All posts tagged website design

How to write a better advert for your business

Posted by colin in Marketing • May 14th, 2011 • No comments

This article is intended to clear away some of the fog surrounding advertising. Writing Ad Copy for online and offline media

Here we look at the age-old question of how to write an ad that sells. How come some people seem to get a good response from an advert while others just throw money at it and get little or no reward for their efforts? Well it’s all about the way you write your ads and how well you put across the benefits of what you are selling.

The difference between features and benefits

Once you understand that there is a difference between features and benefits, you will look at all of your advertising material differently in the future. In the example below you can see what impact stressing benefits over features will have on your target audience.

Example

If you sell computers, you might write an ad telling people all about the size of the screen, how much the unit weighs, how much memory the hard drive has, what software is included and maybe some funky new teccy stuff like cloud computing , live streaming for games and films….and so on. Ever seen an ad like that?

To be clear this is just an example and we aren’t picking on the computer sales industry because the principles here are true for every single market sector I have ever seen.

So what’s wrong with all that stuff anyway, I mean it’s what we all need to know about a computer after all. Isn’t it?

The answer is of course both yes AND no! The problem is this. All that “stuff” about screens and hard drives are actually features and if you think about it for a second, what do you ACTUALLY want your computer to do?

Well how about surf the internet faster, run applications quickly so you save time in the day NOT waiting for programmes to load up or have enough storage capacity so you don’t need to keep backing up large files to a DVD & then uploading them again.

So what’s the difference?

Well the last points were BENEFITS they were the actual useful features that might make you buy one. It’s not that features are unimportant, in fact quite the opposite. Features and benefits are simply 2 sides of the same coin (so to speak).

Here’s an example of a feature & that feature with its benefits added.

Feature – 500GB hard drive

Benefit - A 500 Gb hard drive offers enough storage capacity so you don’t have to use external storage. There will be other benefits too no doubt but this illustrates the point.

What are you buying?

Look at the example above and answer what it is that you are ACTUALLY buying when you get your new super computer. Is it a hard drive or is it what the hard drive will do for you?

As we said before it’s actually both BUT which one is more likely to make you buy one?

That is the point being stressed here. People DO NOT buy features, they DO buy benefits. So benefits sell. If you don’t get people to understand what the benefits of your goods or services are, then you will be losing out on sales hand over fist.

So well written adverts express the features as benefits.

To use our example again, you might want to re-write the ad from:

500 Gb Hard drive

TO:

500 Gb Hard drive which gives you amazing storage capacity inbuilt. Special offer for this month – Free auto back up software to ensure your data is never lost again. See website for details www.computersonline.com/special offer

Which one looks like the computer you would buy if you were in the market for one today?

Summary

People buy benefits (i.e. the benefit that item will bring to them)
People DO NOT buy on features alone. You can list a feature of the product to show it holds up to the competition (or even exceeds it) but it’s not enough on its own to state a list of features and expect people to jump at the chance of owning that feature.
The whole point of marketing (including adverts like the example here) is to get people to understand how THEY will benefit from using what you sell. Then and ONLY THEN will they make a buying decision.
Well written and structured sales literature is effective at getting people to make a buying decision.
These principals are true for printed adverts (newspapers, flyers, leaflet etc) as well as for websites.

If you found this article of interest, please leave a comment.

We offer a copywriting service to business of any size, so for more information please contact us at sales@dzined.co.uk or call 0844 357 5439 for more information and a free review of your literature.

A/B Testing. If you have a website, read this article.

Posted by colin in Website optimisation • May 12th, 2011 • No comments

A/B Testing your website home page for effectiveness is essential. Call Dzined now on 01992 350066

If you’ve ever had an eye test you’ll understand about A/B testing.
Your optician will change lenses around until they find the most suitable type for your eyes. The optician will then continue with the “Is this one better or worse than the last?” approach until the optimum version is found. Job done!

Well there is an equivalent version of this available for your website.

Why should I bother?

The point of optimisation is simply to find out the most appealing version of your website from your site visitors perspective. Which version do they do what you expected them to do most often? You see you might think it’s obvious that they should just click here or use the big button your web designer added a year ago, but they might a have different opinion. So what’s the best version?

Well the “best” version may not be what you think it is.

If you go through a process of optimisation of your website home page (that’s always a good place to start but you don’t have to start there) you are looking for improvements in performance between 2 versions (version A and version B). Those improvements will be different for every business, so for example if you run an e-commerce website it might be an increase in sales (or sales value perhaps) or it might be an increased sign up rate to your blog or more e-book downloads etc.

No matter what the goal of your optimization tests you are looking for the best ways of letting your website visitors reach the conclusion you want to reach without putting obstacles in their way to prevent them getting there.

So hows that done then?

There are several tools you can use but the one we would recommend you start with is the Google website optimizer tool. It’s very powerful, its easy to use, gives great information and best of all – It’s free to use.

Here’s a summary of how it works. You will need to have 2 versions of the test page designed with different layouts or different elements on the page. These “elements” could be the use of a picture vs no picture, or they could be colour vs black & white pages or perhaps a full on layout with tons of links vs a very simple layout.

The point is there are 2 versions being tested against each other and although we cannot predict which will perform best- I guarantee you that one WILL out-perform the other. Just like the optician testing one lens over your eye against another, you will find that your website wasn’t optimised before and there IS a better way of doing it.

This sort of information is utterly invaluable because it could return a business to profit and make you think recession? what recession! If your business is down 10% on last year and you improve your conversion rate online by 10% then that could tip the scales in your favour for a change.

This is a very worthwhile exercise for any website owner because its extremely cost effective & quick to set up and get results. Google will split your site traffic into 2 and automatically send half one way & half the other. It’s also clever enough to set a cookie to make sure that the visitor always gets to see the same version of the page when they visit again so the results are more reliable.

The programme will look to send 100 visitors to 1 version & 100 to the other at least so depending on the number of site visitors you get each day, you can quickly calculate the time it will take to get some data.

How will I know when I have optimised my site?

Once you get the first result (lets say version B was best for the purpose of this example) you can set up another A/B test. You would keep the version B and make a new version A based upon B with more variations. As you get more information you might want to vary the elements within each page.

So you might have found that by adding buttons gets a better interaction rate and people do what you need them to in the first tests, you can try varying button colours or using images instead. If you found adding a title to a page worked best, then you can vary the title.

So initially you look for broad stroke effects, then you refine these to get the true optimal layout. Eventually you will see smaller & smaller differences in the results, so you can then start to look at other data like how people navigate through the site and start to optimise more pages & even the checkout process. Reduction in shopping cart abandonment can be like a pay rise on its own.

In the past we had to rely on our instincts or good old experience to run a marketing campaign, thats still valid now but (as they say) the numbers never lie and however clever you think you are (or your boss think he/she is!!) you now have an unprecedented opportunity to prove beyond all doubt what works & what doesn’t.

Sound great, where can I get me one of those?

Google website optimizer tool is available for anyone to use but if you would like more information (because there is LOTS more to discuss) on use of the tool or maybe some help setting it up or just some ideas on designs and layouts to test, just call dzined on 01992 350066 or email sales@dzined.co.uk