How to Grow, and NOT, Grow Sales: SalesMemes 54 – Clear Calls-to-Action

Hone Your Marketing Message – Follow These Four Levels Of Communication

One of the central keys to success is the ability to communicate accurately and effectively. It’s a skill you never stop learning, never stop using.

While communication can take many forms and serve many purposes, there’s a smart way to think about your efforts to communicate that will help you in almost every situation: it’s the Four Level Model.

The Four Level Model of communication is intended to help you focus on the essentials of the communications process, so your every utterance and written message conveys what you want with the maximum possible power. To use it, start thinking about your communications like this:

Level One – Why Is My Message Important?

There’s an old joke about a young boy whose parents are frantic because he never speaks. Finally, at age ten, eating some eggs for breakfast, he opens his mouth and says “Mother, please pass the salt.” Pandemonium and joy ensue, until eventually someone asks the boy why he hasn’t spoken for the first ten years of his life. His answer: “Until now, everything has been just fine.”

The point is simply that communication always has a purpose.

More to the point, you’ll make your communication more accurate and effective if you start by determining its purpose: What is important about your message? What exactly do you hope to accomplish? Why say it now rather than last month or next week? Nail down these elements, and you’ll have the basis for a powerful message.

Level Two – What Am I Trying To Convey?

Most people think they always know what they’re trying to say, but this is rarely true. Sure, you may know that you’re asking a specific person to do you a favor, or suggesting a course of action in a difficult situation, or something else. But most times, there’s much more going on in your messages. Look for and try to understand the deeper issues you’re conveying, perhaps unconsciously, such as: your own motivation for conveying the message, the words you’re choosing to use in your message, ideas and information you’re leaving out of the message, the emotional tone of your message, and so forth. By understanding these additional layers, you give yourself opportunities to convey a more accurate message.

Level Three – Who Am I Trying To Reach?

Communication involves messages directed at audiences. That’s why it’s important you identify and understand the people you are trying to reach with your message. These are people who already have a certain amount of relevant information, and who live within a complex set of responsibilities, opportunities, drives, and limitations. The effectiveness of your message depends heavily on communicating ideas that resonate with your intended audience.

Level Four – How Can I Stimulate The Reaction I Want?

After thinking through why you’re communicating, what you’re communicating, and to whom you’re communicating it, you’re finally in a good position to think about the reaction you want from your message, and the best way to generate that reaction. Your communication can employ factual information, emotional appeals, practical incentives, and other elements, which you can weave all together to seamlessly motivate and inspire your audience to do what you’re hoping for.

Not every message succeeds at stimulating the response you want, but using the Four Level Model provides a systematic way to maximize the chances that your next message will achieve a higher level of effectiveness.

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4 Simple Ways to Test if Your Website is Mobile-Friendly (aka, has a Responsive Design)

As the amount of web browsing done on smartphones and tablets continues to grow, the importance of having your website be mobile-friendly has never been more important. If your website isn’t easily accessible and navigable on mobile devices, you’re missing out on opportunities to connect with and convert potential customers.
It used to be that if you wanted your website to be mobile-friendly, you had to have a separate “mobile site”, often with a different web address than your desktop site. If a customer were to visit www.salesrenewal.com from a smartphone, its web server would detect that, and transparently forward them to m.salesrenewal.com, which would display the same information, but in a format that worked for phones. This approach, however, required considerable management to make sure content was always in sync on the two sites, and even when the content did match up properly, there were potential problems with search engines indexing the same content twice (which can hurt search engine rankings). Further, these mobile sites often were designed primarily for smart phones, so tablet users were still without a pleasant browsing experience.
Fortunately, there is a new technique for handling mobile browsing has arrived, called responsive website design. While it was first proposed in 2004, it wasn’t until 2010 that it was first put into use, and it didn’t become common until 2013. A good definition of responsive website design is (source):

“Responsive design is an approach to web page creation that makes use of flexible layouts, flexible images and cascading style sheet media queries. The goal of responsive design is to build web pages that detect the visitor’s screen size and orientation and change the layout accordingly.”

Put in less tech-y terms, that means that the design of a website will change dynamically based on the amount of space (in particular, the width)available to display a webpage: it still displays the same page elements, just rearranging them based on a set of rules in a style sheet. There can be multiple sets of these rules, so it’s possible to insure the website will look good for all display sizes. Since there’s only one site, there are no issues with content duplication, and the need for ongoing maintenance is greatly reduced.

Testing your website to see if it is mobile-friendly

If you’re wondering, “does my website work on a phone?” here are some easy ways to check if your website was built using responsive website design:
1. Resize your browser window
Since responsive websites change based on the amount of space available to display content, resizing a browser window on a desktop computer will activate the alternate rule sets. For example, on this site, once your browser window is narrower than 960 pixels, it switches from a two-column to a single-column layout. Once it’s narrower than 400 pixels, the navigation menu switches to a much more compact, mobile-friendly menu. If you see these same kinds of changes on your own website, it’s a good bet that your site is already responsive.
2. Browser tools & extensions
There are lots of great tools out there that will let you test different screen sizes to see how your website will display on different devices. One of our favorites is an extension for the Chrome web browser, the Responsive Web Design Tester.
3. Test on a phone
Or, even better, test on every phone you can find! While desktop-based tools can give you a good sense of how the site will display on a mobile device, there’s no substitute for looking at you website on an actual phone. Some interface elements – most notably menus – may work perfectly well when you have a mouse pointer to hover and click, but hitting the exact right spot with a fingertip can be a challenge. The opposite side of that coin is that some elements that work poorly on a desktop may function beautifully on a smartphone.
4. Test on a tablet
While smartphones are important, tablets shouldn’t be neglected in your testing, as their market share has also continued to grow, and while tablets generally have a much larger viewing area than a smartphone, they also have many of the same interface differences from desktop browsers. The best design for tablets often blends features from the desktop and mobile versions of a website.

Is it possible to make an existing website Responsive?

Absolutely and this is done all the time. When the Sales Renewal website was initially launched, for example, responsive website design did not exist, so we had a separate mobile site. As responsive design become more established, we switched over and killed the separate mobile site (saving a bit of $$ every month too). Other sites for which we’ve completed responsive conversions include Concord Flower Shop and Mendon Greenhouse and Florist. If you’re interested in a responsive conversion of your site and other ways we can help turn your website into an effective sales tool, contact us!

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How Google Works [Infographic]

From Website Magazine, a very informative infographic (download it).

And it’s amazing to think how much processing is going on in the fraction of a second Google takes before returning your results.