What do the best marketeers all have in common?

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Passion trumps everything Over the decades marketing has changed. The tools we use have changed. The delivery mechanism for our messages has changed. Our audience has changed. Fonts, colours, design trends change so often that it can be hard to keep up.

In this environment where there is so much change how do we go about building marketing teams that are future proof?

How do we go about ensuring that we back the right horses when recruiting to ensure that we can continue to deliver the results from our marketing activity that will continue to drive our business forward?

It may please you to know that the solution to this problem may not be as complicated as you think.

Why? Forget about change since the Mad Men era. The truth is that over the centuries marketing hasn’t changed. For hundreds, if not thousands of years people have bought products that they feel a connection with. What remains true today is that the main function of your marketing efforts is to make people believe in what you are selling.

Read my previous post; Make people love what you’re selling

In order to make other people believe in what you are selling you have to believe in it yourself. This is supported by the fact that in my experience working with small and medium sized businesses the company founder often remains the best performing sales person. This is because they are driven by the passion and belief that saw them start the company in the first place.

We’ve all experienced it. We’ve all heard people talking about their product or service with such passion and belief that we’ve immediately bought into the idea. We want what they’re selling.

So when you’re adding a new person to your marketing team make sure that you take the time to find out whether they can bring this passion to their efforts. All the qualifications, experience and training in the world will not trump passion – the most important skill a marketeer can have.

But how do you go about assessing this during a recruitment process?

This is a question I’ve struggled with myself. During our recruitment efforts we tend to put the focus on ourselves.

What do they know about our company? – a pointless question which just involves a recital of all the information on the ‘About Us’ page of your website.

How would they go about selling product X in country Y? A tick box exercise in whether they’ve done this sort of stuff before.

The answer is to stop focusing on you and start focusing on them.

They don’t have a passion for your products or services. They can’t. They don’t know enough about them.

They will be passionate about something though.

Maybe it’s the sports club that they are a member of.

Maybe it’s the charity work that they do.

Maybe it’s the hobby that consumes their every free moment. Their garden, their record collection, their love of old lawnmowers.

So instead of asking them to deliver a presentation on how they would improve YOUR website, improve YOUR branding, identify YOUR unique selling points just change the focus.

Ask them to tell you about something that they are passionate about. What it is. Why it is important to them. How it makes them feel.

This will give you a real insight into how passionate they are likely to get about your product.

All the tools that we need to master as marketeers will change. The need for us to have a real passion for what we’re selling is a constant. So focus your efforts here and you’ll not only enjoy much more fulfilling and informative interviews but you’ll build a formidable marketing team.

It’s all about passion – because that’s what all great marketers have in common.

And truth – but that’s for another time.

If you’d like some help building your marketing team then get in touch.

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What’s your most effective lead generation tool?

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email marketing petrac marketing

Email marketing remains one of the most effective lead generation tools

This isn’t a rhetorical question. It’s just a question. What’s your most effective lead generation tool?

Of the many functions that we as marketers are involved with I personally believe that lead generation is the single most important activity.

This is the first stage in the sales process and allows us to help the sales team to build the pipeline that will lead to future sales.

So how do we know which is the best tool when there are so many available to us?

The cost of generating the lead is obviously a very important factor in assessing whether it represents good value. However, the cost of acquiring the lead isn’t the only factor to consider. It is also essential that we understand the potential for that lead to convert to a sale. It’s only when we understand both of these factors that we are able to make a proper judgement on whether our lead generation activity represents good value for money.

For the purposes of this post I want to focus on email marketing and explain why I believe it represents one of the best value tools on your kit bag when it comes to trying to generate new leads.

It starts with your list

Your list building activity should be focused on developing a subscriber base that you know has an interest in your products or services. By doing this you are maximising the opportunity for a high conversion rate from your email marketing campaigns.

Another key element in a subscriber list that will add value (sales) is to remember a phrase critical to email marketing success – permission marketing.

Your list is only a valuable resource if your subscribers have opted to receive information on the products and services you are offering.

List building is easy if your focus is on the wrong thing. If your focus is solely to build your list to 10,20,50 thousand subscribers then I can’t imagine your email marketing campaigns will deliver any significant value.

If on the other hand your metrics involve not only the size of your list but also monitor open rates and click through rates then you are building your list with quality subscribers – all of which combines to deliver higher conversion rates.

Understanding specific customer needs

If you’re selling a range of products or services then it’s unlikely that everyone on your list wants to receive the same content.

It’s going to offer a far better return if you send your email marketing campaigns to smaller groups with a specific interest.

All of this information is easy to obtain at the subscription stage – whether that is through a web sign up form, leads from an exhibition or registrations for an event you are hosting.

By focusing on product, service or market specific campaigns you are further increasing the potential for your lead gen activity to convert to a sale.

The delivery mechanism

Loads of great tools out there – Mailchimp, Constant Contact. Dotmailer are just three that spring to mind.

These packages have such a broad range of functionality that it’s difficult to imagine why you would try any other option. They will all manage your lists – new subscriptions and unsubscribes – produce easily digestable reports outlining your key metrics and most importantly help you to optimise your campaigns to ensure maximum open rates and click through rates are achieved.

As well as all this boring (but critical) mechanical stuff they also offer a superb range of email templates from which you can choose. If you have your own design team – that’s no problem either as you can create your own email marketing templates quickly as easily.

In summary..

Email works

This may surprise you given the volume of the stuff that we all seem to receive on a daily basis but if you get your list building strategy right then you will have a very good chance of generating leads and converting sales from your targeted email marketing campaigns.

As trade magazines (eventually) move into the digital arena they are offering expensive email blast campaigns to their large distribution lists. In my experience you can generate the same number, if not more leads at a fraction of the cost if your email marketing activities are organised in the right way.

If you would like some help developing your email marketing strategy – list building, campaign design and delivery – then get in touch:

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How to Diagnose Your Funnel to Create Predictable Growth

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Why wouldn’t you click on a headline that includes the words ‘predictable growth’?

It’s what we’re aiming for every day – a way of optimising the sales funnel so that we are able to confidently predict what our sales numbers will look like in the future.

The article linked below is one of the best I have read on this subject and after reading it you’ll wonder how you didn’t already know this?

Not only does it break the sales funnel down into 3 easily understandable sections – top for traffic, middle for lead conversion and bottom for sales – but it identifies every possible scenario that will help you to identify where the inefficiencies lie within your sales funnel.

Then it only goes and tells you exactly what you should be doing to combat the inefficiencies you have identified.

If you have been baffled by trying to analyse your sales funnel and confused by the thought of how you go about working out where the problem is then I suggest that you read this article. Things will appear a lot more clear afterwards.

How to Diagnose Your Funnel to Create Predictable Growth | Marketing Automations.

Thanks to HubSpot for the original post.

Persona development for a new level of customer insight

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Persona development for customer insightsThe development of customer personas isn’t a new concept but it’s definitely undergoing a bit of a renaissance at the minute. There are endless articles extolling the virtues of the activity as a way to gain really meaningful customer insights and to identify the areas where there is a knowledge gap today needs to be filled.

Despite the growing popularity of the topic and the growing acceptance of persona development as a useful – if not essential – activity I feel that the approach that most people take to the development of customer personas falls short of what is required. As a result the value that can be extracted from the process is not maximised.

In my work as a marketing practitioner with a wide variety of companies I find myself using the persona development process extensively – it’s an essential exercise in understanding the businesses I’m working with. Understanding what it is that they are selling. Understanding the dynamics of the team I’m working with (the persona development process tells you a lot about the level of insight that exists into specific customer requirements and the people with the most developed knowledge tend to end up leading the process).

Persona development is less about managing a process and more about facilitating an environment where previously unspoken customer insights can be aired. These insights can then be validated (with some additional direct customer contact) and then used to drive a whole raft of new business initiatives.

I use the term business initiatives intentionally – it is often the case that this is seen as a marketing team project but that couldn’t be further from the truth. The insights that come from an effective persona development process will have impacts right across the business and hopefully the process map below will illustrate some of these.

As I’ve already said it is essential that the process is carefully considered in order to maximise the value that you will extract from persona development. I’ve outlined a few stages below which I have found to work very well.

1 – Think carefully about the team structure

When thinking about who to include in your team there is only one thing to remember – customer empathy. This doesn’t necessarily mean those that have the most direct customer contact – although it is essential that customer facing staff are represented.

Customer empathy can be as simple as those within your organisation who work in similar roles as those people customer’s organisations.

If you’re selling to procurement departments then involve people from your own purchasing team.

If you’re selling to accountants (increasingly the case in b2b environments) then involve people from your own finance team.

If you’re selling to a particular age range or gender then involve those people in your organisation who match this profile.

Another important consideration is representation from the board and senior management. My own opinion on this is to avoid where possible – this can be quite a hard sell internally but I think it’s a conversation worth having,

The first reason for this is that you want the environment to be an open one where people feel they have the freedom to talk openly. If board members or senior management are present it can have the effect of stifling the process. No matter how flat a structure you think your organisation has it will still be the case that people can be intimidated by the presence of senior people.

It is also often the case that senior management score quote low on both the customer contact and customer empathy criteria – not because they don’t understand your customers. Other people might just understand them a bit better. There are usually other people in the organisation who have more customer contact than those at senior management level. Customer interactions with senior management may also not be as insightful as they may be with other employees as a result of being more formal – it’s through the every day conversations with your customers that the real insights can come.

2 – Create a relaxed, creative environment

People will start to make assumptions about how this process will run from the first second that they walk through the door. What we want to do is make people relax rather than start to fear what is ahead.

A really simple way of doing this is to have some music playing on the background as they enter the room. This acts as a distraction and usually results in some light hearted conversations starting – and so you’ve set the tone and the atmosphere for the task ahead.

Where possible is also suggest that you hold the sessions away from your offices. By doing this the risk of distractions and interruptions from others is eliminated.

It is also important that the session is time limited. I find a two hour session is best as after this the value being extracted drops quite rapidly. If you require another session – which you probably will – then hopefully the experience of the first session leaves the group enthused and eagerly anticipating the opportunity to do it all again.

The final one – and it’s a tough one to achieve – is to get people to surrender their phones for the duration of the session. Even if you ask for the phones to be turned off people will just put them on silent – and won’t be able to help having a sneaky look at their emails which will derail the process and kill any momentum that you’ve built up.

3 – Answer the ‘why am I here’ question

Everyone is thinking it as soon as you ask them to be involved – it’s human nature. The best approach here is to be honest – let the group know that the intention was to put together a small group of people who have been identified as having the most customer contact / empathy and can therefore being the most value to this process.

4 – Visualise the potential gains from the process

This is where you have to really illustrate the value that can be gained from creating your customer personas. At a very high level this is increased sales, better profits, better customer retention through enhanced customer service and increased opportunities to sell more to your existing customers as a result of a better understanding of their requirements.

But you need to go deeper than that. The real value in this process comes from the granular detail that you get down to – and it’s here that the process can stall as people don’t really see the point of it all.

This is where the first practical exercise comes into the session. Seeing is believing and you can do all the explaining that you like – nothing will actually beat a live demonstration.

It’s at this point that I usually try and start to map out the buying cycle. I use the format below to do this:

5 stages in the buying cycle petrac marketing

The purpose of creating your customer personas is to understand what you can do at every stage of the buying process to maximise the chance of your prospect choosing your product or service over all of the others that are available.

Getting to a clear definition of your the buying cycle for your product or service creates more questions than answers and this leads directly into the development of your customer personas.

5 – Drill down into the real detail 

At every stage of the process outlined above there will be questions raised that will require a detailed understanding of your prospect’s behaviour in order to be able to increase the chance of success.

It is very rarely the case that you are selling to just one type of person. There may also be different products or services targeted at different groups. You need to create individual personas for each of these because ‘one size fits all’ is very rare.

Once you’ve identified the individual you are focusing on then you can work through every stage of the buying cycle and answer the questions that will help you to gain a much more complete understanding of their requirements at every stage.

Awareness

Where are they looking for information on your products or services. Internet research? Exhibitions or trade events? Trade magazines? Referrals from other customers? Do they already know us?

You can then drill down further into this – let’s take internet research as an example. The kind of questions you can ask here are;

  1. Desktop. mobile or tablet?
  2. Are they likely to click on Google AdWords? (typically around 30% of people will click on AdWords advertising)
  3. What time of day are they doing their research?
  4. How active are they on social networks? (and which networks do they use?)
  5. What industry sources do they use and trust?

Consideration

  1. What is the specific problem they have that they are trying to find a solution for?
  2. Who else will they be considering?
  3. Are they loyal to a particular brand at the minute and how long has this relationship been in place?

Interest

  1. What are the major pain points that they are trying to overcome?
  2. What is their reason for considering this purchase in the first place?
  3. How does what you offer meet their requirements better than anyone else?

Preference

You’ve been selected as the preferred supplier – but why?

Is it price, lead time, brand reputation?

Have you demonstrated experience in solving the kind of problems that this prospect has for others?

Are you the convenient choice? Is it because you are local (or have local support by way of a retail outlet or local distribution partner)?

What criteria has your prospect used to get to this point? Is it a tendering process where scores are given under a range of different criteria? If this is the case do you understand the scoring criteria and the weighting given in each area?

Purchase

What are the barriers to getting the sale closed? Are there terms and conditions to negotiate – will your payment terms be accepted?

Is this person the only person involved in the decision to purchase or are there others with an influence?

If there is more than one person involved in the purchasing decision you need to understand their individual motivations as well – so you go back to the start and complete the process again.

Once you’ve done this across your customer base and established customer personas for the key individuals you’ll find yourself with a lot more knowledge about your customers that will undoubtedly raise a whole series of questions about how your business manages the buying cycle.

If you’d like some help developing your customer personas then get in touch:

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What’s Trending in Marketing: Top Content of the Week

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With so much advice available on how you can maximise the return from your marketing investment it’s nice to find a blog post that pulls a lot of articles together. This post on LinkedIn does just that and deals with a number of interesting topics:

  • Case Studies showing how Content Marketing Drives ROI
  • How to improve the tired old content on your website
  • What content marketers can learn from traditional journalism
  • A beginners guide to keyword research for SEO
  • SEO for mobile
  • Getting the biggest SEO bank for your marketing buck
  • Advice on structuring your URL’s for the best SEO advantage
  • 17 Visualisation tools to make your data beautiful
  • What makes a truly great product great?
  • 21 thought leaders answer 17 questions

What’s Trending in Marketing: Top Content of the Week | Marketing Solutions Blog.

Forget logic. Make people love what you’re selling

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make people love what you're sellingWe all like to believe that we buy stuff sensibly. We carefully consider all the options available. We weigh up the pros and cons of each available choice.

And the use of return on investment calculations isn’t the preserve of the B2B market – think of the last time you bought a car. I’m sure you considered running costs – fuel consumption, tax implications, service and maintenance charges.

So we’re all driven by logic and reasoning and as long as anyone trying to sell us something convinces us that theirs is the most cost effective choice or the choice that will last the longest or simply makes the most sense then they’re onto a winner.

Wrong.

In the centre of all of our brains is an area called the limbic system. This is where all our emotional experiences start. It’s where we experience love, happiness, joy. It’s also where we experience pain, hurt, anger.

And it is here that the vast majority of the buying decisions you make are made. The exact number is subject to some debate but it’s somewhere between 80% and 90%.

So our buying decisions aren’t based on logic at all but a simple desire to have something – that beautiful car, the stylish house, a new coat.

What then happens is we try to rationalise the desire we have for the new thing which is when we start using the neocortex – the part of the brain responsible for information processing among other things.

The car – 30mpg isn’t that bad and I don’t really do too many miles anyway so it won’t hurt that much.

The new coat – I haven’t got a blue one and it’ll go with loads of my other clothes so I’ll definitely get my money’s worth.

The new 60 inch TV – I’m only getting it so I can enjoy watching the sports in the house. Think of the money I’ll save by not going to the pub to watch the game.

If we made every buying decision using only logic and reasoning we would only buy things that we need.

Every car on the road would be the most fuel efficient one available.

Every coat would be designed for a specific purpose – rain protection, winter sports – with no consideration for aesthetics.

And in the age of online reviews the only products to sell would be those with faultless 5 star reviews.

Thankfully this is not the case.

What it means for anyone selling anything is that it is essential to understand what it is about your product that will trigger the necessary emotional reaction from your customers.

Of course this is much easier for retail, fashion and mass market consumer brands than it is for those in the B2B market but with a bit of careful thought you can find your product’s emotional trigger.

It may be the design of your product that seals the deal. Go the extra mile with the design of your product – think about form as well as function and you’ll increase your chance of success.

Don’t worry if you’re selling services – you can play this game too. We’re social animals – so use the currency that your personality represents. Be transparent and authentic and you’ll establish meaningful relationships with your customers that are very hard to break.

Stand for something – display your passion for what it is you do. People don’t buy what you do – they buy why you do it. By showing that you really care about delivering the best solution to their problem what you’re saying is ‘I won’t let you down’.

So let’s put the return on investment sheet to one side for the minute and get to work on nailing down the ways that you can make your customers feel more connected emotionally to your products or services.

This requires that you have an in-depth understanding of who your customers are and what their specific needs are. This has to go beyond their job title and their role in the procurement process as this alone just will not give you the insights you need.

You need to understand their daily frustrations – the pain points in their everyday existence that your product can help to overcome. Once you’ve done this you can craft your marketing messages to push these buttons.

If you’d like to read more about the part emotions plat in your decision making then I’ve included a few links below to some articles that I found interesting:

Decisions are emotional, not logical – the neuroscience behind decision making.

Delving into the logical and emotional sides of the human brain.

If you would like some help understanding the emotional triggers that will allow you to sell more effectively then get in touch:

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Urgency as the key ingredient in successful marketing strategy execution

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I love targets. They help to define what success looks like but I think there’s a much more valuable function that they perform.

Put simply, the create clarity amongst the noise that our everyday marketing work creates.

We all have so much going on – the event you’re planning, the last minute requests for ad copy from your print and digital media campaigns, the case study you have to write, the product launch piece you need to sign off, the photo shoot for your latest project.

Having a set of clearly defined targets helps to create order from this chaos and allows you to take a look back over your activity and see what impact it is having – how it is contributing to your journey towards delivering on all your key metrics.

But it’s not simply the value of targets that I want to talk about. What I’d like to look at is how we use these targets to drive better performance. While defining the key metrics is a crucial part of this it’s only the first stage in a successful process.

It’s my experience that unless appropriate attention is given to what the evaluation and reporting process looks like the time spent setting targets is wasted time.

Strategy execution sales and marketing by petrac marketing

Urgency is the key ingredient in your sales and marketing strategy

Simply setting your targets is not a job in itself. It is merely an exercise that ensures you will be able to deliver value from your sales & marketing strategy.

In setting up your evaluation and review process there are a variety of issues that need to be addressed and questions that need to be asked.

How often do you review progress against your targets?

The answer to this will be inextricably linked to the sector that you are in. If you’re involved in the fast moving consumer goods sector then it’s not inconceivable that there are daily targets to be reviewed. In the B2B market this review process will usually not be as frequent.

I’ve spent a lot of time in the high value capital equipment market – focusing on the quarrying and mining equipment market. In this, and other high value capex project markets the gestation period for new sales can be very long. As a result, businesses are typically set up for quarterly reporting.

This cascades down to the sales and marketing teams charged with delivering the new sales.

We recently did a bit of analysis of new sales won by month rather than by quarter and the results were very interesting.

In each of the last 3 years the best four months sales figures were in the final month in the quarter. Even more interestingly this remained the case even when the business changed its reporting period with HMRC.

What this suggests is that the pressure to perform, the pressure to deliver the sales target created an urgency across the business. This urgency was seeming to create the environment where our sales team were able to remove all the barriers to purchase that had been in place for the previous 2 months.

So what did we do about this?

The conversations centred around how we could ensure that the sense of urgency from the last month in the quarter was present every month.

If we could do this we would smooth out the dreaded lumps in our new order ledger. This would improve cash flow across the business and ensure that investment planning decisions could be made more comfortably.

What we did was not only extremely effective – but frighteningly simple.

We moved from a quarterly reporting system to a monthly system. The sales and marketing teams had their targets redrawn to show 12 individual monthly targets. This was linked to new commission plans and bonus schemes.

The annual target was no longer one large number but twelve smaller numbers. This helped to create a new environment where a sense of urgency was present every day across every member of the sales team.

Supporting departments providing technical specifications, preparing customer proposals, finalising payment terms were all incentivised the same way to ensure that everyone was working together to deliver the common goal – the new sales at the right margin that would deliver further growth and provide the financial basis on which future growth plans were founded.

The urgency is created by the fact that the maximum amount of time left for you to deliver your next target is 30 days. This led to a considerable development in expertise within the sales and marketing team. Sales and marketing craft developed at breakneck speed because there was now a requirement to understand the customer, understand the obstacles to the deal being done, understand the competition better than they understand themselves.

What were the results?

It won’t come as a surprise that the new strategy and reporting / reward scheme took a large amount of internal selling before it was introduced.

It won’t come as a surprise that it took a while before it started delivering the intended results – but only a short while. After a slow first three months by month 4 the intended results started coming through.

Another important factor is company culture. This system creates a pressure environment. Your people need to thrive in this environment.

This system also requires that sales and marketing does not operate in a silo but that the organisation as a whole recognises the importance of new sales and works in partnership with them to help bring the new sales in.

For me it’s the perfect example of the science of selling and how an understanding of what drives people to succeed will help your business to deliver better results.

If you would like some help with any aspect of your strategy setting or review process then get in touch.

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Keep it simple. Keep it human.

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there is beauty in simplicity

Simple marketing messages connect with your customers

Some believe that the more complex you can make something sound, the more intelligent you will assume the designer is.

If the years I have spent in the manufacturing sector has taught me anything it is to focus on the simplicity of it all.

This doesn’t mean the product was simple to design – quite the opposite. In crafting the marketing message to accompany the shiny new product just focus on the end result for your customer.

Does it reduce their workload?

Does it reduce their costs?

Does it make their life a little easier?

Does it reduce waste or make their business more efficient in some way?

This is where the magic is found in your customers’ eyes.

It’s not about the clever piece of software you’ve created or the engineering of your new machine.

It’s about the problems that you are solving for your customers.

It’s about demonstrating that you understand their business, understand their daily frustrations and understand the value in being able to solve their problems.

It’s this approach that leads to true partnerships with your customers.

It then becomes a self fulfilling prophecy – you get even greater access to their business, which fosters an even greater understanding of their requirements.

All of this builds over time to create relationships that are very hard to break. The value you are adding now extends way beyond the product or service you are offering.

In the pyramid of trust a sales person appears very close to the bottom. This approach will help you move yourself out of this area and into the ‘expert’ zone.

And it all starts with a simple marketing message.

If you would like some help with a new product launch or to define your business to a new customer group or new market then get in touch.

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Dealing with the Digital Skills Gap

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Digital Marketing Strategy Petrac Marketing

Digital marketing is an essential part of the modern marketing mix

With the amount of technology now available and the pace of change it’s never been as challenging for anyone working in marketing to understand all of the channels that are available when trying to get your product or service to market.

This has led to the creation of new Digital Marketing and Social Media Marketing roles  – but I can’t help feeling that this is just an abdication of responsibility by those in charge.

Digital is simply a delivery mechanism for all your marketing efforts. There is no digital marketing – it’s just modern marketing.

In an increasing number of organisations there is a recognition that there is a skills gap in relation to digital marketing. However, it’s the response to this problem that I think is focused in the wrong place.

For too many companies and organisations this skills gap is addressed by the creation of a new role within the marketing team – Digital Marketing Executive, Social Media Marketing Executive being two such positions.

I don’t think anyone would argue that digital marketing represents a huge part of the modern marketing mix – so surely there is a requirement that every member of your marketing team is a digital marketer?

When creating the person specifications for all members of your marketing team surely some sort of digital capability must be included in the ‘essential skills’ box?

You wouldn’t employ a software engineer without the relevant qualifications. You wouldn’t employ a engineer without knowing that they had training in the relevant engineering discipline. You wouldn’t employ an accountant who hadn’t had the appropriate training.

The same should apply with your marketing team. Creating separate digital marketing roles is simply abdicating responsibility for digital to a single person in order to avoid having to learn about it yourself.

Digital marketing is no longer a ‘nice to have’ for anyone working in marketing. It’s essential that you have these skills or you will end up being surplus to requirements.

The other side of the same coin is that by skilling yourself up in all things digital you are giving yourself a serious competitive advantage over a lot of other people.

There’s simply no excuse any more – there are shed loads of formal digital qualifications out there and as much online content as you can cope with.

As with anything though the only way to really get it and understand how you can use it to improve your business results is to get involved.

So stop passing the responsibility on to others and embrace the challenge and the opportunity that digital marketing presents.

Get started now – Professional Diploma in Digital Marketing from the Digital Marketing Institute (Ireland and UK)

If you would like some help working out how you can take advantage of digital within your marketing strategy then get in touch.

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7 Reasons Why Bad Website Design Decisions Get Made

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I cam across this great post on why bad website design decisions get made (published on the Tribute Media website).

Of the 7 points that are made there is a common theme that runs through them all.

In far too many cases the decisions that are made about the best design are too focused on what the organisation would like to achieve rather than what the visitors to your website are there for in the first place.

This is a result of the focus being in the wrong place – too much time is spent on coming up with a website design that gets the approval of the powers that be. The damaging effect of this is to further disconnect your website from the people who will be using it.

At the very outset of your website design journey you should be spending a lot of time researching who it is that visits your website and what they want to do when they get there.

7 Reasons Why Bad Website Design Decisions Get Made.

why bad website design decisions are made

7 reasons why bad website design decisions get made – original post from Tribute Media

All of this information is very easy to get:

Have a look at your current website analytics – there is a wealth of information in here about current user behaviour. Where are your users coming from? What content is most popular? Where are your poorly performing pages?

in addition to this you should be profiling your different website users – creating personas for the people who visit your website is a very useful exercise that will allow you to better understand how to deliver a positive website experience for your visitors.

This can be easily achieved by talking to the customer facing people within your organisation. Your sales team is the obvious first step but don’t ignore the others in your organisation that can add some serious value to this process.

If you discover that you are selling to procurement departments, then involve your own in this profiling exercise as you’ll often find that what is important to them gives you an insight into what motivates your customers’ buying decisions.

The same is true if you find that you are selling to accountants – increasingly it is accountants who occupy the Managing Director or CEO position. Involving your own Finance Director or CFO will allow you to expand your awareness of what questions these people are likely to want answered when considering buying a product like yours.

It is this focus on your visitors that will allow you to create a website that will ultimately deliver you increased conversions – whatever that conversion may be. It could be increased sales, increased white paper or brochure downloads, increased enquiry levels, increased registrations for the event you are running, increased donations for your charitable cause.

Whatever sector you are operating in – public, private or third sector – the process should be the same.

In my experience a lot of the conflict and pain of a new website design project is as a result of a misplaced focus on the subjective elements of the website design.

It is virtually impossible to get a cross section of people to agree on a design that they all like – we all prefer different websites for different reasons. When your project uses consensus on the design of your new site as the starting point or your project it is destined to take longer than you originally planned for, cost more than you originally planned for and – most importantly – deliver a website that it not configured to achieve its objectives for improving business results.

Your website is not a vanity project – it’s a project that when delivered correctly will deliver real, tangible, positive results for your company or organisation. But only if you get back to the science of the process and remove subjective decision making.

7 Reasons Why Bad Website Design Decisions Get Made.

If you would like some help with your website project then get in touch:

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