Have you every stopped to listen? Really listen? I have often experienced situations where someone has a question and the listener is so sure they know the question and the answer that they haven’t really heard the question and end up giving an answer to a different problem. And I’ll confess that more often than not, I’ve been the “listener” who didn’t hear.
So how does that apply to Internet marketing?
You ought to “listen” to your web site. You can listen in different ways:
1. Talk to customers who have actually used your site. Ask them what they liked. What they didn’t like? What they noticed? What they passed by without a second thought? And then listen to their answers instead of making assumptions about what they’re about to say.
2. Look at your site statistics. There are many different ways to do this – you know what you want people to do on your web site but you can listen to visitors by seeing what they actually do – what links they click on, what actions they perform, whether they actually do what you want them to. You can try free programs like Google Analytics and I also recommend looking at the statistics program on your web server – look for something called webalizer, awstats or logaholic (three of the most common stats programs).
3. Run one or more tests on your web site. A/B testing is the easiest to perform and usually the easiest to understand the results of. Listening through testing can help you understand what the best message is “Buy now!” versus “Check out pricing”, which colors to make your buttons (sometimes a blue button gets more clicks than a red one, who knew?), how much information to ask for (do you really need a physical address to get a newsletter subscriber?) and other useful kinds of information. Google Website Optimizer is a good tool to get started with.
What other ways have you found to listen on your web site?
If you haven’t been listening but want to, let us know how we can help by filling out this form.