PJA Blog: The Complex Brand

I like two things I’ve seen over the past week about the experience you ought to build and generate on your Web site (or is it next-generation Web presence?).

One is Brand Action, from Ron Rogowski at Forrester. Your site needs to both communicate Brand Image and encourage Brand Action by delivering value. I think that’s a handy little heuristic to use when looking at sites. Not so surprisingly, Rogowski looked at some luxury brand sites and found they were all image and no action. I’d have to say that many BtoB sites are in the same boat: us, us, us. Just compare the chest-thumping of Oracle with the helpful and lower-key approach of SAP. Who cares if you’re #1 in embedded databases, especially in 28 point type?

The other term is customer carewords. Okay, carewords does call up an image of a new section of the Hallmark store, but in the way Gerry McGovern defines them – the words that bring your customer through your site versus to your site – they make a lot of sense. He points up a good example in a recent MarketingProfs article: the term ‘executive MBA’ might get someone to your school’s site, but a term like ‘advance your career’ qualifies as a careword because it’s going to motivate them to go on.

He offers some good steps to arrive at the carewords that should drive your site: look at Level 1 and 2 of your site classification, look at competitive sites, look at most popular search words to your site and your industry, see which pages are the most popular pages on your Web site, and dig into the most common help desk call topics your help desk gets. In addition, talk to customers through usability tests.

The better cared-for the visitor feels, obviously, the higher the conversion rate and the more actions they take.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 15th, 2008 at 11:11 am and is filed under Interactive, Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.