Author: Bill Freedman

Evidence, Persuasion and Perception

By Bill Freedman

Marketing-speak is littered with all kinds of trite sayings. I was in a meeting today at a business software organization where the words “perception is reality” was uttered yet again. I sat quietly listening to the speakers’ claims. My client does, after all, have experience in the market, with customers and with the technology.

I understand the logic of the truism. If a customer believes something to be true, they will act on their beliefs. In my experience, prospective IT customers are a skeptical bunch. They distrust advertising slogans and sales claims. And for good reason: they’ve been burned by bold claims and vendor promises.

So the real question isn’t “if” the prospective customer believes your claims, but rather how to persuade the customer to conclude that they need your product and services. In other words, what can you do to induce the prospective customer to take the actions you prescribe. These words are easy to say, hard to accomplish. Changing individual behavior is hard to do. Changing the behavior of a large segment of the market is a remarkable accomplishment.

Evidence, I believe, is the strongest tool for persuasion. Evidence comes in many forms: quantitative studies, product demos, customer references, cost/benefit analyses and others. Evidence stands apart from claims in that it is grounded in one or more forms of reality. Typically evidence is tangible. Most importantly, customers can assess and experience evidence on their own terms.

Creating evidence with the power to change market and individual behavior is hard. It is rarely the case that your product aims at a greenfield opportunity and has no relevant competition. People are very much creatures of habit, making incumbent solutions to problems seem acceptable. Evidence however, can shock markets and individuals into action. They may not buy immediately, they may not even fully accept the evidence, but they will use the evidence to test and perhaps alter their perception of reality.

Is perception reality? Perhaps. But if you want to change perception, you better get some evidence.

The Full List: 23 Varieties of Successful Web Conversion Offers

By Bill Freedman

Your website should deliver your highest value and lowest cost business leads. People who find your site are interested in your business. People who stay on your site are engaged and developing trust. People who fill out a form on your site, sharing their contact information in exchange for something of value, are gold.

Web Conversion Offers

To mine gold, your web site needs to offer two things:

  • One or more registration forms
  • Relevant content that visitors want

Below is the full list of 23 successful web conversion offers, sorted by category:

Information Downloads

  1. White papers
  2. Tip sheets
  3. Software
  4. Apps

Registrations

  1. Webinar sign-up
  2. Cloud account on your site
  3. Trial request

Activities

  1. ROI calculator
  2. Webinar attendance
  3. Meet-up attendance
  4. Hack-a-thons
  5. Software usage

Subscriptions

  1. Newsletter signup
  2. Mailing list signup
  3. Blog or podcast RSS subscription
  4. Social media “like,” “follow” or “channel subscription”

Access

  1. Contact us
  2. Request a demo
  3. Meeting request
  4. Free consultation
  5. Contest entry
  6. Claim a discount
  7. Inbound call to sales

Picking offers for your business is a very important decision and should flow naturally from your marketing strategy. One size doesn’t fit all. A free trial may make sense for a software developer but not for a business decision-maker. Make sure you have content for all potential buyers.

Keep one more thing in mind: conversions happen in the buyer’s mind and only gets measured on your web site. To earn a conversion, you first need to prove that your business is trustworthy, honest and helpful.

What’s Not on the Web Conversion Offers List

The following types of helpful web content are not listed as conversion offers because it should just be freely available. Somethings, even some valuable things, you just need to share freely. Make the following content freely available to inform, engage and build customer trust:

  1. Product specs and data sheets
  2. Announcements and press releases
  3. Customer success stories
  4. Endorsements
  5. Infographics
  6. Sizzle videos

Are you using other types web conversion offers to generate leads? Share below!

This Novice Built a Responsive WordPress Theme in a Day—And So Can You

By Bill Freedman
Screenshot of article in responsive wordpress theme

A post from Bill Freedman’s Soon to be a Major Trend viewed from an iPhone using the new WordPress Responsive Theme

How cool is it that a marketing leader and data nerd with modest web development skills can, all by his lonesome, bring a WordPress blog/website into the modern era in under a day? That’s just what I did.

I’m pretty darn happy with the new look of Bill Freedman’s Soon to be a Major Trend. I started this site in 2006 when table layouts were the bomb. My last major change was in 2008 when I started using the MistyLook theme by Satish. Browse through the pages and posts. Read the articles and view the images. Leave comments. Did you have a good experience with my spiffy new theme and the pre-existing content? Did you find something I should fix? Please leave comments below.

I’m amazed at how little effort was needed for browser and platform accommodations in this era of fragmented computing platforms. This site with its Responsive WordPress Theme looks good to me on an Android phone, a Windows PC, an iPad as well as a MacBook Pro running Chrome  that was used for “development.”

Responsive WordPress Theme Development Shout-outs

While the make-over only consumed about a day of my labor, my success clearly benefited from the innovation, creativity and contributions from many others. As Isaac Newton said, “If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants.” I’d like to give heart-felt shout-outs to a number of sturdy-shouldered giants who saved me time, effort and frustration:

  • WordPress—It was a great piece of software when I got started blogging in 2006, and I’ve been a user and trusting fanboy ever since. WordPress has become an incredible content management system (CMS) backed by an industry and ecosystem devoted to helping the world create flexible web sites. The platform has evolved to support HTML5, CSS3, responsive design, security, scalability and a whole lot more. All this without making me edit my previously created content.
  • Automattic—The commercial sponsor of WordPress contributed to my site in countless ways, from sponsoring development of core WordPress features to essential plug-ins like Akismet to driving standards in theme development.
  • Ian Stewart—The original Theme Shaper and now an Automattic employee. I found Ian’s Thematic framework in 2008 and have been learning from him ever since. While I’m not a PHP coder or theme developer, his well-commented themes and blog posts taught me that themes matter. While I didn’t dabble with the latest in themes on this site, my clients’ sites benefited from his contributions, teachings about functions and child themes, and now from Underscores (_s), which is the starter theme for this site.
  • Anonymous Media Query Author—Somewhere at sometime I found a set of WordPress- and _s-ready media queries. I don’t remember who wrote this code. I hope I’m not violating your license. I just added the media queries to my style.css file and—poof—my site was responsive.
  • Yoast—Joost de Valk and the Yoast team have created numerous reliable plug-ins and training that help my content get found. It’s not enough to have a pretty and responsive WordPress theme. Your site and content needs to be found, read and responded to. WordPress SEO by Yoast helps the SEO and writing process for authors and does the behind the scenes work to make your content irresistible to Google and Bing.
  • Font Awesome—I’m a fan of this set of well designed icons and happy to include them as a core part of my new look and feel. The style sheet and plug-in (by Rachel Baker) made integration of the icons-as-font easy. I also like that the associated .pdf enables me to use the icons as scalable images in derivative works.

I could go on. But rather than blindly take my recommendations, just get started with updating your own theme. One piece of advice: don’t do theme design on your production blog. Do it on a local WordPress instance, which isn’t that hard to set up and manage. All you really need are some free tools, intermediate knowledge of CSS3 and comfort configuring advanced things on your desktop. I have a Mac, so I’ll help you out with tools for Mac:

  • A MAMP stack-Mac OS, Apache, MySQL and PHP-to run WordPress. One preconfigured download is MAMP.
  • A MySQL admin tool to export/import your content between production and development. I use SequelPro
  • A text editor. I like Sublime Text which isn’t free. TextWranger is a good choice that’s free.
  • An FTP browser. My choice is Cyberduck.
  • WordPress
  • A starter theme. I used Underscores.

Perhaps you’ll go the Underscores route as I did or perhaps you’ll purchase a ready-to-use responsive WordPress theme. It doesn’t matter. Get your site onto the WordPress platform and take advantage of the wealth of resources that can take your site from good to great.

What is it Like to be Your own Customer?

By Bill Freedman

Häagen-Dazs strawberry ice cream. Ecco shoes. The New York Times. WordPress blogging software. We all have our favorite companies, products and services. Products that deliver exceptional value, services that are reliably great, and companies that are easy to business with.

haagen dazs strawerry ice cream

Photo credit: Haagen Dazs

Now look in the mirror: is your business as consistently excellent as your favorites? If you’re not sure, then you probably have work to do. After only a brief glance in the mirror, I buckled down and got to work.

Benchmarking Customer Experience

I started by taking stock of what I deliver, my uniqueness and the promise I offer. This was the easy part, because I get to define the playing field. Just as you can’t play tennis without lines and a net, you can’t benchmark your business without a measure of capabilities.

The next step was also easy. I examined my “first impression” touch points: my email footer, my voicemail greeting and my home page. Did they match the benchmark I set for my business? I made a few small adjustments to be more consistent, clear and customer-aware.

Finally I talked to customers, prospects and partners. I asked two direct questions:

  • How did our project improve your business?
  • Would you recommend my company to others?

I listened. I wanted to hear about numerical results. Was there more revenue, more leads, repeatable campaigns? I wanted to hear about problems that are now behind them and a clear path toward their exceeding their goals. And finally, I wanted to hear that they’d recommend me to colleagues and friends.

I got exactly the answers I wanted to hear. Honest answers about what we’d accomplished together. In addition to the good things I wanted to hear, I learned about rough spots and frustrations. In other words, I learned that the core value is solid, but there is room for improvement in multiple areas, as there are many popular business areas now a days like casino games, as sites like woo casino 2 specialize in this.

For me, the greatest take-away from this exercise is that I learned I need to be consistent at everything, not just at my core advantage. My customers want excellence everywhere, from an initial proposal to a final invoice, and from a second campaign to ad hoc phone advice. This makes a lot of sense. My favorite companies have a level of consistency and quality across multiple processes and multiple employees. My goals are not just helping customers succeed, but improving my business across all dimensions.

Walking the Walk

Let me be clear. I’m not advocating for perfect products or over-the-top money-losing service levels. I’m merely suggesting that it’s worth benchmarking customer experience and see if it meets your standards. Creating value is the core of what I do very well. By upping my game, I make my business one that my customers respect, rely on and recommend to others.

How Efficient is Your Marketing?

By Bill Freedman

The famed retail pioneer from the late 19th century (and fellow Philadelphian) John Wanamaker reportedly said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” Marketers of all stripes wrung their hands while reluctantly accepting Wanamaker’s findings for nearly a century after his rise to success.

Marketing has come a long way since Wanamaker. With online advertising such as Google AdWords, all sorts of advanced bidding strategies and closed-loop click tracking, the new mantra is “43.745% of my advertising is wasted; but tomorrow’s experiment will give me the insight to improve conversion rates and reduce spend.”

So the question on my mind today is: are today’s marketing expenditures more efficient than a century ago?

The ability to measure digital advertising and customer behavior provides marketers with an extensive array of data on customer behavior and advertising effectiveness. But let’s not kid ourselves: having data is different than using the data to improve outcomes, and few marketers have the combination of quantitative skills to analyze results and creative skills to devise new online experiments that improve outcomes.

Advertising and promotion budgets continue to be a significant business expense. Heck, businesses may even be spending more today than in Wanamaker’s day–but I’ll leave that question to my colleagues in academia.

The paradox is clear. Newly available data enables more efficient promotional spends. But promotional spending continues to rise.

Marketing in the Age of Experimentation

Here are a few ways you can improve your marketing efficiency in the age of experimentation:

  • Data Trumps Gut. Are you really sure you picked the optimal ad copy, keywords and subject line? I used to think I was smarter and more creative than the average marketer. Now I don’t think that at all. I trust the data to tell me, not how smart I am, but which campaign will yield the best outcomes. Gut, or should I say experience, helps your craft experiments. Data helps you make decisions.
  • Fail Fast. Experiments should last just long enough to provide you with a large enough sample to make valid decisions. What is amazing is that a test could be completed by running an AdWords campaign for a few days and costing only a few hundred dollars. This represents a dramatic shift from the the old “reach and frequency” methods of designing ad campaigns.
  • Focus on Outcomes. In Wanamaker’s time, advertising generated awareness, brand preference and (occasionally) immediate revenue. Measuring the revenue contribution from advertising was difficult. In the age of experimentation, advertising generates clicks and conversions. These clicks and and conversions can be tracked all the way to revenue. When you can find a campaign that consistently produces more revenue than it costs to create a customer, you are simply printing money!

Data is a marketer’s friend, but it has limits. Before you start replacing the copywriters and entrepreneurs in your marketing department with mathematicians, remember that translating product features into customer focused benefits, creating messages that resonate with customers and producing images that inspire action are powerful skills. John Wanamaker, if he were alive today, would probably hire the same marketing professionals he did in the past…as long as they traded in their egos for calculators.