Now that we’ve had an overview of what customer-centric design is, let’s discuss how it can be used to create leads.

Providing Valuable Information

Having a reason for customers to visit your site is the first step in creating leads. The most important aspect of customer-centric design is providing your customers with exactly what they are looking for.  Think about everything they might come to your website to look for and make sure the information is easy to find.  It should also be easy for customers to contact you with questions or concerns.

A Place to Connect

By providing a place for your customers to connect with each other and with you, you can help your customers get the information and support they need.  More importantly, you’ll be able to get information about who needs help and where they are in the buying process.

Enticement

Do your customers have a reason to give you their contact information?  Is there some useful information or service you can provide for free in exchange for contact information?  Enticement to create leads can be very effective for you and provide a useful service for your customers.  Remember to keep information gathering to a minimum. (name and email work best).

How do you use customer-centric design to create leads?

(photo by Just chaos @ Flickr CC)

Technorati Tags: customer-centric, design, customer-centric design, usability, customer service, brand, brand management

We’ve mentioned customer-centric design in several of our recent branding and customer service posts.  Using customer-centric design on your site is extremely important to your customers.  Why?  Because they only care about what is important to them - getting whatever information, services, or products they came to your site for.  If they can’t find what they’re looking for, they’ll simply go elsewhere.

So what is customer-centric design anyway?

Customer-centric design is design centered around what the customer wants (as opposed to what the company wants).  To do this, you have to always keep in mind why the customer came to your site and make it as easy as possible for them to accomplish their goals.

Ok play nice with customers, but what about my goals?

Your goals are probably concerned with increasing sales and leads (if not, they really should be).  Here’s the best part.  Customer-centric design actually makes it easier to accomplish your goals.  Customers who can find what they’re looking for are much more likely to make a purchase or return later for more information and services.  Most importantly, they’re likely to recommend you to their friends and colleagues, which is one of the most powerful ways to increase sales.

I getcha, now what?

Take a look at your site from your customer’s point of view.  What are the most important functions (for them, not you)?  Are they easy to find from anywhere on the site?  When a customer is in the middle of a process (finding support information, making a purchase, etc.), are there places for improvement by making things more clear and removing unnecssary steps or clicks?  Put yourself in your customer’s shoes.

Solicit feedback

Sometimes only your customers really know what they want.  So ask them.  It’s an easy and cheap way to get good feedback and by listening to your customers, you can increase customer satisfaction and brand awareness.

How have you used customer-centric design to help your customers?

(photo by ralphbijker @ Flickr CC)

Technorati Tags: customer-centric, design, customer-centric design, usability, customer service, brand, brand management

Before beginning to strategize, you need to create goals for your business.  In order to create goals you need a solid grasp of your current situation on the Internet (your current web presence). To get an idea of your current internet situation take a look at:

Website - Ideally your website is the hub of your Internet presence with customer-centric design and content.

• Analytics - How well is your website performing?  Basic statistics such as page views, visits and uniques are useful.  But more importantly, how many leads and conversions are you getting?  Where is your traffic coming from?  How useable is your website?  Are people getting frustrated?
• Usability - Can visitors find what they are looking for on your website?  Is it easy to use?  What could be improved?
• Content - Great content provides your customers with the information they need to succeed.  Creating content should be a continual process.  What content do your customers want to see?  What expertise can you provide?
• Design - Your website needs to be easy to use (usability), but also should be eye-catching and professional.  Are the fonts need to be easy to read and does the layout should draw visitors into your message?

Community & Brand Reputation- Your customers are talking about you both online and offline.  Find where your customers are and join the conversation to get key insights into improving your business.

• Blog - If you have a blog, what feedback have your readers given you? What are other bloggers saying?  Who has linked to your blog and what have they said?
• Forum / Discussion Boards - If you don’t have discussion boards on your website, find places where your customers frequent.  Listen to concerns and join the conversation with suggestions for improvement.
• Social Networks - Your customers are probably on social networks already (if they aren’t they probably will be soon).  Find social networks where your customers frequent and see what they are saying.  Join the social networks to give them an opportunity to connect.
• Reviews - Have there been any reviews of your products and services?  What can be improved?

Search Engines - Many potential customers will find your website through search engines so it is important to understand how search engines currently crawl and index your site.

• Keywords - What keywords do the search engines see on your site?  Where does your site rank for various keywords?  It can be helpful to pick the top 100 to monitor at first.  There are a number of free tools available to help (Google Webmaster tools, Rank Checker for Firefox, SEO Quake for Firefox and Internet Explorer).
• Indexed Pages - How many pages on your website (and blog) do the search engines include in their indices?  (SEO Quake and Website Grader can help).
• Incoming Links - How many other sites are linking to your website?  What are they linking to?  What are they saying? (SEO Quake and Website Grader).
• Outgoing Links - What other websites are you linking to? (Google Webmaster tools, SEO Quake).
• Cache - What pages are the search engines displaying in their results?  What do they have saved that may be old content?  (Google Webmaster Tools).

Marketing - What is your company trying to say to customers and potential customers?  What are the current marketing messages your company is using?  What is the status of any advertising or sales campaigns?  What is the return on investment (ROI) of any campaigns?

• Advertising - It is important to understand how any advertising is impacting your bottom line and helping to reach your goals.  Besides budgets, clicks, and impressions, it is important to measure leads, conversions, or sales - what return you are getting on your investment (ROI).
• Competitors - Who are your competitors?  What are their web presences?  What marketing and advertising are they doing?  What are their strengths and weaknesses?  What opportunities and threats exist?

There is quite a bit of information to gather, but once you have it you’ll be able to get a good overview of what your current Internet presence is.  You should be able to find opportunities to improve and be able to formulate some business goals. As you can see, Internet business strategy merges into traditional business strategy by using the Internet to collect information and feedback and to further business goals.  Next we’ll talk about vision and goals.

(photo by argenberg @ Flickr CC)

Related Posts:

• How to Create an Internet Business Strategy - Introduction
• How to Create an Internet Business Strategy - Methodologies
• Vision & Goals for your Internet Business Strategy
• What are the Requirements for your Internet Business Strategy to Succeed?
• Creating an Internet Business Strategy - Implementation

Technorati Tags: internet business strategy, internet strategy, internet strategic planning, internet strategic plan, internet strategy consulting, internet business consulting

If you are a business-to-business (B2B) company, your website audience is quite a bit different than a company who targets consumers (B2C).  To get the most of your business website, you’ll need to account for these differences in both your design and content.

Intent

Website visitors to a B2B website are people from other companies who are also trying to do business.  Their intent with visiting your site is to help them make money - by purchasing your products or services, gathering information, etc.  The B2B audience is usually online from their workplace, so time is valuable.

Small, targeted audience

The audience for B2B sites is usually much smaller than B2C, but is much more targeted.  Keep your targeted audience in mind when designing the site and writing content.  You have an opportunity to reach just the audience that you want - your customers.

Behavior

Because they are using your website for business decisions, the B2B audience will be focused on finding the information they need to make those decisions.  If they can’t easily find it, they’ll quickly move elsewhere.  However, B2B visitors are also looking to build relationships with companies and people they can trust.  If you provide valuable information, products and services, there is an opportunity for long-term partnerships.

Expertise

Your B2B visitors are experts in their field and expect the same expertise in potential partners and vendors.  They probably know your products or services better than you, so website content and layout needs to focus on this sophisticated audience.

Buying Process

The buying process in B2B is much longer and more involved than in B2C.  B2B customers are making rational purchase decisions based on business value.  They want products that will help their business be successful.  B2C customers make emotional purchase decisions based on personal value.  Information about your products and services needs to focus on business value and information necessary to make a rational purchase decision.

Value of Sale

Purchases made by B2B customers are typically much larger than B2C customers, so there is a great deal of value in the sale to your company.  It is worthwhile to put the time and effort into providing your customers exactly what they need to succeed - they will reward you with sales.

Listen

Because your B2B customers are experts in their fields, they are a valuable resource to your company.  Listen to what they have to say about your products, services and website.  Since they are looking for long-term relationships, they are often more likely to spend the time to help you improve.  Your B2B website should include opportunities to interact with your customers and for them to interact with each other.  You’ll find valueable information that usually comes with the high costs of a customer research firm.

If you have a B2B website, how do you use your website to reach your B2B audience?

For more information:

• B2B Audiences
• B2B Usability Basics - Introduction
• B2B Usability Basics - Part 2 - Layout
• B2B Usability Basics - Part 3 - Testing
• Good vs. Bad B2B Websites
• Website Content for the B2B Audience
• B2B Website Design

Technorati Tags: B2B, b2b website, business to business, b2b web design, internet consulting, internet business strategy

Presented by Dan Stickel, CEO of WebTrends

Let’s take a look at Google’s innovation and how they do it.  They divide their efforts:

• 70% on core products - search quality, crawl/indexing, AdWords, AdSense, Toolbar
• 20% on emerging products - Blogger, Google Mini, Picasa, News, Pack
• 10% on break-out strategies - Offline Ads, Code, WiFi, Talk

Google also has these key ingredients in everything they do:

• Focus on users
• Think big
• Ignore Constraints
• Break the mold
• The right people
• Small teams
• Iteration & experiment
• Bottoms-up ideas & projects

Google harnesses the innovation of the entire world through easy-to-use tools.

Use some of these same ideas to turn motivated visitors to your website into customers.  Listen and build a better experience.

Get a 360 degree view of visitors:

• Listen - On your website, through onsite search, via surveys.
• Learn - From offsite information and CRM.
• Act - Email, Direct Mail, and use behavioral targeting.

Technorati Tags: customer experience, customer-centric design, internet strategy, internet strategy summit forum

Some 55% of all adult Americans now have a high-speed internet connection at home, according to a May 2008 survey conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. The percentage of Americans with broadband at home has grown from 47% in early 2007 and 42% in early 2005. Among individuals who use the internet at home, 79% have a high-speed connection while 15% use dialup. - Pew Internet

The report also shows that broadband has dropped slightly for households with incomes less than $20,000, which is not unexpected with the economic downturn.  Take this information into account when you decide what features to add to your website and whether your customers will be viewing it mostly at work (where most have broadband) or at home. If your customers are in a lower-income bracket, they may have a slower dial-up connection or no connection at all at home.  Websites which have lots of graphics and Flash may turn away customers with slower Internet connections.

In the web’s earlier days the cool kids were the Macromedia Flash Developers. They had that mystical quality to them; a special blend of tech voodoo and creative style. A great Flash artists could bring any early browser screaming to its knees, but inbetween dropped frames and hung processors you swore you were looking at the future of the web. Flash Developers were the Rock Star developers of the web a decade back.

Now we try to use Flash in moderation as if it were a controlled substance. Most business websites have a pinch of flash to spice up the bullet points and mission statements, but it all seems perfunctory and subdued. In the business world, Flash has been relegated to bit parts like tie-ins or transitions, back seat functions to the AJAX revolution. Sure, the media industry is still addicted to their Flash applications as is the online gaming and advertising sectors. For most development houses, however, Flash became an unfamiliar tool used sparingly.

Adobe buying Macromedia has successfully righted that ship, in my opinion. They’re first all Adobe take on the Flash franchise was to relicense a little thing called Flex. Flex was originally a Macromedia product targeted for upper echelon corporations. Flex was and is Flash for programmers. Plain and simple, Flex lets your code slingers write decent Flash applications using tools they understand, namely programing languages. When Adobe got ahold of the property, they wisely saw the potential for curious geeks to adopt this new shiny thing, promote it within their communities, and build it up to a viable web solution. Flex 3 SDK (Software Development Kit) is free to to download and licensed under a open-source friendly Mozilla Public License. Adoption of the Flex 3 platform has been impressive, thanks in no small part to adobe’s marketing of the tools as they have.

N ow the geeks are sitting side by side with the cool kids at the web table. I would say we now have to work on the Jocks (DBAs), but that just might be a bridge too far.

In upcoming posts I will review Adobe Flex and Adobe Air.

Technorati Tags: adobe, adobe flex, adobe air, B2B, B2C, internet consulting, B2B internet consulting, B2C internet consulting, business internet consulting

What do RoR, APIs, Interactive Media, Mashups, and Product Communities all have in common? Well other than they all make up the bottom row of this year’s Buzzword Bingo card, all five are technologies that you aren’t using but should be.

Here’s a truism - Really good websites create buzz about your product or service. To create that excitement, you have to find a compelling feature, function or attribute that causes a positive reaction. When Macromedia’s Flash first came out, people were unimpressed. So it was a web animation tool for advertisers to make monkeys move really fast back and forth in a banner ad, big deal. It only became a big deal when really talented designers began making sites that generated attention. That attention separated the really good sites from the no talent hack imitators, solidifying their product and/or service in the minds of their viewers. The same can be said for each of the technologies in that list. Used properly and in moderation (as with most things in life) you can create some truly impressive results. Those results, in collaboration with smart marketing, will never fail to deliver the all important buzz.

In what looks to be a longish series of posts, I hope to convince you that one or more of the above can help your business website stand out.

• Ruby on Rails (RoR) thinks it can, and does
• Application Programming Interfaces (API’s) and why they aren’t just for geeks
• Interactive Media talks back
• Mashups = Your chocolate in my Peanut Butter
• You can make a community about anything these days (Product Communities)

You may not realize it yet, but the Internet boom has created a global audience for your products and services. How is your website viewed by your potential customers in other countries? Is it annoying? Insulting? Inappropriate? Designing your websites properly for the culture of your audience can increase your traffic and your profits. Aaron Marcus (Aaron Marcus and Associates) presented an overview of these cultural considerations and how they influence the design of a website for different cultures.

Power Distribution (PD) is the extent to which less powerful members expect and accept unequal power distribution. A country with a high PD has centralized power in few hands. Websites designed for countries with high PD (China) have a structured access to information with emphasis on social order and focus on expertise.

Individualism vs Collectivism explores how tied-in an individual is with their family and social status. Countries with high individualism (such as the US) expect websites that maximize personal achievement, focus on consumerism, and activity.

Feminity vs. Masculinity - Men are typically focused on achievement, earnings, recognition, advancement and challenges in their work goals. Women are focused on relations, cooperation, living area and employment security. Websites designed for these audiences need to take these differences into account. If you take a look at a website geared towards women, it typically is designed around community and sharing. Websites which cater to men typically are information-heavy with little interaction.

Uncertainty Avoidance - Certain cultures feel threatened by uncertainty or the unknown. These cultures typically view teachers are experts (who know all) and have high formality in gestures and procedures. Sites designed for low uncertainty avoidance cultures (US) can be fun and whimsical, whereas sites for high uncertainty avoidance cultures need to stick to the point.

Long vs. Short Term Time Orientation - Some societies have been around for a long time and have a different view of what is important to accomplish in a time period. China, which is at the top of long term time orientation, views problems, issues, and tasks from the point of view of what needs to be done this generation whereas Americans try to solve and accomplish tasks in as short of time as possible. A website for China can be fuzzy and focuses on people, but a website for Germany is task-oriented and focuses on function mastery.

These metrics are based on older data and tend to sterotype cultures as one per country. However, these cultural considerations are important to include in your business website design to make sure your global visitors understand your products and services and can find what they need.

Technorati Tags: web2expo, usability

Just finished my first Workshop at the web2.0 Expo

This will be a quick and dirty post between sessions (and while eating a sandwich)

Web 2.0 Best Practices, authored by Niall Kennedy

Niall’s talk focused on taking the audience though the stages of web development history in order to lay down a path for the future. No matter where your web site is today, the take home from Niall is that you have homework to do. If you have a site that doesn’t have RSS distributing your content out in feeds, you need to start here. If you already have that part in place, your next hurdle is adopting microformats

Microformats is the landing pad for preparing your website for the new semantic movement, likely to be the 3.0 of web 3.0 Microformats lets you tell search engines what your content is meant to be. hCard, hCal, and hReference are all reference implementations of microformats. Using them will improve your search engine results, this is now really now debated much.

Once your site is using Microformats, it is time to extend that content out to large platforms like Google, Facebook, MySpace and others. Widgets allow you to put your content up on sites like Facebook to use their traffic to extend your content’s reach. This is usually done through proxies; your content is updated on their site only as often as your site wants. This limits your traffic burden.

Niall did a very good job with this workshop. It was compelling to see how the decisions of the past can make educated guesses on where we are going in the future. If he’s right, this really isn’t the time to sit on your latest site redesign. If you get out infront of this microformat movement and widget revolution, you can beat your competition to the punch to getting those valuable eyeballs that drive sales in an online world

Technorati Tags: web2expo, microformats, B2B