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Taking
Advantage of The Experience Factor
We read the
newspaper, we watch television, and we listen to the radio, but we
experience the Web; this is what makes 'The Website' one of the most
powerful marketing tools available to today's marketing executives.
Unfortunately conventional wisdom has stifled the 'experience
factor' on most website presentations.
Traditional
circulation based advertising biases and pitch-mandated direct mail
practices from metric-minded agencies have limited businesses'
ability to take advantage of the Web's capacity to provide a more
active, creative, and penetrating sensory experience aimed at
furthering marketing objectives.
Editorial
Note: Drop by the SiteProNews Blog to read regular posts by one of
the Web's top SEO writers, Jim Hedger, or listen to The Alternative
on WebMaster Radio, the new weekly, hour-long live broadcast hosted
by Jim Hedger, covering the world of independent search engine
alternatives and, of course, developments at the Big 3.
As consumers
of information we all filter what our mind considers irrelevant.
When we go to a website we quickly recognize where banner and text
advertisements have been placed and proceed to ignore them for the
rest of our visit. Even television ads are becoming increasingly
less effective, even as their cost increases. Yet people will watch
and even look forward to creative, entertaining advertisements that
capture our imagination and inform our ability to make better
decisions about what we buy and who we buy from.
Does Anybody
Really Know What Works?
It is easy to
rely on after-the-fact number crunching and projected head-numbing
statistics to justify how marketing campaigns are constructed rather
than on the less predictable but more relevant elements of
psychology and human nature. But do numbers really tell the true
story, or are they just protect-your-butt justification designed to
ease everyone's mind when it comes time to commit to a budget?
Take the
entertainment industry for example. Here is an industry that can
tell you how many people watched a particular television show on a
per minute basis. So, if these and the other
cerebral-cortex-boggling figures are so telling, why do networks
have such a hard time delivering programs that people will watch; or
do they yank new potentially successful shows off-the-air based on
their initial numbers before they ever have a chance to find an
audience?
Television is
such an expensive medium, its practitioners have come to rely on
seemingly safe, tried, hackneyed old formulas, knowing that it is
easier to sell sponsors what used to work, even when they know there
is little chance of it working again. The fact is nobody really
knows what combination of stories, writers, actors and producers is
going to capture the publics' imagination.
So what does
this have to do with Web-marketing? Everything. The Web is not an
expensive production medium and that allows marketers to experiment
with different techniques and creative. Unless your Web-business is
a circulation-based advertising model, there is no reason to limit
your creative marketing to worn-out concepts and number-based
incentive formats that for the most part, no longer work.
Sensory and
Experience Design Concepts
The essence
of good advertising and its big brother marketing, is creative story
telling; stories presented effectively, inform, persuade, and
penetrate our consciousness based on their ability to tap into our
sensory experiences. There has developed over the last few years two
new approaches to design that acknowledge this powerful aspect of
human nature: Sensory and Experience Design.
The
implications of Sensory and Experience Design can be found in
everything from product development to package design. When we talk
about SenEx Design we are talking about how real people react to
their experience with products and marketing presentations.
We experience
the world through our senses: sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste.
Stand in a supermarket and watch people shop for fruit and
vegetables; they pick them up, squeeze them, turn them over and over
looking for flaws, smell them, and if the store keeper isn't looking
they may even have a taste. When people buy a car, they look at the
specifications listed in the brochure, but they still go to the
showroom, kick the tires, run their hands along the shinny new
paint, smell the leather interior, and take that sucker for a test
drive to see how she handles. It's all about experiencing the
product through our senses - it's that sensory experience that
becomes embedded in our memory.
To date most
companies have lagged in their efforts to implement these new SenEx
marketing communication approaches on their websites due to their
obsession with search engine optimization issues that focus on the
volume of traffíc rather than the quality of the marketing message.
Business seems to be stuck in a circulation-based advertising and
mass-market mindset that runs contrary to the Web's niche market
'Long Tail' nature and its ability to communicate by presenting
information that appeals to a variety of senses.
Search Engine
Optimization Issues
No one will
argue with the desire of website owners to attract large numbers of
viewers to their sites. But this desire has spawned an entire
industry of people claiming to be able to provide website owners
with the holy grail of search engine optimization: making it to the
top spot in an organic search on your favorite search engine.
Not everyone
willing to pay for an S.E.O. expert to optimize his or her site can
be number one in an organic search. And of course there is the issue
of paid search placement that trumps organic searches.
As fast as
search engine optimization experts develop ways to beat the search
engines, the experts at the search engines change their algorithms,
and my money is on the guys at Google.
When it comes
to search engine optimization consider the following important
issues and questions:
1. Do the
search engine tactics employed on your site degrade, obscure, or in
some way diminish the ability of your website visitors to quickly
find the information they want?
2. Do these
search engine tactics impede your ability to effectively deliver
your marketing message in a way that attracts attention, triggers
relevant sensory experience, and embeds your message in your
visitors' memories?
3. Do tactics
like outbound reciprocal links and inline body-text links send
people away from your site when you want them to stick around and
hear what you have to say?
4. Do you
have excessive repetitive copy-text on your site aimed at being
indexed by search engines rather than read by people for clear
concise understanding?
5. Have you
reduced your complex message or instructions to a series of bulleted
points that confuse rather than clarify?
6. Do your
search engine tactics concentrate on the volume of traffic rather
than the quality?
7. Is the
traffic you're attracting leaving your site as fast as it's
arriving?
The lesson we
should learn from SenEx Design concepts is that websites need to be
designed for people not search engines. Delivering a clearly
understandable marketing message is achieved by tapping into the
psychological and emotional responses triggered by sensory
experiences. That is how you need to communicate to an audience
separated from you by the vast expanse of the Internet.
SenEx Web
Design Using Audio and Video Techniques
People are
hungry for information. In today's fast-paced world the average
person needs to constantly upgrade their knowledge of ever changing
and more complex products and services. Things that were good for
you yesterday today are harmful; products that don't exist today
will exist tomorrow. So it doesn't matter if you are a homemaker,
retiree, or a buyer for an international corporation, the
need-to-know is constantly with us and it creates what Richard Saul
Wurman have described as "Information Anxiety".
We just don't
have the time to study everything we need-to-know or want-to-know
that affects our business and personal lives. We need the
information fast and in an easily digestible format. And we need
that information presented in a way that will make it easy for us to
retain it.
The power of
Web-audio and video is their ability to illicit experiences by
presenting information in a linear narrative that appeals to the
senses of sound and sight. This ability attracts and focuses an
audience's attention on the material you want highlighted; it
presents that material in an easily digestible format; it clarifies
the meaning and significance of critical details; and it penetrates
viewers' consciousness so that the information is retained.
The following
types of audio and video SenEx Web-presentations can be used to
deliver a variety of material:
1.
Web-commercials and Email Campaigns
2. Special
Promotions and Product Offerings
3. Product
Descriptions and Overviews
4.
Testimonials and Reviews
5. How To
Instructions and Tutorials
6. Frequently
Asked Questions and Q&As
7. Expert
Lectures, Analysis and Opinion
8.
Backgrounds and History
9.
Personality, Staff, and Business Profiles
Conclusion
We all have
something we want to sell: a product, a service, a plan, an idea, or
even ourselves. And anyone who has ever run a sales department will
tell you the best way to sell is through human interaction and the
best way to emulate that on a website is with Web-audio and video
that uses Sensory and Experience Design techniques to deliver the
message.
About The Author
Jerry Bader is Senior Partner at MRPwebmedia, a website design firm
that specializes in Web-audio and Web-video. Visit MRPwebmedia,
136 Words and SonicPersonality.com.
Contact at info@mrpwebmedia.com
or telephone (905) 764-1246.
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