Making your website work for you (2)
Content is still king
Content is the soul of every website. Great websites have mastered the art of creating sticky content. Sticky content is relevant and responsive to the needs of the users. It is worth sharing.
Take the case of the British Broadcasting Corporation and its coverage of the 2012 London Olympics, for example. The BBC had planned for the Olympics many years in advance. The organisation wanted to have a significant share of voice before, during and after the games. The sports section of its website (BBC Sport online) had a page for every athlete, country, sport and venue.
The BBC provided over 2,500 hours of coverage across PC, mobile, tablet and connected TV viewers. Visitors were treated to over 24 High Definition (HD) live streams – with live data, statistics and information, while the action was ongoing. The hard work paid off. The organisation broke several records and set a standard for the future of content.
In all, about 55 million global browsers assessed BBC Sport online. There were about 106 million video views (62 million for live streams, 8 million for on-demand streams and 35m for clips). Mobile views were not left out – over 12 million. If the BBC had not planned for and created such sticky content, the revenue that accrued from this effort would have been none existent. The 2012 London Olympics was known as the Digital Olympics partly due to initiatives like these.
We must continuously anticipate the needs of our users and provide content on a real time basis that meet and hopefully exceed these needs. Take the example of a hotel located in a city that conducts a major annual carnival. Some weeks or months before the carnival begins, sticky content on the hotel website might include links to the carnival’s website (if it has one), information about the carnival’s programme of events, fun activities that the hotel plans to hold during the carnival, hotel’s gallery of photos and videos from past carnivals, carnival Pre-registration page, crèche and playground facilities for families during the carnival, etc.
Creating and sustaining a sticky content is hard work. It needs careful thought, research, time and resources.
The dividends however are big. Where possible don’t just create your own content.
User Generated Content is a tested and tried source of sticky content. If users create content they are more likely to share the content. Every week I send my email contacts the link to my article. The rule of thumb here is this – the more user generated content you have, the greater number of people you would reach. Each author is likely to share his/her content with his/her network. Go for it! It is a guaranteed win-win.
Calls to action
Every section of a website attempts to fulfill a particular need for the visitor. It could be a need to get the website’s visitor to read the complete information about a product, service, a part of the business, etc. A website needs to have specific actions that its visitor needs to take in order to deepen the relationship.
These are called ‘call to action” words or phrases. Examples include ‘find out more’ ‘more’, ‘click’, ‘read more’, ‘read’, ‘buy’, ‘join’, ‘register’, ‘subscribe’, ‘learn more’, ‘check out’, ‘agree, ‘sign up’, ‘view, ‘search’’. These words hopefully should lead visitors towards fulfilling the reason(s) why they visited the website in the first place. There are a number of websites where the calls to action are too few or not compelling enough. For others, the calls to actions are not clickable or if they are, they link to inappropriate content. Calls to action need to be constantly reviewed to ensure that they resonate with users. Calls to action can and do work. That’s how your email service provider got you to signed up in the first place. Make your calls to actions words and phrases work for you.
Treat your website like a piece of real estate
Some months ago, we planned to run a display (banner) advert campaign on the website of a leading media brand in a particular country. The media brand’s website was the most visited website in that country. We chose and paid for a package that would enable our banner stay on the website’s home page for a period of one month. We chose to have the advert placed besides the logo of the media brand. This was a prime spot – one that should attract sufficient impressions and clicks. We paid for the advert and it started running. However, things did not go as planned.
A few days later, we reviewed the performance of the advert. To our dismay we had received only a fraction of the number of impressions/clicks we expected to have had. On checking the media brand’s website, we were surprised to see another brand’s advert on the position we had paid for. We refreshed the page a number of times but the result was the same. For each time the page was refreshed a different advert (from another organisation) was displayed.
Finally, after refreshing the page seven times, our advert was displayed. On repeating the process again, we noticed that there were a total of nine adverts from nine different organisations. All the adverts rotated in a particular order. We were number seven on the rotation. This was neither what we expected nor what we paid for. When we took this up with the media organisation, their response was, “our website is a piece of real estate. That’s why we charge advertisers premium fees. If you pay more, we would move your position to number one or two. We did not sign an exclusivity clause with you for that position. We can have as many adverts run there as possible”. Although it was too late for us to do otherwise it was nevertheless a good lesson on the value of this “real estate”.
Culled from Punch Online
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