Tim Ash
Beginning now, we are introducing a weekly post recognizing top Internet marketers for their contributions. Our goal is to help business owners, marketing managers and others gain a broader understanding of the marketing landscape as it exists today.
These are the thinkers and pioneers in online marketing. They’re the people we pay attention to and learn from, while we develop cutting edge technologies of our own. Hopefully, in learning a bit about them, you’ll be inspired to take your own marketing efforts to ever greater heights.
I first learned of Tim Ash in 2007 when I read his book, Landing Page Optimization. By then, I already had several years of digital marketing experience behind me—especially SEO and conditional messaging, and sales-pipeline kinds of activities.
In the 2-3 years prior, I had begun formulating my own ideas about how marketing, especially online, was more of a statistical exercise than an artistic one. It was Tim Ash’s book that solidified my thinking, and gave words to what had previously been vague ideas and thoughts.
Even today, I recommend Landing Page Optimization to all of our newly hired Internet Marketers at OCG. Around here, Landing Page Optimization is referred to simply as “the book.” Save for the expected evolutions in available technologies, “the book” is a relevant today as it was in 2007.
Tim Ash is the President & CEO of a company called Site Tuners, a CRO (conversion rate optimization) firm that works with large organizations to ensure the highest possible ROI for their online efforts.
His Ph.D. studies were in Neural Networks and A.I., and he has a Master’s degree in computer science…. So, enough said about qualifications.
In many ways, we build and utilize landing pages the way we do today, because of the effort of Tim Ash back in the 1990s. I was an Internet Marketer at that time, working with some of the very first companies engaged in this new concept, e-commerce. That was before Google, and the search leaders were companies like HotBot, Inktomi and Ask Jeeves!
To imagine someone like Tim, with the foresight to analyze consumer behavior at a time where we were just focused on getting our SSL connections to work is amazing to me. It’s also humbling.
So, thank you, Mr. Ash. You’re an inspiration to me, and a great resource for our company.
If you’d like to learn more about Tim Ash, visit http://sitetuners.com/about/management/tim-ash/.
If you’ve been brushing up on your web terminology, you may have heard the term “landing page” floating around. What is that exactly? In the marketing world, a landing page refers to a web page designed with one specific purpose in mind: to convert visitors into leads.
Let’s take a minute and break this down into simple terms. These pages solely exists to get visitors (i.e. the people visiting your site) to perform a specific action like filling out a form or clicking a call-to-action. By completing this action, you are able to collect important information about this person or direct them further into the sales funnel. Once you have their information, they became a “lead” that you can add to your database of potential customers.
If you’ve ever been enticed to sign up for an e-book or free sample, there’s a good chance you were lead without even realizing it. A well-designed landing page will persuade you to exchange your contact information for an attractive offer, such as a discount code or newsletter. Basic design elements combined with the right page layout can also help boost your conversion rate.
As mentioned above, these pages help guide visitors toward completing an intended action on a website. By definition, a landing page should not have global navigation linking back to your main website. This keeps visitors from clicking off the page and getting distracted from the main conversion goal. To learn more about how landing pages are used, check out our previous blog post.
Landing pages come in two basic forms: lead generation landing pages, which direct you to fill out a form and click-through landing pages which direct you to another page. Both types are important and serve different purposes to maximize conversions. It does no good to place random forms or buttons all over your website in hopes that people will click them. Instead, placing these strategically on a landing page statistically leads to better conversions. Thanks for reading! We love hearing from you. If you have more questions about landing pages or Reno web design, contact OCG Creative.
I’m tired of dating analogies in Internet marketing. But, when we’re talking about call to action mistakes (CTA mistakes) it is hard to find a better one, so let me get it out of the way. Outside of Vegas, meeting and getting married all at once is a pretty rare thing. Business relationships need to progress too.
With that in mind, I’ve put together a list of 5 call to action mistakes even professional Internet marketers make. In truth, marketers make a lot more than 5 CTA mistakes. The important thing is knowing how your customers progress through the buyer’s journey.
In general, expensive or complex purchases involve a lot of reinforcement. Impulse items, not so much. This list will help you create the perfect call to action.
I often tell clients, “nobody cares about you, or you company.” It’s a harsh statement, so I soften it a bit, but it’s true. Unless you’re Fabio, nobody is going to swoon over your “Click Here” button.
Imagine you’re a guy, and you’re in a bar with 250,000 other guys, and 3 girls, and your goal is to marry one of them. Get the picture? Those are tough odds even for Fabio. For you to reach your goal, the following has to happen.
The whole strategy is wrong. In reality, one of those 250,000 other dudes is probably going to kick your ass before you get anywhere near the girls. That’s the Internet.
Given the amount of work and planning it takes to get noticed online… Let me put it this way. Say you do get one of the girls to talk to you. It’s your big chance. All you need is a way to contact her later. So…
You hand her a page long form to fill out. It asks for her address, phone number, likes and dislikes, email address, where she works, and requires that she write in long form her favorite things about you.
When your position is weak, you can’t make demands. Keep your forms short and only require the information you absolutely need. Often, just an email address is enough to open the door to a second contact.
In business, we set goals all the time. Popular favorites include sales goals, revenue goals, cost reductions, walk-ins—it could be anything that’s important to a particular business. Most business owners are pretty good at keeping track of the big stuff, i.e. money in, money out.
Probably the most measurable part of any business is what happens online. Google Analytics, at the very least, will tell you all about where your visitors come from, what pages they visit, how much time they spend on them, what device they’re using to view your website and thousands of other details.
Virtually everything about your website is knowable, so it’s a pretty short leap to say, “Our conversion rate is 1%, so let’s get that up to 3%.” There are many ways to increase website conversions, but it starts with two things:
Yet, the vast majority of business owners pay almost no attention to what happens online. My next article is going to be about what online metrics are most important to business owners. Drop me an email (joe@ocgcreative.com) and I’ll send you a link when I publish it.
There’s a common misconception that you need to place calls to action all over your website. It isn’t true. While you absolutely should make it clear how to contact you from anywhere on the site, CTAs are intrusive and expect too much from the visitor.
Look, if the big red “click here” button didn’t work at the top of the page, it won’t work placed 30 more times down the page.
If your landing page strategy requires more than one CTA on a webpage, that’s fine as long as your page was well planned. In general, if your call to action is supported with factual, believable, relevant content that is bathed in sincerity, you’ll convert at least some visitors.
Ultimately, CTA placement should be tested. Until it is proven that one CTA location outperforms another, place a simple form near your most compelling content—usually near the top of the page. Leave it there and count conversions for the first thousand or so visits before testing another location.
It’s a very unscientific test, but it will help you get your brain into a testing and measuring mode. It also starts to lay a foundation for developing good habits as you begin to develop more reliable experiments.
If you read #2, and thought to yourself, “how would I know?” there are two essential tracking tools; Google Analytics and your CRM. Let’s look at Google Analytics.
Google Analytics is by far the most popular web analytics tool available. It’s free for all but the largest (by that I mean HUGE) companies, and is simple to set up and use. Chances are you’re using Google Analytics already if you have a website.
You may not know there are conversion tracking tools built in. Essentially, these work by identifying a checkout page or “thank you” page as your “conversion goal.” Every time that page is served, it counts as a conversion. You can track many different conversion points in Google Analytics.
Most of the time, your should use a different page for each conversion path. That way, you’ll better distinguish which results in what. There are many, many sources on the web that provide step-by-step instructions on how to set up conversion tracking in Google Analytics. In the interest of brevity, I won’t go into it here.
The second essential conversion tracking tool is your CRM. What, you don’t have or use a CRM? Client relationship management (or is it customer retention management?) should be the center of your universe. By linking all of your online conversions to your CRM, you’ll be able to recall critical details through every stage in the buyer’s journey.
Your business depends on attracting and keeping business. Yet, business owners everywhere store critical client history in their email inboxes. Don’t be one of them!
CRM is so important that it is included in all of our Internet marketing plans. Unfortunately, very few companies use CRM as effectively as they could, but that’s a topic for another day.
Business owners are often mislead into thinking website visitors behave differently than people. As it turns out, most website visitors ARE people. People use the Internet for lots of reasons, but topping the list is to learn things and solve problems.
At the beginning of this article, I said coldly that nobody cares about you or your website. Actually, they don’t trust you either. It should be your burning imperative to build trust. You do that by providing information people believe and can use.
Too often, the call to action is the focal point. Marketing jackasses tell clients, “you need CTAs. It’s all CTAs these days.” WRONG! Your goal should be to make yourself essential by being the trusted source of information.
Prove what you know. Prove that you deliver. If it takes a thousand words, write them. If you suck at writing, have someone write for you.
The key point is if you want people to take an interest in your business, they have to take an interest in you. For that, you have to be interesting and make the extra effort your competitors won’t.
This is hardly an exhaustive list. In truth, the most common CTA mistake is not taking a serious interest in your own conversions. Too often, web related duties are assigned to a nephew or the girl who answers the phone.
As a business owner, the opportunity cost of not having experts manage your online marketing is immense. It’s intangible, though, so you don’t feel it the same as if you are writing checks.
You wouldn’t dream of having a teenage daughter handle your accounting, yet it happens all the time in marketing. Just because Sally Sue likes Facebook doesn’t make her an Internet marketing expert.
Internet marketing (which includes calls to action) is a complex, statistical exercise. Most “marketing” agencies have no clue about how to run a statistically valid test on a CTA. Guessing doesn’t really cut it.
On the other hand, it can be fun, especially when you start getting results. The bottom line is you should embrace the call to action component of your website like you would any important business function. You’ll be surprised how much business your website can generate when you apply effort in the right areas.
CTAs are overall beneficial for a business and are typically associated with landing pages that are intended for your website visitors to perform a specific action. Learn more about the importance of landing pages here.
In loose terms a website landing page is simply the webpage your visitor “lands” on when first entering your site. The page might be the result of a keyword search, an online ad, a link from another page, or even a directly typed URL from a printed coupon or a commercial.
A landing page differs from the rest of your website in that it has a specific purpose, and all of its copy, images, etc. are focused on meeting that purpose. Later, I suggest every page should be viewed as a landing page. Nevertheless, here are a few common reasons for creating landing pages…
There are as many reasons for creating landing pages as there are reasons to do business online. The point of a landing page is to support a single, undiluted purpose and outcome.
Many books have been written on the topic of landing pages. Most will tell you to provide plenty of information and be liberal with your placement of calls to action (CTA)—at least that’s the takeaway of most Internet marketers. The reality of creating effective landing pages is a far more complex statistical exercise. (A great book on the subject is “Landing Page Optimization,” by Tim Ash.)
I like to view landing pages like infomercials. Those paid 30-minute segments for the blend-o-matic or some such thing are catchy and conversational. They always feature people you feel like you could get to know. Usually there’s a product expert and one or more stunned onlookers, amazed that he/she has gotten by this long without a blend-o-matic of his or her own.
Over the course of 30 minutes, the advertiser takes you through the entire buyer’s journey (awareness, consideration, decision). If you watch closely, you’ll see them bolster interest and overcome objections until anyone with a telephone and a credit card places an order.
Starting at the top of the page, your only purpose should be to create interest. In fact, that pretty much sums up marketing in general. Too often, marketing messages center around the seller rather than the buyer. “We’re the number 1 this…” or “In business since 1878.” Trust me, no one cares—at least not yet.
Read any book on sales and it’ll tell you to sell the benefits, and demonstrate the features when there’s interest. In other words, start with the why, and work toward the how. The blend-o-matic will save you hours in the kitchen and make your hair grow back. How? It’s as easy as pushing a button.
If you are effective, your webpage visitor will scroll further down the page. The idea is to underscore the benefits in as many ways as it takes until you hit on the message and delivery that resonates with the reader.
You never know what that will be, so I often try them all. I’ll use testimonials, video, info-graphics, lists, headings and catch-phrases. With so many elements, you run the risk of creating very messy web pages, so they need to be divided into segments using white space and typography to define clear, digestible messages.
If you’ve been in business for a while, you already know what motivates your customers or clients. Ours come to us because we bring them more business. How we do it is secondary. The primary motivator is more business.
Our business is all about credibility. Chances are, yours is to. A business owner or decision maker has to believe we will solve the problem or meet the objective. YOU DON’T BUILD CREDIBILITY BY DOING WHAT YOU PROMISE. YOU BUILD CREDIBILITY WITH THE RESULTS.
One of our promises is more traffic and better qualified leads. If we don’t deliver that, it doesn’t make any difference what we did.
One powerful way we build credibility is by showing what we’ve done for other clients. It’s even better if it comes straight from the client in his or her own words. Testimonials are powerful motivators. However, most business owners that use them blow it by creating a “testimonials” page with a long list of quotes.
For a testimonial to be effective, it must be timely and contextual. The best way to achieve that is by using individual testimonials that give credibility to the point you’re making, in that exact spot on the page. It’s best when they are accompanied by a real name with a picture of a live human being your landing page visitors can relate to.
There is nothing more powerful than an enthusiastic customer or client gushing about how your product or service made his or her life better. Forget about making a polished, highly produced video piece. It takes too much time and costs money you don’t need to spend.
Grab your iPhone and ask your happy customer to tell you what she likes best about whatever you did or sold. Let her go on as long as you still feel flattered, or she remains interesting to watch. Clip out the best 45 seconds to a minute and get the video up on YouTube (or Vimeo, whatever you want…) so you can embed it in just the right spot on your landing page.
If you don’t have anyone to talk about you, talk about yourself. Be genuine, honest and human. People have a high tolerance for questionable production quality, but none at all for BS.
As a side benefit, if you tag and describe your video properly, you’ll get a boost directly from YouTube. Also, modern smartphones shoot pretty incredible video, so it’ll probably end up looking pretty darn good. Trust me, online video is worth it.
It is important to recognize that your site visitors might enter through any page on your website. In fact, the entrance could even be the result of an image search. Whatever page, post, picture, video, pdf file, Word document or text file happens to be the most relevant to a given search phrase, that is what Google will display on its search engine results page (SERP). Therefore, it is in your best interest to make sure you provide enough information to at least get through the interest stage of the buyer’s journey.
Have a purpose and a plan for every page on your website. Support that with keyword goals, and even conversion goals. Know what keywords you want that page to rank for, and do everything you need to to make that happen.
Also it is important to use tracking tools so you’ll know how each page ranks compared to your goal (and your competitors). Do the same for other website metrics like the number of visits, average time on the page, etc.
Treat every page as a landing page, because it may be the only page your visitor sees. You’ve only got about a second and a half to be interesting, so it better be pretty obvious to your visitor why he or she should keep reading.
You’ll find that it takes planning, follow-through, and a bit more work, but you’ll be rewarded with more visitors that are better qualified. More qualified visitors means more leads. More leads means more sales. More sales means you’ll have a bigger house, more vacations, you’ll save time in the kitchen, lose 20 pounds and your hair will grow back.
