Yes your website sucks... Here's how to change it. (Review)

Once people hear I'm studying digital marketing two things usually follow:

1) I've been meaning to make a website

or

2) Can you fix my website up?

I'll always at least look at it and while I always applaud the effort, the actual site is dismal.

So this week we're going to delve deep into the psychology of websites, persuasive design and pricing on your website to make it awesome.

Let's start off with the most important part... No it's not the design but rather the psychology behind the design.

Without the right psychological triggers all the design and copy will be pretty pointless.

So we've talked alot about System 1 and System 2 thinking and how we can utilize it in our marketing.

The same goes for our websites...

We want to appeal to their emotional desires and let them rationalize it later.

Your site should clearly state who it's made for and what benefits you provide for the reader.

To get really clear about what triggers to hit we can go down a 4 step process introduced by Talia Wolf that will help us create an emotional content strategy.

1) Emotional Competitor Analysis - Look at 10 -15 competitors or companies that would be targeting your customers. Grade them on messaging, colors, image and feelings.

2) Emotional SWOT - Do a swot analysis on the emotional strategy for your site and the industry

3) Emotional Content Strategy - Build your website to strengthen weaknesses and mitigate threats.

4) Test your emotional strategy vs their emotional strategy for fine tuning

Now you probably won't have the budget to run test but by doing the first thing you'll have exactly what you need to create a strong emotional content strategy. It'll help you find the colors in your design and choose the triggers you'll use to create the copy for your website.

Now that you know what emotions you want to invoke its time to create the copy and you should start with you Value Proposition.

Value Propositions are the reasons they would choose from you instead of the competitors.

This should answer your prospects question of "What's in it for me?" Assume that your prospect is skeptical and you must make compelling arguments for why they should trust you and do business with you. Once you answer the question of what's in it for me, you've got to prove it.

Now the Value Proposition for big companies are vastly different than what most people need. They are established and their customers have higher awareness.

But for most reading this, you have to build awareness and become established and we do that by driving home the problem and that you have the solution.

There's a dedicated formula given by Mokomo Price that gives us a good idea of how to create the best UVP.

So first we list our key features or the big things your product does, pinpoint those that are unique or special, list the pain points for those that are unique and define the desirable outcome for each pain.

Then we need to rank each pain/outcome by severity & frequency.

Severity - How annoying is this problem from 1 to 5? 1 being I don't even think about and 5 being an intolerable problem.

Frequency - How often does this occur from 1 to 5? 1 being once a year and 5 being daily or more.

These two should give you a score out of 10. The highest scoring pain outcome then gets edited into our UVP headline formula.

WRITE THIS DOWN!

No, seriously... write this down and use this for your website.

There's two approaches for writing copy: Your customers are either trying to achieve a desireable outcome or eliminating pain. So regardless of how much awareness or how established you aren't you still approach it the same way.

So if you're wanting to help them achieve a goal the formula for value propositions are:

Low Awareness Acheive a goal - [Acheieve specific goal] with the [only, largest, most, etc] [product type] that does [valuable thing]

Comparison Shopper Achieve a goal - The only [product type] that [achieves desirable goal] by [valuable thing]

Low Awareness Pain Avoidance - [Eliminate Pain] with the [only, largest, most] [product type] that [valuable, unique thing]

Comparison Shopper Pain Avoidance - THe only [product type] that [eliminates customers pain] by doing [valuable thing]

These 4 with the emotional content strategy will give you a very strong start to your website.

You can even rate your headline that you came up with: is it specific? is it unique? Does touch on emotional desires and trigggers? Is it clear? Is it succint?

Now you know the triggers, you know the unique value proposition and we need to define the action we want them to take. Whether that's to sign up for your newsletter or buy your solution to their problem, You've got to define the action and make it easy for them to take that action.

That leads into the part that everyone worries about first...

The visual design.

It's important... very important...

You have less than 50 milliseconds to get their attention that's good news and bad news.

Good news because the decision maker of the brain analyzes visuals 50x faster than copy so you can create visually appealing sites and get their attention.

Bad news because you only have 50 ms to get the visuals and messaging right to KEEP their attention.

Studies show that websites need to be two things in order for it to be considered visually appealing: 1) Predictable as in it is not really quirky or new and 2) Low complexity as in it's really clear what you do, what you want them to do.

So we want the visuals to be appealing and we want to use visual hierarchy to guide their attention. Use color and size contrast to make important things stand out. We need to leave a lot of white space so the only things that are left are things that are important.

Use Huge photography in backgrounds, use humans to direct attention and help customers make connections. Avoid big walls of text using only 4 line paragraphs and after every 2 paragraphs use subheading to help customers skim our web pages. Use arrows and triangles to point our customers down our website.

Only use one action per screen when they're ready. Asking for the action too soon will lead them ignore your offer. They won't engage because they don't know what they're buying or subscribing for. Give them time to figure out who you are and what you do before asking for action.

Now that you've got them engaging your offer, you have to get the pricing right.

First look at the context of your pricing. What implicit comparisons are they making? Who are the competitors? Have they used similar products before? What did they pay? What's their budget? Are the price sensitive (walmart) or are they value sensitive (target)? What other products are they considering that you can compare for them to make your product stand out?

Then you want to see what are the drivers that will drive them to buy? You've already done this throughout the process and so it's easy to know what Level driver you need to do?

Primary Drivers - Product Features

Level 2 - Product benefits

Level 3 - Emotions or goals of the benefit

Basic - THese are the biological drivers like avoidance of pain, pleasure, time or money.

Lastly you want to change your price perception using different persuasion tactics. You can add urgency, use the decoy effect, center stage effect where you put the offer you want in the middle as most default there, anchoring, show them whats most popular, or use social proof.

After going through this process you're going to have a well designed, high converting website.

This last week has been tough but this was a really rewarding week. This cxl institute course on digital psychology and persuasion is amazing. I can't believe it's almost over but I look forward to using this information to help build my skills and build stronger marketing.