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What You Can Learn from Disney’s Content

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It’s been said that Walt Disney World is the happiest place on earth. To me, a happy place is where I can pick money off of trees, not have it exit my bank account like thousands of bees flying at warp speed.

But when it comes to the customer experience, Disney World may very well be the happiest place on earth. And their content has a lot to do with it.

Here are a few takeaways from Disney’s content.

Disney nails the mobile experience with timely content

While weaving our way through parks, the My Disney Experience mobile app was always at the ready. That’s because the app is highly useful for maximizing your time during the day.

And time is of the essence. It’s one thing to clown around at your neighborhood park and wonder where the time went. But for my family, this was a trip of trips. We may never return, so let’s squeeze every ounce out of this puppy like a Florida orange.

You can see wait times

Standing, walking, and stopping to enjoy an attraction at Disney World is the norm. It’s like Wait Disney World. (Pun nailed.)

But with the app, geolocation allows you to see precisely where you are in the park and the wait times for all of the attractions around you. The listed wait times were highly accurate, so we could make good judgments on whether to trek across the park for a ride, or hit an attraction quickly before our FastPass window was up.

You can order food

Getting food in the park favors the app user. While people wait in lines, you can find your dining option, order on the way, and have your food ready at the mobile order pickup line when you arrive. Just don’t order a rack of ribs in the middle of the day like I did. #HurtDisneyWorld

You can make a plan

Once you have your FastPasses in place, you can plan your day around them. You can set reminders for shows and keep track of any appointments or reservations you’ve made. It’s easy to add and delete items too as your plans change.

Content lesson: Empower your user to have the most efficient experience possible while using your platform. It’s OK if they spend less time on your app if it creates a better customer experience.

Disney uses content to minimize boredom in the line

It’s hard to beat Disney’s FastPass+ system when it comes to the customer experience. You walk toward the ride entrance, see the miserable, serpentine mass of humanity winding around the park, approach the gate, swipe your Magic Band, and breezily stroll past 7,000 people to the gate of the ride. It’s a hero’s moment.

Buuuuttt, you do miss some of the cool stuff Disney throws on the walls of the standby line to keep people from impatience-induced conniptions.

Stuff to read

Waiting for Expedition Everest isn’t bad at all. When you arrive at the attraction, you enter a world of a Nepalese ski lodge where it’s obvious the menacing Yeti is the star of local lore. While waiting, you have time to read things like newspaper clippings of Yeti sightings and a summary of indigenous animals with a helpful image key to identify their scat. That’s exactly the kind of crap I want to see.

Content lesson: If your customer has to endure a fairly long experience, like a survey or opening an account, find ways to reward them throughout the process to keep them engaged.

Stuff to look at

One of the best places to wait for a ride is Toy Story Land in Hollywood Studios. Both the Slinky Dog Dash and Toy Story Mania attractions feature enlarged toys and kids’ things, like Elmer’s glue and Crayola Crayons, which contain the actual product verbiage on those packages, which I never read before! This captured my imagination and made me feel like toy in a kid’s room, which didn’t get chewed up by a dog, which is exactly the experience they wanted to create.

Content lesson: While the content itself is vital, pay attention to the surrounding details where the content lives. Thoughtful content design will delight your customers and keep them coming back.

Stuff to play with

At Thunder Mountain Railroad in Magic Kingdom, there are lots of little surprises of things to do while you wait. You can push down a lever to blow up some dynamite, or spin a wheel to blow air on yourself. Yes, it’s quite the germ fest for your fingers, but distracts you from noticing yourself wilting like a daisy in the Floridian heat.

Content lesson: Timely, interactive content brings delight to the customer experience. If you can fit a little game or quiz or calculation into your content, and reward the customer with information they were looking for, you’ve won.

So go be like Disney

While Disney delivers the ultimate customer experience, their content isn’t world-beating. It’s just thoughtful and useful. So find ways to weave great content into your CX, be it offering simple instructions for snappy task accomplishment or something interactive that offers a payoff.

If we can learn from Disney’s content experience, we can ensure our CX isn’t Mickey Mouse.

5 Ways Business Owners Can Step Up Their LinkedIn Game

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For business-to-business marketers, there’s no better social platform than LinkedIn. If you have great content to share, LinkedIn is the place to do it.

While there are now more than 500 million LinkedIn users, only 3 million share content every week. This is a tremendous opportunity for business owners. If you simply share content, you’ll show up again and again in your prospect’s timeline, while your competitors remain MIA.

However, showing up in a timeline isn’t enough. Your profile should be air-tight and the content you post should be targeted, engaging and useful to your audience.

Here are five things you can do right now to boost your game on LinkedIn:

1. Establish goals for your content

Most of us have no strategy when it comes to posting and interacting on LinkedIn.

We post random articles, some having to do with our industry and others having to do with a missile crisis.

Or we “Like” a story about why some guy quit Google, comment on a poignant quote from Tony Robbins, then share a press release about our business.

The problem is that by doing everything, we appear to be focused on nothing.

By establishing goals for your LinkedIn content (could be promoting your product’s benefits, developing leads, or starting a conversation), you start to look like something. Your work looks purposeful, and with repetition, you start to establish yourself as an authority in your prospects’ minds.

Generally, the goal gives you a filter for what you like, comment on and share. This is actually valuable for your prospects, because over time they’ll start to see a pattern of you posting relevant content, and will gain interest in what you have to say. You become the only guy on your prospects’ timelines talking about an alternative to corn syrup, the complexities of corporate accounting, or the health benefits of mud wrestling. (Just make sure it’s not all of those.)

Then one day, the warm call comes in the form of a free lead, all as a result of the work you put in for months of relevant posting on the platform.

2. Identify your audience

Once you know what you want to achieve, you should start thinking about whom you’ll achieve it through.

On LinkedIn, you’re likely connected to hundreds of people, all with different backgrounds and professions. It’s possible many of your connections are simply people you know and aren’t prospects.

However, you’re probably connected to a decent handful of people you’d like to market your business to. You must identify who these people are, and then block out everyone else. Your content won’t matter to everyone else, so give up on making a broad appeal.

Instead, identify 1-5 prospect types that will comprise your audience on LinkedIn. Doing so will sharpen your focus for the content you need to share.

3. Optimize your profile

Think of your profile as a personal brand to your audience. Remember that if you’re a business owner, you’re not marketing to all of your connections—just the ones you’ve identified as your audience.

When an audience member visits your profile, it’s generally because they want to know what you can do for them. Few of us have the time to peruse profiles just to know more about people.

Instead, your audience has a need they’re looking to fill. One of the most important things you can do to engage them is to fill your profile with the topics they care about.

Make a list of the 10-20 most important keywords, and revise your profile to include the keywords as you explain your summary, experience and education. All of these elements should point to how they can help your audience.

Then, add other sections that further support the idea you can help. Honors and awards, projects, and certifications will add value if they’re relevant to your target audience.

For anything that’s not relevant, scrap it. Adding hobbies and birthdays to your profile are generally wastes of space. Instead, take some time to add skills and endorse the skills of connections. Typically, those connections will return the favor.

4. Create a company page

Your company page can serve as a destination for audience members who are highly interested in your content.

In the timeline, your posts compete with everyone else’s. But on a company page, your audience has the opportunity to consume tons of relevant content.

Anyone reading a good company page will quickly conclude that you’re an authority in the space they’re interested in.

Additionally, if you have a particular product, service or brand that deserves its own space, you can create a showcase page. This would be a great place to drive customers who have a specific need you’re able to fill.

5. Start posting, every day

Today, it seems that the best way to get noticed on LinkedIn is by frequency of posting.

Certainly, getting likes and shares helps your cause, but consistent posting means consistently attracting the eyeballs of your audience.

Here are a few ways you can post:

  1. Share an article or video – When you run across something interesting that would appeal to your audience, go ahead and post it. Add your own take or intro to the piece of content, and encourage some audience participation, perhaps by asking a pointed question and requesting comments.
  2. Like an article or video – If you see something pop up in your feed that’s relevant to your audience, simply “Like” it. This is a nice way to show up in others’ feeds with minimal effort.
  3. Publish a post – Use LinkedIn’s publishing platform to create your own post. Writing your own post enhances your reputation as an authority in your space.

Make a goal to post at least once a day. People like to check LinkedIn when they get into work or are about to leave for the day, so try to post in the early morning or early evening.

Wrapping it up

The opportunity to effectively market your business on LinkedIn is great. While buying ad space can certainly help your cause, there are plenty of actions you can take to get noticed organically.

Once you’ve determined your business goals and who to market to, optimize your profile based on your audience’s needs. Then create a company page and keep it up to date.

From there, simply stay consistent with engaging, relevant posts at the right times of day.

By implementing these five mini-strategies, you’ll have stepped up your LinkedIn game and will be on your way to generating more leads.

 

Learn from the Breweries and Maximize Word Choice on Your Homepage

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Believe it or not, breweries aren’t only good for beer. They can teach us something about how to build an engaging website.

As the craft beer industry explodes in our country, so does the need for breweries to create a competitive edge and distinct brand. Which is why offering a professional, engaging website is so important.

Breweries have the enviable opportunity to make their sites fun and creative, because that’s the culture. They don’t have to take themselves too seriously, nor would their customers want them to.

The role of the homepage

The general “fun and creative” business philosophy has resulted in some cool examples of brewery websites and how they present their homepage.

Although these sites don’t have to be perfectly buttoned up, they still need to offer a simple experience that helps visitors accomplish their goals for visiting the site.

No matter what your business is, your website homepage is an essential hub for your customer’s experience. Though you’re not in front of your customer physically, the words of your homepage should still sound like you. Plus, because this is a static interface with only a little room to communicate, you really have to make your words count.

Basically, the words on your homepage should do three major things:

  1. Inform the visitor about where they are
  2. Guide the visitor to know where to go
  3. Motivate the visitor to take action

Almost every homepage has elements that the user expects to see to recognize it as a website. These elements typically include:

  • Navigational menu
  • Banner
  • Textual introduction
  • Buttons/calls to action

With each of these elements, it’s paramount to get the words right, otherwise you’ll leave the user uniformed, unguided and unmotivated.

Today, we’ll take a look at how breweries are effectively using words with the major elements of their homepage.

1. Navigational menu

The primary navigational menu is what your visitor sees when landing on your page, before scrolling over or clicking on the menu.

Due to limited horizontal space and the need to catch skimming eyes, menu items must be 1 to 3 words. They also have to be broad enough to encompass all the other pages beneath it in the sub-navigational menu.

With the primary menu, it’s more important to be familiar than interesting. Visitors want a clear picture of where to go on your site.

Take Stone Brewing’s homepage for example. These guys make some of the tastiest, hoppiest beer on the planet, but they also understand how to guide their visitor through their site. Have a look at the simplicity of their primary navigation:

With only four items, a visitor doesn’t need to do much skimming to choose an option. After all, a simple hover over the items will reveal all of the other pages/paths one can navigate to.

For your own site, consider simple, well-known word choices for your menu, such as “Services,” “About,” and “Resources.”

With the sub-navigational menu, you can be more nuanced. As long as the menu item is clear, it can be more flavorful.

Sierra Nevada, one of the country’s largest brewers, offers a good example of word expansion with their sub-navigation.

When it comes to your site’s navigation, clarity is paramount. People generally don’t click on things out of curiosity. Use clear word choose for menu items and you’ll effectively guide people through your site.

2. Banners

Banners are attention-getters and have prime real estate on your homepage. Words are generally punchy and meaningful, and seek to promote a product or offer a brand’s value proposition.

One brewery that uses effective banner copy is Deschutes Brewery out of Oregon.

Here, Deschutes uses the banner space to reinforce the value proposition of their brand, that they make beer to bring people together. While some breweries are edgier and may promote a party atmosphere, this will resonate with the more laid-back craft beer drinker.

Another good example is from Great Lakes Brewing:

Notice how the headline is attention-getting, punchy, and easy to consume. Then, the sub-headline is used to reinforce the headline and informs us where this goodness exists.

For your banner copy, ensure your headline is interesting and stands out. If you introduce a sub-header, make sure it flows with the headline and reinforces it. You only have room for a sentence or two, so make it count.

3. Textual introduction

Sometimes, images and punchy copy aren’t enough to achieve the message you’re wanting to deliver on your homepage. Finding space to offer an introduction to your brand is important.

One brewer that does a nice job of this is Trophy Brewing, one of our top local breweries here in Raleigh.

In just one sentence, Trophy conveys some important points about their company. First, they’re definitively a Raleigh brewery. Also, they highlight the food and community aspects of their business, both things they do particularly well and differentiate them from brewers who only brew beer. Also with Trophy, you can have a different experience in each of their three locations.

For your homepage, consider crafting a value statement that distinguishes you from everyone else. You don’t need to say a lot, just enough to whet your visitor’s appetite to explore the rest of your site.

4. Buttons/calls to action

On your homepage, you’ll use buttons to direct visitors to other pages on your site.

Typically, button copy is very simple. In most cases, it should be succinct and action-oriented. But it doesn’t hurt to be more specific if it clarifies to the user what to do.

Here’s a simple but helpful example of button copy on the Sierra Nevada site:

In this “beer finder,” it would’ve been easy to label the button “Locate.” However, adding “beers” to the label reinforces the header, makes the button stand out more, and is a little more fun, fitting for a beer website.

For your homepage, look for opportunities to make button labels specific while remaining concise.

Wrapping up

Your homepage should aim to guide, inform, and motivate your visitor to take action. By using the right word choice in your navigation, banner, textual introduction, and buttons, your homepage will be a major contributor to the overall customer experience.

Five Must-Haves to Make Your “About Us” Page Worth Reading

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Is your About Us page an afterthought? 

That’s perfectly natural, of course. Whenever you built your site, you spent most of your time creating your landing page, product page, blog, and pretty much anything else to engage your visitor.

Then maybe someone said, “Oh! And we need an About Us page in case anyone actually happens to care about who we are.” And because of its natural deprioritization, the About Us page is often thrown together as a couple of paragraphs and bios that check off a box for the site being completed.

Of course, many people who visit your site won’t click on your About Us page, which further affirms the sense of its deprioritization in your site navigation. But for those who do click on “About Us,” the page becomes vitally important. So we have to ask ourselves why people click on this page.

Why people click on “About Us”

When a customer clicks on “About Us,” it’s likely they are asking one of two questions: “Why should I care about this company?” and “Why should I trust this company?”

For the care question, a visitor may simply be intrigued by the product and like it enough to consider buying into the brand.

The trust question is especially important. Trust can be a crucial part of the buying experience, particularly when the spend is large. If you can nail this page, you can take a casual customer and turn them into a loyal follower, which is big for your revenue and your brand.

So here are 5 must-haves for your About Us page:

1. A purpose that connects with the customer’s need

Being that you’re a business, you exist to solve a problem. If people need exercise, you open a gym, and if people have foot fungus, you cure it. People want to know that you’re in business to make their world better.

Generally toward the beginning of an About Us section, you describe when and why you went into business. Here, call attention to the major problem you set out to solve, the reason you went into business in the first place.

Your purpose should identify with the customer’s greatest need for your product or service. Making that connection is the most powerful way to make the customer care about your business and feel like they can trust you.

2. An explanation that what you do is better than what they do

It’s not likely that your business is one of a kind. Even if you sell peanut butter pickles (an obvious craving choice for pregnant moms), you’ll still need to convince visitors why no snack satisfies cravings like yours.

It is likely that your business is similar to others, but is just different enough to be interesting. When it comes to fighting foot fungus, you’re not the only game in town. No one will read another boring story about how some company’s product cures foot fungus.

But people will listen to why the offering is different; that it’s environmentally friendly, that it’s the fastest working, or that it’s the toughest stuff on the market.

A good About Us page unabashedly claims why your business is better. Naturally, a customer will care about your business if you offer something they can’t get anywhere else.

3. A personal touch that makes you seem less like a business

People like doing business with other people. When we first interact with a business, it’s often purely transactional. We tend to perceive that this entity is just out to capture our dime.

Yet once we can associate a brand with a face, our perception quickly changes. We see that it’s not simply a nondescript machine collecting our cash, but a company with well-meaning people behind it who should be paid for their helpful service.

When writing about the people who created and run your company, include human elements that visitors can relate to. This is a great time to be open about why you yourself needed the product, how family values have been passed down through generations with your business, or how you involve yourself in the betterment of the community.

With a personal touch, a visitor can trust that you’re not an evil money maker and your business (and its people) is out to help them.

4. A consistent message that ties in to the rest of your site

The About Us page is also a place to reiterate your value prop at a deeper level. Visitors may already know what you’re about from using your product or service, spending time on your landing page, or getting your messages in advertisements.

Now is the time to ingrain that message by backing up why you believe so passionately in it.

As you tell your story, weave in the features and benefits of your offering and reveal why they matter to you. Messaging that’s consistent across your site enables your content to resonate more powerfully and stick with your visitor.

5. A narrative that the visitor buys into

Of all the ways you could present your message, nothing beats a story. But there is a time and a place for it. It’s probably not on your homepage or landing page, where you’re really just greeting the visitor and offering passages into other rooms of the house.

But with an About Us page, they’ve “walked around” a little, grown comfortable, and want to know more about you. So you tell your story.

Here, the visitor actually wants to hear your story; they want to connect with it. An About Us page can be fairly bland, but it pays to put some work into it and create a compelling narrative. This is your shot at solidifying someone’s status as “loyal follower.”

Wrapping it up

If you’re creating an About Us page, implementing these “must-haves” will take your page from an afterthought to one of the most compelling pages on your site.

If you already have an About Us page, revise it using the filter of “must-haves,” and your page is sure to resonate more with visitors.

Need help telling your story? Let’s talk.

How to Write a Stellar Marketing Email That Increases Conversions

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Are you concerned your marketing email isn’t getting read?

According to followupmachine.com, the average adult receives a staggering 147 emails a day.

Think about if you actually read and responded to all of them. You would be highly informed, highly connected, and you wouldn’t get a damn thing done.

So you become a super scanner, creating systems to filter through the junk and find the meaningful mail that matters most to you, like mail from family, friends, and…ahem…email marketers.

Don’t you love marketing emails? Of course you don’t—and you’re an email marketer! In a sea of personal mail, a marketing email looks like a piece of trash, like six pack plastic rings that disgust you as they drift by because you know they’ll eventually choke a seagull. With this level of cynicism, how can your email stand out, get opened, and convert?

There is hope. In fact, I recently received a marketing email from a company I never heard of, for a service I didn’t need and for a problem I didn’t know I had. Yet it got my attention and kept it all the way to conversion.

Four sales tactics for marketing email

Being that I’m so cynical about marketing emails and kind of couldn’t believe I’d buy from one, I had to evaluate why it was so successful. What I found was that the company expertly used four universal sales tactics to craft a concise yet highly effective email. The sales tactics in the email included:

  1. An attention grabber
  2. A problem and solution
  3. An objection silencer
  4. A non-pushy offer

In this post, I’ll share the email with you and explain how each tactic was used appropriately to give you inspiration for crafting your next marketing email.

The marketing email worth studying

At first glance, this email isn’t very impressive. The design is fairly minimal and the text and page elements together aren’t particularly attractive. In fact, some of it looks downright off-center.

But upon closer inspection, part of this is by design. This screenshot was captured in desktop, but the mobile view of the email looks more structured and tightly aligned.

Even though it’s not pretty, the center-aligned text actually looked different than the standard left-aligned email. Which was a good way to trick my mind out of thinking, “same old marketing email.”

But honestly, I would’ve never even opened this thing if its subject line hadn’t grabbed me.

An attention grabber—the entry to engagement

If you’ve now read the email, you can see it’s from a web hosting service called HostMetro, who I’d never heard of. I have a couple of websites, and the host to one of those sites is Bluehost.

Bluehost is a solid web hosting service, but that’s never mattered much to me. A web host is kind of like a referee. You don’t pay much attention to it until it starts screwing up.

Honestly, I hadn’t thought much about my web hosting service until this email dropped in my inbox with the subject line “Bluehost Raising your Renewal Rates.”

The subject line stopped me in my inbox skimming and quest to delete all unworthy messages. How?

  1. It was timely. The importance of this factor can’t be overstated, because there’s only about a three-week window during the year in which hosting services would consider me a target prospect: when my hosting service subscription is set to expire. In fact, I was aware of this, because I had received a few subscription reminders from Bluehost already. So, the timeliness was huge because I was already slightly engaged in this idea of resubscribing.
  2. It offered new knowledge. I hadn’t considered my rates being raised. HostMetro knows that customers don’t give subscriptions much thought and often set services to auto-renew. So they gave me a new thought that caught my attention.
  3. It appealed to my fear. Few things perk us up like our most primal instincts. HostMetro’s email was targeted to a sole prospect: the cost-conscious one. I don’t like getting overcharged, which meant I would need to investigate this further. (Got me.)

A problem and solution

The subject line alerted me to the problem, but I still didn’t understand what the true problem was. Like a good email marketer, HostMetro wasted no time telling me.

In fact, notice that they don’t even offer a greeting. I’m so used to seeing a welcoming sentence, or a “Hey Carson,” that I often ignore it. Yet here, they skip the pleasantries and immediately help me understand my problem. Just what I wanted.

The problem presented (my rates going up 600%) actually made me do what I should’ve done weeks ago: check out my auto-renew rate from Bluehost. Which was easy to do, because Bluehost had sent me a renewal reminder just five days before, with the new price in the email. Sure enough, I was going from $3.95/mo to $10.99/mo.

It’s worth reiterating the timeliness of the HostMetro email. They were capitalizing on their competitive knowledge of when my rates would go up, the only time they’d have a chance of swooping in to grab my business.

It’s also worth noting the conversational way in which they presented the problem. The “Pretty similar, right?” and “Don’t believe us?” lines do a great job of engaging me so I’d keep following along. All in all, this was a concise and effective presentation of the problem and solution.

An objection silencer

I was sold on the problem and HostMetro’s ability to solve it. But like any good sales presentation, this email would need to anticipate and handle objections.

So HostMetro addresses two of the biggest concerns a web hosting customer has about switching: contracts and transferring files.

No matter how great your offer is, you’re still up against the human tendency of inertia. I liked HostMetro’s offer, but figured switching might be more painful than the extra cost. So I’d do nothing.

HostMetro overcame my inertia by giving me the impression that their service was easy to acquire. The response to objections here gave me the feeling that not only could HostMetro solve my problem, but could do it easily and with little effort on my part.

A non-pushy offer

Following engagement, problem solving, and handling objections, it was time for HostMetro to make an offer. The offer begins with a discount, but then continues into a surprisingly unaggressive close.

Typically, a best practice for marketing emails is to create a sense of urgency. This can be done with an expiring offer (creating fear of loss) and a “don’t wait, get started now” approach with the copy leading into the call to action.

Yet, following the discounted offer, HostMetro eases off. The best sentence of the email for me was this: “Not quite ready? That’s fine. Your code never expires, and you can cancel anytime.”

At this point, I released any of my remaining defenses to switch. HostMetro wasn’t desperate for my business, and I wouldn’t lose anything if I waited. Perfect.

The brilliance of this is that HostMetro didn’t need to create urgency. My problem was already urgent; I had to make a choice about my web hosting subscription in the next 30 days anyway. Why would HostMetro be pushy when they didn’t have to be?

Then they close with a quick list of benefits and a “sign up” button. Simple, clean, concise; it was an offer I felt like I couldn’t refuse.

What we learned

A good marketing email can convert the most cynical of email readers, even email marketers themselves! It’s wise to employ tried-and-true sales tactics, yet have copy that’s clever enough to not come across as salesy.

As email marketers, we must grab readers’ attention, present the problem quickly and solve it, counter any objections, and present a compelling but non-pushy offer. If the email is timely and meets people at their point of need, you’ll have an excellent chance of converting even the most cynical of readers.