4 Tactical Ways Salespeople Can Build Trust with Video

Have you ever had a text message conversation that was needlessly tense? Where you wrote something, saw your friend’s little “typing” indicator come up, and then watched it drop off with no reply?

If you’re like me, you wondered, “Was it something I said? Did they take it the wrong way? Have I offended them?” The ensuing minutes can feel like hours.

This painful uncertainty is essentially what it’s like to sell via cold emails or voicemails. You’re blindly casting out messages and wondering whether your prospect understood you. Why? Because text and voice alone just never communicate enough. And, without the ability to say more, it’s pretty tough to land any sales.

Bridging the trust gap

For a sale to happen, “there has to be a trust and an emotional connection,” says Hunter Madeley, the Chief Sales Officer at Hubspot. Without that, prospects can’t be sure that a salesman won’t mislead them about the product, embarrass them in front of their boss, or take the money and run.

According to Psychology Today, there’s an easy way to establish this trust. You must demonstrate that you exhibit the 3 c’s of trustworthy people: competence, character, and caring.

Here’s how video helps you quickly check those boxes:

• Competence: Video can demonstrate your professionalism through your demeanor, your dress, and your smile. According to the scientific journal Evolution & Human Behavior, even if you only manage a friendly grin, it will make people 10% more willing to trust you.
• Character: Video lets you demonstrate your personality so that you’re more memorable. Once prospects see and hear you a few times, you’ll evolve from a stranger into an acquaintance.  
• Caring: People naturally assume that videos take more effort than email, and if you’re making an effort, you’re showing that you care.

With the power of video, you can start a conversation with prospects that’s devoid of long pauses, awkward misunderstandings, and ‘…’ responses.

Here are 4 tactical applications for building trust with video:

1. Use it to avoid misunderstandings: If you ever find yourself composing an email that takes you more than ten minutes to write, shut it down and record a video. If whatever you’re trying to say requires that much careful wording, it’s highly likely that something’s going to get lost in translation. It’s far better to show, not just tell, via video. This helps weed out any misunderstandings and keep the trust level high.
2. Help the ‘ghost’ buyers: There’s a segment of the market that wants to buy, but doesn’t want to talk to sales. “Everybody on the planet has had unpleasant experiences with salespeople,” writes Geoffrey James, a professional sales coach, in Inc. “Many have walked away from a sales situation feeling manipulated.” These sort of prospects will avoid talking you at all cost and instead will ravenously research on your website. With video, you can reach out, help them, and establish an early rapport. Send them recordings of yourself explaining the product and suggesting places that they research. This gives them at least part of what they need without having to submit to a live call and gives you the opportunity to build up some trust.
3. Reinforce conversations: We’ve all had a great call or demonstration with a client whereafter we wonder, “how much of that are they going to remember? And how effectively will they communicate this to their boss?” Don’t leave it up to chance: immediately send a follow-up video while it’s all still fresh in your mind. Highlight the most important points over again. Later in the sales cycle, when they’ve talked to competitors and they’re feeling more confused than ever about who does what, you’ll be able to defend your credibility because you’ve documented what you said.
4. Show vulnerability and doubt: Just as seeming clueless can cause clients to distrust you, so can seeming too certain. “If you’re absolutely convinced the customer needs your product, the customer will sense you’re close-minded and become close-minded in return,” says Geoffrey. You can use video recordings to share your thoughts, and show that you are actually considering their perspective.

Don’t leave your prospects wondering what you meant. Start using video to show your competence, your character, and that you care to build the kind of trust that leads to sales!

The post 4 Tactical Ways Salespeople Can Build Trust with Video appeared first on Vidyard.

from Vidyard http://ift.tt/2gtQffh
via IFTTT

How to Leverage Behavioral Analytics In Your Growth Strategy

If you’re obsessed with growth, you know how important it is to have a super detailed growth strategy. You and data are BFFs, right? Great, but you also need to understand the context that surrounds that data.

I know that sounds a little dense, but bear with me. What I mean is that information alone isn’t enough. Yes, in data we trust. Sure, lots of metrics are all well and good, but if you can’t leverage that data, there’s no point to it. Think about it. Who makes the growth happen? You might think it’s you, but in the end, it’s actually your audience.

How your users respond to your tactics will decide how successful your growth strategy is. So take a step back and look at your audience. Do you really understand them? Be honest with yourself. Most growth hackers think they understand their customer base, but they only know raw data. Knowing demographics doesn’t mean you understand your audience.

This is where I drop my bomb of a topic. Behavioral analytics, folks.

Understanding and applying behavioral analytics can be incredibly useful for growth strategies. In fact, it could be the energy and edge that your brand has been missing.

Want viral growth? Say hello to behavioral analytics. These analytics give you a look into the minds of your users so you can put yourself in their shoes. You’ll be able to build targeted campaigns that better suit your audience, create messages that reach the right users at the right time, and attract entirely new user bases.

I realize that “behavioral analytics” doesn’t sound all that sexy, but you’re going to discover just how powerful it is. Let’s take a look at some fundamental concepts of behavioral analytics that you absolutely need to know and then explore some actionable strategies you can use.

If you’ve been sleeping on behavioral analytics, it’s not too late. Read this article. Do what it says, and your brand will grow.

What Psychographics Are (and how you get them)

When it comes to behavioral analytics, psychographics are vital.

Psychographics provide a foundational understanding of why your customers behave the way they do.

Demographics are the who. Psychographics are the why.

Each psychographic is a data point that tells you something about your users’ behavior.

Here’s a more comprehensive list of psychographics:

Image Source

These go way above and beyond demographics to give you a fuller picture of your audience.

Psychographics clue you in to your users’ behaviors. For example, if you know that most of your audience is composed of parents of 5-11 year olds, you’ll understand why those kid-sized T-shirts are flying off the shelves.

Although you can’t get any super specific data like number of clicks, you still need psychographics to get a general idea of how your audience acts and why they do what they do.

Psychographics will often reveal what’s important to your users.

Image Source

Do you understand now why psychographics are so important? They help you see your customers as people and not just information from your analytics software.

Speaking of analytics software, you can find some basic psychographic information in GA by heading over to Audience > Interests > Overview.

You’ll see three categories: Affinity Category, In-Market Segment, and Other Category.

The Affinity Category shows you different lifestyle categories. Google compares these groups to TV audiences.

This category points to specific interests that your users have. Even if you just look at this section of GA, you can get a pretty good understanding of what your audience likes.

The In-Market Segment shows you what types of products your users have shown interest in.

Basically, your customers are looking to buy products or services within these categories.

The Other Category offers a narrower view of your audience.

If you want to go even deeper, Google has a handy guide on using this psychographic info in conjunction with other analytics.

There are many other ways to grab psychographics, from surveys to focus groups. Use as many of these methods as you want. Too much psychographic data is never a bad thing.

Still, psychographics are just that––data. You need to use them in a creative way.

With that in mind, let’s look at some growth techniques that depend on psychographics and other behavioral data.

Data-Driven Customer Personas

Creating an imaginary friend might sound a little childish to you, but that’s essentially what you need to do with psychographics.

Right, I know, it’s not exactly an “imaginary friend.”

I’m talking about creating a fictional person who is a representative of your audience base and not just some creature you made up. These representatives are otherwise known as customer personas.

You’re probably familiar with the idea of the customer persona, but if you’re not, don’t worry. Here’s a brief rundown.

A customer persona (also called user or buyer persona) takes aggregate data and uses it to create a fake person. This person is your average customer.

His or her demographic and psychographic information is representative or your audience (or a segment of your audience).

Here’s what an example customer persona might look like:

Image Source

As you can see, you can get really detailed with personas. The more detailed they are, the better you’ll understand your users.

By definition, a customer persona is chock full of behavioral analytics. They help you describe the persona in detail.

Once you have all of your behavioral analytics together, you can take a couple of different approaches to creating a persona.

The approach you take will depend on what you want to accomplish with your personas.

Do you want to create better email sequences? Do you want to improve your Facebook ads? Think about your objectives as you create your personas.

Image Source

Specifically, you can use certain analytics based on the results you’re after. Let’s look at some examples of this idea in action.

Let’s say you want to redesign your CRM software to attract more leads. In terms of analytics, you’d want to look for business-related psychographics.

These might include the user’s role at work, how much time they spend at their job, or even the search terms they use to get to your site.

So an example persona for that would look like this one (the one on the right side):

This persona is great for SaaS because it uses analytics that relate to work. There’s little personal information here, but there’s enough to give you an idea of who the persona is.

But that type of persona isn’t ideal for every sort of situation.

Another example: Say you’re the head of growth at an ecommerce apparel startup.

You’d be more concerned with personal behavioral analytics and not so many work-related data. So a persona for you might look something like this:

Image Source

The types of analytics you use should all depend on your goals and the kind of product or service you’re selling.

It doesn’t hurt to get as many data points as possible, but you’ll want to refine them to zoom in on your average customer.

Creating a persona doesn’t take much time, but it can change how you see growth. That said, you have to make sure your personas are as accurate as possible.

If you get the wrong analytics, well, your entire customer journey might just go down the drain.

But if you get it right, your customers will feel like you really know them.

This is a perfect example of how behavioral analytics can make all the difference in your growth strategy.

Remember, you’re not simply looking at a bunch of random numbers. This information has real uses that you can take advantage of starting today.

Let’s take a look at another one of those advantages.

Customer Segmentation

You’re segmenting your users…right?

Okay, maybe you’re not. That’s okay. But you totally need to be.

Some marketers and growth hackers see their audience as one big mass, so every campaign gets sent out to everyone.

But not everyone has the same needs and wants. Your customers are all different.

So if you group people into similar segments, you can deliver more accurate, targeted messages and have better results.

That’s why segmentation is part of every good marketer’s (and growth hacker’s) playbook.

And––you guessed it––behavioral analytics can help you segment better.

The basic idea is to create segments using one or more behavioral attributes.

If you group generally according to behavior, you’ll get an inside look into what different types of customers are looking for.

Image Source

Just this basic behavioral segmentation already gives you a much better understanding of the different kinds of users you have.

All you need to do is a little behavioral research to get started with this. In GA, you can go to Behavior > Behavior Flow to see an overview of the average user path on your site.

While this isn’t incredibly comprehensive, it can prep you for actual segmentation later on. Odds are the trends you see on Behavior Flow will reflect your audience as a whole.

This type of segmentation is flexible and can be used in a variety of ways.

Take email marketing. You can see what emails people open, which people almost never open your emails, and maybe even how long a user spends reading your email.

You probably look at data like this all the time:

Image Source

But have you considered that you can use this information to tap into your subscribers’ brains?

All of those are behavioral analytics in their own right, and they’re great for segmentation.

There’s a lot you can do with these analytics. You can send a special discount email to the loyal subscribers who regularly open your emails, or you can send more targeted emails to people who tend to open one type of email.

And your results are almost guaranteed to improve.

Image Source

The possibilities are endless.

And if you’re using Kissmetrics, you don’t have to worry about any of this because the behavior-based delivery feature does it for you.

 

Still in doubt? I know it sounds like a lot of work, but it really isn’t, and it can pay off big time.

MailChimp found that segmenting subscribers by interest made every metric soar:

Image Source

If you’re willing to get even more crazy with segmentation, get ready.

You can also use behavioral analytics to group your customers by their place in the customer journey.

This concept is a little more advanced than the techniques we’ve gone over, but it packs a serious punch.

The typical customer journey is more or less like this:

Image Source

By using behavioral analytics, you can find out what stage of the customer journey a user is going through.

Behavior Flow can often show this. If someone has checked out lots of your product pages but hasn’t made it to the checkout, he or she is in the consideration stage.

Once you’ve found out where someone is in the customer journey, you can place them into an appropriate segment.

Image Source

This approach is a growth hacker’s dream. Not only can you segment your customers, but you can also get a better grip on the customer lifecycle.

It’s awesome, isn’t it?

If you’re serious about converting and growth, you should strongly consider this advanced tactic. It’s one of the best ways to hyper-focus your messages, and you’ll reach the right users at the right time.

Conclusion

Growth is all about people.

And by people, I mean your users.

A good growth strategy has to be centered around your customers. Otherwise, your strategy will fall flat on its face.

If you’re focused on sheer volume and ignore your customers in the process, you’re going to get nowhere fast.

Analyzing and leveraging your users’ behavior is one way to enhance your current strategy.

If you understand your users’ behavior, you can more easily determine what kind of content they want and what kind of messages are best to send to them.

Like I said, it’s all about people. We want to be understood, and we want our needs to be taken care of.

As a growth nut, it’s your job to make sure that happens.

So if you need to step up your game, behavioral analytics can give you a fresh perspective and boost your results.

About the Author: Daniel Threlfall is an Internet entrepreneur and content marketing strategist. As a writer and marketing strategist, Daniel has helped brands including Merck, Fiji Water, Little Tikes, and MGA Entertainment. Daniel is co-founding Your Success Rocket, a resource for Internet entrepreneurs. He and his wife Keren have four children, and occasionally enjoy adventures in remote corners of the globe (kids included). You can follow Daniel on Twitter or see pictures of his adventures on Instagram.

from The Kissmetrics Marketing Blog http://ift.tt/2iHtw07

Content Pros: Why a Waiter Should Be Your Next Content Pro

Teaming up with the team at Convince & Convert, Vidyard’s VP of Marketing Tyler Lessard hosts the Content Pros Podcast. For this week’s episode, Tyler is joined by Clair Byrd, Director of Competitive Marketing at Twilio to talk about creating the perfect content vehicle. Check out the full podcast:

Here’s a few of our favourite moments:

During your time at InVision, how did you create such a vast network of external contributors to your blog?

There are a couple things that when we were building this program we wanted to shift. I’d been involved in trying to build contributed programs for a long time and I always saw a lot of problems. I tried to go in with the mindset of just taking those problems off the table. One, you have to make people look really sexy. That was job number one, was to design a blog that was beautiful and people felt proud of being on. Beyond anything else, that was our job number one, make them look really great.

Number two, let them write about what they want to write about. So many contributed programs that I’ve been a part of have so many strict editorial guidelines and rules and they actually prescribe topics to you. That’s not how we approach this at all. We were like, “That’s nonsense. No one is going to actually write about something that we want them to write about. We will empower them to write about the topics that they care about.” Instead of having an editorial line, we put together a framework where we’re like, “If your topic falls within design skills and methodology, design culture, and design leadership, we will publish it.” We would happily contradict that point of view the next week. We didn’t feel like there needed to be any sense of stream of consciousness around what we were trying to do because we really wanted to represent a healthy cross-section of the design community. We empowered people to write about what they wanted to.

The third thing was that we staffed differently than a normal content marketing team. We actually have people who will sit in a Google document and co-write with an author to make them feel better about the direction that their piece is taking and actually give them a really great engagement layer with a real human that makes it feel more like a partnership and less like they’re doing us a favor. We spend a lot of time with our writers to really give them a deliverable or a final piece that they’re really proud of. That’s a core tenant of the InVision marketing program, is make great stuff. Don’t be gross, that’s another one.

The last thing is that we did a lot of outbound work. This is not an easy thing. I feel like many people who set up a contributed program set it up, tell the world that they’re taking contribution, and then suddenly, the pieces will just roll in. That is absolutely not the case. We spent months and months and months going outbound, searching the internet high and low for writers who we thought were really great with something interesting to talk about and gave them the opportunity to contribute to the blog, but also told them that they would be getting a custom catered unique experience with a beautiful final deliverable that we would do the absolute best that we could to get as many eyeballs on as possible.

We also even started engaging syndicates so that when a fast company would pick up a blog post from the InVision blog, they got the byline. We didn’t care if we got the byline. We just wanted the links in the post, to be completely honest. We wanted to expand the breadth, expand the footprint of our content and we didn’t really care if we got the credit ’cause it wasn’t ours to take. It was that person’s credit to take and we were just basically riding on their coattails and providing them a hype machine in which to share their ideas with the community that they really cared about.

How did you design the blog at InVision to be so clean, clear and easy to read?

Everything that is on any InVision property is designed in house, which I think is different and I think that that actually helps with the deep understanding of the values of the company to create this really consistent thoughtful brand experience that expresses the company’s values. Plus one to doing things in house. From the perspective of approaching the blog, we were speaking to designers. We just took a design thinking approach. Designers, how do they want to read? What is the problem that we’re trying to solve?

We’re trying to communicate to designers something that they don’t know how to do yet around design leadership. What is the best format in which to do that? We ended up landing on this incredibly clean, no ads, no side bars, readable mobile-optimized experience because we knew that these designers are probably on the bus and they’re reading something or they’re on their commute. They’re probably not sitting at their desk at work. We did actually make sure that we backed this up with true facts about how people engage with our content, but the hypothesis was simply build the best solution for our audience. We cannot stress the importance of good web strategy and readability and accessibility with regard to web best practices. I would highly recommend all content people get comfortable and literate with what it is to design for the web. This is a really important thing, especially if your audience is technical. However, even still, a readable experience is going to do nothing but benefit you.

Get The Full Story

If you want to hear the full podcast, we’ve posted it above, and you can read a full transcript of this talk on Convince & Convert, where it was originally posted!

The post Content Pros: Why a Waiter Should Be Your Next Content Pro appeared first on Vidyard.

from Vidyard http://ift.tt/2xxwZBG
via IFTTT

Crush Your Support Goals With Video

In the ever changing world of support, we know that creating high quality support is becoming harder than ever to execute. What’s the secret to success in this digital era? A truly outstanding customer experience—the kind that evokes heart-eyed emojis and maybe even a slow-clap.

More and more businesses are waking up to this reality but are finding that it’s becoming harder to deliver. Customers demand faster and better support practically by the day according to Salesforce’s 2017 State of Service report and support organizations are being asked to do more with the same old resources. So, what’s the best possible answer to creating more of an impact for your support goals? Video! Video is simple to record, convenient, and adds that personal touch to convey any message.

Marketers and salespeople have long known the explanatory power of video and it’s high time customer support organizations caught up. Why is video so impactful? Because it offers a higher informational throughput than legacy channels such as email, phone, or live chat.

Since video is the future for support, we wanted to make it easy for you to learn the best practices. Below are a few examples of how you can use video to to exceed your support goals.

Save Time by Replacing Phone and Email with Video Messages

Video is much more precise because support agents can record their screen as they perform the action. This leaves zero room for interpretation—it shows rather than tells—and is a huge time saver for both the sender and the viewer. Agents need only a few minutes to record a just-in-time video and customers need only the same to view it. There’s no email writing, rewriting, or editing. There’s no waiting for the customer to return from inactivity during chat support or having to repeat themselves over the phone. Agents can move on to other tickets in the interim.

Optimize videos to increase team efficiency

Video analytics allow you to continually optimize your entire team’s performance. As agents create, send, and save videos, your team can review what worked, what didn’t, and see where they can improve. Unlike other forms of support content such as emails, portals, PDF guides, and FAQs, video offers a wealth of usage data such as how much of each video a viewer has watched and where they’re struggling, rewatching, and pausing.

Increase Customer Satisfaction with Video

Videos boost customer satisfaction. In a day and age when more and more support is automated, customers who can’t fix their own problems are typically dying for the type of human connection that video delivers. With video, customers can actually see your agents empathizing with them, can hear their name spoken, and can see the physical gesture of a hand reaching out which shows that your team takes their issue seriously.

Increase Productivity with a CRM Integration

Agents who automate their video responses are far more productive. A good video automation platform will offer a super tight CRM integration. This allows agents to create and share videos from CRM support responses, automatically ties videos to customer case records, and even triggers actions. For example, if a distraught customer only watches 25 percent of a support video, agents can be notified to reach out.

Now that you’ve had a taste of what the best support agents are doing to reach their support goals, take a look at the eBook now!

 

The post Crush Your Support Goals With Video appeared first on Vidyard.

from Vidyard http://ift.tt/2iI0vBl
via IFTTT

Setting Your Customer Engagement Emails on Automation Using Kissmetrics

Human attention spans are embarrassingly bad.

I’d have to be lucky to get just 5% of people to read this entire post. Most probably won’t get past the intro, so I’ll get to the point:

In this age of infinite distraction, brands that can keep their customers engaged with the product are bound to be the winners.

Fads come and go (by definition) and companies have short lifespans. Here one day, closed (or acquired) the next.

Brands that will succeed are the ones that keep customers engaged and re-purchasing.

Brands like Netflix, Facebook, and Amazon are the masters at keeping users engaged. Netflix keeps producing great content, which keeps people coming back. Facebook has a great, addictive product that billions of people use everyday, and Amazon has made billions off keeping customers to come back and make more (and more) purchases.

To keep customers engaged, they’ll need to be informed on what they’re missing without you. To do that, you can send behaviorally-targeted emails towards the relevant group of users.

Here’s how to spot your unengaged users, and get them re-engaged. And this is all done with Kissmetrics.

Just What the Heck is an Unengaged User?

Before we dive into the hows, we’ll first need to know what an unengaged user looks like.

There are active users and there are engaged users.

Active means they have logged in. Even if they login, stare the screen for a few minutes, and leave they can be considered active.

An engaged user is one who uses the product in a meaningful way. They use features, comment on statuses, send messages, and share photos.

Each product will have different conditions of what makes an engaged user, but one thing is for sure – they need to be using the product and interacting with it, not just logging in.

We’ll use a SaaS company as an example in this post. And we’ll set our definitions of unengaged and engaged customers:

• Engaged – Has used at least 3 features 4 different times in the last 7 days.
• Unengaged – Has not used any feature the past 14 days.

Now that we have our definitions, we’ll monitor our unengaged users using Kissmetrics Populations and then target them using Kissmetrics Campaigns.

Monitoring With Populations

Populations was created for growth/marketing and product teams to help them keep track of their growth cycle. With just a few clicks you’ll be able to monitor the KPIs that matter to your company.

For this post, we have to goal of shrinking our unengaged user base. So we’ll create Population that tracks the users that have not used any feature in the last 14 days.

Let’s see how many users are in this Population:

So we have our Population in place. Since these are our unengaged users, we’ll want to reduce the number of people in this Population. Let’s take our first step by creating a Campaign.

Send Behavior-Based Email Messages Using Campaigns

Campaigns is one of my favorite features in Kissmetrics. Once you find a segment of users that need to be nudged – whether it’s toward conversion, using features, logging in, etc. – you pull up Campaigns and create the perfect email to nudge them.

There are a number of things you can use Campaigns for. In this case, we’re using it to get our unengaged users in the product and using the features.

In Campaigns, we’ll create a new email message:

And we’ll target the people in the Population we previously created:

We’ll then set our conversion goal. This means that we determine if the Campaign is successful if the users do a specified event. For us, that event will be Used Feature.

We’ll then track the results in Campaigns, where it’ll say how effective the Campaign has been. Here are the results from a different Campaign:

And we can’t forget about Populations. Once we have our Campaign running, we’ll check the Population to see if it’s growing (bad) or shrinking (good).

Minor Interruption

Prefer to just watch our promo videos for Campaigns and Populations? Just hit play below – let’s start with Populations:

 

And Campaigns:

 

Conclusion

No matter how sticky your product, there will always be a group of unengaged users.

Even the ultra-addicting Facebook gets unengaged users.

And how do they bring them back?

Through emails.

Don’t believe me? Just get off Facebook for a few days (if you can) and you’ll eventually receive the barrage of emails that come like clockwork.

New friend suggestions, did you see person’s comment person’s status, person added a new photo, and you have 99 notifications, 5 pokes, and 3 new friend requests.

All designed to get you sucked into back and using Facebook once again.

Facebook (and countless other companies) send these emails because they work. Everyone has email, no one ignores their inbox, and well-written emails convert.

About the Author: Zach Bulygo (Twitter) is the Blog Manager for Kissmetrics.

from The Kissmetrics Marketing Blog http://ift.tt/2x1x2Ik

Homepages Rarely Convert Because These 6 Elements Are Often Ignored

No, this headline isn’t clickbait.

This article does contains critical homepage elements that are often overlooked. And you might be ignoring them. In fact, the examples I share here are a sure sign that many marketers still ignore critical homepage elements. And conversions are lost for these simple reasons.

I’m not going to rehash what you already know about homepages.

You are a smart marketer. You already know a homepage is your website’s front door. It’s where most of your customers expect to find the #1 thing you do that can solve a specific problem for them.

Okay, enough talk. Here are six homepage elements you’re probably overlooking that are costing you conversions:

1. Homework (a.k.a. doing customer research)

Homework ‘on people’, that is. And yes, it’s a homepage element—because it shows when you do it well.

Imagine this for a second: Your high school teacher assigns you homework and asks you to submit it in three days. For the next two days, you stay up late and wake up early to deliver your best. You faithfully turn in your homework on the third day.

Question: How long would it take your teacher to score your work? A few seconds to five minutes. That’s how long it will take to score something you worked on for days.

It’s the same with your homepage. Your homepage (or even any landing page for that matter) is like homework given to you by your target audience. It takes them a few seconds or minutes to score you, before deciding to bounce or stay.

Homework shows on your homepage—because, if you do it, your copy will be saying what your prospects want to hear. If they land on your page and find that you’re not speaking their language, it shows you haven’t done your homework, and things can get ugly. You may even leave such a bad impression that they make a point of not going back.

Example, Ashdown People—a firm specializing in HR for IT businesses:

If you’re a tech firm who visits this page for the first time, here’s a couple of questions you’d naturally have in mind:

• What does Shaping The Digital And Technology Workforce mean?
• How are you shaping it?
• What’s the exact HR problem that this brand solves for IT organizations?

The page looks nice, but imagine the confusion its visitors may be experiencing.

In contrast, take Solertia — another HR firm:

Their homepage copy speaks directly to a specific challenge folks running HRs face—developing compensation strategies to avoid losing key talent. This will catch the attention of an HR pro because it deals with problems that hurt and offers a solution.

This is a good example of someone doing their homework. Whoever wrote this copy studied their audience well enough to find that ‘developing strategies to keep key players in an organization’ is a goal HRs always try to reach.

Doing your homework on your target audience reflects in your messaging.

How do you do your homework? Talk to the very people that visit your homepage: customers. In other words, get feedback. There are great tools that will help you here, some of which include:

• SurveyMonkey: Create surveys and generate quality feedbacks.
• Kampyle: Get feedbacks from users.
• Get Satisfaction: Build a forum where customers talk to one another about your product, while you just watch, listen and act accordingly.
• AnyMeeting: Schedule live meetings with customers and get actual feedbacks from them.
• IdeaScale: Allows users to make and vote suggestions about your product. And feedbacks with the most interactions gains higher recognition than others.

These tools will help you know your customers’ pain points, goals and how they will need your product to solve their problem. Then, you’ll be able to create a homepage (and even any other landing page) that speaks directly to those problems.

Next, brevity and clarity.

2. Brevity and Clarity

Brevity doesn’t necessarily mean copy is short. It does imply there are no redundancies, and yet enough clever repetition to convince visitors to take a specific action.

Chris Garrett, Chief Digital Officer at Rainmaker Digital, wrote that a landing page should be, “as long as necessary. And no longer.”

That’s brevity. As long as necessary. No longer. And clarity, on the other hand, is self explanatory enough. Is the problem you solve for your audience crystal clear?

When your homepage doesn’t briefly and clearly explain your offerings, people lose interest. It’s that simple.

Another case in point is where you have brevity on your homepage, but not clarity—a case where your homepage copy is brief, but it isn’t clear how visitors will benefit from your business.

A typical example of that is ZOHO’s homepage:

It’s a well designed page and it sure is brief; not much to read here. But to me, it lacks clarity.

If, like me, you knew nothing about ZOHO before visiting their homepage, you have no idea what The operating system for your business OR A revolutionary all-in-one suite to run your entire business means. If you’re curious, though, you might want to click the “learn more” link to find out.

But according to some sites, Zoho gets about 18 million monthly visits. What if 400k, 1mm, 5mm … of those monthly visitors aren’t curious enough to click learn more? They were probably looking for a specific solution before landing on this page, and that’s what they expect you to communicate to them.

Your best bet is to communicate whatever you’re offering in the clearest and shortest way possible. A perfect example of “brief and clear” is Google My Business’ homepage:

In just over 20 words, with an image on the side, Google My Business clearly and briefly explains how they help your business get found when your brand name is searched.

So brevity and clarity could mean five, ten, 200 words. What matters is that your page provides enough information for your visitors to become convinced and take action. And this why not hiring a good copywriter for your business is a terrible idea. A good copywriter will do enough dirty work to produce copy that has both brevity and clarity.

3. Active voice on CTA Buttons

(Active voice describes a sentence where the subject performs the action stated by the verb.)

In other words, a CTA button with active voice is one that says “This is what will happen when you (the visitor) click this.”

And active voice goes beyond just using verbs on your CTA.

It’s easy to think that all visitors understand what a colored CTA button means, but you’d be surprised. Sign-Up.to recently mentioned in their study that “Images are good, but it’s not always clear that the image is also a call to action.”

Just because you have a colored button on copy doesn’t mean visitors know where the button will lead when clicked. Example:

Where will Click Here lead when clicked? Is that button for a call, an email, or a link to another page? You need to let people be certain what your button is for, or you risk confusing people.

A good CTA button has active voice on it—one that says “This is what will happen when you click this.” Here’s a perfect example of that from Toyota:

“Explore Prius” is active voice. It says exactly where the CTA will lead after it’s clicked—a page where you get to explore the Toyota Prius.

That’s active voice in action. Don’t put your visitors in a position where they’re not sure what your button is meant for. Make it as descriptive as it needs to be — Explore [my product], See a demo, Check out this case study, etc.

4. Specificity Over Hyperbole

Why not hyperbole? Because overstating can lead to visitors questioning your sincerity.

Instead, use copy that specifically communicates how you actually add value to people’s life and businesses. Twilio’s homepage is a good example:

Twilio is a tool that software developers use to add communication capabilities to the applications they build. And that’s exactly what they explain in the homepage: “Build software that communicates with everyone in the world.”

No overstatements. No hyperbole. Just the specific problem Twilio solves for people.

Hootsuite’s homepage is another good example:

According to SEMrush, Hootsuite gets about 7.2 million monthly visits. That’s impressive, yet, there’s no mention of how big they are on the homepage, but a brief and clear explanation of how their product solves problems for people.

Adding hyperbole to your copy doesn’t communicate any value. ConversionXL Founder Peep Laja says it this way (54:21): “You don’t add life to copy with hyperbole. [For example,] ‘We have the best pizza in town VS. We deliver pizza in 10 minutes’. [Pick] specific [over] hyperbole”.

5. Testimonials With Smiling or Happy Faces

Testimonials are powerful already, but one with a smiling face pictured? Terrific!

One Swedish study reveals that your smile has a huge effect on people around you— try smiling at someone and you’d see they almost can’t help but smile back, unless they consciously don’t want to. Amazing, eh?

Did you know? With the Kissmetrics A/B Test Report, you can see how a test impacts any part of your funnel. Running a test on your homepage and want to see how it affects lead quality at the bottom of the funnel? Find out in 10 seconds with the A/B Test Report.

Pipedrive lay emphasis on the fact that their customers are actually happy people. Then they put those happy, smiling faces about 40% down their homepage.

Kissmetrics understands this concept as well:

So, if you’re going to use testimonials with customer headshots, use those that are smiling already since they have a positive effect on viewers.

6. One Page, One Goal

You’d think every marketer by now gets the concept of one page, one goal, until you see a homepage like this in 2017:

Several CTAs on one page. What’s the one goal that a page like this is trying to achieve? Virtually everyone would have no idea. And several studies have proved it’s far better to use one page for one result. The more specific you are, the better you’ll be at converting specific visitors.

A good example of a homepage with one goal is this one on QX Recruitment Services:

In contrast to HR Consultants homepage (above), this one has only one goal. Which means if the homepage gets 2000, 5000, 20000, etc. monthly visitors, this report will be the number one thing catching their attention. And it’s the only action they’re first asked to take. Brilliant.

This way, QX Recruitment Services know how to measure the homepage’s success — it’s as successful as the number of downloads the report gets.

Start Converting With Your Homepage

If you’re going to have a homepage (or even any landing page) at all, you want to ensure it drives optimal conversions. And the tips above have hopefully inspired you to make specific corrections on your homepage, or even create a compelling one from scratch.

About the Author: Victor Ijidola is a conversion-driven freelance writer and content marketer. Need help with landing pages, ebooks, blog posts, guest blogging, email newsletters, etc? Contact him at Premium Content Shop.

from The Kissmetrics Marketing Blog http://ift.tt/2wDWeVz