But did you know that traffic generation and website optimization aren’t mutually exclusive? There are tactics that will help you accomplish both goals at the same time, and one FutureNow Partner recently spoke to me about a tactic that’s working well.

Our Partner is a software development firm that specializes in web-based applications and good old web development and design. They are currently gaining leads and sales by being very active with their marketing mix: radio, billboards, PPC, SEO, etc. They identified that there is a clear separation between their leads based on the lead’s motivations and, more importantly, their budgets. Some leads are looking for a small and simple web site with a custom design, with an approximate $500 budget. Other leads are looking for very complex web sites with a lot of tools and capabilities with a much higher budget in the $5000+ range.

The marketing team recognizes the difficulty in trying to effectively speak to these very different segments on a single site. Even using landing pages, there is the possibility that one type of visitor may be turned off by content they read that was written for another type.  (FutureNow has a whole methodology for writing copy and mapping out buying paths for different types of visitors on a single site, but this takes a focused expertise and experience.) On top of trying to speak to all types on their main web site, this company creates completely different buying experiences on separate micro-sites for each segment. This drives more targeted and qualified traffic to these micro-sites. The micro-sites speak more directly to the segment and therefore move them through their buying process more effectively, without possible distractions from content that doesn’t speak to their motivations and needs.

They generate the smaller budget leads via radio ads. These radio listeners are driven to a micro-site in order to follow through on the messaging from the radio ad.

They also generate leads who are primarily interested in finding a web design/development firm in Utah via PPC ads with keywords such as “cheap web sites utah.” They send these visitors to a different micro-site and speak to their interests of a local company that can meet their web design needs.

As you can see, they send these very different prospects down customized buying persuasion paths based on the buyer’s motivation and need. By doing this, they are driving more targeted traffic to sites that have been more effectively optimized for a particular segment.

You can segment your traffic by the different products or services that they are searching for.  Or, you can segment your traffic by the different problems they are experiencing, or solutions they are looking for.  Are you driving all traffic to specific landing pages, or simply a single homepage on a single web site? Are you optimizing your site based on different motivations? These are good questions to ask yourself in order to get started optimizing your primary web site.

On top of optimizing your primary website, you should consider the micro-site tactic in order to drive more targeted traffic to your company and quickly turn this traffic into leads or sales. This tactic is applicable to multiple online business models; whether you’re e-commerce, lead generation, or a brochure site.

Note: Micro-sites are entities that can become part of your overall marketing strategy and shouldn’t be created and then forgotten about. Along with your other marketing efforts, micro-sites need to be continuously optimized and improved.

Are you ready for the challenge?

Or are you a lettuce picker? The sort of person that toils for long hours in the field and accomplishes a long day’s back-breaking labor of work that most white collar business execs would consider a less-than-optimal career.

That fact is, when it comes time to harvest, virtually the entire crop must be worked on at the same time. You don’t have time to cherry pick, and anyway the average business isn’t expert enough in how and what to optimize to know which portion of the crop should be cherry picked. Instead, when that crop is ripe, it’s time to get out there in the field and put in a 14-hour day getting it harvested.

Often when we speak wiith prospective clients new to OnTarget™, they have the impression that there is some magical formula that leads to higher improvement rates and that it can be achieved without any hard work or commitment. The reality, however, is that our most successful clients who enjoy on-going regular improvements of 40-80% in their conversion rates year after year are the ones who are implementing change on a regular basis. They’re lettuce pickers, and not so proud as to let hard work get in the way of increased revenue.

Are you a hard-working lettuce picker when it comes to your website? Are you guessing at what changes will improve your site? Or do you work diligently every week, every month, and every quarter to effect continuous improvement?

When you break that sentence down, you start to understand how to optimize your conversion rate.

Step 1 – Let’s understand “number of people“

Who are these people? Are they all the same? Do they have different characteristics, needs, questions? Do all these people have the same amount of product/service knowledge that you do? Are they all at the same stage in their buying process? Do they know you already? Or have they never heard of you before?

How are you bringing these “number of people” to your website? Do they all come by directly typing your URL in their browser? Do some search for your brand? Do some search for your category? Or your products? Do some of those people come from organic search? paid search? emails? affiliates? Do these people come from different websites: Google? Bing? Yahoo!? Wikipedia? Twitter? Facebook?

Do you launch new marketing efforts regularly? Are the efforts last week different than this week? last month versus this month? Is there an important calendar event occuring (Christmas if you’re a retailer; Fourth of July if you’re a seller of fireworks; Mother’s Day if you sell flowers: etc.?) all of which may induce a “spike” in traffic that is different than usual.

There is no such thing as an average person. That is why your average conversion rate is a rough indicator but virtually worthless as a way to focus your conversion optimization.

You have lots of segments who come to your website. They differ by demographics, psychographics, behavior, or because they came in through very different marketing efforts. You can calculate a conversion rate for each one of these segments/marketing efforts and you should.

Step 2 – Let’s understand “the action you want them to take”:

If you are in retail, you want them to purchase a product.

If you are in lead generation, you want them to become a lead.

Are there no other actions that are valuable?

In retail, even in they don’t convert now would it at least be more valuable to know if they added an item to your wish list, or subscribed to your newsletter, or looked up your retail store hours, or added items to their cart versus, just bouncing off the site right away? What are you doing to turn that one-time customer into a repeat customer? Do they only need one product you sell or might they need different ones over the course of time?

In lead generation, if they don’t give you all their information and request to be contacted by sales, is it valuable to have them sign up for a whitepaper, or a demo, or your newsletter? Is it better to download specification sheets, engage in calculators, or print or forward pages rather than just bouncing off the website? These are all steps that move people through their buying process.

These are just some of your macro-actions. What happens when someone comes from one of your ads and gets to a landing page? Sometimes the action is one of those listed above, but what if that page is only meant to help your visitors to choose the right product or service and they still need to actually click on the right one for them? What do you do to help them take that action and not bounce away? These are the micro-actions that need to happen from step to step in the potential customer’s visit.

All of these are actions we need to optimize. You can calculate a conversion rate for each one of these macro- and micro-actions, and you should.

Step 3 – Let’s understand “total number of potential people who could have taken that action”

What happened to the majority of visitors who did not convert? Why didn’t they convert?

Did they land on your site incorrectly? For example, they typed in “shingles” into a search engine and they were looking for roof repair and not a skin condition. This is obviously a disqualified visitor. Did they try to purchase from your website and something went wrong? Did they have problems accessing the information? Could they not figure out how to take action on your website? Did they not trust you? Did they leave with questions that were not answered? Did you answer their questions for today, but they aren’t ready to buy now? Did you not instill a sense of urgency or desire in them? Did you not make them a great offer?

You need to optimize your website experience for these potential buyers through the hierarchy of optimization.

Click here to view the embedded video.

There are thousands of potential improvements to choose from. You need to prioritize these based on the level of impact that improvement can have and the resources available to execute them. If you don’t have a copywriter available at the moment, you shouldn’t focus on copy changes even if it would be the most impactful. That’s may sound like just common sense, but it catches many companiyes like a deer in headlights.

Your average conversion rate is the aggregated conversion rate of how well your website performs for each of your customer segments, and each of your marketing efforts for each of the actions you want them to take. You optimize your conversion rate by first focusing in on the elements that impact as many of these as you can, and then you have to work on these “micro-funnels.”

While you work on conversions, market conditions, competitive forces, ad copy, and even your customers’ needs change. This is why you need to continuously optimize your marketing efforts. You can’t afford to have a “set it and forget it” mentality to your marketing.

Those of you who have been reading our blog and books for a while might recognize these steps as the fundamental steps of Persuasion Architecture®.

1. Who do we want to take action? This is the “number of people” from step 1.

2. What action do we want them to take? This is “the action you want them to take” from step 2. Have you defined all of these clearly? Are you measuring them properly?

3. What do they need in order to take that action? This is where we analyze what content/effort went into understanding why the “total number of potential people who could have taken that action” didn’t. This is where experience helps a ton.

If you only focus on improving a few landing pages here and there, testing a few variations here and there, tweaking creative here and there you will never reach your highest potential conversion rate!

Don’t worry, your customers won’t go unsatisfied. I guarantee that sooner or later your competitors will figure out how to satisfy your visitors needs. Hopefully that will motivate you to start getting your conversion goals on target by investing in continuous improvement.

[Editor's note: the author of this post is now blogging at bryaneisenberg.com]

In fact, whenever I work with B2B and complex sales clients it’s a sure bet their website won’t:

1) Adequately address the multiple decision-makers and influencers involved in securing the lead

If a sales manager needs to justify a training expense to his CEO and CFO, wouldn’t it help to provide your inside champion with messaging and tools to help him make his (read “your”) case?

It’s usually good to have sections of your website and messaging designed specifically for those secondary decision-makers and influencers that need to sign-off on the decision of your inside champion.  As an analogy to the consumer world, would you really want to construct a website that sells engagement rings without providing content and messaging for the prospective fiancee?

2) Have planned (and tracked) conversion points for visitors who are early in the buying process

To keep with the consumer analogy, let’s say you’re considering having a pool put into your back yard.  Assuming that one of your local pool suppliers/installers had a website with valuable early and middle stage content, how many times might you visit their website before actually contacting them and becoming a lead?

• You might come to them early on when doing preliminary research regarding what type of pool you wanted, what size, shape, depth, etc you should look at, what kind of associated expenses and purchases are involved, etc.  Reading this stuff might take 3-5 or even 15 different visits.  How would you know if any of these visits are successful?  How could you measure or get a handle on your Website’s influence on such a buyer?I’d normally suggest having a goal for these types of visitors.  Maybe it’s downloading a pool planning or pools for dummies report/PDF.  Maybe it’s playing with an interactive pool builder or pool cost calculator.  Whatever it is, having a trackable (and helpful) event for these early stage buyers helps to track your Website’s success in attracting and engaging

• Moving to the middle stage of the buying process, you might touch the site again when you are closer to buying and constructing a short list of potential contractors/installers.  This time you might drill down into why you should do business with them and not someone else, reading up on their installation timelines, the skill of their install crew, etc.You may or may not feel like filling out a lead form at this point.  But a valuable and well-merchandised free download titled something like, “10 Questions to Ask Any Pool Contractor,” might look far more attractive to you – especially if you only had to provide a name and e-mail (rather than the lead forms more detailed info requests) to get it.

• And then at the late stage of your buying process you might look at the site a third time to fill out the form or get the phone number to actually buy the pool. What a waste if the pool website only had the lead form as a conversion point, without ever providing (let alone tracking) any of the early and middle stage downloads and conversion events.  Questions would go unanswered, and prospective buyers would go unengaged / go somewhere else.

Needless to say, the exact same patterns of behavior occur for B2B sites as well.  And yet most B2B sites don’t have defined content and conversion points for their early and middle stage visitors.  Your prospective leads are going to go somewhere to get their questions answered, shouldn’t it be on your website not your competitors?

3)  Have metrics/analytics capable of tracking visitor behavior over multiple visits.

While early and middle stage conversion points help a Web analyst/website optimizer get a better handle on a sites overall success in engaging early and middle stage buyers, it still leaves them guessing at the big picture, simply because they can’t track a lead generation or sale all the way back to that prospect’s first visit to the Website.  This can be crucial for gauging the real success of a PPC campaign.  Key words that might look unprofitable (because they target earlier stage buyers) might be spectacularly profitable – but only after the 8th (or 20th) visit to the site.  Unfortunately, if you can’t track visitor behavior over multiple visits, it’s difficult to get a handle on real – vs. false- measures of keyword performance.

While I love, love, love Google Analytics / Google Ad Words, this is exactly one of these tools shortcomings.  And it’s one reason that we insist that our OnTarget clients install our software in addition to GA/GWO: OnTarget can bracket visitor behavior through keyword entry and track individual visit behavior over multiple visits.  It’s a wish-list come true for us Future Now Persuasion Architects and can be a positive boon for our On Target clients.

So there you have it: start matching your B2B and complex sale website to the real complexity of your sale.  I’ll be writing follow-up posts with exercises and steps on how to do this, but in the meantime, would it be too forward of me to suggest you sign up for On Target?

• increase your qualified leads
• create a system to prioritize leads
• reduce the lag time in responding to leads
• target content to your different market segments/personas
• aggressively optimize your lead/demand generation process
• improve the ROI of your search and pay-per-click campaigns
• reap the value of a continuous optimization discipline

Get your copy of “The Leading Edge” now.

Have you ever received great advice from a consultant but couldn’t implement it?

A recommendation is just advice, no matter how excellent, until you implement.

It’s only when you implement a recommendation that you reap the rewards.

Even when you know the advice is great you can get consulting indigestion.

You, the client, in consuming the advice can be the log jam or the hero of every consulting engagement. It’s rarely the consultant that makes the difference. If you choke or get indigestion then consulting leaves a bad taste in your mouth.

Just-In-Time Optimization

We have always tried hard to screen for toxic clients with unrealistic expectations. Our NPS scores are excellent and our client successes speak for themselves.  Nevertheless, the most common lament among our clients isn’t about us it’s about them. They simply don’t have extra resources or time to implement everything we recommend.

We could ask our customers to change or we could change.

We chose to change!

Instead of providing you with a gut busting all-you-can-eat buffet we’ll provide you only the healthiest tastiest morsels of advice that you can actually consume and we’ll do it for much less money.

Think of it as just-in-time optimization. You tell us how much time and resources you can devote and we’ll prioritize our recommendations based on how much impact it will have towards reaching your goal.

You get analysis and recommendations without the considerable expense of having to hire an analyst.

We’re Not Crazy

Well at least we’re not dangerous, except to your competitors.

OnTarget, our new software-as-service model allows us to automate a great deal of otherwise costly consulting tasks that don’t provide as much value to you.

With OnTarget you get:

1. Our expert analysis of your online lead generation and sales efforts;
2. The best recommendations you can actually implement with an estimate of time & resources required;
3. Pricing based on your ability to implement (starts as low as $1,000 a month) so that you achieve the highest return on investment of your time, money & resources.

We are launching the OnTarget program this week. We will be busy revising our website all week but you can preview the OnTarget service description.

If you want to know more or want to inquire about our reseller program please contact us.

Marketers are often measured by the number of leads they generate. Sales people are measured by sales. Marketers don’t want to be held accountable for sales because they aren’t actually selling. Sales people criticize “poorly qualified” web leads. This all leads to a lot of tension.

The Consequences of “Low Quality” Leads

In fact, in a survey conducted by Omniture and InsideSales.com they set up aliases, such as John@xyzcompany.com, and completed the lead or request information form of 700 different companies, several different times. Then kept track of their lead response and nurturing strategies and found:

• Average email response time: 19 hours, 31 minutes
  *Optimum response time should be within the first hour

• Average phone response time: 36 hours, 57 minutes
  *Optimum phone response time should be within the first five minutes

• How many companies even responded?
  *Only 47.3 percent responded via email, and just 7.5 percent responded via phone!

Web-generated leads decrease effectiveness by over 6x in the first hour according to InsideSales.com.

Obviously, there is a huge disaster in the making. Marketers have potential customers who indicated some level of qualification to buy from your company and sales people who practically refuse to respond. In the end everyone loses out.

Five Steps to Solving the “Lead Qualification” Problem

1. Identify which sources of traffic generation are creating improved qualification rates and ideal close rates. You need to have the analytics and a CRM / sales workflow system that helps you close the loop from marketing all the way through the close of the sale.

2. Identify which offer types improved qualification rates and close rates. Understand your personas and what actually matters to them. Spend time testing and refining offers and generating additional content that you can prove matters to your prospects.

3. Improve your method of qualifying and capturing leads. Test your lead forms to find the right balance of questions that keep the quality and lead count up. Use a platform that enables you to capture web activity (pages/content viewed, tool/calculator interactions) and include that information in the customer profile for sales. This usually involves tagging content to identify its value in the sales and buying process. Content tagging is so simple when you use Persuasion Architecture.

4. Improve your method of distributing leads. Often times the delay in getting form submissions responded to is your internal process of routing leads to the appropriate sales person. This should never be a manual process considering you lose a leads effectiveness with in the first few minutes. Think about it, the last time you submitted a form on a site, when did you want the response to your inquiry. Now! So do your prospects. Use a platform that will automatically distribute leads based on the profile of the customer you have collected through their visit(s). Distribution is often based on geographic region, company size, product/service they are interested in, etc. Either you can have the prospect fill this out in a form or most of this information can be collected and gleaned by web activity.

5. Improve your lead response time. When marketing aligns with sales using effective content planning, integrating the customer buying process with the company’s sales process, distributing leads that have not been turned off by your processes (and horrendous forms), providing sales people with details that matter to them about the prospect’s interests and motivations and then distribute those leads effectively, their isn’t a salesperson who wouldn’t want to respond to that kind of “qualified” prospect right away.

Do you need help generating more qualified leads? We are here for you.

Conversion Isn’t an Event, it’s a Process

We always like to focus first on increasing the number of leads towards the top of the sales funnel. However, without the next step, consumption, the companies don’t necessarily achieve their better but usually unstated goal of increased revenue.

This is the same fuzzy focus that has companies intent on getting more clicks to their PPC ads just so they can show the increased traffic numbers without focusing on converting that visitor into a lead or sale. To tell you the truth it is not as hard to get visitors to take the uncommitted step, as it is getting them to actually use and consume the product.

When you optimize for customer experience you really need to take the whole scenario from awareness (clicking your ad) through conversion and ultimately to consumption (and ideally to evangelism) into account.

An Example of Trying to Create Consumption

Yesterday I received this email from TimeBridge. I set up an account when I received an invitation from a friend at another company to setup a meeting. You know how challenging it is to coordinate a meeting amongst several people using email, etc.  Well I responded to his request and I really enjoyed the experience (partially because it was seamless using my Mac and Entourage) so I decided to setup an account. I even told several people about it. But I was never converted enough to incorporate it into my work flow.

I must have setup countless meetings since then all without the use of TimeBridge. What do you think went wrong? I converted, did a little worth of mouth for them but never consumed the product. Somehow the persuasive momentum was lost.

This is one way to try to initiate consumption. Use emails to try and prod engagement, add a bit of bribery (such as a contest for a $10 Starbucks card) and see how it works. We’ve seen several other really good examples over the years, what is the best method you have ever seen?

In fact, his last e-mail was so good and applied so well to most lead generation websites that I thought I’d share it with you directly:

“…Leach recruited the BIGGEST OFFENSIVE LINE in college football (bet it’s bigger than most pro teams as well). These guys make the offense that Leach runs possible. They wear down defensive lines, protect the passer, open up running lanes … but guess what … THEY DON’T SCORE. They only make it possible to score.

I think great websites similarly open up the door of possibility but no matter how big the website is … and how many bells and whistles it has … there is a lot more to scoring points with the customer.  You still need to do all the other things right.

Southwest Airlines is aggressive online. I print boarding passes through the website.  I get my seat assignments through the website. I also get regular email offers from them. Sounds hunky dory but the Website AIN’T the reason I am booking flights. It is the cost, convenience and great service Southwest has been delivering to ME for a long time. The WEB just made my ongoing relationship with them even easier.

Amazon isn’t just a website … they do an incredible job of shipping my books to my doorstep … and yep, they send me customized emails about new books on subjects I read.

UPS lets my company do all its shipping on line … but it is the guy in the brown truck who picks up my packages on the day I want to ship that I am interested in … the UPS website is merely a tool.

The same concept applies to your clients. The WEBSITE is an extension of the business … it ain’t the business. The Man-Giants for Texas Tech don’t score … they make it possible for Graham Harrel and Michael Crabtree (i.e., the SALES TEAM) to connect and put points on the board  … the defense is the OTHER stuff we do that people may not notice (like delivering really awesome service).

I think that more and more energy is being put into websites (the Offensive Line) … and it is vitally important … but you still have to have a sales force (QB & Receivers) and combine it with excellent core service & products (Defense). Put it all together and you can win a National Title.

t”

Yet while Tom was taking this from a somewhat negative light by asking “are your company’s QB/receivers up to snuff?”  I was taking this from the opposite perspective of, the better the offensive line blocks, the more successful the rest of your offense will become.

More specifically, clients with lead generation sites are always more than happy with the increased number of sales leads we can create through Website redesigns and optimization, but that’s not what the rave about.  What they’re usually blown away by is the increase in lead quality and reduction in sales cycle time.

Why?

Because most clients weren’t thinking about – and therefore weren’t expecting improvement in – that aspect of lead generation when they hired us, so success on that front is more of a WOW for them.  And also because those factors can be even more important in bottom line success than increasing the raw amount of leads.

Of course, when you really focus on the fact that the website itself won’t complete the sale, it becomes second nature to ensure the sales team gets the best possible hand-offs and the most protection from time-wasting tire kickers “sacking” your QB.

So if you already have a solid sales team, the question I’d ask you is: how good is your offensive line, and how much more could you be scoring with a better one?

• Established his own (very successful) ad agency
• Launched the Dodge and Chrysler brands
• Hired and mentored Leo Burnett, creator of the Marlboro Man, Tony the Tiger, Pillsbury Doughboy, and many other advertising icons that made his clients rich
• Turned positioning into a fine art form half a century before Ries and Trout even coined the term.
• Helped establish Cadillac’s pre-eminence among early automotive marks
• Wrote “The greatest ad of all time,” as voted in 1949 – an ad still listed in the top 50 of Ad Ages Top 100 Advertising Campaigns.

Interesting, but why should you care?  Because MacManus’s – and by extension Burnett’s – approach was the yin to Hopkins’ yang, and because MacManus’s approach still works today.

And what was that approach?

In a word, it was to position the client while dethroning competitors in the minds’ of the audience. He wanted to create, in the mind of the public, a deep-seated prejudice towards his client’s brand.

If, in the words of the legendary Gary Halbert, the biggest key to success is to sell to a starving crowd, then MacManus aimed to persuade the consumer that only his client’s product would fully cure their hunger, and then wait for the more-cheaply-persuaded and much larger mass audience to get hungry as their individual circumstances dictated.  This would be in contrast to targeting only hungry people and then selling to them via direct mail.

And so the two poles of advertising continue on to this day, as is clearly seen in the following comments by an extraordinarily successful brand builder, Chris Maddock.  Chris was responding to my request for his opinion on Google’s recent attempt to track the effect of offline advertising upon online sales/conversions.   Here’s what he had to say:

Jeff,

I think Google’s traditional ad analytics are interesting, sexy, and certainly useful on some level.  But I think the program could also be dangerous, in that it could give some folks faulty impressions of what is actually happening – or what is right – because it assumes advertisers know things they probably don’t.

Let’s say a local hardware store runs some print ads, and compares the online response to another time they’ve run radio ads.  If the print ads were for a short term offer, and the radio ad of a more institutional bent, the print ad could drive more traffic to the website and have the hardware store owner thinking that print’s the ticket.  The reality in such a situation is that the print advertising is impressing and motivating a tiny, albeit palpable, percentage of the market to respond and go the the website, while the time-sensitive nature of the offer makes the advertising all but invisible to the bulk of the market.  On the other hand the radio advertising is likely creating greater long-term top of mind awareness, yet probably not motivating as many to go the website.  Mr. Hardware likely thinks that the radio campaign was less effective, when in fact most category dominant businesses are those that eschew short-term sales, offers, promotions and the advertising tools that make them work, while leaning on intrusive media such as radio and television to push long-term awareness.  Over time, radio could likely drive many more visitors to the website – visitors who will likely buy.

So my worry is admittedly Hamiltonian.  Years of interaction with average business owners and traditional ad people has revealed a startling blindness to things like buying cycles, differences in long and short-term strategy, and proper media selection.

So these new Google analytics are cool.  I just hope the good people using them understand what they’re trying to make happen, and what the numbers returned really mean.

-    Chris

Do you see how Chris picks up the standard of Theodore McManus, Leo Burnett, and Roy Williams?  Although I think it is possible to intelligently and rigorously compare media, I can’t help but agree with Chris’s larger point.  Creating a prejudice in the mind of the customer before they’re hungry is often a more effective strategy than trying to only target hungry customers.*   But it requires a longer time horizon.  So if you are only measuring on the short term, you’ll likely come to the opposite conclusion and then deem your position to be “scientific.”  It’s a perfect example of one of the deadly sins of Web Analytics.

So what’s your time horizon?  And have you implemented a measuring/analytics system that will enable you to measure accordingly?

* To be fair, there are certainly also times when it pays to directly target hungry customers, rather than engage in a lengthier branding campaign.  I’m not necessarily advocating one over the other; I’m arguing that you shouldn’t base your decision on skewed metrics.

With that level of “targeting,” it’s anyone’s guess. There just isn’t enough information available.

But if George Costanza, the white middle-income male New Yorker between age 30 and 44 from “Seinfeld” picks up the wallet, everyone knows exactly what he’ll do.

He’ll keep the money.

By allowing you to imagine their concerns, reactions, and questions, personas allow you to better plan marketing interactions and messaging. Personas are critical to lead generation Web sites, specifically those that want to engage their suspects and prospects in a sales dialogue online and offline.

Personas vs. Segmentation/Demographics

When building personas for your lead gen or demand generation Web site, psychographics are typically more profitable than demographics.

Psychographics give insight into how an individual perceives the world, their belief structures, and some of their core personality traits. Psychographics, in the form of personality theory and motivational research, have a long documented effectiveness at predicting decision-making styles and behaviors — including buying behaviors.

Demographics, on the other hand, are only loosely correlated to behavior and often horrible in predicting marketing response.

Personas tell us how to plan and have a conversation. Demographics mostly tell us where to have that conversation. Both are important.

Using Personas to Take Action and Build Persuasion Scenarios

Web sites and online interactions especially benefit from this by allowing copywriters to plan the interactivity of click paths, the link structure for embedded hyperlinks, and the messaging required for increased persuasive momentum and conversions.

“Actionable personas” have easily predictable and imaginable conversations and reactions, like good fictional characters. They have to generate empathy and engage the imagination.

Meet Melissa Putnam, 23, Sales Assistant, $32,000 Annual Income

Melissa, a newbie at her job, was just asked by the sales manager to research and suggest some potential sales training vendors. Melissa is a people person; she likes to build strong relationships and relies on good first impressions to get relationships off to a strong start. She wants to make a splash and impress the boss.

The Brooks Group, a sales training company, offers all sorts of customized training, many of which would be a perfect match for Melissa’s needs.

Let’s peek at how we planned the interaction on the site for Melissa’s style and needs.

Melissa is a “humanistic,” meaning she’s interested most in relationships. So as she arrives at the Brooks Group Web site, she’s immediately presented with two links to the About Us page, both at the top and left-hand navigation.

When she clicks through, she’s presented with a page that addresses her motivations about midway through, and notices the header “Meet the team.” You also see a picture of the founder, and a link in the active window that reads ‘real coaches.’ This is all Melissa speak.

After she clicks that link, she arrives at the “Working with Brooks Group” page. There’s a lot of content here that is virtual red meat for her. Here she reads a little about coaching and clicks the link near the bottom of the page that reads, “Contact one of our sales coaches, and they’ll talk you through a typical training deployment.”

Melissa is on her way to becoming a lead.

If you click around the site acting as Melissa, you’ll find other paths for her to follow, all leading toward a conversion event, giving her several opportunities to call or fill out the lead form. You’ll find links and elements designed and planned exclusively for her humanistic style persona.

If you’re astute, you’ll notice that Melissa isn’t the only persona accounted for on the site.

Meet Charlie “Nubs” Harrison, 45, Sales Manager, $90,000 Annual Income

Charlie, a former top salesperson, was just promoted to sales manager. He’s starting to doubt he made the right decision. His quote: “Managing these people is like herding cats.”

Charlie is a take-action, spontaneous type. He doesn’t like to waste time and he’s in pain. His sales people are driving him crazy.

Since Charlie has little patience, the first and most visible link in the active window was planned for him. He might also be interested in first learning about the company, Unlike Melissa, he’s looking more for credibility and experience than a relationship.

On the “about us” page, a link is planted just for him that reads, “the ability to manage sales rather than micromanage sales people.” Score for a Charlie type visitor!

As he follows that link, he arrives at the “Herd Your Sales Cats” page that is rich with Charlie language and content intended to speak to his pain. Near the bottom is a link that reads, “Getting started with the Brooks Group is easy.”

Here are things you can do for your personas to better plan your online lead gen interactions.

• Speak to temperaments such as humanistic. When you have content for several on the same page, put elements links and copy for the impatient competitive and spontaneous types higher up on the page, humanistics in the middle, and provide all the deeper details last for your methodical personas. Methodical types are not afraid of reading, so let them at it.
• Account for buying cycles. Ask what your personas need at each stage of the buying process. If they’re early in the buying cycle, they don’t know what they need or how to buy your product. If in the middle, they know approximately what they need. And finally, those in the late stage know exactly what they want. Provide copy, links, and elements for all three stages. In a recent column, I showed how Marketo was trying to convert outside the context of an early stage buyer.
• Understand sales complexity. You need to know how your personas relate to four measurements of complexity and provide content that addresses the questions and issues they face. One persona may have a greater felt need (Charlie), while another needs consensus (Melissa).

You might be thinking, wow, this is a lot of work.

Yup. But we can help you get these great results.

Being purposeful and prepared to deal with your prospects is always sweat-inducing work. But with a good plan, the sweat breeds greater conversion.

Bottom line for the Brooks Group: it doubled its leads by planning using persuasion scenarios, components that lead a visitor segment to participate in a conversion action.

* Cross posted from ClickZ.

1. Review Your Lead Generation Forms

Typically lead-gen site forms fail in two major areas:

• Many lead-gen sites simply copy forms from a site they like, giving little thought to the nuances and the difference between their business goals and the site they copied. The result can lead to a slew of unqualified leads, or low conversion to lead.
• Some companies make their complex lead scoring requirements the visitor’s job. We worked with a client with a highly complex lead scoring system that, in turn, created an intimidating lead form with a dozen intrusive questions and several drop downs with more than 20 choices. Only the most determined of leads would actually complete the entire form. The obvious result was an offensively high form abandonment rate.

The obvious advantage to collecting information from potential prospects in a lead form is that it can help a business convert more qualified leads. To solve both of the above problems, there’s one successful approach: use a two-part lead form.

On the first page, ask the minimum amount of questions possible for a visitor to become a lead, where each field is a required field. Ask for the contact information and little else.

On the second page, ask several more optional questions that will help the company better qualify the lead. Above the form, explain that the more information they provide, the better you can prepare for a conversation with them. With this technique, even if little (or no) information is provided on the second page, you at least have contact information that the sales team can follow up on.

2. Develop More Than One Lead Form

Many sites still link to one lead form on the site. Consider placing lead forms in several places on the site. Providing lead forms on each product/service pages and on other key pages allows you to track where the lead form was filled out and provides a helpful nugget of data for the sales team as they contact that lead.

3. Avoid Asking for the Lead Too Early

While recently shopping some demand-gen companies, I did a Google search for Eloqua. The second paid listing for Marketo caught my interest, so I clicked through.

Someone on my staff ended up on a landing a page that successfully enticed them to learn more — specifically this person wanted to see the video demo. Unfortunately, one couldn’t watch the video without filling out the lead form.

Many visitors in this situation aren’t ready to begin the sales process by filling out a lead form with only a promise to watch a demo. My colleague was one of those visitors and bailed. Ironically, another member of my team noticed that the logo on top of the page was a link to the Marketo home page and was able to watch a demo video without filling out a form.

While it may be a “best practice” to limit visitor choices on landing pages, this certainly isn’t a persuasive practice, especially for someone in the early stages of the buying process. My colleague didn’t know what Marketo was, and certainly wasn’t ready to give up personal information at this stage to find out. Marketo is losing conversion opportunities by not providing more actions on this page for visitors who aren’t ready to give out personal info until they know more.

4. How to Do Lead Gen the Right Way

Our partner and marketing to women guru, Michele Miller recently blogged about Jenny Craig’s successful persona-based marketing plan. Whether on purpose or by intuition, Jenny Craig’s celebrity spokeswomen appeal to specific personas and buying types. As we dug further, we were even more impressed. We Googled both Queen Latifah and Valerie Bertinelli and were surprised to find that Jenny Craig had purchased some AdWords ads on those two terms.

Even better, as we clicked through the ads to their landing pages, we noticed that each landing page was crafted and had elements for the persona type that would be attracted to each celebrity.

We extrapolated that Latifah appealed to a more humanistic persona. The page was filled with relational language giving the overall impression to the humanistic persona that becoming a lead for Jenny Craig meant starting a relationship — a key motivator for a humanistic buyer. Take a look at the page and see if you can see the strategy at work.

Bertinelli’s page reflects her methodical style, thereby making it easier for a methodical prospect to get more information. Elements on this page are more information focused and allow for the methodical persona to take action their way. Can you see the difference a persona-based page makes?

5. Aggressively Optimize Your Lead-Gen Process

Many e-commerce sites pour resources and time into improving their checkout process. Lead-gen sites don’t seem to have the same commitment to testing and optimizing their lead generation process. If you’re a lead gen site, your lead-generation process is your checkout process — it’s just as critical to your business as a shopping cart is to an e-commerce site.

What have you done lately to improve your lead-gen efforts? Let me know in the comments below.

*Cross-posted on ClickZ.

What: “Always Be Testing” Webinar: Landing Pages: Headlines and Calls to Action

When: Wednesday, August 27, 2008 | 12:00pm EST

Where: Online, register here to receive your invitation

How much: It’s free, but space is limited so sign-up today!

About this session:

Last month kicked off the series with a webinar on testing trust and confidence building elements on landing pages (view archive ). Our August session will continue to explore landing pages focusing on testing calls to action and headlines. register today! Space is limited.

“Always Be Testing” Webinar Series is a monthly webinar that covers specific testing ideas, how to structure tests, and how to use Google Website Optimizer. The best part is that Google has decided to participate in it first-hand, offering the lastest tips and insights straight from Tom Leung, Google’s Business Product Manager.

“Landing Pages: Headlines and Calls to Action Webinar” will be on August 27th, at 12:00pm EST and last 30 minutes.

For more details and to sign-up to attend, visit futurenowinc.com/abtwebinar.htm

We hope you’ll attend and share this with anyone you know who is looking to begin to test their marketing or to increase their testing effectiveness.

About the Series:
Whether your business has just started testing, is planning to test, or has been testing for years identifying the areas and elements that have impact is often challenging. Each month, Bryan Eisenberg starts off by taking attendees on a dive deep on a specific subject area to test in your marketing and give you ideas on variation you could test. Along with these ideas each month Tom Leung will bring you useful insider tips and tricks about using Google Website Optimizer to easily test your marketing campaigns and website. Lastly, the two will team up to answer a popular question spotted on the Google Website Optimizer forums or sent in by our readers and listeners.

Lead generation sites fail to convert for three basic reasons:

1. Visitors don’t understand the value they get in exchange for giving their information.

2. They are informationally challenged and collect too little, too much, or incorrect information.

3. You haven’t established trust and set proper expectations of what to expect when doing business with you.

Obviously, each is interrelated and flow from one to the other. There might be a few more reasons, but for now, these three culprits are enough to start you identifying specific problems on your site and determining action items for optimization.

Keep in mind, more leads may not be what you need. You may need more qualified leads, and a properly planned Web site should help the visitor qualify herself.

We’ve worked with several companies that have seen a decrease in the number of leads, but increased sales and optimized the sales team time and closing ratios because the quality of their leads was improved.

Exchanging Value: My Name for Your Service

Many sites offering “free” whitepapers, case studies, or resources in exchange for some visitor information do a poor job of merchandising their downloads. Your downloads contain valuable information. Treat them as such.

Stop thinking of these downloads as free. You’re asking for something extremely valuable to both you and the visitor, their contact information. To get this valuable information “merchandise” your downloads better. Show the visitor the value of what they’re downloading. So when they fill out the lead form, they feel they’re making a good exchange, valuable information for valuable information.

Include thumbnails of documents.

Let them know what they’ll learn from the download.

Let them know what they can do with the information.

List everything what’s “in it for them” in the download.

Let them know what will happen with their information. Will you be calling them? (More on this, below, under “Establishing Trust and Expectations”.)

If you offer a free trial or demo period, provide clear information about what they are getting. Is it a fully functional trial with a time limit? What happens when the demo runs out? Will you offer them support during the trial? (Sounds like a good way to win over a potential customer doesn’t it?) Disclose system requirements before they begin the sign up process.

Track the number of “bogus” e-mails you get, either bad e-mail addresses or e-mails from Hotmail, Yahoo, or Gmail. If you get too many emails from lucilleball@yahoo.com or elvisp@hotmail, rest assured that visitors don’t see value in the offer and the exchange.

Beware, sometimes these tactics will cause a drop in the number of leads, but rid you of junk leads. You have to determine if this is an acceptable trade off (it almost always is).

Help for the Informationally Challenged

Information, information, information is all around us. Some is useful, sometimes it’s hard to find what’s useful, and some information is just plain not helpful at all.

One approach to determine if you have info problems is to examine time spent on page. Often times I work with sites that have low time spent on main content pages but their FAQ page gets more visitor time. This may indicate that visitors aren’t finding information they need elsewhere. If a visitor relies on your FAQ to get information, it reduces trust. Why aren’t these frequent questions answered frequently (or linked to) on key pages like home and service/product pages?

Often sites put up so much information that visitors cannot find the piece of info they seek. This occasionally indicates an information architecture problem, but more often indicates that the visitors’ needs and motivations aren’t addressed in the content.

Another key issue often neglected is that often the person doing the research on the Web site isn’t the decision maker. She’s trying to gather, sort, and print (you do make it easy to do that, right?) information to give to the person making the decision. Are you making your site easy to understand for this person as well?

There really are no easy solutions to get your information in order. First begin to establish a persuasive framework, building personas then planning each persona’s interaction or persuasion scenarios with your site, and determining what information they need and when and where they need it on the site.

Establishing Trust and Expectations

Visitors must trust you. If they don’t, they don’t become leads or often they become bad leads. Visitors may even fill out a lead form if they mistrust you. Sometimes they are just going through the motion of getting proposals and pricing and are planning on buying from your competitor. You might have the better solution for them but the site or the lead process doesn’t instill enough confidence to take you seriously.

Most visitors who aren’t confident simply won’t contact you. They fear harassment from the sales team. Or sometimes your site is ineffective in communicating the values of the visitor and they bail. Again, this is a tragedy especially when you consider they could be in the market to buy what you sell.

Other times, visitors are in early stages of the buying process and an overly aggressive lead form will cause them to tighten up, assuming you’ll push them somewhere they don’t feel ready to go. Here are some things you can do to help instill trust.

Include information about what it’s like to work with your company. Let them know when you will contact them. Assure them that you will only help them determine their needs and not pressure them.

Ramp up your About Us page.

Ask as few questions as possible in your lead form. Don’t force them to give you all types information or endure a stack of intimidating drop downs.

Include short, friendly lead forms in several places on the site (not just your contact page). This will help you track where they filled out the form and better inform you what they might be interested in.

Tell them exactly what will happen when they send their info, tell them how soon they will be hearing from you. If possible give them a choice of how and when they prefer to be contacted.

Some visitors like to be prepared for the call. Provide a checklist of information they might need to have handy when they speak with you.

Some visitors prefer to call. Provide the phone number near the lead form.

Now go get some leads.

. .

Originally seen on ClickZ.

Editor’s Note: Want more tips on lead-generation? Join Bryan on June 3rd in Manhattan at the Call to Action seminar.

Quick question for anyone with a lead-generation or e-commerce site…

Which is easier: Getting people to trust your website and complete its web form or checkout process, or getting them to literally donate their hearts and eyeballs?

Take your time.

Apparently, the answer depends on where they live. While 99.98% of Austrians agree to donate their organs upon death, only 12% of Germans do the same. Virtually all French citizens will donate a kidney to save a life, but the Brits? Only 17% of them seem willing. Meanwhile, your chances of having a heart (transplant) are nearly four times better if you’re having a triple bock in Antwerp than they are if you’ve already had a triple bypass in Amsterdam.

Seems odd, doesn’t it? Take a look at this graph from a recent Freakonomics article:

Here’s how Dan Ariely — Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Behavioral Economics at the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management, principal investigator of the MIT Media Lab’s eRationality group, and author of Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions — explains this bit of research (from colleagues Eric Johnson and Daniel Goldstein) in the Freakonomics post mentioned above:

…It turns out that it is the design of the form at the D.M.V. In countries where the form is set as “opt-in” (check this box if you want to participate in the organ donation program) people do not check the box and as a consequence they do not become a part of the program. In countries where the form is set as “opt-out” (check this box if you don’t want to participate in the organ donation program) people also do not check the box and are automatically enrolled in the program. In both cases large proportions of people simply adopt the default option.

You might think that people do this because they don’t care — that the decision about donating their organs is so trivial that they can’t be bothered to lift up the pencil and check the box. But in fact the opposite is true.

This is a hard emotional decision about what will happen to our bodies after we die and what effect it will have on those close to us. It is because of the difficulty and the emotionality of these decisions that they just don’t know what to do, so they adopt the default option (by the way this also happens to physicians making medical decisions, and also to people making investment and retirement decisions).

[...] The moment you realize that your intuition about your own behavior might be wrong it is clear that you need another, more objective input.

This is what experiments are all about. We could have never intuited the opt-in, opt-out effect, nor could we have intuited the magnitude of this effect, and this is why empiricism is so important.

If you know anyone who’s skeptical about testing content from the visitor’s perspective, please take a moment to share this with them.

. .

[Image credit: Kistyn E]

1. Indicate which fields are required by using asterisks next to these required fields. Ask yourself if the non-required fields offer enough value. If they don’t, remove them from the form. This could potentially make all fields a requirement — and if that’s the case, the asterisks would be overkill — which brings us to our next point.

2. Only have them fill in required fields. Asking for too much information on a web form is like proposing marriage on the first date. We would all like to know our customer’s age, work title, phone number and address, but if you don’t absolutely need it, then remove it from the form. This will make the form shorter and less likely to frustrate the impatient, fast-paced visitor who may not feel comfortable exposing their personal info. Don’t let this be the reason why visitors are dropping off.

3. Clarify what you expect them to do. Doostang gives the visitor a dialog bubble explaining each field when the visitor clicks to fill out a field. This removes any potential confusion as to what information is being requested and could lead to a reduction in errors taking place if a field is filled out incorrectly.

4. Offer reassurances when asking for personal information. Your visitors are concerned about privacy and security issues. You can offer a link to a privacy and security page so that the visitor can click to read and gain confidence.

5. Clearly state what the visitor will get by filling out the form, and do it at the very beginning of the page. Tell them what the benefits are. There should be no question as to what they’ll expect once they fill the form out.

6. Don’t ask people to submit. Call to action buttons should clearly state the action they’re about to take. Use colors and shading that make the button stand out effectively and, please, try to not use the word “submit” — it’s generic and misleading geek-speak.

7. Offer contact information somewhere on this page and/or in the top-right corner of the site (on every page). Give the visitor a phone number and a “Contact Us” link. If they don’t feel comfortable filling out the form, persuade them to call and speak with you directly.

Do you have any other suggestions to add to this list?

OK, I made up that last one, but it really was that bad. The even scarier thing is, I’ve seen hundreds of forms like it.

When someone does a search and lands on your website, they might have some familiarity with you if you’re a well-known brand. Or, more likely, they have little-to-no awareness as to who you are and what you do. Basically, you’ve just met. So, why ask for so much personal, sensitive information on this first meeting? Are you proposing marriage when you should be asking him/her out for coffee?

Part of the problem is, the only way many B2B or lead generation sites measure success is by the number of people who fill in a lead form. That’s a pretty big step. Many visitors to your site won’t be ready to make that kind of a commitment to you yet. So, do you just write them off? Do you consider that a failed conversion?

Don’t forget, there are other micro-conversions to consider. Your visitors might agree to a cup of coffee, or a short “date” to find out more about you. Examples of these types of conversions could be as simple as someone taking the time to read your ‘About Us’ page, or watching a short product video, or signing up for your newsletter. These are conversions. You should be planning and measuring them.

When trying to measure the ROI of your website, you need to take into account the ways you engage prospective customers when they’re earlier in the buying process. Yes, some people are ready to start some sort of relationship with you; meaning, of course, that they fill out the lead form. (You’re only asking for the least amount of information, right?).That’s a measurable success. But don’t forget those who were engaged enough to spend some time on your site, gather information, watch a video, download a whitepaper, sign-up for a newsletter, and so on.

All these micro-conversions indicate your visitors are at least engaging with your brand. They may only be willing to commit to a cup of coffee right now, but that’s an encouraging first step!

Several of the B2B panelists recommended this report by Enquiro. (Notice the wonderfully short registration form ) I haven’t read it yet, but it got high marks from the panel. Let me know what you think!

When you’re asking customers for information, only ask for what you absolutely must have. Especially if you’ve just met. (Lead generation sites are usually prone to asking for too much information.)

Do you have to ask for a phone number? Why not let the visitor tell you their preferred method for contact? Give them the option of receiving a reply by phone or email.

The same rules apply when asking for a “friend’s” information as well. If you have some sort of “email a friend” option, do you clearly spell out what you will do with that friend’s information?

I had a friend–yes, I did have a friend, once –who was very proud of her email. She’d kept it “clean.” Hadn’t made it onto any lists. Then a friend of hers (not me, thank goodness) signed her up to receive a special promotion. Well, not long after, her pristine email was infected. She started receiving lots of unwanted email solicitations. She did not have a good reaction to this.

It’s basic, but important: ask for minimal information. And tell them what you’re going to do with that information.

Click to read more about customer information forms.

This December, I’m featuring my Top Ten Countdown. These are the articles Future Now, Inc.� has published, here and elsewhere,� that have inspired folks to write (in droves), click through, investigate more and take notice. Whether you are revisiting the material or discovering it for the first time, I hope this issue encourages you to jump start your New Year’s resolutions for your business plans, online and off, in 2007.

And however you celebrate your holidays, may your preparations fill you with the inspiration of the season, may your relationships bring you joy, and may you experience it all in wellness and safety.

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Read the entire newsletter: Volume 144

Let’s pretend for a moment that your analytics reports are lying to you. (It’s nothing personal; they just don’t always see the big picture.)

Now think about a few key questions: Do you know what percentage of online visitors your business converts into offline customers? How many offline sales have you lost from bad online experiences and vice versa? How depressing and/or exciting would it be if you could accurately measure such things? Would you rather have more business or more data?

Okay, don’t answer that last one. Let’s talk about the others.

If there’s any offline component to your business’s online sales process whatsoever-from cold call leads for complex B2B sales to moving consumer goods in brick-and-mortar stores-your website should be anticipating and answering potential questions for potential customers. One thing is certain: your customers/clients/whatevers don’t care which channel they used to find you. In their minds, your brand is some combination of how you’ve treated them and how they’ve perceived your actions. Although brand perceptions tend to ebb and flow over time, an exceptionally good or bad experience-regardless of the medium-can quickly tip the scales.

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Read the entire newsletter: Volume 141

With the new marketing and advertising landscape, companies are demanding greater accountability for their ad spend. Current technology and better persuasive planning can help a company not only increase the lead/cross-channel pipeline but also to measure and optimize it.

Drive Mass Media to Your Site

If your company spends a significant amount of money buying mass media, tracking effectiveness can be tricky. It may not be completely accurate, but you can likely measure which channel generates the most traffic for your site:

• Use friendly, easy-to-remember URLs in mass-media campaigns. If you want to compare campaigns by using a unique URL for each, use differentiating URLs, such as “go.clickz.com” or “read.clickz.com” rather than “www.clickz.com/tv/1234.html.” If you use a forward slash (”/”), it generally won’t work. If mass-media visitors actually remember the URL, they’ll likely just go to your home page and forego anything after the slash.
• Create a different offer for each campaign. Or, track campaigns with a coupon code on a printed piece. Beware: only certain customer types will actually participate in an offer.
• Realize mass media is mass media. Judging mass-media campaign effectiveness on a cost-per-lead basis is almost impossible. When you buy any mass media, reaching a bunch of people who will never buy from you is unavoidable. It’s also extremely difficult to funnel mass-media activity into a specific channel (e.g., a landing page) and measure it with any degree of accuracy. You’ll likely send traffic to some of your other channels, too (e.g., a call center or a brick-and-mortar store).

Continue reading my column at ClickZ…

Gone are the rose-colored-glasses days of “Gee Whiz.” Return on investment is the imperative. Your bottom line depends on your ability to market intelligently. And your ability to market intelligently depends on the accountability you design into your online efforts. As Jim Sterne of Target Marketing wrote for us, “There is no such thing as a perfect website, there is only … change. Do not expect to ever reach the final version of your site. You want people to buy? Keep trying things and measuring the results.”The underlying beauty of a conversion system based on the principles of Persuasion Architecture lies in its accountability. For Call to Action, Jason Burby, Director of Web Analytics for Zaaz, offered these “number tactics” to help you shape the accountability of your conversion system.

Jason writes:

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Read the entire newsletter: Volume 113