On the Right Path

When I was in college, I had a professor who spoke a lot about the importance of wayfinding. He was especially interested in how the Department of Transportation studied design elements such as typography and contrast to discover the best font and colors to use on their signs. When you drive down the interstate, those big green signs with white lettering make navigation pretty easy. Or consider the wayfinding system of a large airport. Getting from terminal A to terminal D would be a nightmare without all the signs helping us along the way. The core function of good wayfinding is to get a person from point A to point B, quickly and efficiently. In order to do that, a person navigating the system should need only to look for signs to point them in the right direction. Just as an exit sign tells an interstate driver where to get off, the visual cues on a well designed homepage should direct a visitor onto the right path.

Why It’s Important to Funnel Visitors

It is the job of the homepage to quickly funnel users to the information they need the most.We often hear the term “funneling traffic.” It is usually used in the context of getting people to visit a site from the outside via search engines, social media or a traditional marketing campaign. But it is equally important to funnel traffic once they get to your site. Your company may have several types of audiences, and you need to speak to each one in different ways. The type of information provided and the tone in which it is presented will be different depending on the audience. A site that tailors its information to specific audiences needs a way for those audiences to quickly identify which category they fit in or which area they are most interested in. It is, therefore, the job of the homepage to do that efficiently. Success in this area means getting a visitor off the homepage and deeper into the site—where you can convert them from a visitor to a customer or fan. It also means protecting them from purposeless information that gets in the way of what they’re really looking for.

Know Your Audience

Before you start funneling visitors you need to identify your audiences. By knowing your target audience, you will be more confident in knowing how to connect with them. Again, your site may have several target audiences. A healthcare site has to accommodate both patients as well as medical professionals. A nonprofit organization has to accommodate people who want to volunteer their time, those who want to donate money, and those who need to use the service the organization provides. All of these audiences have unique needs and specific requests—but before they can become more than a visitor, your site has to give them what they're looking for. The power of your site relies on your ability to focus on your audiences.

Focus Your Funneling

We’ve all been there: stopped at an intersection, not knowing which way to go. One road with two names. Two roads with one name, but going in different directions. Sometimes you just pick a road and see what happens. And sometimes you get lost and have to turn around—something you certainly don’t want a visitor to your site doing. It's natural for a business to want to accommodate every single visitor that comes to their site. Doing this, however, can quickly lead to a cluttered homepage and information overload. Or, in our transportation analogy, an intersection just like this: If your homepage looked like this, most visitors would simply hit the back button and leave your site, not only confused and turned off, but more important, with a negative opinion of your company as a whole. If your site has many types of people visiting, it is important to identify the characteristics of your core audiences in order to quickly direct your most important traffic to where they need to go. This will keep your homepage clean, simplified and actually make decision making easier for the user. Visitors given 3 choices based on core audience characteristics—as opposed to 10 choices based on characteristics for every visitor—will be able to identify their needs and navigate more quickly. Your homepage does not need to encompass every detail about your company or product. Statistically, only 30% of a visitors time is spent on the homepage. The rest is spent on deeper level pages that are better equipped to handle the needs and interests of your visitors—and move them to action.

Give Them What They Like

Once core audiences have been established, you need to determine how you want to motivate them and what actions you want them to take. It is not as simple as saying, “visitor x goes here and visitor y goes here.” You need to know what those visitors are interested in—what motivates them to delve further and eventually cause them to take action or reach a conversion point. Audiences may be influenced by statistics, testimonials, free trials or product features. By knowing what motivates your audience, you will know how to quickly grab their attention and get them to want to take action. So what kind of action do you want your visitors to take? Of course the ultimate action is often financial, whether that is buying a product or service or donating money. But there are other actions that can facilitate that final goal. You may want first-time visitors to download a demo, take a tour or request more information by filling out a form or signing up for a newsletter. Or perhaps you want to drive people to a physical store using a “find the nearest location” feature.

Bringing It All Together

Now that you know the who, how and why, it’s time to bring everything together in a killer homepage design that will not only look great, but function seamlessly as a visitor’s guide to your site. Many well-designed sites begin with a large introductory headline and a brief opening paragraph that gives the visitor a snapshot of what the company is about or what it is selling. The funneling occurs with individual modules that target a specific audience. Designs should be clean and contain good contrast to quickly identify elements. Headlines should be specific, leaving little doubt who the following information is intended for. Typically, “more” or “continue” buttons are used, prompting the visitor to explore the next level of the site. Often pictures of a product or other graphical elements are used to entice the visitor into wanting more. Here are examples of sites that do this well.

Conclusion

Your homepage is not only a first impression, but the starting point to an experience. A good homepage is a spring board that motivates people to explore more important areas of your site. It clearly direct visitors to the information they need the most to get them to a final destination. And if their journey is a pleasant one, you're one step closer to a repeat visitor, fan, and even customer. Happy trails!

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Deconstructing the Viral Hashtag

Pick your platform — whether it’s print advertising, video, Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook or Twitter – hashtags have overtaken them all. Handy, catchy and often irreverent, hashtags are quickly becoming a mainstay of modern marketing. Like every aspect of marketing, though, some brands are more adept than others at creating hashtags that drive awareness and engage the public. As a marketing tool, hashtags can be a bit of an enigma. Many times the best ones are spontaneous and random. They have an incredibly short lifespan, and there’s no way to control them once they’re out there. So what exactly makes one hashtag succeed wildly while another one plummets into instant obscurity? Why are some hashtags so memorable and others imminently forgettable? The short answer: The most effective hashtags appeal to a wide range of people because they key into the human psyche in a powerful way. Let’s deconstruct a few of the most viral and memorable hashtag campaigns of the past few years and uncover the secrets of their success:

The appeal of social currency: #firstworldproblems

The nonprofit organization Water is Life (http://www.waterislife.com) was looking for a way to raise money to supply clean water to villages in developing countries. And they hit on an innovative way to do it, with a video and print campaign that capitalized on the popularity of the existing hashtag #firstworldproblems by juxtaposing the perceived problems of Americans against the all-too-real struggles experienced by those in less fortunate nations around the world. In the documentary-style video, complaints from actual #firstworldproblems tweets – including “I hate it when I go to the bathroom and forget my phone” and “My son got the wrong toy in his Happy Meal” – are read aloud by impoverished Haitian families. The stark contrast in conditions really struck a chord with viewers, who discovered newfound perspective on just how lucky they are to have such superficial issues. The campaign took off, with the video drawing a million views in just four days and response that generated enough donations to supply clean water to impoverished communities for a million days, according to Water is Life. The psychological appeal of this campaign and its signature hashtag is an interesting one. It leverages the natural human desire to accumulate social currency — to appear generous or to “look good” to our peers — to drive people to perform acts of generosity they might otherwise not consider. By poking a bit of gentle fun at the public while educating them to issues of real concern, Water is Life created a tidal wave of awareness and action.

The appeal of emotion: #SFBatKid

There’s no doubt about it: people share content that inspires strong emotions, and the BatKid story was one of the most emotionally appealing stories of 2013. The campaign, which was spearheaded by the Make-A-Wish Foundation, reached out to the city of San Francisco to help make a little boy’s dream come true. And five-year-old Miles Scott, who is currently in remission from life-threatening leukemia, got his dream — and then some. Powered by the Twitter handle #SFBatKid, the Make-A-Wish Foundation originally hoped to attract 200 volunteers in their effort to help Miles become Batman for a day. But the story and the hashtag caught fire, and the foundation was inundated by responses from as far away as Norway and Australia. About 10,000 San Franciscans turned out to watch as BatKid saved them from several dastardly villains. Even the mayor got into the act, giving Miles the key to the city as thousands of spectators watched from the steps of City Hall. It’s important to note that although this could have been framed as a sad story, it wasn’t. Sadness evokes a low-energy response that rarely results in action. Instead, the uplifting #SFBatKid campaign inspired a whole city to act by appealing to the most positive human emotion: hope.

The appeal of humor: #tweetfromtheseat

Who knew toilet paper could be so funny? In a cleverly designed campaign, Charmin managed to get people laughing in and out of the bathroom by transforming a taboo behavior into an ongoing conversation with their playful #tweetfromtheseat. With a little wink and some witty repartee, Charmin’s #tweetfromtheseat campaign incorporates current events and other brands into their Twitter feed — and the public loves it. As a result, they’ve turned a mundane household product into something special and built a huge, highly engaged following at the same time. It’s truly an inspired campaign, with an appeal that’s simple but nevertheless effective. After all, people do love potty humor.

The dual appeal of practical value and social proof: #40dollars

Talk about the power of a tweet: the Obama White House used the hashtag #40dollars to great effect to lobby for an extension on the payroll tax cut. The campaign began in February 2012 when the President tweeted “Taxes will go up for 160 million Americans by the end of this month if Congress doesn’t act. What does #40dollars a paycheck mean to you?” People all over the country responded — and a Congress infamous for not passing legislation was convinced to extend the tax cuts for the rest of the year. The #40dollars hashtag worked on two different levels: It inspired a response from Twitter users because it asked them to consider something of practical and personal value — what would an extra $40 mean to them? And it inspired action from Congress because humans are wired to respond to social proof. In other words, people embrace an idea or an action more easily when they see others agreeing with it.

#thebottomline

Even hashtags that seem to be completely spontaneous — and lucky at that — are often the result of some serious planning. (Check out Oreo’s #dunkinthedark Super Bowl tweet for a great example.) If your business is looking to leverage the power of hashtags to create a lasting impression, you can use these notable success stories as your model. Spend some time strategizing. Think about what type of appeal will work best for your brand, and make a deliberate effort to tap into it. Be thoughtful, be creative and be daring! If you can hit the right notes, you’ll not only be the brand of the moment but the one that people will be talking about for weeks, months and even years to come.

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