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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.

Fill Your Content Gaps and Stop Losing Customers

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Let me guess. You’re probably a lot more interested in not losing customers than filling content gaps. I get it.

In fact, you may not care at all about content gaps. Maybe you aren’t even aware they exist. But if you haven’t assessed content gaps, it’s likely they do exist and are hurting the success of your product.

So where to begin? First, ask yourself this simple question: Do my customers intuitively know how to use my product?

In other words, could a customer just pull your product out of the box without reading or watching anything and have success using it?

If yes, then I congratulate you on creating something so foolproof. But if you’re like most businesses, your customers will need a little help figuring things out.

Today, we’ll look at an example of a product I encountered with a cavernous content gap, why it’s detrimental to the business, and how the business could go about filling the gaps so they’d stop losing customers.

The (Apparently) Useful Product

My family knows I love to grill, and there are plenty of reasonably priced grilling accessories to gift me with at Christmas time. But after years of grilling gifts, it’s getting harder for family members to find me something I don’t already have.

So, this year I got a Himalayan salt cone. It’s quite reasonable for the gift giver to assume I didn’t have this, even in light of my monstrous cache of barbecue whatsits.

It was obvious from the box that the Himalayan salt cone (produced by the Charcoal Companion) roasts whole chickens. Aside from that, I wasn’t quite sure what to do with it.

When I opened the box, there was the salt cone, by its lonesome, with no instructions. On the outside of the box, the concept was briefly explained, basically telling me that the cone reduces cooking time while imparting a subtle, salty flavor. In addition, there was a small paragraph of instructions, that simply told me to cook the cone to 400 degrees Fahrenheit, and then left me with this gem:

When the cone has come to temperature, place your chicken on the cone. Cook your chicken according to your recipe.

According to my recipe? What recipe? Don’t they know I’ve never cooked anything on a salt cone before?

Don’t they get that I’d never heard of a salt cone until five minutes ago?

If the salt cone truly cooks my bird faster, how much should I change the cooking time of my recipe?

If it’s going to make my chicken salty, should I use a less salty rub with my recipe?

Lots of questions, no answers.

The Disastrous Content Gap

All of these questions that the packaging couldn’t answer prompted me to figure it out on the Internet. You know, that magical place where your company can post tons of helpful product content for a relatively low cost.

Well apparently the Charcoal Companion didn’t know, or didn’t care. When I searched for this product, the only results that returned were ratings and retail sites where the product was sold.

In fact, the Charcoal Companion didn’t create one measly landing page for this product. There were no “salt cone” recipes, no tips or times for cooking with the cone. I was holding a product I had no idea what to do with.

When a customer searches for content on how to use a product, and finds nothing, several negative feelings occur in a matter of seconds.

  • Frustration – Even if the sales transaction was smooth as silk, there is now friction between the brand and the customer. Though a lack of content may not cause the friction of something like a product not working, it’s still a blight on the customer’s experience.
  • Distrust – If a brand doesn’t offer helpful content to its customers, does it even care? At first glance, the Charcoal Companion seems to sell products they’re not particularly excited about their customers using. Even if the product was quality, the brand has missed an opportunity to connect and build loyalty.
  • Abandonment – If the customer doesn’t know what to do, and feels no connection with the brand, they are highly likely to give up and find something else to occupy their time.

Once I realized no one had ever published a single piece of helpful Internet content on how to use a salt cone, my customer experience was tarnished.

I was frustrated I had something I didn’t know how to use, I didn’t feel that the brand cared if I used it, and I no longer had a desire to figure it out.

Filling the Content Gap

Today, it’s typically not enough for brands to sell products and then just dust off their hands. Following a sale, customers should be nurtured so that they truly adopt the product.

Currently, the Charcoal Companion is simply a product line for The Companion Group, a family of brands offering a number of goods for the outdoorsman. So any Charcoal Companion product can be found on a product page with a brief description.

But that’s mostly it. In fact, when I go to the page and look for Himalayan salt products, here’s what I get:

Look closer and you’ll notice that my salt cone isn’t even listed among the products. Regardless, my point is that this is the extent of content a prospect or customer gets on Himalayan salt products from Charcoal Companion’s product page. Not good enough.

Fortunately for the Charcoal Companion, the rest of its site already has some pieces in place to offer helpful product content.

Here are three ways the Charcoal Companion can fill their content gaps by using existing content delivery methods on its site:

1. More Imbedded YouTube videos

When it comes how-to content, you can’t do much better than videos. It seems the Charcoal Companion is already thinking this way, featuring several videos on its product page, including ones for the Pitt Mitt and Meat Claws products.

Which is perfect, because I really have no idea what Pitt Mitts and Meat Claws are if they’re just listed out as product names. Even conceptualizing Meat Claws is pretty impossible without a visual. (Right now I’m picturing Freddy Krueger-esque finger blades ripping through hard hunks of ground beef.)

It seems as though the Charcoal Companion already has the resources in place to make a video for our beloved salt cone. So let’s take that same woman explaining Himalayan salt to us in another video, get her a chicken to stick on the cone, and have her give us good reasons why we would ever want to cook like this.

2. Articles on Recipes and Blog Page

The site features two other pages, Recipes and Blog, that would be perfect for some Himalayan salt cone content.

Cooking with Himalayan salt products seems to be rather novel, hence the various pieces of content on the site explaining why this stuff is useful.

Yet on my salt cone package, I’m told to cook the cone with my favorite recipe. Forget favorites, there are no recipes period for cooking a bird on a pink cylinder of sodium.

Instead of making its customers guess how to use the cone, create a simple recipe we can use the first time we try the product.

Then while you’re at it, add a blog post on the different ways we can cook with the salt cone. Tell us how to pre-heat it, how long it generally takes to cook something, and furnish a link back to the Recipes page where that lovely new article on the Himalayan salt cone awaits.

3. Connectivity from Product page to other pages

The product page should really be acting as a a hub for all kinds of helpful content to tickle my fancy. Each product listing should come with at least one link to a recipe, video, or blog post. This will help people get the information they need, while hopping around your site and staying engaged.

If you’re any sort of barbecue fan and want to see how internal site linking is seared to perfection, check out AmazingRibs.com.

Pitmaster Meathead Goldwyn has written seemingly hundreds of in-depth, well researched articles and connected them to each other in an impressive web of internal linking. This creates a slow-cooked session of reading that can leave you on the site much longer than you intended, yet much more informed about barbecue.

Wrapping It Up

When there’s a gap in your content, your customer will feel it. The friction caused by the disconnect will sour your customer’s experience and soil the perception of your brand.

But if you can spend some time recognizing content gaps on your website and beyond, you can begin filling those gaps with useful content. Then instead of losing customers, you’ll be gaining loyal brand followers who will be happy to rave about your products.