Go Mobile or Go Home

Once upon a time, not so very long ago, being available to your customers online 24/7 was enough. But then along came the smartphone – and its even more agile cousin the tablet – and the expansive mobile data networks needed to support them. Suddenly the Internet came unfettered from desktops anchored to offices and homes and became a ubiquitous presence in our lives. Today 24/7 just doesn’t cut it. You must be available to your customers not only anytime but anywhere. At the corner coffee shop. In line at the supermarket. At the airport. In the very aisles of your competitor’s store. You may not know for certain when or where your customers might be looking for you, but you can be absolutely sure that you must be there if you want to stay competitive in today’s market. Consider this statistic: smartphones and tablets currently drive nearly seven percent of digital traffic in the U.S. If that number doesn’t wow you, try this on for size: experts predict that by 2013 – that’s next year – more people will access the Internet via phone than computer. It all boils down to this: the proliferation of smartphones and tablets in the past few years has changed the game. If you’re in it to win it, you have to go mobile or go home. But where do you start?

Look before you leap.

Before you take the plunge into the world of mobile, it’s a good idea first to figure out where you currently stand so you know where you need to go and how best to get there. Peruse your website on as many different devices as you can get your hands on. Put yourself in the shoes of your customers, and evaluate the quality of your experience as you navigate through your site. How easy or difficult is it to select the specific link you want? If you have a lot of images on your site, how long does it take to render on a mobile device? Can you quickly and easily complete critical actions like locating contact information, filling out an inquiry form or even making a purchase? If you identify any obstacles, or if the overall experience is frustrating in any way, you need to take action to make sure you give your business the best chances of capturing and converting mobile browsers. There are a number of ways you can bring your site into the mobile era. To decide which approach is the right fit for your business, you must weigh your options based on your growth objectives and your customer’s browsing habits.

Option 1: Build a dedicated mobile site.

A good mobile website is not simply a shrunken version of your primary site. It’s designed specifically to deliver an experience that’s optimized for the needs and preferences of the mobile user. Keep in mind that these users aren’t typically casual browsers; they’re usually after a specific bit of information or seeking to accomplish a specific task. As a result, mobile websites don’t usually offer all the bells and whistles of their desktop equivalents. Rather, the content and functionality are pared down significantly to offer only those features that are most useful to those on the go. For example, while mobile users frequently comparison shop on their phones, they might not be as likely to actually go through the entire purchase process on their handheld device. As a result, you may not need to offer a full-fledged shopping cart on your mobile site. Instead, you might offer the capability for customers to log in to their account and save desired products to a wish list so they can quickly and easily complete their purchase later when they return to their desk. Great mobile websites have certain elements in common. They focus on critical needs, such as providing access to key services and products and contact information. They limit the use of images to minimize page load time. They offer easy, intuitive, finger-friendly navigation. If forms are included, they are streamlined and ask only for the most essential information. They don’t employ Flash, since Flash-based content is inaccessible to all iOS users.

Option 2: Employ responsive design.

Responsive design is the concept of building a website so that the layout of the site adapts and changes according to the resolution of the user’s browser, which means that it looks just as good and performs just as well on a 27-inch desktop display as a 3.5-inch iPhone and all screen sizes in between. The design is fluid and adapts to the the browser and the platform on the fly. However, the change is more than just a straightforward scaling effect; rather, certain key elements within the design – such as navigational menus, links and search fields – shift and transform according to the resolution of the browser. Employing responsive design allows you to deliver a robust experience to all users without the need to build and maintain a separate dedicated mobile version of your website.

Option 3: Get app-y.

A native app can be a fantastic mobile marketing tool, if done right. However, it’s not the right solution for everyone. Before you go down the app-building rabbit hole, there are a lot of questions to answer and obstacles to overcome. How big is your customer base? Apps require a certain scale to make sense. If you’re a mom-and-pop bakery, for example, you could theoretically develop an app that would let your customers design their own cupcakes and place their order right from their phone. While it would surely be a fun gimmick, it doesn’t fulfill a broad-based need, and the app’s ability to generate additional revenue would probably never offset the cost to create and maintain it. That brings us to another point: you must carefully consider your ROI. If you sink many thousands of dollars into development and get it approved, will people really use it? If you can’t develop an app that offers something people want and will use frequently – whether that’s in the form of utility, convenience, content or all of the above – chances are good that your investment will end up buried in the app marketplace collecting dust. Remember, too, that when you’re dealing with apps, you either have to develop a version for each operating system (Android, iOS, etc.), which can be a costly proposition, or choose just one and ignore the needs of a huge percentage of your potential customer base, which is never a smart business decision.

Be a contender.

When it comes to mobile, convenience and conversion are the name of the game. From a business growth perspective, it’s critical to ensure that your products or services are easily accessible to mobile users so you can boost your chances of capturing and converting an increasingly untethered customer base.

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Insider Secrets to Killer Website Content: All About Your About Page

As important as good website design is, let’s face it, it’s not what brings visitors to your site. They come for the content, and if that content is sufficiently compelling, then they’ll take the action you desire, whether that’s making a purchase, completing a registration form or even just picking up the phone to contact you for more information. In short, the success of your website begins and ends with quality content.

That’s why in this series of articles – Insider Secrets to Killer Website Content – we’re taking a look at types of content that are common to many websites and exploring ways that they can be redesigned and improved. This second installment addresses a ubiquitous website presence – the “About Us” page.

The ever-present, often-overlooked “About Us” page

You would be hard pressed to find a website that does not have an “About Us” page of some sort. It may be called “Our Company”, “Who We Are” or some other variation on this theme, but in the end, these are all pages focused on telling the visitor about the company to whom the website belongs.

The problem is that these pages are typically as boring as they are commonplace. They generally contain little more than some basic facts about the company – perhaps an abbreviated history of the organization, some details about what the company does or a mission statement.

This information may be necessary – after all, it is your company’s website, so it should contain some high-level, general information about your company. Still, your site – and your “About Us” page – can also contain more than just the facts, ma’am.

A lack of depth

The chief problem with the typical “About Us” page is not that the information it contains is bad in and of itself; it’s that it lacks the depth necessary to play a role in advancing your visitors toward conversion.

Compounding this problem is that “About Us” pages, once written, are rarely ever rewritten. During a redesign process, a website’s content is audited and overhauled, but  if the basic facts about the company haven’t changed significantly, the content of the “About Us” page is usually just moved over to the new site with little to no change made at all. As a result, factually accurate but somewhat boring “About Us” content often persists stubbornly through redesign after redesign.

Your company’s history and the services it offers are certainly important information to share, but there’s so much more that truly defines your company, including its unique personality.

Bringing personality into play

Neither the factual history of your company nor your self-proclaimed statement that you “provide outstanding customer service” will set you apart from your competitors, all of whom are saying exactly the same thing, likely in almost exactly the same words. However, what will set you apart is personality.

Every company has a personality. It is the unique product of your people, your company culture and your interactions with your customers. I often find that a company’s personality is energetic and fun when they engage with customers in the offline world, but their online presence captures none of this energy. Instead, the only cards they show are the typical vanilla facts about the company itself. This is what we can change by bringing that offline personality and the particulars of how your company engages in the physical world into the digital space.

Examples of personality

Let’s take a look at a few great examples of websites that are infused through and through with personality all the way down to the “About Us” page, starting with e-tail giant Zappos.com.

Zappos’ “About” page is all about the company’s culture. Yes, the history of the company and their leadership team are there as well, but the main focus of this section is their culture, including images of holiday celebrations and videos of their people. In perusing this content, you get a much better sense of who they are than you would by reading a a mission statement, a brief company history and a bulleted list of achievements and awards.

Another example of a website permeated with personality is Northfield Savings Bank. The sense of fun that they’ve built into their brand is an unexpected but delightful surprise, since banking isn’t generally synonymous with fun. Still, Northfield pulls it off on their website. Starting with the logo, which features a flying pig, they carry this theme through their entire site, turning the popular phrase “when pigs fly” into a rallying cry for how they go above and beyond in serving their customers. These stories are told on a subpage of their “About” section as part of their “Pig Stories” video series.

It’s not all fun and games

Personality doesn’t have to be all about fun, holiday costumes or flying pigs. For many brands, fun would be an inappropriate trait – but that doesn’t mean you can’t display a personality.

Perhaps you are a not‐for‐profit organization that provides assistance to those in need in your community. Fun may not fit into your brand, but passion likely will. You can show that passion by using your “About Us” page or section to detail the impact your organization has had, profile the lives it has touched and convey the drive that you have to continue to do more.

Instead of simple facts and figures, personality will provide a well‐rounded, distinctive look at who your company or organization really is. That will be what sets you apart from your online competitors and their typical, boring “About Us” pages.

The more the merrier: Adding team bios

If adding unique personality to your company’s “About Us” page can help differentiate your organization, then adding individual bio pages for your employees can take this to the next level.

Granted, this approach is not a fit for everyone. A massive organization with thousands of employees obviously cannot have a page on their website for every individual. In these cases, the bio pages may be limited to board members or senior-level executives. For smaller organizations, however, it is certainly possible to feature each team member individually, and there is real benefit in doing so.

About a year ago, my company redesigned our website. During this process, we made the decision to include a section for “Our People” and give every employee a bio page of their own. We also decided to allow the unique personalities of those individual employees to shine through on their pages. Rather than using the professional headshots you would find on LinkedIn or in press releases, we encouraged our employees to submit photos of themselves that showed them outside the office environment. We received snaps of our team members atop mountains and glaciers, competing in races of one kind or another, enjoying vacations, feeding animals or just being silly and having fun. Taken as a whole, the photos show the variety of personalities and passions that make up our team.

For the bios, we included a short professional history, but we also asked our staff to share their hobbies, talents and an interesting or unusual story about themselves. Like the photos that accompany these bios, the stories and profiles we created reveal an incredible sense of diversity amongst our team.

What our customers are saying

Adding these individual bio pages on our website was a leap of faith for us. We were unsure how our clients and prospective clients would respond to this type of content. However, I am happy to report that our fears were unfounded, as the response has been overwhelmingly positive.

A number of our existing clients have remarked how they enjoy being able to see a picture of a team member before they are scheduled to speak or meet with that person. They also like to know a little something about them outside of their professional work. In more than one case, a customer and one of our team members have discovered shared hobbies or interests thanks to that team member’s bio page. This common interest has allowed them to engage in discussion and begin to foster a relationship that extends beyond the work they are paying us to do for them.

In terms of prospective clients, the feedback has been positive as well. In fact, we recently closed a deal where the client told us they hired us because of our bio pages. That client was wary about hiring a technology firm, fearing that we would only speak in techno‐babble and industry jargon and be on a different wavelength than their company. Seeing our interests outside the office, they immediately felt reassured that they could relate to us – a feeling they didn’t get when they looked at the websites of our competitors.

That’s a big win for personality if you ask me!

The argument against

The argument that I hear most frequently against adding personality to company or team bios is that it may turn some customers off and drive them away from your business. We worried about this ourselves when we decided to add the individual bio pages to our site.

It is true that a unique personality could drive some potential business away. But the better question is: should you really care? If you present your company’s true personality on your website, and that personality turns someone away, would you really have wanted to do business with them in the first place?

Yes, presenting a personality that is more than a safe buttoned-up suit-and-tie approach may turn some business away, but the reverse also holds true. The personality you reveal may very well be the deciding factor that sets your company apart in a  sea of sameness and actually attracts clients that may otherwise have passed you over – exactly as it did in the example I cited above. Had we not put our personality out there, we would not have won that business.

Finding the right fit

No one wants to turn business away, but the reality is that not every potential client will be compatible with the way you operate. Finding the right fit for your company is how you can achieve success in both the short and long term – because even if you do initially win over a company that isn’t truly a good fit for you, they are unlikely to stick around for long.

Finding the right fit allows you to build a relationship that may start with one job but grows stronger and deeper over time to create long‐term engagements and partnerships that can help drive success long after that first project becomes a distant memory. One of the ways to find this right fit is to always remain true to who your company is and not be afraid to let your personality shine through for all the world to see.

You’re not done yet

Finding ways to take “About Us” content from the typical company facts and figures to something that will differentiate your company is just one example of how rethinking content can make your website a more powerful conversion engine. Subsequent entries in this series will explore other common elements of website content that can be improved to bring more value to your visitors and greater returns for your business.

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