Quick tips on user experience for your web site

March 1, 2011 Leave a comment

For most companies, a web site is a fundamental tool of marketing and lead generation. It all began in having a site to showcase your products and services, and then you had to have an online store. Not to forget to ever-elusive blog page. And lately, you now must have a social media presence, from tweeting to liking pages on your site. But across all the must haves and checklists of things we must do, we often overlook user experience. What makes your site compelling to visit? Why should I come back? I am finding what I am looking for that will make me buy what you do? Online marketers should take a break from tracking unique visitors you are getting and measure instead measure the user experience. While this can sometimes be measured in terms of bounce rate, you can simply take a stroll on your site like if it was the first time. You might discover a few problems. Here is my quick list of usual suspects:

Target users

Who are you selling to? You better understand the buyer persona that you are trying to attract. For example: making a hip and snazzy looking site that is targeted at finance people might not be the right approach (they most likely will prefer a simple design with immediate access to stats and visual dashboards on ROI, etc).

Focus on message

What is your website saying? Visitors should get a good understanding of what you do and why you are relevant in a few lines (think of your cocktail pitch put on a web site…). Unless I am crystal clear on what you do and why I am here, you will need to educate me about your value proposition and competitive advantage.

Every page is a landing page

Don’t spend too much time just tuning the main page. While being the first page that many people will see, today’s search engines bring people directly to the relevant page as much as possible. Don’t assume that people will all start from the same place. Every page should have a meaning and an ability to quickly put the visitor in context.

Minimize navigation

Everybody hates searching on a web site for what they need, even more when you need to click a handful of time to just get started. Again, if you know you buyer persona, you should be able to place everything they needs within one or two clicks. While adding a search bar can be convenient, it is not the right way to fix a faulty and confusing web site.

What are you looking for?

If you are looking to capture leads or sell a product, make this an obvious and simple process. Many companies will ask you to fill a form in order to download something, make the process as enjoyable as possible. For example, don’t ask me to fill in something and then get someone in inside sales to review my request. People in today’s world expect downloads to be automated. Nothing more frustrating than to wait for a couple of days and then getting someone trying to sell me something before I am ready. There is nothing wrong in trying to convert business, just don’t make it annoying or painful.

Keep testing your site

Managers spend a great deal of time testing a brand new web site and then they go away. This should be an on-going process; to make sure that everything is running fine, that the user experience is not broken (don’t wait for someone to email you if something does not work, fix it before).  Getting regular focus groups is another good way of making sure you have not missed the mark. Even more when your site is your primary source of revenue generation; you can’t afford to have a bad user experience.

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My Presentation Tips & Tricks

February 8, 2011 1 Comment

Here is a follow-up on my latest post regarding the content of an investor presentation. Beyond the information that needs to be put into each slide, here is my top 10 list of tips when it comes to doing a presentation.

Simplify the content

Making presentation is an art form where less is better. Try to make each of your slides and clean and simple as possible. Try to extract the essence of what you are trying to say in each and every slide.

Use words that are easy to pronounce

Sounds silly but in a Province where English is most likely not your first language, try to pick words that are easy to pronounce. Be careful about words that might have a different meaning when badly pronounced (for example, saying “fuck us” when wanting to say focus). Of course, some words cannot be replaced so you just need to practice your pronunciation.

Rehearse, Rehearse, Rehearse

You never rehearse enough; don’t just try to wing it. Even the pros practice a lot their speeches and presentations. Practice your timing, practice the quality of your speech. You can do this by yourself but it is also quite valuable to practice in front of a mirror, in front of people that you are not as comfortable with, and ultimately record yourself with a camera.

Lead the presentation

Too many times, we start talking once we have flipped the slide. If you ever have noticed great speakers such as Steve Jobs, they will lead the slides; starting to talk about the content that will appear next – BEFORE the slides is displayed. This will create a better flow and prevents you from just reading what’s on each slide.

Tell a story

Presenting is very much about telling a story. Make your presentation compelling by focusing in getting your audience engaged and getting them thru a series of steps; up to the closing statement.

Take your time

By keeping the content short, you can make sure not to exceed any allocated time period. You can then make sure to take your time. Nothing worse than a rushed presentation because you have too much to say or are not sure on how long you will take.

Pause by taking a sip of water

One useful trick is to take a quick sip of water once in a while. This will allow you to take a second, make sure you are focused and composed (if you were starting to lose it). While this sip of water will feel like you have paused for a minute (or even feel like an hour), it creates just a small enough of a break to catch your breath.

No matter what happened, focus on closing strong

Even if you have fumbled plenty during the presentation, you always have a last chance upon closing. Take a deep breath and make sure you deliver a good and final message correctly. While always better to do a perfect presentation, a good finish can go a long way.

Be careful of your body language

How are you placing your hands? How is your body moving around can say a lot about your level of confidence and comfort. Make sure that you don’t do any twitching, dangling, or too many sidestepping moves. This is where recording your rehearsals with a camera can greatly help. Sometimes we are just not aware of all the things we do when we present.

Smile

Nothing worse than a presenter that is tense and looks like he is in a bad mood. If you can, remember to smile and have an upbeat attitude as you are presenting; even more when a presentation is recorded and then posted to a public website.

 

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The target customer

December 20, 2010 Leave a comment

It’s a lot easier to build great technology than it is to properly identify your target customer and ideal market. Sure you may have found a market that has great potential. Once deployed, your solution will have a significant impact on the industry – or will it?

Who has the pain?

Before getting a chance of successfully selling a product, you need to have a very good idea of the target customer. This is the person that has the pain (or the need) that your product will solve (or satisfy). If there is not a well defined pain or need, there is limited chance that your solution has value; besides selling to a few people. Of course, the greater the pain, the bigger (and value) is the market opportunity.

Who has the money?

Without revenue, there is no business. One common problem of a lot of startups is a lack of strategy around getting money out of the hands of your customer (a.k.a. monetization). You need to draft a path from where the money will come from. The simplest form is the customer giving you a fat check. The more challenging one is indirectly making money from sponsors, adverts – that is if you have the right kind of volume.

When is your solution needed?

Even after finding a market and how you will monetize, you still need to know about time to market. As an example, tablet PC that came out 8 years ago are obviously not as popular as today’s iPad … It is so important to have a clear understanding on when the critical mass of your customers will be ready to buy your product. It is always better to delay than to simply burn money on a market that is yet not ready to purchase.

Are you too close to the problem?

While you may have been thinking about these things for a while, it is sometimes beneficial to have a little distance or fresh eyes in order to find the right answers. This is where someone like me comes in. You might be surprised on the outcome if you were to consider asking the advice of someone that has many years in developing product plans and go to market strategies. And while such consulting services are not cheap, there are certainly a lot less money than to ship a product to the wrong target customers or at a bad time to market; or even worse to have forgotten how to monetize. Sales and marketing activities are many folds more expensive than product planning and building the right kind of product marketing strategy.

I would be more than happy to provide you some guidance, just drop me a line at michelbesner (at) me (dot) com …

 

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The aftermath of my Twitter diet

November 22, 2010 2 Comments

It’s been three weeks already since I have decided to drastically reduce the number of people I follow. Here is a rundown of my findings since then.

Follow appreciation

I have had a few people thanking me as I continued to follow them. I guess that being more selective increases the value of each person that I follow. At the same time, I have to say that I also better appreciate each individual that contributes to my Twitter feed.

Better communication channel

With a lot less noise on my feed, I miss less pertinent information that I care about and can easily read more news that matters to me. I also spend a lot less time on Twitter as it’s easier for me to keep track of what people have tweeted about for more than just the last 5 minutes.

Easier filtering

There is still a bit of noise on my feed but now it’s a lot easier to clean in between the feeds I want to really follow. I can now simply unfollow a few people here and there when I do not enjoy the kind of news or info they provide.  I don’t mind knowing where my friends land on foursquare but don’t really like to see people that I barely know tell me every 20 minutes what they ate or been (hint to Twitter, you should have different feeds depending on the kind of info we want to tweet about …)

Impact on my audience

At first a lost a few followers but as you can see from the charts below, not to the extent that I have been trimming on my side. Perhaps I could see a bigger impact if more people start doing like me but so far, it looks like my level of Twitter influence has not been impacted.

I would love to hear your own impressions about my recent Twitter diet. I am sure there are some cons that I have not foreseen – but so far, this has been a positive experiment all around.

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My Twitter 2.0: Why did I stop following more than 75% of the people I followed?

November 5, 2010 Leave a comment

I have been on Twitter for almost a year and a half and this is definitively a platform that helps me to stay informed about what’s going on. But as many folks out there, I got carried away with the whole ranking/number of followers syndrome. It gotten to a point where I was using automation tools to try to augment my number of followers, increasing of course the number of people that I follow. Earlier this week, I decided to go on a Twitter diet and reduce the number of followers by almost 75%. You may wonder why I did such a drastic cut, here’s why:

Signal to noise ratio

While I was still getting all the information I needed, the added number of people that I was following was basically creating noise on the communication channel. Implicitly, I was spending more time and checking more frequently my Twitter feed in order to catch all the tweets I wanted to see. While this is good for Twitter, this was not good on my time and efficiency. Less noise means more quality on my feed.

The importance of a Bio

One of the first things I did to start this aggressive diet was to check each Twitter account I was following and looked at their Bio. Do I know this person? Does his/her bio compel me to follow them? For each Twitter account’s bio that did not meet certain criteria, I stopped following. For me, some of the criteria were entrepreneurship, people in product management and marketing, people in the media (mostly local media that is) and Twitter accounts that were news feed or providers of valuable content (such as Mashable).

Do I know you? What do you have to say?

As part of this diet, the level of relationship I have with these Twitter account was also key. Knowing a specific Twitter account personally increased the chance for me to continue following. Also, the quality of what you had to say had a lot of weight in the balance.

When were the last times you tweeted?

Another factor was to check certain Twitter accounts for the last time they had tweeted. While some accounts had interesting tweets, if you had not tweeted for several months, you have been removed from my list. I do not want to keep following someone just in case that this person might have something to say a few times a year. If its business related, we are most likely connected on LinkedIn and I can see any status updates over there.

The result

Well, it feels like I have truly lost a lot of weight. I have now at a little over 600 people that I follow. My Twitter feed is easier to read and I am getting a lot more quality content each time I check the latest updates. It also makes it much easier to trim the last 10 pounds – I basically got into the habit to removing additional Twitter accounts as they tweet things that I don’t find interesting anymore. Also, for the first time in a lot of time, I have more followers that people that I follow.

I will keep you posted on how my Twitter 2.0 experience pan out, so far it has been a breath of fresh air and makes me appreciate Twitter a lot more…

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Online Marketing 2.0 and the end of instant gratification

June 3, 2010 1 Comment

For anyone that has been heavily involved with online marketing and social media well knows that things are not as easy as they used to be. Far much than just a simple checklist, corporations need to have a well thought plan for their online marketing strategy. No longer can you whip up a few activities and pretty web pages and achieve instant gratification.

Online marketing and social media are now CORE
A Marketing team cannot anymore simply think of online marketing and social media as secondary to having a web site. These are now core and at the heart of today’s Web 2.0 consumers. I would even go as far that the evolution of social media is pushing us closer to a Web 3.0 experience; where personalization, social media integration and the return of industry experts are cornerstone of a leading online marketing strategy.

Results WILL take time (no matter what you do)
One of the hardest component of an online marketing strategy is to understand today’s complexity is achieving media coverage and marketing buildup. Each consumer is bombarded with a heavy dose of content and you cannot expect to cut thru the noise just because you just announced a cool new product and posted a funny video on YouTube. You need to make sure you have the right channels and networks to spread the news.

Building the network and media channels BEFORE you need them
While social media channels such as Twitter followers and Facebook Fan/Like pages are amazing networks to help you create any form of viral marketing, these need to be built before you can use them. This is where a Web 3.0 approach centered on increasing your credibility and showcasing your industry expertise will pay off greatly. Of course, this will require you to invest in vehicles such as writing eBooks/Whitepapers & blogs, taking part in industry panels and providing sounds bites for journalists and industry analysts.

Industry expertise and credibility comes at a price (and takes time)
This is where I find that most corporations are missing the mark. Companies are too quick to drop any investments in writing whitepapers, or contributing on a REGULAR basis to their Company blog. The deeper your content bank is, the stronger you can make a case on your industry expertise. The longer you create such content (and please make it unbiased as much as you possibly can), the more credible you will be. This will take a serious commitment of human resources, time and financial investment.

If you’ve done this the right way, you will eventually get some serious momentum and once you have inertia, you will suddenly be able to leverage this in a serious way; only then can you really take advantage of it and really drive forward your entire business. It might take a few months or even more than a year but just don’t give up too fast and you will thank me once you ride the wave of online marketing success.

Add to FacebookAdd to DiggAdd to Del.icio.usAdd to StumbleuponAdd to RedditAdd to BlinklistAdd to TwitterAdd to TechnoratiAdd to Yahoo BuzzAdd to Newsvine

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Promos: how to devalue a product really fast

May 28, 2010 Leave a comment

Over the past couple of days, I’ve received a few marketing emails that was offering me great discounts and promos. This got me thinking that many companies are just great at diminishing the real value of their products by having a disorganized, badly planned schedule of discounts and extensions of promos. Well planned and organized promos that fit within a global strategy do have some value, but you need to follow a few strict rules.

Promos need a hard time limit
If  you keep extending your promos again and again, you basically create a behaviour by which most customer will just wait until the next promo comes in before buying your software. It does not take much for a customer base to understand that you usually extend promos; so they do not necessarily feel the rush to go and buy before the deadline. No matter what, pick an end date to all your promos and stick to it.

Move away from cyclical or calendar based promos
Again, you want to prevent behaviours that make consumers wait for the next promo to arrive. So if you have a bad habit of having end of month/quarter/year sales, you are teaching your customers to wait for a given time. This also applies to making your sales quotas; linearity of sales should be more important than making your numbers. I know a few companies that basically went bankrupt because their customer always waited until the last days of the year to make the big purchases – getting this way the best discount possible. If you want to make such a promo, make it well focused (back to school for example), short enough (black friday sales) and do those rarely.

Discounts don’t need to be that steep
I often see 20-30% discounts (and sometimes even more) on software products. While these have very low COGS and high profit margins, it is not an excuse to go that deep on discounting. Sometimes just a 10 to 15% discount can go a long way. If customer need that of a deep discount to justify buying your product, perhaps your product is not well priced. A promo or discount should be just a little push in order to help the laggard make a buying decision.

Never have a promotion page on your web site
Once in a while you see companies having a permanent promotion tab on their web site. I believe that this is a really bad idea; it shows how much you use promos to drive revenue. Unless I really need to buy your product today, I will just bookmark this page and wait for the right discount to arrive. And since this becomes a widely used behaviour, the discount will indeed come; with sales not coming at the right level (again focus on linearity, not on sales quotas).

Never discount a product at launch (or even before)
I never liked pre-launch and on-launch product discounts. As you release a new product, this is where your customer base should be willing to pay the highest price (assuming your pricing is fair of course). Discounting from the get go just means you are telling your customer: “please disregard our standard pricing, they are bloated and know about it”. Announcing a new release should be exciting enough that your customer want to buy it; if it’s not the case, maybe you want to sit down with your product management team.

If you seeing yourself do some or all of these bad behaviours, you are ultimately hurting the product value and actually leaving money (i.e. better margins) on the table. Be smart about promos and make them fit within a global and well thought out strategy.

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Building a newsletter: small is beautiful

May 24, 2010 1 Comment

I recently received quite a newsletter from a software company. Not only it was long (it included more than 21 sections), it was all over the place; making me give up reading it after a few items. Nobody wants to feel like they are wasting time. So here are my golden rules when building a newsletter:

What is the goal of the newsletter?
What do you want to achieve? Is this just something that management is pushing to have without any clear objective? What will be the interest for your customers and prospects to not only receive it but to read it? Make sure that you have not only alignment internally about the purpose of such editorial but also that you have customer insight on what they want. Nothing worse than spam disguised as a Company newsletter.

Be consistent
At the beginning of the process, pick a format and stick to it. A newsletter needs to be consistent (or as much as possible). Once you defined your categories, simply build an editorial calendar in order to make sure that you have enough content coming down the pipeline to sustain your selected format. Try to make it show up using a layout template.

Make is short
A newsletter should be readable in a few minutes. Everybody is tight on time; don’t make them feel like they are about to embark on a 200 pages novel. If you have a bit more content than you like, it is ok (and a good strategy) to place a summary in the newsletter and then offer a link to the longer version; to be found on your web site or your blog. As a rule of thumb, a newsletter should be no longer than 2 or 3 pages (including all graphics and layout).

Limit product coverage
If you only have 2 or 3 products, it’s ok to have all of them in the same newsletter. If you are something like a dozen or more solutions, you need to think about splitting your readership into smaller groups. For example, create a newsletter for each category of customers; such as by company type (enterprise, professional, consumers), by type of function (engineering versus creative) or by industry (web designers, architects, etc.).

What is the call for action (if any)?
Do you expect the readers to do something beyond reading the newsletter? As mentioned earlier, this is why it’s a good idea to publish short summaries and then offer a link back to a complete version on your site. This is a good way to track people who are really interested in your content. Other call of actions could include upcoming events or subscription to be notified on an upcoming product release.

The rule of seven (7) items
Like many things in marketing and product development, we should never offer more than 7 items to select from; our brains cannot handle more than 3-5 things at once. Since not everybody have the same interests, you need to offer just a little bit more variety; hence the rule of 7 items. For example, here is a small list that I would expect from any newsletter:

  1. Message from the CEO
  2. Company News (2-3 max)
  3. Tips and tricks (1-2 max)
  4. Customer story / user showcase (1 or 2)
  5. Upcoming events (3-5 max)
  6. Link back to blogs and web site (as needed)
  7. Call for action (as needed)

Hopefully this will help my readers draft better newsletter and I will no longer see long, confusing and overstuffed newsletters again …

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Business Plan: Knowing who is your real customer

April 20, 2010 Leave a comment

So your Company has identified a real market problem and you have the technology to solve it. You have drafted a business plan and are looking for funding in order to execute your plan. The revenue forecast sounds pretty exciting as you are looking to commercialize a solution for the general mass (B2C). But have you answered this question: who is your REAL customer?

End user vs. customer
There is a big difference between the end user (the person that will ultimately consume your product) and your real customer (the person that will give you money – that will help you monetize your technology). The answer is far from easy in this day and age with electronic distribution, apps stores and social media platforms that allow you to integrate and sell plug-ins.

Partners can be your competitors
If you are trying to acquire the wrong customer base, you might end up competing with someone you thought would be your partner. For example, if you are looking to release a great solution that will help Facebook increase its revenues, you need to make sure that they do not plan to do the same as well. If you follow closely the customer ownership trail, it will help you create an answer.

Monetizing vs. customer ownership
Great technology will allow your Company to get to bigger revenue if you pick to right way to monetize it. Don’t focus on customer ownership – this is even more important when you are making low prices one-time consumer products sold for a few dollars. OEM or Affiliate partners can be most of the time the better customers, giving you indirectly access to their large customer base and share revenue.

Listing all potential customer types
You should take the time to list all potential customer types you might have: consumer, hardware manufacturer, distributor, etc. Thinking out of the box can actually help you identify a better customer that you might have thought about initially. For each type, you need to recognize the benefits and revenue potential but also (and that is very important) the cost to acquire the end-user base.

Having clarity about your real customer will not only give you a better path to success but also minimize any burn rate you will have in trying to monetize with the wrong audience…

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The cost of Marketing and getting media coverage

April 12, 2010 Leave a comment

I always love to see Apple launch new products (iPad) or new updates (iPhone 4.0 SDK) and the quality of their presentation, message and media coverage they are getting. I don’t know a single company that would not love to have such a marketing machine. Many Entrepreneurs will just assume that this is only possible once you have a gazillion of dollars to spend on Marketing. But then again, if it were the case, every other Fortune 500 company would be just as good, right? While money is key in doing things at a greater scale, there are some basic fundamentals that every company can apply to get an excellent Marketing foundation – that will get just more impressive once you have more money to spend on product launches and marketing campaigns.

Marketing takes time

That is perhaps the most important point. No matter how some people think that marketing can be done in a quickie, it is far from the truth. First, you need to build a team and that does not end once you have hired the staff. As a rule of thumb, I assume that building a team and getting all the contributors to be working as a unified group takes at LEAST 6 months. It does not mean that nothing can be done in the meantime, but you can’t expect a team to function and work cohesively in less time than this (no matter how much you pout, scream, put your foot down and lose patience). I have a similar rule for tracking the impact of Marketing. Getting market traction and media coverage takes time, you won’t get it from a single event or even worse – expecting that one press release or a snazzy re-designed web site will do the trick. Consumers are bombarded with news and information; it takes time to imprint brand value and media awareness into the cerebral cortex…

Spikes vs. marketing buildup

Entrepreneurs (and their CFO) do not often see the hidden cost of doing sporadic Marketing activities. The amount of energy and time that you need to put in order to get a single event to move the needle on media coverage is borderline insane. But I still see companies every day still hoping that this will work for them. What startups don’t seem to understand is that marketing is all about buildup. This is just like collecting wine. Every time someone asks me how I got to build my wine collection (I have about 600 bottles), I simply answer that I just buy a little more than what I drink. After time, this builds up to bigger numbers. Now if I was trying to build the same wine collection over a small amount of time – the effort, pain and cost would be much higher than what it took doing it the right way (if you just won the lottery disregard this comment…). Think of marketing as a long term buildup that after a while (and this is at least beyond a yearly cycle), you will be doing more and more Marketing activities that combined will have a real impact over your business.

Planning and process
In order to get marketing buildup, you need to plan ahead and have simple, yet effective processes. Activities such as blogging, tweeting, writing customer stories & eBooks, and doing press releases all need to fit in a marketing timeline that allows you to successfully spread your message. Each element needs to have it’s own process where things are done on a regular basis and ultimately effortlessly. If each time you write something on your blog, it eats too much of your time, it will be very hard to continue contributing on a regular basis. Without a due process and regularity, you cannot yield more output from your Marketing team. As an example, I rarely take more than 30 min to write each of my blogs. Writing a few times a week then only takes me an hour (two at the most) to support my blogging effort. If it was more than this, I would not be able to sustain such a frequency…

Bottom line is that marketing is more of a process and takes longer than most entrepreneurs are willing to accept. Never underestimate the cost of building a team, and getting this Marketing buildup. Without patience, you will just simply keep changing your team every 6 months to a year, continuously re-working the foundation (and web site) and never achieve any kind of Marketing momentum and media coverage you desire.

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