Designing Websites That Appeal To The Senses
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Jerry Bader November 29, 2006
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Taking Advantage of The Experience Factor
We read the newspaper, we watch television, and we listen to the radio,
but we experience the Web; this is what makes 'The Website' one of the
most powerful marketing tools available to today's marketing
executives. Unfortunately conventional wisdom has stifled the
'experience factor' on most website presentations.
Traditional circulation based advertising biases and pitch-mandated
direct mail practices from metric-minded agencies have limited
businesses' ability to take advantage of the Web's capacity to provide
a more active, creative, and penetrating sensory experience aimed at
furthering marketing objectives.
As consumers of information we all filter what our mind considers
irrelevant. When we go to a website we quickly recognize where banner
and text advertisements have been placed and proceed to ignore them for
the rest of our visit. Even television ads are becoming increasing less
effective, even as their cost increases. Yet people will watch and even
look forward to creative, entertaining advertisements that capture our
imagination and inform our ability to make better decisions about what
we buy and who we buy from.
Does Anybody Really Know What Works?
It is easy to rely on after-the-fact number crunching and projected
head-numbing statistics to justify how marketing campaigns are
constructed rather than on the less predictable but more relevant
elements of psychology and human nature. But do numbers really tell the
true story, or are they just protect-your-butt justification designed
to ease everyone's mind when it comes time to commit to a budget?
Take the entertainment industry for example. Here is an industry
that can tell you how many people watched a particular television show
on a per minute basis. So if these and the other
cerebral-cortex-boggling figures are so telling, why do networks have
such a hard time delivering programs that people will watch; or do they
yank new potentially successful shows off-the-air based on their
initial numbers before they ever have a chance to find an audience?
Television is such an expensive medium, its practitioners have come
to rely on seemly safe, tried, hackneyed old formula, knowing that it
is easier to sell sponsors what used to work, even when they know there
is little chance of it working again. The fact is nobody really knows
what combination of stories, writers, actors and producers is going to
capture the publics' imagination.
So what does this have to do with Web-marketing? Everything. The
Web is not an expensive production medium and that allows marketers to
experiment with different techniques and creative. Unless your
Web-business is a circulation-based advertising model, there is no
reason to limit your creative marketing to worn-out concepts and
number-based incentive formats that for the most part, no longer work.
Sensory and Experience Design Concepts
The essence of good advertising and its big brother marketing, is
creative story telling; stories presented effectively, inform,
persuade, and penetrate our consciousness based on their ability to tap
into our sensory experiences. There has developed over the last few
years two new approaches to design that acknowledge this powerful
aspect of human nature: Sensory and Experience Design.
The implications of Sensory and Experience Design can be found in
everything from product development to package design. When we talk
about SenEx Design we are talking about how real people react to their
experience with products and marketing presentations.
We experience the world through our senses: sight, sound, touch,
smell, and taste. Stand in a supermarket and watch people shop for
fruit and vegetables; they pick them up, squeeze them, turn them over
and over looking for flaws, smell them, and if the store keeper isn't
looking they may even have a taste. When people buy a car, they look at
the specifications listed in the brochure, but they still go to the
showroom, kick the tires, run their hands along the shinny new paint,
smell the leather interior, and take that sucker for a test drive to
see how she handles. It's all about experiencing the product through
our senses - it's that sensory experience that becomes imbedded in our
memory.
To date most companies have lagged in their efforts to implement
these new SenEx marketing communication approaches on their websites
due to their obsession with search engine optimization issues that
focus on the volume of traffic rather than the quality of the marketing
message. Business seems to be stuck in a circulation-based advertising
and mass-market mindset that runs contrary to the Web's niche market
'Long Tail' nature and its ability to communicate by presenting
information that appeals to a variety of senses.
Search Engine Optimization Issues
No one will argue with the desire of website owners to attract
large numbers of viewers to their sites. But this desire has spawned an
entire industry of people claiming to be able to provide website owners
with the holy grail of search engine optimization: making it to the top
spot in an organic search on your favorite search engine.
Not everyone willing to pay for an S.E.O. expert to optimize his or
her site can be number one in an organic search. And of course there is
the issue of paid search placement that trumps organic searches.
As fast as search engine optimization experts develop ways to beat
the search engines, the experts at the search engines change their
algorithms, and my money is on the guys at Google.
When it comes to search engine optimization consider the following important issues and questions:
1. Do the search engine tactics employed on your site degrade,
obscure, or in some way diminish the ability of your website visitors
to quickly find the information they want?
2. Do these search engine tactics impede your ability to
effectively deliver your marketing message in a way that attracts
attention, triggers relevant sensory experience, and embeds your
message in your visitors' memories?
3. Do tactics like outbound reciprocal links and inline body-text
links send people away from your site when you want them to stick
around and hear what you have to say?
4. Do you have excessive repetitive copy-text on your site aimed at
being indexed by search engines rather than read by people for clear
concise understanding?
5. Have you reduced your complex message or instructions to a series of bulleted points that confuse rather than clarify?
6. Do your search engine tactics concentrate on the volume of traffic rather than the quality?
7. Is the traffic you're attracting leaving your site as fast as it's arriving?
The lesson we should learn from SenEx Design concepts is that
websites need to be designed for people not search engines. Delivering
a clearly understandable marketing message is achieved by tapping into
the psychological and emotional responses triggered by sensory
experiences. That is how you need to communicate to an audience
separated from you by the vast expanse of the Internet.
SenEx Web Design Using Audio and Video Techniques
People are hungry for information. In today's fast-paced world the
average person needs to constantly upgrade their knowledge of ever
changing and more complex products and services. Things that were good
for you yesterday today are harmful; products that don't exist today
will exist tomorrow. So it doesn't matter if you are a homemaker,
retiree, or a buyer for an international corporation, the need-to-know
is constantly with us and it creates what Richard Saul Wurman has
described as "Information Anxiety".
We just don't have the time to study everything we need-to-know or
want-to-know that affects our business and personal lives. We need the
information fast and in an easily digestible format. And we need that
information presented in a way that will make it easy for us to retain
it.
The power of Web-audio and video is their ability to illicit
experiences by presenting information in a linear narrative that
appeals to the senses of sound and sight. This ability attracts and
focuses an audience's attention on the material you want highlighted;
it presents that material in an easily digestible format; it clarifies
the meaning and significance of critical details; and it penetrates
viewers' consciousness so that the information is retained.
The following types of audio and video SenEx Web-presentations can be used to deliver a variety of material:
1. Web-commercials and Email Campaigns
2. Special Promotions and Product Offerings
3. Product Descriptions and Overviews
4. Testimonials and Reviews
5. How To Instructions and Tutorials
6. Frequently Asked Questions and Q&As
7. Expert Lectures, Analysis and Opinion
8. Background and History
9. Personality, Staff, and Business Profiles
Conclusion
We all have something we want to sell: a product, a service, a
plan, an idea, or even ourselves. And anyone who has ever run a sales
department will tell you the best way to sell is through human
interaction and the best way to emulate that on a website is with
Web-audio and video that uses Sensory and Experience Design techniques
to deliver the message.
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