Are you digital, or are you marketing? As web marketing continues to get more important and more competitive, my view is there is less opportunity for digital, and more opportunity for marketing.
- Being able to conjure the right message to the right audience at the right time,
- Understanding propositions, and how to relate
- Appreciating the many decisions that ‘people’ need to make
It sounds easy, but it’s the long term difference you can make to your business. It’s far more nuanced than picking a keyword and seeing what happens.
The good news is, that success comes from being human, and finding someone to guide you.
Free Strategy Session
We take a little time to listen, and then show you how it all might work.
The Visitor Journey
Conversationware started life as a search traffic company, gaining expertise on the searches people make, creating ads and seeking to understand keyword audiences to start sales conversations. We developed
- A commercial instinct between clients offers to match what people are looking for.
- Translation for the words into levels of intent, testing and sifting.
- A level of activity based on results and patterns.
Soon enough we realised the website had a major impact on success. Landing pages are easy enough, but what about handing those earlier, at the start of their path.
This is now
The design and ease of use; we focused on form and function in supporting dozens of keyword audiences in finding what they were looking for.
So we grew into providing websites that served a specific purpose, served visitors in their decision making and therefore, serve our clients so well.
Design and development are two different skills, you need both in harmony. But the underlying technology is the most important thing to support them both. WordPress helps you get things done with low cost of ownership, but only if you pick the right tech. The easier to build, the slower the site, the worse the performance.
WordPress just means ‘car’, you still have to pick the bodywork, the chassis, wiring loom, engine, suspension and tyres.
And it has got to go somewhere. A belief in navigation is to design the content for people earlier in the search process. Landing pages are short term. The comprehensive content we helped inspire is attractive to search engines.
Design and brand are utterly important, but service to others is where growth comes from, and you can grow into something worthy.
What are they looking for – how can we help?
Content was something we advised clients on, and continue to consult about. How could we ourselves create content for expert level companies? Frankly, we had enough to do in the early days. But we do know what visitors need, so we can help right.
We just tried to communicate our beliefs. Our most successful clients picked up on it, and delivered their expertise on the right pages.
What is happening
This scenario is changing, competition means we can’t leave content to chance. We have been editing and providing frameworks for so long, that we developed our own expertise. Right content for the right search.
And so today we are witnessing an explosion in competitive development. A deluge of content from new believers, and increasing tempo in the levels of slick visitor experience.
The only people who don’t value this are the ones not worth persuading.
The search engines want to share their value more widely, and who is to stop them? If they win at that then the other pillars have to perform more strongly. Excellence is being demanded in order to be featured, in order to win.
Continuing the conversation; what next?
Attracting the search engines continues to grow more demanding, but the rewards are still awesome.
Our job now is to steer a path for our clients to develop competitive advantage and continue to develop continuous streams of new business.
There are only five things to do.
- Create great offers in your business that serve a wide enough range of niche visitors to be profitable. Complexity is a given.
- Sift the search traffic to find the most valuable visitors ready to do business. Measure the reality of effect as close as possible.
- Build a fast, relevant and enjoyable website experience, in double quick time, that makes it easy for clients and users to deliver more persuasive content.
- Say the right things, at the right time, in the right place and in the right order to the right people.
- Choose the most valuable thing to do next. Avoid spending too much in one area, and leave yourself short in another. Projects are full of friction. The major impediment to success is to ‘give in’ because the wheels are hard to keep turning. One wheel bigger than the other and you’ll go in circles.
Maybe you don’t have enough wheels. Maybe you don’t know. But those that deliver the right content will win. They always have. The icing makes the cake.
What are we doing with our own content?
Sharing our skills more widely, giving away the basics to create demand for the advanced
Reassure clients we are on it, and working for their benefit by communicating
Continue to help deliver results, leads by example. When clients are successful they continue to want more, this is the best use of our time.
Selling to clients who aren’t, won’t or can’t be successful is actually a waste of our time – called opportunity cost. But if we can support more people more of the time in the short term gaps, then we expand our horizons.
What shall we do with this content in particular?
This process should be promoted within the company.. we all have things to say. Our clients all have things to say, capturing is the biggest challenge, the rest is just polishing.
Capture
My belief in responding in the moment, practicing and not letting a good idea get in the way of the flow of content is the ‘capture’ piece of the process. We need more of this from everyone.
We provide a notes platform, that nobody uses. That has to change,.
Capture is collecting the firewood to make the fire. Organising Distilling and Expressing is next.
CODE.
Organising
Who is it for?
Clients, mainly. To share as we evolve our skills and services. To show history and direction. Which means, it can be a blog post, supported by email to promote it.
Which means we need an email list and the platform ready to go.
What is it for?
To introduce the fact we are more involved with content and have always been successful with it.
Distilling
Value value value. Is all this worth saying, what are the highlights.
Say the same thing with fewer words. Use less words. (See what I did)
Is there a point that needs expanding – articles should go in the body of the site
Can we, should we, say it somewhere else and link to it?
Shall we break up into multiple pieces.
