Prioritizing in the attention economy Jul 1, 2007 12:00 PM
, LARRY BECKER
JobZone
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Start
at 10,000 feet. How well does your site articulate your unique selling
proposition, the reasons to buy from you and not your competitors? Have
you done the necessary soul-searching to come up with something you're
passionate about? If your message isn't important to you, it will ring
hollow when you try to convince someone else.
Now,
can you state your USP's case in 250 words? How about three sentences?
A seven-word tagline? If you can't nail this down, your site's
messaging and design will likely reflect this lack of focus.
As
a quick exercise, have your team list and rank the specific benefits
you offer your prospective customer. Next, survey both buyers and
nonbuyers, asking them to rank your internal list based on the
importance of each equity to their own purchase decisions. Ask them if
they were aware of each item on your list and for any omissions.
Periodically survey your customers to understand what they really want
to do on your site and how well they're currently able to do it.
With
these prioritized inventories in hand, you're in better shape to lead
with what's important to your user — and capture their attention.
Prioritize your page real estate
Drop
down to page design. The next time you're about to create a new page,
before you move a single pixel, think first things first. List each
element competing for placement on the page. Each should correspond to
an action your user can take, like buying, signing up, or even drilling
down. As design, make sure the item at the top of your list commands
the best real estate and the page's central visual focus.
Look
at the “add to cart” button on your product detail page. How well does
it draw attention and place each of the page's subordinate offers in
context?
When
you're designing for attention and action, your central offer needs to
be the most visually prominent. To avoid noise, your style guide will
need to go further than “bigger” and “more red.” You need a hierarchy.
As
always, clutter is the enemy, and a prime culprit on cluttered pages is
copy that's not optimized for the Web. Online, people read less and
scan more. Here again, to earn attention put first things first.
Create copy optimized for reading online
Your Website is not your print catalog. Remember these points when you're crafting online copy.
Write in journalism's inverted pyramid style: most important ideas first.
Omit needless words.
Write short sentences and short paragraphs.
Use frequent subheads, bulleted lists, and bolding.
Layer your content. Make what's most important to most people readable by default, link to the details.
Use front-loaded title tags and HTML headlines
Putting
first things first is key to getting attention from search spiders,
too. Your best strategy for natural search is to design your site for
users first, search engines second. The engines are looking for the
same thing as people: relevant content, formatted properly. Still,
there are some page elements that can benefit from search-specific
attention.
Page
titles, the 50-70 characters of text that appear in the chrome at the
top of your browser window, are powerful tools for telling the natural
search spiders what your page is about.
Make
them more effective with front-loading. Forget wasting characters on
“welcome.” Unless it describes what you sell, save the name of your
company for last. On each page, populate your title tags with the
keywords most relevant to that page. Place these words in descending
order of importance. Like your readers, the search spiders won't give
your content or your code an unlimited amount of attention.
Next,
let's look at headlines. A strong headline catches your reader's eye,
and under the hood, proper formatting makes your headline appealing to
search engines too.
In
your site's source code, make sure each page's main headline is always
encased within H1 tags. These tags help the engines recognize a
headline for what it is: a description of the most important content on
the page. At one time designers avoided H1 tags because of their ugly
default appearance. But you can use CSS (cascading style sheets) to
style these tags to your liking.
Optimize for the preview pane
Consider
your customer's inbox. Is there anywhere attention is at a greater
premium? To gauge success in this noisy space, among the metrics you
track is your e-mail open rate. But thanks to the preview pane, this is
becoming less important. Your user can consider your offer without ever
opening your message.
What
does the last e-mail your company sent look like within the preview
pane? Remember that in the latest versions of Outlook, the most popular
e-mail client, images are not loaded by default. That means if the only
content visible within the first two inches of your message is a
picture or graphical headline, the offer your team labored over will
read like this:
“Right-click
here to download pictures. To help protect your privacy, Outlook
prevented automatic download of this picture from the Internet.”
Here
again, the prioritizing front-loader prevails: make sure each of your
e-mails leads with a plain-text statement of your message's most
compelling offer. It's a small point, but it could increase your share
of the attention that's becoming harder to win.
Larry Becker is vice president at the Rimm-Kaufman Group, an online marketing agency.
