate being offered a free month and then be forced to dig for information about the promotion once they click to your site. Instead, they’ll simply leave.

• 3 Clearly defining your goal and call to action. So often, site owners and managers want to pack a landing page full of goals. “Well, while they’re here we might as well…” What one primary goal do you want to accomplish with this page? Once that’s defined, what specific call to action do you need to give to make your goal happen? Make sure everything in your copy measures up to those two standards. Giving too many options on a landing page is confusing to visitors and fractures their attention while on the page.

• 4 Be clear. Marketing Experiments once published an article entitled something to the effect of “Clarity Trumps Cleverness.” Skip the cutesy headlines and copy; instead, opt for clear information that is well written.

• 5 Write to your target customer and no one else. So many times, copywriters and website owners tend to write about the company and not to the customer. You should be speaking with your target audience singularly. Write in second person (“you” and “your”) instead of we-ing all over yourself with copy stuffed with “we” and “our” and “us.” It’s not about you.Change the focus of your copy to your customers. Instead of:Our products come with a lifetime guaranteewrite:You will receive a lifetime guarantee on all purchases.

True landing pages should never be generic. To work their best, they need to address the visitor, relate to the campaign, give informative copy, focus on a specific goal, offer a clear call to action and speak to your target customer. When you incorporate these elements into your writing process, you’ll find your landing pages convert with much greater success.

Subscribe to Karon’s Marketing Words Copywriting Blog today and receive your free target customer discovery questionnaire and Copywriting Makeovers ebook.

“A new study by Vivaldi Partners and Lightspeed Research, which fielded the data, examines more than 60 companies and assesses customers’ brand affiliations, advocacy, and sense of community, among other factors, for how they create true value for the companies, no matter whether it’s online or off. The results reveal some surprising insights about the limits of social media. Most notably, smug, stunt-driven apps, games, and videos generate buzz but little else. So what does work? We combed through Vivaldi’s data to find the most intriguing lessons. Here are the new rules for the game.”

The article lists five valuable comparisons of two different businesses’ use of social media. The “Five Steps for Consumer Brands to Earn Social Currency” are:

1. Advocates Trump Followers
2. Context Matters
3. Not Every Brand Should be Social
4. Social Tools are a Means, Not an End
5. Gimmicks Marginalize Trust

The message here is to be clever and genuine in your marketing. While a video, a game, or a flashy advertising campaign may get attention, what you convey once you have that attention can convert followers into fans.

Your headline is the most-read component of your copy. It has an enormous impact on sales. Just because you’ve found one that works pretty well doesn’t mean there aren’t several others that pull even better results. This is why it’s important to test and tweak every headline on your website.

If you sell an ebook, you might have a primary headline (at the top of the page) and a few sub-headlines that are scattered throughout the copy. If you operate an ecommerce website, you’ll likely have dozens from the main headline on your home page to each of the headlines on every one of your product pages. They all should be tested regularly. PPC ads? You bet! Those headlines should have their turn at improvement as well.

Which One’s Best?

Anne Holland’s clever website, Which Test Won?, offers proof that testing and tweaking can make a huge difference. There are a couple of tests on headlines you can view including one that improved conversion rate of a lead generation form by 143%.

The point is, you wouldn’t know which of these headlines was the best until you tweaked your current copy and then tested the results. You could be happy as a clam with a 3.5% conversion rate, thinking you were well above the 1%–2% average, when in all actuality you could be realizing gains that are 20%, 50% or even over 100% greater.

Take it Slow

How do you test headlines? Unless you are well versed with multivariant testing, you need to only change one headline per page at a time. If you make too many changes on the same page simultaneously, you’ll have no way of knowing which change caused the increase/decrease in sales.

I recommend Google’s Website Optimizer. It’s free; it’s easy to use, and it is reliable.

What Do I Change?

Take a look around your site and plunder through your website statistics/analytics for ideas. Perhaps you’re only using one take on a particular product. For instance, if your website sells professional dinnerware to restaurants, you may be focusing your headlines and copy strictly on price. However, for upscale restaurants, quality or appearance may be more important factors. You could test headlines that bring out these features/benefits.

You could also test headlines using different:

• Keyphrases – Sometimes site visitors connect more with headlines that use the precise keyphrase they were searching for.
• Numbers – Switch up using “50% Off” with “Half Off” or “Fifty Percent Off.” Formatting numbers in different ways can produce significant increases.
• Target Segments – A laptop computer sales page might test mentioning business users, students or senior citizens in the headline.

It’s well worth your time to set up a testing schedule for the headlines on your website. You’ll be amazed at how much you will learn and what phenomenal improvements you can experience with very little effort.

Subscribe to Karon’s Marketing Words Copywriting Blog today and receive your free target customer discovery questionnaire and Copywriting Makeovers ebook.