Effective Communication Skills & Successful Speaking Secrets

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How do you translate your client’s culture? (Issue 29, Vol 03)

By Chris Davidson | Published: November 17, 2011

One of the really interesting guests on my radio show earlier this week was Michaela Leithner, the managing director of Smile Translations, an Austrian based translation and interpretation company.

Michaela and her colleagues work internationally, providing translation and interpretation services for companies, government organisations and conference organisers.

Not only was I struck by the amount of effort that goes into translation and simultaneous interpretation, but I was I also surprised at how much of it has nothing to do with language and everything to do with culture. What do I mean by this?.

There are several levels of translation/interpretation and it’s very important to know at what level you’re operating. There are direct parallels with how you communicate with your clients, so read on and see if you agree with me.
For example, we can say in English, “It’s raining cats and dogs”, which is an expression used to explain the fact that it’s raining a lot – something foreigners think is a normal occurrence in the UK.

If you simply translate the above phrase into French (for example), you get, “Il pleut des chats et des chiens”, which on the face of it, seems correct French. The problem is though, that it’s not what a native French speaker would say. He or she is more likely to say, “Il pleut des grenouilles”, the English for which is, “It’s raining frogs.” My personal favourite is the Norwegian version of this saying, which (I am led to understand) translates back into English as, “It’s raining female trolls”. A free copy of my book if anyone can provide a logical explanation for this one.
So what?

Well, imagine that you’re Michaela, or one of her colleagues, responsible for some translation or simultaneous interpretation It’s not enough to know the language of the destination country, you have to know their culture too.
Now this may all seem obvious when it’s split out into the many necessary levels of communication required to hop from one language to another, but my challenge to you is this: How often do you translate your solution into your client’s language and culture – and how do you know you’ve been successful?

In the last edition of CDCD I listed the five things all customers want to talk about, in some form or another:
• Increasing their sales
• Increasing their conversion ratio
• Reducing their sales cycle time
• Reducing their costs
• Improving their reputation

The key lies in the phrase, “…in some form or another”. For you to engage with your clients successfully you have to know precisely how they talk about the above five things within their business – within their culture. Do they talk about cats and dogs, or do they talk about frogs?

Make a start and improve your effective communication skills Now!

This post was first published as one of Chris Davidson’s regular “Competitive Difference” emails. You can subscribe to Chris Davidson’s “Competitive Difference” (CDCD) Via the Active Presence website. You can also contact Active Presence directly.

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Small Targets, Fast Bullets (Issue 28, Vol 03)

By Chris Davidson | Published: November 15, 2011

I’ve been working with two clients this week, both of whom had similar issues and both of whom had similarly misdiagnosed those same issues.

They (both) thought that what they wanted was some help in putting over their message more convincingly – so delivering the convincing initial sales presentation to potential clients, that sort of thing. While this was true, what they had both missed was the extent to which they’d failed to get to grips with who their potential clients were and the implications that had for the content of their message, never mind style of delivery.

The issue both my clients were struggling with was how to focus their message to their particular customers. They believed that by keeping their message reasonably generic, they’d attract more clients, when in fact, the converse is true.

A tightly targeted message stands a much greater chance of succeeding.

You might think that this much is reasonably well known by now and companies would consider it second nature to tightly target their marketing messages – but they don’t. Time after time, I come across ’sloppy messaging’, where the author/presenter has not thought things through. Maybe they were too tired, maybe they didn’t have enough time to prepare – the underlying reason doesn’t change the result.

While any lack of targeting is serious, for some presentations it may not spell disaster. The customer might still select from your material what interests him or her and invite you for more detailed conversations. The issue is altogether more serious for printed material, and there are several reasons for this:

• If the materially is professionally designed and printed, it will represent a significant investment. If you’re spending your hard earned cash you want to get it right.

• Printed material can be read in your absence, when you’re not there to cover up any deficiencies in its messaging. It absolutely has to be capable of standing on its own.
The “you” and “me” test
Take an example of your printed material – a brochure, maybe – and armed with redand blue pens conduct the following test:

• Every time you find reference to your company name, or where the text says “we” or “I” then circle these occurrences in red.

• Every time you find references to your clients, for example, words like client,customer, you, your, circle them in blue.

• Count the blue and red circles. The total number of each isn’t really the issue – what’s important is the ratio of blue:red. You want a ratio of at least3:1.

This is a great exercise in forcing you to focus on the benefits your clients will get, as opposed to the ’stuff’ you want to sell them.

The Five Things All Customers Want
Having said how important it is to focus on what it is that you customer wants, it is possible to isolate five things that I’ve all customers are keen to talk about:
• Increasing their sales
• Increasing their conversion ratio
• Reducing their sales cycle time
• Reducing their costs
• Improving their reputation

If you can illustrate a clear link between your products or services and the above list, you’ll find it much easier to open meaningful conversations with potential clients.

The above list is in fact a specialized subset of the two basic questions that successful business people ask themselves when they are faced with making a decision:

• How does this add value to my business?

• How does this reduce my costs?

If you cannot clearly and simply answer either of these questions you’ll struggle to have your message taken seriously.

Look to improve your effective communication skills

Posted in CDCD Archive, CDCD Vol 03 | Tagged effective communication, effective communication course, effective communication skills, Marketing, presentation skills | Leave a comment

Cold Calling and Bullet Points Don’t Work (Issue 27, Vol 03)

By Chris Davidson | Published: November 10, 2011

Earlier this week I spoke to a meeting of the members of the International Visual Communication Association. The event was billed as a “Cold Calling and Pitch Presentation” seminar – which meant there was a lot of information to cover in a relatively short evening event, after everybody had been hard at work all day. Not ideal, but we got through it all and I thought you might appreciate some of the highlights. Two topics triggered particular debate:

Cold calling – how to do it, etc
Making a powerful sales presentation – the value of bullet points

Cold Calling
Not only is cold calling is a waste of time, money and effort, it’s also terribly old fashioned and out-dated – “so 20th Century” – as my good speaker friend Terry Brock says. It’s out-dated because in the “old days”, i.e. 1980’s pre-internet, sales people were a primary source of information and were therefore welcomed into customers’ offices for cups of coffee and ‘update’ meetings, during which the customers got free education on whatever it was the sales person was selling. This would then be cross-referenced over another cup of coffee with another sales person from the competition, and so the game proceeded. OK, I’m getting a bit cynical, maybe, but you get my point. Fast forward to the 21st Century and pretty much any information of a “speeds and feeds” variety is available free on the internet. There is simply no longer any need to offer any sales person a free coffee in exchange for some free education. All of which means that trying to ‘muscle’ your way into a meeting via cold calling is getting harder and harder with each passing day. Other reasons as to why cold calling is a waste of time, include:

The customer doesn’t see you as an equal. The moment you make the call, the prospect knows you want his or her business.
It’s very inefficient, as the vast majority of phone calls end up being re-routed to voice mail.
There is no prior evidence that the prospect has any interest in what you’re offering (at that point in time) – so even if you do succeed in actually speaking to him or her, you may discover that they’re not in the market. More time wasted.
Apart from the wasted time, noted above, the whole process actually fails the basic test of producing qualified, high quality leads – something which any good prospecting system ought to do.
It makes you immediately unpopular with the very person you want to be popular with: a busy prospect. What better way of getting his or her back up than interrupting them while their focus is elsewhere.

If cold calling is a bad as all this – which I really do believe it is – then what’s a better alternative? The short answer is to adopt a much more consultative approach to the sales process. A good place to start is with your existing on-line and off-line networks, the value of which, which I’m willing to bet, you haven’t fully mined. If you’re in the UK or North America then you certainly ought to have a LinkedIn profile. If you have a few hundred contacts in your primary network, then you have hundreds of thousands of potential customers to whom you can be personally introduced – goodbye cold calling, hello warm introduction.

The Killer Sales Presentation
Bullet points don’t work. By this, I mean that information displayed to an audience in a “bullet point style PowerPoint slide” will not be remembered. At best, an audience will remember between 10% and 15% of the content of a bullet point slide. They truly are a waste of time. They are used by so many presenters because:

They’re copying everyone else
They don’t know any better
There are lots of bullet point templates in the software

The templates were created to boost the sales of the product. They have no place in excellent communication. Many presenters use bullet point slides to keep them on track. They have not acknowledged that slides should be there for the benefit of the audience and not for the benefit of the presenter – who ought to know what he or she is talking about. (And if the presenter needs notes, then there’s nothing wrong with good old fashioned 6×4 index cards. Presenters’ notes don’t need to be on public display).

By the way: I know I’ve used bullet points in this post – and that’s OK becuase it’s part of a document that you’re reading. In other words, the document is the entire communication. PowerPoint slides are not the entire communication – they are there to support the message the presenter wants to deliver – a very different role.

These are big topics and ones I’m sure I’ll come back to in future posts. In the meantime, scrap your bullet points and junk your cold calling. Improve your Presentation Skills

This post was first published as one of Chris Davidson’s “Competitive Difference” emails. You can subscribe to Chris Davidson’s “Competitive Difference” (CDCD) Via the Active Presence website.
You can also contact Active Presence Directly.

Posted in CDCD Archive, CDCD Vol 03 | Tagged business presentation, effective communication, effective communication skills, presentation skills | Leave a comment

Better Communication = Better Business (Issue 26, Vol 03)

By Chris Davidson | Published: November 8, 2011

I continue to be surprised by the number of people I come across in business who seem to display the shallowest understanding of what’s important so far as ‘making money’ is concerned. Most of the confusion comes from over-complicating what it is that comprises a viable business. There are just four elements to any successful business.

The four elements of any business are:

Your personal performance
The product (or service) you sell in exchange for money
How you introduce it to the market
How your business works behind the scenes (invoicing, financing, etc).

Many people I see in business spend huge amounts of time, money and effort on the “product”, believing that the best product will sell itself and dominate the market. It might do, but only if people know about it. If you don’t introduce it to the market effectively, it’s not going to get the chance to sell itself.

Another common oversight, curiously often made by the same, product obsessed people, is a lack of investment in themselves. I’m not quite sure why this occurs, but it certainly does – I have come across it many times. Maybe the root is the same as above: the product will sell itself and therefore I don’t need to produce well crafted proposals, or deliver excellent sales presentations. Yes you do – mandatory – not optional.

And so we find ourselves back at “marketing”, the most misunderstood and over-abused term in business. I don’t really understand why this should be the case: marketing is simply a specialized form of communication (for a specific group of individuals). I firmly believe communication is the key to unlocking superior business performance. The process of buying involves the buyer believing the seller. The buyer has to make an emotional investment in the seller. That’s what belief is: an emotional investment. People buy from people. And people buy from people they know, like and trust – because it is in these people that they are much more likely to make the necessary emotional investment. An engineer would characterize all the communication in the world today as having a low signal to noise ratio. In other words, there’s so much noise around, it’s blocking out the important stuff. Doing business in a customer’s office can be like doing business in a packed bar – you have to shout above the noise of e-mails, Twitter feeds, Facebook updates, You Tube videos, LinkedIn requests, SMS messages, voicemails and mobile phones. The same can be said for internal communications, between company employees, particularly between different levels of management.

For you to be successful your words have to stand out head and shoulders above the rest – you really do need to soar far above all that noise, otherwise you’ll just get drowned out. Never before has there been a more important time in business to make sure that you really can clearly articulate a crystal clear reason as to why your customers should buy from you.

Catching their ear is difficult enough – when you have it, make sure you have something relevant, engaging and memorable to say.

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Can your words provide leadership? (Issue 25, Vol 03)

By Chris Davidson | Published: November 3, 2011

I’ve just returned from the annual convention of the German Speakers Association. All things considered, I would say this was one of the most elegant and well organised national conventions I have been to, regardless of industry or association. There was the right balance of main stage performances, breakout sessions, networking opportunities and time to speak with exhibitors – make new friends and reconnect with old ones.

A special guest at the GSA convention was Hans-Dietrich Genscher, who served as Germany’s Foreign Minister and Vice Chancellor. In his long political career he is most respected for his role in helping end the cold war and reunify Germany. He delivered the most inspiring speech, which I cannot possibly do justice to in print, but it certainly was ‘one of those moments’. He held the audience in the palm of his hands and his words visibly moved all of us – some to tears. When he finished we cheered and clapped – and wouldn’t stop – we went on and on, honouring this man and the difference his leadership had made to the world.

The whole weekend – Hans-Dietrich Genscher and all the other opportunities to speak and listen – set me thinking about the whole process of communication. There are people who have triggered massive changes in the world by the example they set and the words they spoke – and I believe it’s quite possible for each of us to the same in our own way. Hans-Dietrich Genscher was the catalyst for the hopes of thousands of East Germans who’d sought refuge in the German Embassy in Prague – and (sadly) 20 years later, it seems to me that society is still in desperate need of leadership.

In your own field, you can provide that leadership. In fact, I challenge you to do this. I believe that if you speak in front of audiences, large or small, private or public, you have a responsibility to demonstrate leadership in your field. So the challenge isn’t so much one of presenting your message in an engaging and charismatic way – this is taken for granted. The challenge is one of defining a message that people can use as a ‘touchstone’ for their own development (professional or personal).

Effective communication skills are something that you cannot afford to not possess.

Posted in CDCD Archive, CDCD Vol 03 | Tagged effective communication course, effective communication skills, improving your presentation skills, Public Speaking | Leave a comment

Where are tomorrow’s audiences? (Issue 24, Vol 03)

By Chris Davidson | Published: November 1, 2011

A study recently conducted by the UK’s media watchdog ‘Ofcom’ (the independent regulator and competition authority for the UK communications industries), has highlighted how inter-connected and technology dependent our lives have become.

Ofcom’s report discovered that (in the UK) we spend 45% of our waking hours dealing with various media from a variety of devices, from mobile phones to PC’s and TV’s. Although the study is UK based it wouldn’t surprise me if similar statistics existed for all countries where this e-mail is read.

A quarter of our time is spent on the internet and we send four times as many text messages as we did in 2004.
The ’smartphone’ is spreading like wild fire. In the UK nearly 13 million people own one – and here’s the real kicker – nearly half the people accessing the ‘net from their smartphone are logging onto Facebook.

Your business is no different from any other, in that its success depends on effective communication with your customers – the core of what ‘marketing’ is all about. I’d suggest that you can ill afford to ignore the impact of this report’s findings.

There’s a lot of hype surrounding making money on the ‘net. The reality is that it’s every bit as difficult, as time consuming and as fickle as any other mass marketing method – it’s just cheaper and quicker to test, that’s all. To achieve statistical significance you have to be dealing with huge numbers, just as with direct mail 30 years, for example. The bigger the sample size, the better. And who has the huge numbers nowadays to make up your big sample sizes? Well, these folks for a start:

• Google
• Facebook
• You Tube
• Twitter

The really exciting thing about Facebook is the amount of information they know about each of their 500 million active users; age, sex, martial status, interests, where they live, (>70% outside the USA, by the way), how they spend their time, etc.

So what? From a marketing perspective this sort of information is as valuable as gold dust and as rare as hen’s teeth.
However, just before you go rushing off to rewrite your marketing plan to switch all your online advertising to Facebook, you might want to consider the following. Generally speaking, Facebook adverts have a lower click through rate (CTR) than many (major) websites and also a smaller percentage of Facebook users click on advertisements, compared with other large websites. The reasons for these results remain unclear, but could be aligned to:

• Facebook users being (on average) more technically savvy than average web-users and better able to deploy ad blocking software

• Younger Facebook users being better at ignoring advertising messages

I know of people who have enjoyed considerable success with Facebook ads and I can imagine them working for product associated with computers, like computer gaming, for example. I remain to be convinced as to their efficacy with regard to more traditional off-line products or services. The issue as I see it is this:
If a potential customer is watching TV or listening to the radio and they experience a commercial break, they know that – without taking any action – they’ll be returned to where they left off, in the fullness of time.
If the same potential customer executes a Google search, he or she is looking for information and is glad to receive lots of it to read.

However, if the same person is on Facebook, communicating with their friends, do they really want to open up an advertisement and follow another thread that takes them further away from their initial reason for logging on? I’m not sure.
What I do know though is that this development has much further to run. I am sure that Facebook and Twitter will be an important part of our on-line worlds – no matter what businesses we find ourselves running – and that as professional communicators, speakers will need to take account of this more and more.

Do not hesitate! Improve your social media skills now

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What would Napoleon Hill do? (Issue 23, Vol 03)

By Chris Davidson | Published: October 27, 2011

Unusually, I’m going to focus this edition of CDCD on one book (which shares the title of this broadcast), “What would Napoleon Hill do?”. It’s a distillation of Napoleon Hill’s 17 Principles of Success, drawn from his two books, Law of Success andThink and Grow Rich. The book is edited by Bill Hartley and Ann Hartley. It is not sponsored by, endorsed by, or affiliated with Napoleon Hill, (his family or heirs), or the Napoleon Hill Foundation. However, this doesn’t stop it being an excellent book in my view and essential reading for anyone who really wants to ‘make it’ in life.
Napoleon Hill’s own story is quite an amazing one and although this post is about you and your business, a scan across Hill’s life illustrates just how important other people are – you can’t do it all yourself:

• Hill’s mother died when he was nine years old and it was the young Napoleon’s step-mother, Martha Ramey Banner, who became the massive inspiration and driving force behind the Hill family – father and children.

• Hill’s meeting with Andrew Carnegie in 1908 is well documented as the meeting of two great minds. Carnegie himself left Scotland as a 13 year old in 1848. In 1901 he sold his steel empire to J P Morgan for $400 million (roughly $8 billion in today’s money).

Aided by Carnegie’s connections, Hill was able to interview many of the world’s most successful business people and document what made them tick. This effectively became his life’s work – and in this sense, he can justifiably claim to have made more money than Carnegie – it’s just that he didn’t make it himself, he showed other people how to make it.
That includes you too.

One of the early points brought out in the book is what Hill refers to as your definite chief aim. This is a very powerful concept and in the book Hill describes his process for boiling life down in such a way that you are able to describeprecisely what it is you desire and also to visualize it. These two points are vital and very different. Describing is something you do for other people, so as to help them grasp your ideas and help you in return. Visualizing is something you do for yourself – something that keeps you on the straight and narrow, focused and on-target.

Although your definite chief aim contains numbers, it is far from being a dry, analytical spreadsheet, or list of goals, seemingly disconnected from each other and reality. Your definite chief aim is written almost in story form. Mine is about four pages long, containing a mixture of narrative and goals.

Hill describes how reading your definite chief aim before you go to bed at night and before you start work in the morning really helps to keep you focused. In his section on visualization, he gives you a process for really seeing the results of your effort in your imagination. Visualization is very powerful. Its basis is that your mind can’t tell the difference between something that is real and something it is told is real (even though the ‘thing’ itself may not actually exist). Sounds complex and maybe my explanation is cumbersome, but the point is that it really works.

Please do yourself a favour – get your hands on the book and work through it cover to cover, just doing everything Hill suggests. Don’t try fiddling with the process. Don’t ask questions as to ‘why this?’ and ‘why that?’, just do what it says, cover to cover, and be amazed as your life changes for the better.
ISBN: 978-1-932429-59-6

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A potpourri for greater success (Issue 22, Vol 03)

By Chris Davidson | Published: October 25, 2011

This week I’d like to present a collection of ideas, thoughts, views, beliefs that help me keep a grip on life and make progress. If you have half a notion that you might find any of them valuable too, then feel free to use them as your own.
As far as I’m concerned the quote from John Ruskin pretty much sums up a good approach to life:
“When love and skill work together, expect a masterpiece.”
This leads us to two simple questions:

Do you love what you do?

Are you as skillful at it as you could be?

I hear a lot of people talking about how important ‘passion’ is in business. I disagree with them. I don’t think passion is remotely important. Why? Because passion is a short-term thing. Nobody can be at the height of passion for their entire lives about ‘being in business’ – how unreal is that? People can be in love for a lifetime though. And if you’re brave enough to start your own business and intend seeing it through good times and bad, then loving it will just make the whole process a lot easier.

Remember those show-biz tryouts where some poor hopeful sidles onto the stage and starts to sing? What’s the one word that strikes despair into their hearts as it reverberates around the auditorium?
“NEXT!”

That’s the director speaking – denoting that it’s time to cut your losses and get off the stage so that he or she can get on with the job. For the director, there is no emotion attached to the word. It is just a punctuation mark. A line that is drawn to separate one moment from the next – one failure from the possibility of finding success … “next”.

I’d suggest that learning to yell “next” a bit more often might be a useful thing to do. Be honest with yourself for a moment: How much of your life is taken up struggling on with things that you know are highly unlikely to bring you success?

I believe you need to draw a line under some of that stuff before your emotions, your energy and your potential success gets overwhelmed by stuff that simply isn’t going to work.
That’s not to say that I’m suggesting you should bounce from one thing to another, shouting “next!” all day long. It is vital you give each of your endeavours the chance to succeed – and sometimes that success takes its own sweet time. Keep an eye on progress though – and when you’re as certain as you reasonably can be that no further progress can be made, then put on your director’s hat and yell in the loudest voice you can muster:
“NEXT!”
________________________________________
There is a Buddhist mental trick that can come to the rescue in times when you are lost for an answer. When a problem is in front of you and your mind is refusing to come up with a solution, try this:

Close your eyes, calm your thoughts and count yourself backwards from 5 to 1. As you count, imagine entering a deep, dark, quiet place where all your memories are stored.

Bring your problem into focus and tell yourself that you know the answer, you just have to remember it.
Speak inside your mind to that subconscious place and tell it that the answer is buried in your memories and that it should drop everything else and go off to find it.
That’s all you do.

Now count yourself back to the present, put your problem to one side and get on with other things.
Your mind will now work on the assumption that you DO know the answer, rather than panic that you don’t.
In time, at an unexpected moment, a solution will pop into your head. And when it does, take note, it is almost certain to be right.

Improving your Effective Communication skills

Posted in CDCD Archive, CDCD Vol 03 | Tagged Business Planning, effective communication skills, Strategic planning | Leave a comment

How you ask a question determines the answer you get (Issue 21, Vol 03)

By Chris Davidson | Published: October 20, 2011

Improving your Effective Communication skills

I’m sure at some point in your life you asked someone, or been asked yourself, “What’s wrong?”

The answer was most probably something like, “Oh nothing really.”

How much more different would the answer have been, if the question had been phrased as, “If there was something wrong, what might it be?”

Sounds silly put like that, doesn’t it – and maybe it is a bit – but it serves to illustrate the main point of this post, which is:
How you ask a question determines the answer you get

This simple point is of critical importance to people presenting information. Frequently presenters pose questions for their audience to consider – either rhetorically or not – in an attempt to trigger a particular line of thought. However, if the language of the question isn’t carefully chosen, there’s a high risk of the presenter’s strategy failing.

For example, consider the simple question, “Why did you do that?”, asked a million times over all around the world. The tone of voice will determine whether it’s perceived as being accusatory or simply inquisitive, but either way the response will most probably be defensive to some degree and subjective, as opposed to factual. Now imagine asking the same person, “What issues did you consider when deciding what to do?”. This will produce a very different result, in that it leads the interviewee into considering and revealing information they perceive as factual, as distinct from their initial ‘gut reaction’.

The more effort you dedicate to posing exactly the right question, the more useful the response will be.
The same approach applies to giving ‘feedback’, although before we start on that one, I do have to repeat a plea: please pick some other word that ‘feedback’. I know the word is very popular management speak and well used by HR bods and the like, but I really hate it. Here’s why:

• The term ‘feedback’ has a technical meaning and for the most part feedback is something that design engineers don’t want. They dedicate a lot of time trying to get rid of feedback from the systems they design, so the very word has a negative connotation for many technical people.

• The word is also historical. The inclusion of the word ‘back’ roots the whole word in history – and history is something you can’t change. There is little point giving Fred or Mary a history lesson – focus instead on telling how they could be even better in the future – so how about using the term ‘feed-forward’ – so much more positive.
So, as regards giving feed-forward, let’s assume that your colleague has just giving a really poor presentation, and he or she has asked you for ‘feedback’, which of the following is most useful?

• “Well I guess you probably felt that it wasn’t very good really Mary/Fred. Don’t have so many slides in future and don’t keep looking back at them either. Also, the way in which you moved around seemed a bit aimless to me and not natural or coordinated with the message in any way.”

• “You presentation had a good structure Mary/Fred, which a clear beginning and call to action at the end. You could almost certainly get as good a result with fewer slides. You will carry the audience with more if you maintain eye contact, as opposed to looking at your slides. When you have a particularly important point to make, face up to the audience, make that all important eye contact, and deliver you point from one place, standing still.”

Whether you agree with the above points is neither here nor there, the key point is that the second message was essentially positive in that it gave Mary or Fred a specific set of actions to follow. The first message was negative in that it told what not to do, but crucially, it missed out what they ought to do.

Posted in CDCD Archive, CDCD Vol 03 | Tagged Consumer interaction, effective communication, effective communication skills, effective communications course, speaking | Leave a comment

Converting website visitors into buyers (Issue 20, Vol 03)

By Chris Davidson | Published: October 18, 2011

There is, quite rightly, a lot of focus on increasing the ‘traffic’ to websites. The general concept is that traffic (i.e. visitors) equals business – and broadly speaking I’d agree with this. A comparison with the off-line world is appropriate:
Consider two shops, side-by-side in the high street. All other things being equal, the shop that has the greater number of people walk through the door will more than likely do more business.
The clue lies in the phrase, “all other things being equal”. Your challenge is to make your website un-equal to your competitors, so you can maximise the traffic you do get. This is a distinct and different task from increasing the number of visitors in the first place.

There are two very important things you need to think about when it comes to converting website visitors into buyers:

1. The keyword/phrase that you are optimising for must be one that a potential buyer would use, as distinct from someone just seeking information. For example, I might type in “compact digital cameras” if I’m researching the market, thinking about buying a new camera. At this stage I’m not really in buying-mode. Later on, when I’ve made my decision and I type in “Nikon Coolpix s8000?, for example, I’m much more likely to buy exactly that model. Spend time thinking about your keywords. You can easily end up with a high Google ranking and no business, simply because you’re picking up people in ‘research-mode’ and not ‘buy-mode’.
What this illustrates is the need to optimise for two sorts of traffic – what I term ‘research traffic’ and ‘purchase traffic’. There is very little loyalty on the web – just because your site contains some great data about compact digital cameras, it doesn’t mean you’re going to get the business when the prospect has made up his or her mind and is ready to buy.

2. You now need to consider the page upon which the visitor lands, having clicked on your reference to “Nikon Coolpix s8000? (continuing the above example). Thing very hard about what it is that you want the visitor do to. In the example here, I want him or her to buy a camera, but you might want visitors to give you their email address and sign-up to your list. Make sure that everything on that page delivers a crystal clear message to the visitor as to what it is that you want him or her to do. Don’t leave any doubt in their mind.

To increase your understanding of how to instil precision and clarity into your messages you may want to consider a effective communication course

Posted in CDCD Archive, CDCD Vol 03 | Tagged Consumer interaction, Effective communications, internet marketing, technology | Leave a comment

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