Brand Checkup: Relevance and Intuitiveness

Marketing, ,

Today we’re discussing how to evaluate your brand’s online presence and optimize its performance. We’ll look at content relevance and site intuitiveness.

Test: Does your home page attempt too much?

The more you have to say, the more focused you should be. Ever visited a site and wondered where to start? Visit any global brand Website, such as Disney.com or Nokia.com, and you’ll discover it is hard to find what you’re looking for. These companies try to say everything to everyone at the same time. Each topic must fight for attention and for space on the home page.

Saying everything to everyone, not to mention squeezing it all onto the home page, is impossible. Branding is about establishing relevance. The more relevant your brand is to the consumer, the more likely that consumer is to purchase your brand.

Structure content in such a way that your message appears only when it’s relevant. How? Forget about an internal site search engine. Instead, establish microsites, each representing essential offerings from your company.

Imagine you’re an insurance company that offers everything from old-age and life insurance to property, car, and boat insurance, travel coverage… you name it. Instead of displaying all those policies at once, spread the information around. Establish a site that focuses 100 percent on old-age insurance, linking to your corporate site as well, of course. Establish another that focuses entirely on property insurance. Each site should be optimized for search engines, ensuring it appears when a user types the site’s subject as a key phrase (e.g., “property insurance”). A company that claims expertise in everything garners less credibility than a company that offers niche expertise.

Test: Is your brand intuitive?

Like me, I’ll bet you’ve purchased a video recorder and found the instruction manual heavier than the appliance. Most probably, the VCR can do amazing things. But the manual’s so indigestible, you use only the simplest of functions — the intuitive ones.

Brand building, online and off-, is much more than ensuring logo visibility. Branding must be intuitive. It should require no instruction manual, lengthy description, or oracular guidelines. Ask yourself what a typical first-time user would want to know. What would a second-time user be after? The needs are bound to be vastly different. Brand usability is essential.

Experience clearly shows customers who have difficulty finding what they’re looking for on a site cultivate a diminished opinion of the brand. Analyze the type of information each consumer is most likely to be after, right this very minute, and structure that information in such way that navigating through it is intuitive.

Relevance and intuitiveness are essential parts of a healthy online brand’s life. Did you pass this week’s brand health check? If you did, stay tuned for next week’s installment. At this rate, your site is elevating closer to brand heaven. Are you nearly there?

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Why a Traffic Retention Strategy Matters

Marketing, ,

It’s getting increasingly harder to generate and secure traffic to your site. Time to reconsider your strategy for building this valuable asset? Statistics show persuading a customer to visit your site is 10 times more difficult than persuading existing customers to make a purchase.

What’s your traffic retention strategy? What measures are in place for retaining visitors?

It’s said Amazon.com’s original strategy was to retain customers for at least 10 years. That’s an ambitious goal. But you do need a traffic retention strategy that looks further into the future than one day or one week. Short-sightedness is characteristic of most sites. Look 3, 6, or even 12 months ahead. Give more to each customer during that period. There are returns with this strategic investment. You won’t make your goal tomorrow, but perhaps six months to a year from now you will.

Why talk about long-term strategy in times demanding instant return on investment (ROI) and instant results? Because your customers aren’t dumb. We’re all customers, after all. We’re all sick and tired of the never-ending addictions to decreasing quality and supposedly “special” offers. While everyone focuses on short-term goals, today’s discount, and other gimmicks, smart marketers combine this thinking with long-term vision. They’re plotting in substantial timeframes to survive beyond today.

Brands that will reap rewards in 6 to 12 months are those adopting parallel short- and long-term strategies. In doing so, they communicate to customers they don’t stand for short-term, opportunistic gain. They want to build loyalty.

Easier said than done? Yes. In coming weeks, I’ll take you through some future-focused activities you should consider adopting. They can help you establish more enduring customer loyalty, secure valuable repeat visits to your site, and encourage increased frequency of return and consequential revenue gain.

None of this will put an end to your day-to-day, short-term strategies, important for generating buzz around your site. The two approaches must be combined and work in harmony. Make your customers feel you’re in business for the long haul and not, like so many other Web sites, only for today. Acting like there’s no tomorrow can persuade visitors that’s exactly the case. There’s no reason for them to visit again.

A golden tip to help you through these difficulties is to seek help from a professional source, such as Student Marketing Agency.

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