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In websites we trustBy .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address), September 3, 2009
What if someone made a snap decision (without your knowledge, behind your back) not to trust you? What if that person told others not to trust you either? What if every time this happened, it cost you money? What if you could do something to stop it?
Well, it’s happening, every second. And you can.
Today in business you have one chance to make a first impression and that’s your online presence.
Whether it’s a B-to-B or B-to-C relationship, your customer goes to Google or another major search engine first to find a product, service or information. The days of phone books, directory assistance, foot traffic and other non-web sales and searches are over.
One business department is looking for industrial battery power for its plant. A banking ops supervisor is tasked with finding a new security service. A teen wants a new pair of basketball sneakers. They are all going one place first – online.
If your website is not search engine optimized, they won’t find you. If you’re not on LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook, there’s a greater chance they won’t find you.
If they do find you, what do they find? You better know and be in complete control of it.
Hopefully they find an up-to-date, easy-to-use website (or links to it).
If they don’t find that, you have lost their trust. You have lost them. And it took less than one second.
Welcome to the New Era of Trust in business – the way it’s determined, anyway.
Today, a fully-updated, functional, maybe interactive, and attractive website is a critical tool in establishing and maintaining trust. It convinces your customer that you are professional and that they should take the next step with you.
“Trust is the ultimate shortcut to a buying decision,” says Marty Neumeier in The Brand Gap. “…if I can trust the maker, I can buy it now...”
You’ve probably done it yourself.
I conduct 50 to 100 Google searches each day for research, fact-checking, and leads. When I find a good website, it tells me, “These people have got it together.”
When I find a dated website, broken links, errors, or just plain bad design, I immediately think, “These people have no idea what they’re doing.”
With the dramatic international shift toward our new search engine culture, we now allow websites to make our buying and business decisions for us. Companies are either “cool” or antiquated based on their web presence.
You could have the greatest product, a dynamite sales force and a stellar business plan, but if your web presence is lacking, you are losing trust and money every day.
As you read this sentence, there are people on your website making silent assessments and decisions about your company, and you.
Get in control of these people as soon as you can.
Fast forward: Lessons my 4-year-old taught me about advertising.
By .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address), July 10, 2009
My 4-year-old daughter is writing some. She’s got her alphabet and colors down pat. She likes to talk. She also likes monkeys and cats. But she doesn’t yet know how to read. That doesn’t stop her from being impacted by advertising. And teaching her old man a few new lessons about the changing media habits of her fellow classmates in the future shoppers of 2017.
My wife and I are DVR people now. We didn’t use to be. In fact we still have a fully-functional VCR hooked up to our TV. Today, 80 percent of our DVR hard drive is filled with our daughter’s shows. We have every possible show she could ask for at any given moment in a wide range of flavors for each. “Dad, I want Dora. The one with the magic flute.”
You got it. Anything for my on-demand child. Imagine that when we were kids. If you wanted to watch Sesame Street, you had to wait until 9:00 a.m. on weekdays. And it’s not like I could tape it and watch it whenever I wanted. My parents didn’t even get a VCR until 1984, when I was 10.
Back to my daughter. She watches live TV for about a third of her view time. We limit her to the kid-friendly confines of Nickelodeon, Sprout, NOGGIN and a few others. Some channels have commercials. Some don’t. The DVR captures all of it. I suspect many working parents are on the same sofa as my wife and I – looking for a little relief in our day. The show goes on. The kid is happy. She learns something along the way. The DVR commercials go on as well. And my daughter won’t let me fast forward past the ads. Nope. They are part of the show for her. She watches these shows over and over. And with no fast forwarding, that means my wife and I are exposed to the ads over and over – even if it’s white noise for dish washing.
Recently the Future of Advertising project, headed by the Wharton School in partnership with the Advertising Research Foundation [Advertising Age article 136993, June 1, 2009], helped debunk some myths about the negative impact of DVRs on advertising. They found that DVR households watch more TV than others, so this might help mitigate some of the fast forwarding.
But what about the little ones, and the big ones like me, who are consistently exposed to the same ads during repeated DVR viewings? It’s advertising frequency that may not have been intended by the advertisers or realized by the selling networks, but is extremely effective. How effective?
Recently my wife, daughter and I were grocery shopping. We were in a hurry, grabbing just a few items. As always, my job was to entertain our daughter in the shopping cart while my wife did the searching. As I’m zooming my daughter through the dairy section to the deep sounds of my Hemi-powered imaginary cruiser, my daughter excitedly yells out, “Ohhh! I want Danimals Crush Cups!” I knew what she was talking about. I’d seen the commercial for this new way to eat yogurt about a half a dozen times on her shows. The product is promoted by the teen stars of Disney’s “The Suite Life of Zack & Cody.”
Again, my daughter doesn’t know how to read. We’ve never bought this product, because, we’re a proud Scooby-Doo yogurt family. And we weren’t even shopping for yogurt at the time. She saw it, brought my engine revving down to idle and asked for it. I’m a softy for my daughter. If we were buying yogurt that day I would have given in to the Crush Cups. If she asks again, I’ll certainly cave in to her demands.
The very next day my wife was listening from down the hall to make sure our daughter was washing her hands. While playing in the sink water, my wife heard our daughter yell, “And that’s the power of Oxi Clean!” Now she’s spouting the lines of the late pitchman Billy Mays. We thought it was funny but it also just reinforces a few, old advertising basics.
And that is the power of frequency! Thanks for the brush up course, kid.
A few lessons for review:
- Kids (even the tiny ones) influence their parent’s buying habits – especially when it comes to things for the kids.
- It’s always a good idea to show the product. Show the package. That’s how my daughter stopped the shopping cart in its tracks. She saw the package that she recognized from the ads.
- Advertising frequency is king. You can’t fight its effectiveness when the message is hammered home with repetition – no matter how tough you are.
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Phone: 716-433-7688
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