Designing Websites That Appeal To The Senses by Jerry Bader
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.
About the Author
Jerry Bader is Senior Partner at MRPwebmedia, a website design firm that
specializes in Web-audio and Web-video. Visit http://www.mrpwebmedia.com,
http://www.136words.com
http://www.sonicpersonality.com. Contact at info@mrpwebmedia.com or
telephone (905) 764-1246.
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