Readers interested in the difference between intentional and unintentional marketing messages may want to read What your marketing is REALLY saying, my latest IMedia connection column. The column deals with how the psychological biases of creative and marketing professionals can get unintentionally placed into a campaign and lead to its downfall, usually without the creative and marketing professionals even knowing what's happened.
Let me expand on the online insure provider anecdote I share in that column (it's one of my favorites).
The ClientThe client is an online insurance technology provider which had been in business for over a year. They were entering a highly competitive field and being fairly unsuccessful.
The Problem
The client was spending a great deal of money on their website and related marketing efforts with very poor return on their investment. Part of the confusion was that their principal competitors' websites were having great success and the client couldn't identify the reasons for their own lack of success.
The Solution
The VP of Marketing contacted NextStage and requested that NextStage analyze the client's website using NextStage's TargetTrack to determine the differences between the client's unsuccessful site and the successful sites of five competitors.
NextStage conducted the TargetTrack analysis of the sites and presented the results. The VP of Marketing's comments follow:
"I asked NextStage to use TargetTrack on our site and five of our competitors' sites. TargetTrack showed our five competitors with pretty much the same messages; 'Learn about us here' Our site had the message 'Go away, we're not ready.' I told NextStage's consultants this was hard to believe because I had designed one of those competitive sites as well. About ten minutes later while I was thinking about it, I realized that when I designed our site we didn't have a product and were about six months away from having one. I remember that I was really nervous someone would actually contact us and ask for a demo when we had nothing to show them. NextStage's TargetTrack correctly analyzed the message that was deeply embedded in our site, and because I'd never updated our site the message was still there, months after we'd been in the market."
NextStage's TargetTrack also provided some minor suggestions to remove the "hidden" message it had uncovered and to make the site more accessible. These suggestions included:
- Change the opening splash screen to something more discreet and quickly resolve it to highlight desired menu options
- Remove the existing graphic of a building and replace it with a smiling female face
- Change the background coloring of the menu so that the items stand out
We let the customer’s webmaster explain:
"It went like this. We had a splash screen - 13 sec duration that went to the home page. The majority of our unique visitors logged stayed on our site less than 1 minute. The majority of our visitors never went past the homepage unless it was job seeking. Shortly after NextStage conducted its analysis, we implemented the recommended changes and monitored the site very carefully. After 2 months the statistics showed an average of 6 minutes visit time per unique visitor and a high percentage of the visitors were 3 pages deep. After 2 more months the average time increased to 8 minutes with a high percentage 4-5 pages deep. Subsequent site monitoring revealed that the average time remained about the same at 8 minutes."
Increased site-penetration and time-on-site translated into a 20% increase in conversions in four months' time, turning an unsuccessful site into a successful site for the cost of NextStage's analysis and a half-day of webpage editing.
Please contact NextStage for information regarding presentations and trainings on this and other topics.
Upcoming Conferences:
- IMedia Brand Summit on 9-12 Sept 07
- XChange on 20-21 Sept 07
- DC Emetrics Summit on 14-17 Oct '07
- Society for New Communications Research Annual Research Symposium & Awards Gala on 5-6 Dec 07 in Boston.
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