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Words that will make you money in your marketing - three of them anyway
Many people will say that advertising doesn't work for their business. "Yes I tried that once and didn't get anything from it" is the standard response I get. When digging down there are many reasons why they have not worked. Improper strategy, unidentified goals, wrong design style, inconsistency with branding, no measuring techniques or just the wrong words.
Here are three words that I would suggest you include in as many marketing tools that you have to engage the people you want to get a response from - I suggest in headings or titles at least.
You
This is the key ingredient to engagement. Talk directly to them. Treat this as the magic word for all your copy. Using this word instantly forces you to have a connection and conversation with the person reading it. Don’t you think that this is a good way to go?
Easy
With everything that is going on at the moment people want to worry less about stuff to make life easy. We want to see easy quick results, have them be easier to achieve and easy to buy. Spelling out how easy something is makes it much more attractive as we want everything... well... easy. If what you are offering makes lives easier, spell it out!
Now
As a business when would you like to make the next sale? Tomorrow, next week, next month? How about now? There always comes a time when you need to tell your customer what to do to lead them onto the next step of the relationship with you and your brand. They need to click through to your contact form or checkout, call your office or walk into your shop. Telling them that 'now' is the time is one way to encourage them not to wait.
There are many other words that will make you money through your website, brochure, advertising or promotions - but these are my top three.
Try them out in your next advertising campaign - let me know how they perform according to how you currently word them.
Did you use a template to build your website?
Thoughts on ready-made web templates
On the surface of things, ready-made web templates are often sold as one of the most cost effective way of building a website for your business or organisation and the ideal option for the novice webmaster or site owner.
However - things are not always as they seem when using templates yourself or used by your developer. There are some difficulties that you may stumble across that you should be aware of before you decide to use one over the skills and experience of our web design team at Creative Rush.
The Back-End
The one problem that will first hit you is that the template will need editing. Not a really big problem as there are 100's of web editing programmes available for you use, many of them are free and some even built into internet browsers. The issue arises when you look at that code and think 'Ahhhhhhh! What is that!?' Unless you have any experience with looking at HTML code, or whatever language it has been written in, you may get stuck.
However depending upon the web editing programme that you choose, you may find that it has wizards and walkthrough's to help you in amending the code in the template. Some editors even have predictive text coding built in - but for most of these you will have to pay for them.
Using the wizards and prebuilt functions in many of the web editors results in your website becoming clogged with 'fat' that you don't need - code that just isn't required and code that can cause your site to slow down or even become less search engine optimised. Try to keep you code as lean and 'fat free' as you can.
The other drawback of using a different editor than that used by the creator of the template is that the site may not even display properly in it. The editor may not support the technology or language used to build the site and as such becomes useless.
The Front-End
Once you have your web editor sorted and understand how the back-end code works the graphics within the template will need to be changed. Most templates that you can buy come with Photoshop or Fireworks created graphics. You will need to have a program that will read and edit these or one to recreate the images you want to use on your site. Some of these are not cheap but again free software is available for this purpose.
Today the best templates that you can buy, which is now most of them, use external style sheets. These again will need editing to enable you to change the template design but be mindful that if you don't change enough, if someone else buys the same template, your site look very similar. Bear in mind that a good knowledge of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) will be required for you to do this and also to ensure that what you change has no impact on the design, layout or structure of the site in the many browsers that are out there. A 10 pixel margin in one browser may be a 20 pixel margin in another!
Things to consider
I would recommend that if you choose to develop your site using a template solution, either by doing this yourself or paying someone to do this, always choose a template that uses, HTML navigation and CSS for layout and structure.
Unless you know what you are doing, try to avoid templates that use JavaScript or images for navigation, are web editor specific (for example Microsoft FrontPage or Adobe DreamWeaver) and avoid at all costs sites that use frames.
Normally forgotten
Most templates are built by designers or developers that forget to include anything other than the page names in the meta tags. A meta tag is text written in the code of a web page in order to provide information to a search engine about the contents of the page. This is hidden from the visitors to your site but is very important. Just because you can't see it when viewing your site, does not mean that it is not important.
What is the alternative?
There are a couple. When you look at getting a website up and running you need to buy the right domain name (web address) and choose the right hosting provider - there is a lot of leg-work to be done here but that is a story for another day. Once you have you domain hosted by the provider of your choice you may find that they have a 'web builder' application. Similar to the template option this will allow you create a web page using pre-defined templates. The limitations with this is that you may find that you can't do exactly what you want and put things where you want them on the page!
A Content Management System (CMS) is a collection of tools specifically designed for the creation, editing, organising and deletion of information from a web site. The major plus is that in most cases a CMS requires little or no knowledge of HTML coding in order to create new web pages. Free CMS systems are available and may be installed on your hosting when set up. Some of the more advanced CMS's (the ones you normally have to pay for) allow for a completely bespoke design to be built into it, enabling full control over the design, structure and use of the site. This is normally done by the company that you are buying the CMS from.
Another solution is to have a web development agency to design, and maintain if required, a bespoke site for you. This clearly gets you exactly what you want, how you want it and more often than not gets you a completely unique site that will look and feel like no other.
So what?
Kevin Roberts, CEO Worldwide at Saatchi and Saatchi says "We have moved away from an Attention economy, into an Attraction economy." This means that we must focus on the engagement and emotional connectivity with our consumers. We need to think less about being irreplaceable but become much more irresistible.
If we look across the internet and find that we are moving from website to website, seeing similar designs, layouts, royalty free stock images used on websites, then it all merges into one and no one stands out. How can you start to nurture a relationship with your consumers if firstly they have no interaction with your site as they have seen dozens like it and it does not engage them?
Be different - move away from templated design if you can. Avoid the pitfalls of looking like others in your marketplace. Rather than think about the return on investment, 'Oh its only £10 for a template and I can get that hosted for £1.50 a month', think about your return on involvement. In todays fast paced economy it's all about the inspirational customers that will talk about your site to others, rather than being able to shout from the rooftops that you have 1000's of visitors to your site day in day out.
Creative Rush
If you would like to know more about how our web design team at Creative Rush can help deliver you an individual site that will work for you and your business - get in touch today
