It's Digital Marketing

2nd Chance: easy way to boost your conversion rate

Gary — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 21:01:12 +0000

This article is one of a series entitled Digital Marketer+. The series is aimed at marketers working in the digital marketplace and also at others looking for new ways to promote or build their business online.

The intention of the series is to take a second look at what you’re currently doing and approach it from a different perspective. So far we have covered knowing your objectives, fixing your customer experience and conducting a Mobile review. Plenty more to come, including tips, best practice and case studies.

photo credit: Katie Tegtmeyer

I’m going to let you in on a secret. In your very near future, you’re going to see a stupid, crazy spike in your conversion rate. Bold statement, but true.

If you spend any money on advertising your website, you need to be doing this. Trust me.

The great thing is, your competitors are highly unlikely to be doing it, so now’s your chance – your advertising performance will improve and you’ll look like a genius.

And the craziest thing about it; it’s in a place you’d never think to look.

Spill the beans

I’m sensing I should get to the point. So what is this magic elixir that will cure all marketing ills?

Display advertising. That’s right, you heard me. Display advertising. Okay, so no ordinary display advertising, but dynamic retargeting.

You’ll be aware of standard display ads and you’ve probably heard of behavioural targeting, whereby ads are targeted to users who match broad segments (i.e. visit a travel site on an ad network and be shown holiday ads in the future). However, dynamic retargeting takes it a whole bunch of steps further, by creating personalised displays ads containing content relevant to the individual, based on their previous activity on your site.

As the ad content is tailored based on the user’s intent and deeplinked to the relevant product page, your click through and conversion rates are significantly improved.

You talking to me?

Let’s take a look at an example. Bob is looking for a holiday in Spain. He’s spent the week sneakily checking out travel sites – including yours – during his tea break at work. Now it’s the weekend and he’s in a well known coffee chain taking advantage of the free WiFi with his Latte, whilst checking the football match reports.

As he scans the page a display ad catches his eye. Now normally he wouldn’t give it a second glance but this one is different. Yes, it shows Spanish holidays, but more importantly it contains the exact holiday resort he was looking at earlier in the week and several other very similar resorts he may be interested in. So what happens? He clicks the ad, books the holiday and the rest, as they say, is paella.

There are 2 reasons why the ad was so successful in converting Bob. 1) The content was personalised to his preferences and 2) it was presented to him whilst he was still in a buying frame of mind.

Bob may very well have forgotten about your site in all his research, but your use of dynamic retargeting has enabled you to leapfrog your competitors in his mind, and secure his custom.

So how does it work?

There are a number of companies that provide behavioural based display products, including Google and Criteo, but the product I’ve been describing in this post is from Struq, which from my perspective has the more sophisticated technology of the three. Hand in hand with that sophistication goes a greater conversion rate, due to its ability to deliver personalised content.

In terms of how it works, this graphic explains it well (click to enlarge).

How retargeting works - image courtesy of Struq.com

In a nutshell, the user comes to your website, where Struq collects data on their activity. If the user leaves without converting (e.g. purchase), Struq will display a personalised ad to them if they turn up on another site in the ad network(s). The ad will contain at least one item they have previously looked at on your site, plus other similar content / products they may be interested in. Clicking on the ad will take the user straight through to the deeplinked product detail.

There is a live demo running if you want to see it in action.

Awesome but does it work?

From personal experience, yes, it certainly does. I’ve seen click through rates 1000% better than standard Run of Network display advertising, very impressive conversion rates, and cost per acquisition lower than pay-per-click advertising.

Clothing site, Republic, have reported getting ‘conversion rates for retargeted customers that are two or three times higher than our normal average’.

However, It’s worth pointing out, that dynamic behavioural targeting is not a replacement for your other advertising activity. Consider retargeting as your second chance to convert. Your PPC, SEO, email marketing, TV advertising and social media activity are all still needed to drive the traffic into your site in the first place, but the retargeting presents a great opportunity to complete the sales cycle and reduce wastage.

5 Key takeaways

Dynamic retargeting is a cost effective way of bringing back unconverted visitors
Delivers relevant content to users whilst they’re in a buying frame of mind
Enables you to keep your brand ahead of your competitors in the mind of the potential customer
Must be used as part of your marketing mix, not on its own
Dynamic retargeting dramatically outperforms other types of display advertising (and other digital media)

You don’t need a lot of money to get started with dynamic retargeting, so it’s a great, low-risk opportunity to make a significant difference to your marketing performance. If you want help with your digital activity, I can recommend I Spy Marketing (who I use), or you can contact Struq directly.

So I’m guessing you weren’t anticipating an article raving about the incredible performance of display advertising, right? Well, I was sceptical when I first heard about it too. It took about a week for that all to change when I saw the first performance numbers come in.

I’m pretty confident, that you’ll think the same too. Thank me later, just don’t tell everyone about our secret. It’s too good to share.

Other posts in this series:

Know your Objective

8 Steps to Fixing your Customer Experience

Your 60 Second Mobile Review

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Over the course of this series, we’ll be looking at a wide range of things for you to try in your marketing, including behavioural re-targeting, smarter customer service, social media monitoring, conversion rate optimisation, mobile marketing, and creating linkbait to boost search performance. Please feel free to add your comments and join the conversation.

Or if you’d like to contribute to the series by writing a guest blog post, please get in touch to share your idea for consideration.

No related posts.

Your 60 Second Mobile Review

Gary — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 21:27:19 +0000

The intention of the series is to take a second look at what you’re currently doing and approach it from a different perspective. So far we have covered knowing your objectives and fixing your customer experience. Plenty more to come, including tips, best practice and case studies.

Let me know if you’ve any ideas or experiences you’d like to share.

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For many companies getting the website right is enough of a task, so something like Mobile just has to wait. Especially as it’s not yet mainstream, right?

Or is it? If you read the press / blogs, it’s very clear that this year is finally the long-promised ‘Year of Mobile’. Smart phone uptake is substantial, Facebook has 150 million active mobile users and more and more companies are making mobile revenue.

Great for them, but your market isn’t quite there yet, is it?

Or is it? I think it’s an easy assumption to make, especially for less ‘glamorous’ industries. But I’ll ask you this, how do you know?

On the clock

This series is about being a better digital marketer and making a personal impact. Well, to do so you have start looking at things differently. This is an easy one, it’ll take just 60 seconds for you to work out if you need to pull your finger out and go mobile now or whether to add it to your list of ‘check back in 6 months’ projects.

It’s simple. You could survey your customers now and ask them if they would use a mobile solution and run the risk of getting a bunch of “sure, probably would, I guess” answers. Or, you could just look to see what they are already doing with mobile.

The answer lies in your analytics.

A mobile case study: Jobsite.co.uk

Before I show you where to look, consider this example. Over at Jobsite.co.uk we have just announced some fantastic stats for our mobile usage. Over the past 19 months, traffic from mobile devices to the website has increased by over 600%. We’re not playing around with impressive sounding percentages on tiny actuals here either, the mobile traffic represents over 5% of our total site traffic – more than double what Yahoo and Bing search engines provide to us combined.

The takeaway from this example however, is that we only discovered the initial mobile traffic growth because inquisitive minds asked the question (“I wonder how much mobile traffic we get?” ). Stunned by the numbers, the data was fed into strategy and product development discussions and a year later Jobsite is now leading the way in mobile recruiting.

We could have waited until the mobile recruiting market was more established, but our customers were telling us otherwise – they wanted a mobile job hunting solution now – so we moved quickly.

What are your customers telling you? And are you listening?

Checking the numbers

So, this is what you need to do (using Google Analytics for this example):

Login to Google Analytics
Select your date range (top right). Recommend at least a year to see a growth pattern.
Open the ‘Visitors’ menu on the left of the page
Click the ‘Mobile’ link to open up the mobile options
Select ‘Mobile Device’
Marvel at the information

So what do your customers say? Is there a need for a mobile friendly version of your offering? If yes, you need to ask – and answer – some important questions.

Does your business lend itself well to mobile?
Can you improve the customer brand experience via mobile?
Should I do something in Mobile right now?
Which first – iPhone, Android, Mobile or other?

You can answer these questions soon, but right now you need to spend 60 seconds in your analytics package. You’ll learn something about your business and customers and have an opportunity to influence the future direction of your company’s strategy.

Other posts in this series:

Know your Objective

8 Steps to Fixing your Customer Experience

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Or if you’d like to contribute to the series by writing a guest blog post, please get in touch to share your idea for consideration.

photo credit: Jesse757

MOBILE: iPhone or Android – which is more App for your business?

8 Steps to Fixing your Customer Experience

Gary — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 15:52:40 +0000

photo credit: Mooganic

This article is part of a series entitled Digital Marketer+. The series is aimed at marketers already working in the digital marketplace, but also to others looking for new ways to promote or build their business online.

The intention of the series is to take a second look at what you’re currently doing and approach it from a different perspective. It will include tips, best practice, case studies and a fair amount of opinion. Not just my own, I’d love your input too. If you have any great ideas or experience, please do share it, as I’m keen to become a better digital marketer too.

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The customer service department is unlikely to be the first port of call for a marketer looking to improve their performance. However, if you want to make a significant difference to your website’s performance, its worth walking over and saying hello.

Whilst your outbound marketing – TV, display advertising, video, etc. – might be more exciting at first glance, it’s the information collected by Customer Services that is arguably more valuable to your business.

Customer Service is the coal face of your business – the closest your online business comes to your paying customer. Any questions, enquiries, returns or complaints go through these guys. It’s not the easiest job, or the most glamorous and the pay rarely reflects the hassle that comes with it. It’s often neglected or ignored by other parts of the company.

So why should you be interested?

Because there’s gold in there, that’s why. Every record from contact with a customer holds information to make your product better. It’s not always obvious; sometimes you have to look beyond the words the customer uses to identify the real problem. Reviewing the contact records will reveal technical problems with your site (broken pages / processes), inaccurate / outdated information (i.e. pricing), poor site copy / instructions, clumsy user interfaces and new product ideas.

Still wondering what this has got to do with you?

Even if you work in any organisation in which the Marketing department is only responsible for promotional activity, you have to make this your business or at the very least bring it to the attention of someone that can do something about it.

If you want to become a more complete marketer you need to think about the whole business; how you can make it better and how you can improve the brand experience of your customers. That makes customer service your business, even if it doesn’t state it on your job description.

8 Steps to fix it

Speak to your Customer Service reps. What are the common problems / complaints they face? What would they change about the website? (why don’t they get asked this question more often when they face the problems every day??)
Review the customer records yourself. Get a feel for what is wrong and what could be improved. Remember to read between the lines
Draw up a list of all the issues you uncover and identify their potential solutions
Establish the frequency of common complaints / issues. This will aid you in determining priorities later. Add this info to the list
Flag each item as either ‘Technical’ or ‘Non-technical’. Technical items will need IT development work. Non-technical issues could include things like re-writing the on-page instructions, changing button labels, writing help guides or re-examining the positioning and promises in your advertising.
If your list is long you’ll need to prioritise all the items to determine which need to be addressed first. It’s important to be realistic when you request these changes. A very long list may be delayed until sufficient resources are available. Breaking it into smaller chunks will improve the chances of the important things getting done.
If you have a very busy IT department you’ll need to make a case for your changes to be made. The best way – and hardest to argue against – is to put financial figures against them. What are you losing each month due to these problems? What is the revenue opportunity by fixing them? Consider the best metric to use. Do you know the actual financial loss? Or could you use an average basket value? Or lifetime value?
For the non-technical changes, the responsibility probably lies with you / the Marketing department. Think about the best way to fix the issue – will a screencast help? A FAQ? Or do you need to feed the info into the discussions about your next advertising creative?

Whatever solutions you implement make sure you continue to work with the Customer Service department and monitor the impact. Have your changes improved the situation? If not, continue to press on – what else can you do?

Things are rarely perfect in life, so never assume your work is done. Keep monitoring, keeping testing, keep improving.

One benefit you’ll find from fixing some or all of the problems will be the new found friends you’ll make in the Customer Service department. They’ll appreciate you making their life a little easier, which may well come in handy a littler later.

So what’s the outcome of this endeavour? Are you a better marketer?

Without a doubt. You’ve just hit on all Big Three Goals of business. In fixing the problems you increased your customer satisfaction. This lead to an increase in revenue from your happy customers (not forgetting the friends they recommended you to). You also lowered your costs – you now convert and retain more of your visitors, so there is less wastage on your advertising and fewer hours are needed in supporting your product (or at the very least you can put it to better use).

Well done. Not bad work from going to say hello.

Other posts in this series:

Know your Objectives

Your 60 Second Mobile Review

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Or if you’d like to contribute to the series by writing a guest blog post, please get in touch to share your idea for consideration.

Know your Objective

Gary — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 19:59:09 +0000

photo credit: WorldIslandInfo.com

This article is the first in a series entitled Digital Marketer+. The series is aimed at marketers already working in the digital marketplace, but also to others looking for new ways to promote or build their business online.

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Know your objective

There are probably far more exciting things to talk about to kick-off this series, but it’s important we start here, with Objectives. We need to know where we’re going, before we can work out how to get there.

Ask yourself this – do you know why you’re crafting that email newsletter today? Or why your display adverts are using that creative? Why that particular wording in the press release? Or why you’re monitoring mentions of your brand in Twitter?

If you don’t know, why are you doing it?

How much of what you’re doing today, is because you did it yesterday, and last week and because the person who trained you said you should do it that way?

The key to being a better digital marketer – or any marketer or business person for that matter – is to know what you’re trying to achieve and why. Only then can you unleash the creative beast inside you and deliver the outstanding results you want.

Tip: As toddlers we drive our parents mad, asking them “Why? Why? Why?” to everything. It’s a habit we grow out of as we get older. Try it again today, question others, and question yourself. But don’t just blunder on regardless.

There are three areas I’d recommend you consider:

Business Objectives

What are the objectives of your business? This is crucial to know. Each employee, each department, will have their own objectives, but they should all serve the objectives of the business.

Jim Sterne, in his book ‘Social Media Metrics’, says there are only three true business goals:

Raise Revenue
Lower Costs
Increase Customer Satisfaction

According to Sterne, “If the work you do does not result in an improvement to one or more of these Big Three Goals, then you are wasting your time, wasting money, spinning your wheels, alienating your customers and not helping the organization”.

If you’re not sure of your company’s goals go ask your boss. If he/she is not sure either, maybe you need to go find a new boss too.

Project Objectives

Moving to a more tactical level, let’s look at what you’re trying to achieve from your own work, using a few examples:

Customer email newsletter: what is its purpose? It’s notoriously difficult to achieve high open rates on B2B newsletters, mainly because most are full of promotions to get the customer to spend more money. But is that your objective? Should it be? Or should it be about providing additional value to the customer and developing a longer term, more profitable relationship?

Campaign landing page: You have all your campaign ducks in a row…display ads, pay-per-click (PPC), email, facebook ads, video pre-rolls…all pushing potential customers through to your landing page(s). What do you want them to do when they get there? Purchase? Register? Vote? Follow? If you have a clear objective in mind, you’ll know what goes on the landing page – and what doesn’t. Just getting traffic to come in and dumping them on your homepage, hoping they’ll do something positive is not really a viable – or successful – strategy.

Social media monitoring: you’re ahead of the curve; you’re monitoring mentions of your brand in social media. Great. Why are you doing it? Watching out for negative comments is the most likely answer; protecting your company’s reputation. There are so many opportunities here, its important to be clear on what you want to get out of it. Yes, there is reputation management, but consider customer service, ideas for new product development, relationship building, sentiment on advertising campaigns and yes, in the right situation, a revenue opportunity.

Whatever the project, start by asking what do I want to achieve, swiftly followed by how will I measure it. Key to your objectives will be knowing when you’ve achieved them.

Personal Objectives

It’s not all about the company (unless you happen to own it). Think about your own objectives too. What do you want to get out of your work? Is this the best company and the right position for you to achieve what you want to do?

I consider myself fortunate that I work for company that has a culture of innovation and experimentation. It enables me to be creative, to test new products and ideas and recognises there is no harm in failing a few times along the path to success.

This works nicely for me. I deliver results for the company, while building my skills and experiencee, which in turn makes me more valuable to my current employer (and those in the future).

Have a think and write down what it is you want to be doing now in your role and again the same for 5 years time. Then think about how you’re going to get there. Will working for your current employer enable you to do that? If so, what do you need to learn and what experience do you want to gain?

And if its not the right company, well, even in this climate there are other jobs available that may suit you better. Follow this series and hopefully you’ll pick up some ideas that will boost your current performance and give you something to help you stand out from the crowd at your next interview.

So there you go, the beginning of your journey to becoming a better digital marketer. It all starts with the objectives. You have some thinking to do now. You’re at Point A and need to work out what Point B looks like. Then comes the fun part of making the journey.

Other posts in this series:

8 Steps to Fixing your Customer Service

Your 60 Second Mobile Review

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Or if you’d like to contribute to the series by writing a guest blog post, please get in touch to share your idea for consideration.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of Customer Service via Twitter

Gary — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 22:30:10 +0000

"HE RECKONS IF YOU CAN'T SEE THE TWEET IT DOESN'T EXIST"

What’s worse – not providing customer service or providing poor customer service?

That’s a question I’ve pondered recently as a consumer, whilst experimenting with utilising Twitter as a means of contacting brands when I’ve needed assistance. It’s been an interesting and varied experience, something we as marketers should consider for our own businesses.

You don’t need me to tell you times are changing. With the prolific adoption of social media, companies that are not monitoring brand mentions are missing a huge opportunity to serve their customers or to build / repair their reputations.

The conversations about your brand are happening in the social space whether you like it or not. Making like an ostrich and sticking your head in the sand is not going to make it go away.

But why would you want it to? The benefits of monitoring the social sphere are plentiful. For instance:

answering customer questions to aid use or encourage sale
addressing / resolving customer complaints to improve satisfaction
directing non-customers to useful services or info (both your own and others), as a longer term, value-based relationship builder
crowdsourcing new product development ideas or improvements to existing products

The list could go on, including being a revenue generating source, if appropriate to your business (though I’d avoid the direct, hard sell approach).

It’s early days as a service medium however, and consequently customers are encountering a mixed bag of experiences. Here are 3 of my own:

The Good – LOVEFiLM

I love film and love the approach of this company. They clearly ‘get’ how to use this medium for relationship and brand building. Not only do they share film news, run competitions and converse in an engaging, cheerful manner, they provide bloody good customer service.

For example, having watched ‘Numb3rs – Season 1’ (sue me, it’s a guilty pleasure), I wanted to move on to Season 2 but it wasn’t listed on the site (though Season 3 was). A quick exchange of tweets with @LOVEFiLM and they’d dispatched an enquiry to their catalogue team with a promise to come back to me with an update. Crucially they did, less than 24 hours later I received a follow up tweet to say the DVD had been sourced and would be available shortly.

One happy customer.

The Bad – Halifax bank

The polar opposite of LOVEFiLM is the Halifax bank. They don’t even have a Twitter account. So when they changed their bank charges at the end of 2009 – a move that appeared to leave a large proportion of their current account customers worse off – the howls of protest online fell on deaf ears.

Now, could they have lessened the negativity by participating in the conversation? Maybe, maybe not. But wouldn’t that have been preferable to adding to the frustration by ignoring their customers?

(I switched to a much friendlier bank, by the way)

The Ugly – BT

BT has a customer service account – @BTCare – though many would agree with my assertion that the name is a fabulous oxymoron.

They clearly try to provide a good service, having invested time, money and resource into their solution. For this they must be commended. However, they may want to review its application.

When I tweeted about the trouble I was having with my internet connection, they were quick to respond with a tweet within a couple of hours – even though it was the weekend. Their apology and offer of help was appreciated. Ignoring my reply was not.

When I did finally get a response a couple of days later (following more tweets), it was evident I was being dealt with by someone who had no record of our earlier conversation (or didn’t look it up). Then when I had to switch the conversation over to the telephone I had to start my conversation all over again.

I found the whole process incredibly frustrating. When you can’t get something to work and someone comes to your rescue offering a solution, only to disappear, then reappear with some kind of amnesia and no solution, your hopes are cruelly dashed.

It doesn’t help that they seem to have a lot of problems with their service. A thankless task for their customer service people, if I ever did see one.

Make my day

So, back to my original question – which is worse? Not providing any service like the Halifax or having a poor experience such as the one with BT?

In a vacuum I’d probably say no service, but in reality I was more annoyed with BT. Of course, I’d love it if all companies I dealt with were like LOVEFiLM. Sadly, they’re not, but its something we as marketers should aspire to with our own businesses.

What are your best experiences with businesses using Twitter? What about the worse? Please add your comments below, I’d love to know your thoughts.

If you aren’t monitoring your brand in social media and would be interested in finding out more, I’d recommend speaking with the good folks over at 6Consulting, the UK partner of Radian6.

Birthday Greetings from Server 12

Gary — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 21:29:37 +0000

photo credit: Kiwi Morado

Saturday was my birthday. Thank you, you’re very kind.

Unfortunately, your best wishes are a little slow compared to those from the UK Business Forum and NFL UK Forums.

Both businesses sent me birthday wishes in the small hours before I’d even woken up to start on my 37^th year.

How very kind of them, yes?

Giving gifts

These two messages led me along a train of thought about the act of gift giving. For me, the best birthday presents and wishes are those that have significance to me personally. I appreciate the kindness and thoughtfulness of the giver. It’s even better if they get you something you really like or always wanted.

But can a company do this? Can you automate a personal message? Note I said personal, not personalised – inserting the user’s name into the email is not personal.

Scale is a challenge for most businesses; you cannot know all your customers, so you cannot craft a thoughtful, personal message for each one.

So the tendency is to create a standardised message that goes out in an email on the user’s birthday, based on the data they left when using a site.

The problem with that can be seen with the messages from NFL UK Forum and UK Business Forum below. An impersonal, bland message, made worse by the fact this is obviously an out-of-the box feature of the forum software provider. Different ‘sender’, same text, sent at the exact same time – 00:01 on the date of my birthday. The sincerity was distinctly absent.

It must be possible to do better.

Paying for your own present

Let’s think about the real world giving of birthday wishes. Often it involves a card and sometimes a gift. It is done – in most cases – without expecting anything in return.

If you buy a present for someone, you don’t ask them to pay for part of it either, so why do some businesses say ‘Happy Birthday! Here’s 10% off your next purchase’?

Here is something novel. Why don’t you give them something for free? Something useful, with no strings attached.

The effect of this generosity will stand out and raise their perception of your brand instantly. You’ll have taken a step towards attaining brand loyalty and advocacy from the recipient.

Obviously, you can’t do this for every customer, but do you need to? If you segment your data, you’ll already know who your best and most valuable customers are – why not reward them for their continued business?

Don’t stop there; identify those with potential to join your best customer list, those on the cusp. Your gift won’t necessarily be the clincher of long term use but it will certainly make an impression.

If you’re concerned about the cost of gifts, think of creative ways to provide value. If a user pays for monthly access to your service, perhaps you could give them a bonus week (or month if you’re feeling generous). If they’re receiving a volume of service (such as file storage capacity on a photo site for example), then give them additional storage.

Whatever the gift, keep it relevant to the needs of the user. A branded keyring or calculator is of no use to anyone (unless you lose your keys regularly or struggle with your maths).

This advice is applies equally to the B2B and B2C markets. However, applying this approach to the consumer market is the really exciting application of gift giving. In B2B, gifts are given to decision makers in potential customer business every day, but think of the impact this could have if you applied the same approach to consumers. It would be very powerful and a way to make your business stand out from the crowd.

Do you know of any business that already take this approach with giving gifts to consumers? Does it work? Please feel free to share your opinions or stories below.

No related posts.

Fighting Lizards: How to overcome nerves when presenting

Gary — Thu, 20 May 2010 20:50:07 +0000

Recently, I presented at an event for I Spy Marketing, the search and conversion agency. I spoke on the theme of re-marketing to unconverted visitors using behavioural targeting. By all accounts, the presentation went well and the feedback I received from attendees was positive.

However, in the days leading up to the event, the thought of presenting made me incredibly nervous. That in itself is not uncommon – most speakers experience butterflies – but public speaking has never featured particularly high on my ‘Top 5 ways to spend an afternoon’ list.

The funny thing is, once it’s all over, I do sometimes wonder what the fuss was about!

Whilst preparing for my presentation, I learned a lot about why I get nervous and how to overcome my nerves when presenting. I found the process so valuable I thought I’d share it, just in case it can help you too.

So here goes. My not so definitive guide to overcoming nerves when presenting. It’s a story of two parts.

Part 1: Preparing your presentation

Taming the Lizard brain

This may sound strange but trust me, I’m not making this up. According to Seth Godin in his book Linchpin, there is a pre-historic part of our brain that tries to keep us out of harms way. It’s been looking out for us humans since the beginning of time, telling us when things get hairy to fight or flight.

It’s the part of your brain that tells you not to stick your neck out – for heaven’s sake don’t get up in front of this ferocious crowd of people and tell them what you think! What if they say you’re wrong? What if you fluff your lines? They’ll be out for blood, the sky will fall and you’ll look silly.

It’s the Lizard brain that says no to public speaking opportunities. It would rather you hid away. Godin believes you should seek out discomfort:

“Discomfort brings engagement and change. Discomfort means you’re doing something that others were unlikely to do, because they’re busy hiding out in the comfortable zone”

So if you’re nervous about public speaking, just do it. You might not like it, but you’ll get value from it, you’ll learn and grow and it will get a little easier each time.

It’s a good book, worth the read.

Knowing your subject is better than memorising your speech

It’s pretty difficult to memorise a 30 minute speech. In fact, in trying to do so, you may just end up causing yourself more stress. You’d be far better off ensuring you have a good understanding of your subject than being able to recite your presentation word-for-word.

You can forget a line and it won’t matter. You can be interrupted by a question or be taken off on a tangent and it won’t faze you, because you know your stuff and you can adapt and work your way back on track.

Break and practice in segments

I discovered an excellent article by Tim Ferriss (author of The 4-Hour Workweek) that covers the subject of preparing for a speech. His approach is to break his speech down into segments and rehearse them all separately. He never learns the speech verbatim but he does memorise the first and last 2-3 lines of each segment.

I found this technique very useful, especially in regards to the introduction. For me, it’s the most nerve wracking part of a presentation – no one wants to look a bumbling fool in front of an audience – so having this squared away is reassuring.

Oh yes, and practise out loud and at the same vocal level you would use during the presentation itself. You don’t want to hear it for the first time in a ‘live’ environment and discover it’s stilted and doesn’t flow.

Tell a story

Using a story can really help structure your presentation and aid comprehension for an audience. We’re not talking Three Little Pigs here (though I sure that would make a great analogy somewhere). Instead, paint the picture for your audience, give them context, let them relate your story to theirs; show them how they too can have a happy ending.

But keep them wanting more. This is the Cliff Notes edition not War & Peace.

(Plus if you’re nervous and lose your track, it’s easier to find your way back if you can remember the story)

If you want to learn how to structure using stories, head back over to the Tim Ferriss post to check out his Point-Example-Point and Example-Point-Example approach. Works a dream.

Prompts not essays

I’ve witnessed a nervous speaker reading, head down, directly from several pages of A4 notes and whilst I feel for the guy, it doesn’t make for a good presentation. If you need notes, use little prompt cards. It’s inevitable when you’re nervous that you’re going to forget what comes next at some point, so just make partial notes of the first line of each segment or the key points. This is all you’ll need as a little prompt to remember the line you’ve rehearsed.

Part 2: The day of the presentation

Be you

When you’re nervous it’s easy to regress into a monotone, expressionless robot, which makes it very difficult to engage the audience. People don’t go to seminars and conferences hoping to see someone mess up, so they’ll more than likely understand if you’re a little nervous. So try to relax a little and inject some of your personality into your presentation. A little self-depreciating humour or insight into your life can go a long way to making your presentation more interesting for the audience.

Testing, testing, 1-2-3

For piece of mind, arrive a little early and if possible, run through the technical set up of your presentation. If you’re running a Powerpoint presentation and need to switch to the web for a demo or an example at some point, make sure you can see for yourself that it all works. It probably will, but making sure will reassure you that you won’t be standing up there alone, appealing to the wings “Is this thing on?”

And make sure you have a back up plan if technology fails on you. Can you deliver your presentation without the slides? If you know your subject, have rehearsed well and have your prompts, you should be just fine.

There’s no rush with public speaking

Final tip, make a concerted effort to speak slowly. If you’re nervous, you’re more than likely speaking faster than you normally would. Add in a pause when making a pertinent point, it gives the audience a chance to think and controls the rate you talk.

So there you go, my take on dealing with nerves when public speaking and making presentations. As I said, I’m no expert on giving presentations, but I am a bit of a semi-pro at feeling nervous giving them.

I hope you found the tips useful. Please do share any of your own. Improving how you handle your nerves when public speaking is a continuous process, so anything you can add from your own experience is most welcome.

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Impact of TV imagery on website conversion rates

Gary — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 19:49:56 +0000

It’s an unwritten law: spend big £/$ on a TV campaign and your website traffic will go through the roof.

Your overall cost per visitor will naturally follow suit. So how do you get more out of the traffic you’re buying in?

The answer is pretty simple – conversion rate optimisation. Test and tweak your pages and processes until you can get more people doing much more of the things you want them to do.

A case study in conversion rate optimisation

The company I work for – Jobsite.co.uk – is into its 2^nd year of TV advertising. The traffic levels during the campaigns have been incredible (see graph below for search query peaks during two TV bursts).

UK search trends for 'jobsite' - Google Trends

Whilst looking at the data, I wondered what the impact on conversion rates would be if we used the same imagery from the TV ad on the site’s homepage search box. Would it encourage more searches?

As we were about to run another burst of TV advertising in January 2010, we had a prime opportunity to do some conversion testing to find out.

If you’ve worked on a brand’s website during its TV campaign you’ll be familiar with the following traffic pattern: a tremendous surge during the ad period, followed by a gradual, not sudden, drop during the subsequent weeks – known as the ‘Halo Effect’. In our case, TV ads aired throughout January, with the halo effect running into February.

The conversion test

I wanted to test 3 things:

What impact would TV imagery have during the TV period?
What impact would it have during the halo?
What impact would it have during a ‘normal’ month?

When testing, you need to identify which conversion metric you are looking to improve. Given the nature of our site, my preference tends to be job applications or CV (resume) uploads. However, in this instance, I felt there were too many variables that could influence either metric (particularly the fact that jobseekers often leave the website to prepare their application before returning in a separate session to apply). So for this test I chose to track on site job searches.

Could switching the search box imagery from the default stock photo of people over to the TV image (featuring British actor, Max Beesley) actually increase the number of visitors that become searchers?

Rather than a simple A/B test (Max vs the People), we ran multivariate tests, featuring variations of the search box heading, the search field label and the imagery. This would give us insight into which element(s) improved the number of searches.

Results during TV

As expected, the winning page combination during the January TV campaign was a version that featured Max Beesley. Based on the visitor figures for the month, running this version on 100% of visits would have resulted in an additional 11,328 job searches.

click image to enlarge

The % uplift over the default version was not dramatic – a 1.3% increase – but sufficient enough to be noticeable when you’re dealing with a highly trafficked website.

What was clear with this test, however, was that the heading ‘Find a Job’ outperformed the default heading ‘Job Search‘, with an 87% chance of beating the original headline (on the default version).

Into the Halo Effect

Things began to change in February with the ‘halo effect’. Traffic to the site was still high, TV had stopped but other digital brand advertising (PPC, Mobile pre-rolls) continued.

The same Max variant continued to outperform the original, but its impact had begun to decline (down to +1.0% over the original combination). In fact, it had slipped into 2^nd place, behind a variant using the original stock library image (+1.18% over the original combo). Based on February traffic figures this new lead variant would have generated an additional 8,181 searches if the creative had run for 100% of visits.

click image to enlarge

The impetus for this performance increase was the heading ‘Find a Job’ (+1.09% over the original heading) – the call to action was more of a factor than the choice of image at this stage.

Interestingly, we also saw a rise in the performance of a 2^nd heading – ‘Search Jobs’ – amongst the successful variants (+0.93% over the original)

Under ‘normal’ conditions

As we moved into March, there was enough distance from the high profile ‘Above the Line’ activity to consider it a ‘normal’ environment.

Of the 19 variants we were testing, only 3 outperformed the original – and just barely. All three made use of the stock library imagery. The best performing variant was almost identical to the original, with the only difference being a heading of ‘Search Jobs’ instead of ‘Job Search’ (a simple switch of word order creating a call to action instead of a description).

click image to enlarge

This variant increased searches by 0.32% over the original – extrapolated to 2,338 extra searches in March.

When you look at the individual components’ performance, ‘Find a Job’ was still marginally ahead of ‘Search Jobs’ (+0.54% to +0.52% improvement on the original), but in combination with the other elements, the latter featured in the best performing variant throughout March.

Interestingly, if we’d used the best performing TV imagery variant in March, it would have resulted in 1,169 FEWER searches than the original.

Learnings from conversion testing

Overall, we can conclude from this test that the use of TV imagery within your search box DOES improve your conversion ratio of visitor to searcher during your campaign. However, it should be coupled with a strong call to action to maximise its impact. In this case study, it provided the possibility of 22,000+ additional searches over the 3 months.

So what else can we take from this test?

In general terms, I would recommend the following tips:

Continuous testing is important – external influencing factors, e.g. advertising campaigns, news, events and seasonality, can impact the conversion performance of your site. Test and change your design accordingly
Give consideration to your use of imagery – its not there just for aesthetics. It can be a powerful aid to conversion
Use clear Calls to Action in your copy, especially titles and/or buttons. Stick to a single call to action in a creative to avoid mixed messages

In regards to Jobsite, we’ll be returning to TV again next month (May ’10). My specific recommendations are:

Use TV imagery and ‘Find a Job’ title throughout the broadcast period
Continue with same creative for first fortnight of halo effect period
Switch back to original creative thereafter but with a call to action in the title – either ‘Search Jobs’ or ‘Find a Job’
Continue testing – introduce new variant options, such as alternative imagery, text, buttons or even background colour

As with all conversion testing, this isn’t a blue print for success with your own website. You’ll have your own set of external factors to contend with, your own site design and product offering to influence results. Set up your own optimisation tests and see how you can improve your own conversion rates.

I’d love to know about your successes with conversion rating optimisation – what has been your most interesting or successful conversion test? Anyone done any conversion testing with websites & TV with a story to tell? Please do share your comments or experiences.

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Sticky Fingers: Our Children’s Technological Future

Gary — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 13:03:48 +0000

I have sticky finger prints smeared across my flat screen TV.

They’re not mine, I might add. Rather they belong to my two year old son. Unlike his other random markings around the house (walls are a particular favourite), these are deliberate and with purpose.

He tries to operate the TV like he would my iPhone. That is, he competently swipes and pushes objects (buttons) on the flat screen as a means of navigating to the content he wants.

When the TV doesn’t respond he gets annoyed and airs his displeasure. For instance, a favourite programme of his starts and ends with the characters entering a lift (elevator) – the top floor housing a fun play room. One day, as the programme was coming to an end and the doors to the lift closed on the departing characters, he began to furiously ‘swipe’ the doors on the screen, yelling “no, no, no!” – desperately trying to open the doors so the programme wouldn’t end.

But end it did, and in tears.

It struck me watching this, that he’s two years old and already he’s frustrated with the speed of technology advancement. To him, there is no reason why a TV shouldn’t work in the same way as Daddy’s iPhone.

Which makes me wonder, how fast will technology evolve in just the first couple of decades of his life?

Flash back

When he’s old enough to understand, he’ll probably laugh when I tell him about the technology I had when I was growing up.

Two main broadcast technologies, TV and Radio – three channels on the former and mainly national stations on the latter. As a kid, the height of cool was owning a twin deck radio cassette player (for recording the Top 40 Charts on Sundays). And…, well, that was about it for the early years.

Then came the technology revolution, as the (top-loading, not front loading) video player burst on to the scene to change the entertainment world forever. Not that our family was an early mover on this one. We were well into the Late Majority before I discovered Vader was actually Luke’s father.

Consumer-owned computers appeared in my teens in the 90s but I barely touched them until I left college (mid 90s). Then of course technology exploded again, as we marched in the new millennium, with the next wave of game changers – the iPod and iPhone.

The odd thing for him is that these new technologies are all standard devices. They are so everyday in our house that he doesn’t understand why the other (older) shiny things don’t work in the same way.

Flash forward

Being fortunate (unfortunate?) to have a parent working in technology, there is a good chance that he’ll adopt emerging technologies and activities quite quickly. From a school perspective, it’ll be interesting to see how it develops.

I still remember the excitement of being allowed to use a calculator in class for the first time, I can’t imagine being able to open up a browser to access the web via the school WiFi.

Much will depend on education funding, but isn’t it likely that within just a few years all school children will be working from laptops or iPad-like devices in class, rather than with books and pens?

Much of this technology is already available, but what else is to come? How about:

User Generated Content Story books, placing the child within the (e)book (viewed on a Kindle-esque device, naturally)

Desks and ‘blackboards’ using Minority Report style interfaces?

3D experiences of faraway places, visiting the Pyramids or back in time to ‘witness’ historical events?

Virtual classrooms, with remote teachers delivering lessons by teachercam or holographic projection?

Collaborative projects using wiki-based platforms?

Start-ups formed as part of the Business studies or Economics curriculum (with Intellectual property rights shared with the school, of course)

All of these things are achievable within this next decade. I can’t even comprehend what it will be like by the time he reaches his teens.

I have no doubt children of his generation will readily adopt any new technology and application that emerges – perhaps the biggest question will be how will we keep up?

photo credit: foundphotoslj

Cool Tip: How to capture screen shots on your iPhone

Innovate for your brand’s survival

Gary — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 12:54:41 +0000

Let’s be honest, you can milk your Cash Cow for quite some time. However, like oil, one day it’s going to run out. Then what?

Well, by that point it’s too late. One, or several, of those pesky start-ups who launch good looking websites with shiny, multi-featured products, will have figured out how to monetise their passion and will be waving at you in slow-mo as they pass you by.

You’ll be left to wonder what happened and at some point you’ll look at your new market leaders and will lament “we could have done that”.

Ideas needed – apply within

So, you’ve seen the future and you don’t like it. What are you going to do?

Firstly, look to your customers. And particularly to those who aren’t your customers. Don’t start building anything until you understand what they need. Not necessarily what they say they want – or what you want – but what they need. There is a big difference. Answering a need secures a customer for the long term, answering a want will have you following fads and wasting resources.

Secondly, embrace the creativity in your workplace. Great ideas are not limited to the executive suite. The Support Assistant on the phone speaking to the irate customer may have the greatest insight of all in your business. A cliché it may be, but employees are the business’ greatest asset. Tap into it. Treat your employees like citizens, let them join the cause.

This is a cultural thing. Much like your brand in the social sphere, is your business happy to relinquish ‘control’ to the ‘masses’?

Consider it. It can produce exciting results.

A case in point

At the 2010 Onrec Awards for the online recruitment industry, Jobsite.co.uk won in two categories – one of which was for its candidate services. Amongst the products included under that banner, were Jobs-by-Twitter, BeMyInterviewer and RecruitRank.

Jobs-by-Twitter is an API integration between Jobsite and the micro-blogging platform. It was created as an experiment to understand how we can reduce the searching workload of jobseekers by delivering relevant jobs to a platform they were already using daily. It was also a direct response against the torrent of untargeted job tweets gushing into the Twitter sphere

BeMyInterviewer is an interactive interview practice service that utilises video to enable jobseekers to rehearse with top industry professionals, including the likes of Dragons’ Den mogul Duncan Bannatyne.

RecruitRank is a jobseeker feedback system, enabling applicants to rate recruitment agencies for the customer service they received. It came in response to research that revealed over half of jobseekers find the process of job hunting frustrating and demoralising.

All three products came to life through the creativity of Jobsite employees – be it initial concept or enabling the idea to flourish into a fully featured – and useful – product for our customers.

It was possible because the culture promotes such creativity – to step beyond the paint-by-numbers approach that has littered the industry with commodity products.

Be a market leader

Seth Godin, in his book ‘Linchpin’, defines a Hierarchy of Value as follows:

Lift, Hunt, Grow, Produce, Sell, Connect, Create

For your company to be (or continue to be) successful it will need to deliver at multiple levels across the hierarchy. However, to lead your market into the future you need to excel at creation, at innovation.

Take a look at what you offer your customers. How is that different to what your competitors provide? Now find out what your customers actually want and throw some grey matter at finding solutions. It’s crowd-sourcing on a company level. Get everyone in a room – physically or figuratively – and throw away the job titles. Leave them at the door, they’re not needed here.

Now start creating.

photo credit: Locomotive Stillstand

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