‘Every object in a state of uniform motion will remain in that state of motion unless an external force acts on it.’
Also known as ‘people won’t do shit till you make them’. (As implied by the use of the word force and its application in many current marketing practices.)
I like to reframe that a tiny bit.
‘People won’t do shit till you make it so easy, they fall into it’
The distinction lies in recognizing emotional intelligence. Don’t make. Inspire.
Today’s user has no time for anything less than intuitive and easy.
If it’s hard, it’s likely not worth it.
And if it’s not clear and compelling, why bother?
So Newton had it spot on!
Let me start at the beginning.
In the last 12-18 months, I’ve taken on a massive scaling up exercise that took me from being a one-woman show, with back-end support to being a digital strategy agency that’s well… ‘tiny but mighty’
We’ve fixed impressive problems for impressive people.
And through it all, I’ve lamented about how much I hate our website.
‘It bodes well that nobody hires us based on our website’ I’d moan. That we’re still limited by being passed around from name to name like we’re secret. Because if someone went to our website they’d leave forever. Forever. Legit.
It’s not like we haven’t tried to fix it in the last couple of years. We made improvements. We filled in budget gaps with tongue in cheek writing and clever use of visuals. We called in external people, and consultants on our rolls to help overhaul it. And some progress was made.
But overall our website was a big fat pile of interwebs shame for me. No, really.
Entirely not representative of what we could do for people.
That’s when we gave ourselves a good hard shake. We’re digital marketing strategists, dude. If you think it, we can likely magic it into being, and get it a following. And if we can do it for you, we can do it for ourselves. If we put on those grown-up pants and get to it.
So we played.
And played.
And drew on walls (whiteboard walls).
And pages.
We looked at what we wanted to say and how other people were saying it.
And what we loved about some websites.
And what we hated about many websites.
You know, all that good shit we make you do, and do for you. Yeah, some of that.
And we went at it with 3 goals:
- Keep it simplified and interactive, and get people to play. (More web space. Less website.)
- Deliver a customized content experience to each person depending on where your journey takes you.
- And the holy grail… deliver a different experience each time someone comes back. (ummm no, not just a blog post 🙄Surely you know me better than that if you’ve read this far)
Why?
Because… want to know the number one pain point we hear? It unifies all our client segments, whether large corporates or solopreneurs.
That pulling people to ‘homebase’ isn’t working anymore.
(ie: your website/microsite/content properties)
It’s why so many people are spending their time building houses on other people’s land, so to speak. Just to hear the sound of sweet feedback.
Because you’re either hearing crickets.
Or you’ve attracted a bunch of cicadas when you wanted crickets.
Or whichever way this metaphor goes.
My point is, you’re doing it wrong 🙂
If you want people to come in, and stay, it’s going to need to be an environment worth staying in.
If they’re coming in and leaving without buying.
Not at all biting on your retargeting.
Or worse still, not coming at all…
You’ve got the wrong people.
Or a crap experience.
In our case, we knew we had the right people. My rumbles of discomfort were entirely around the fact that our website-from-holy-hell was a variation of the brochure we all thought we killed in 2007.
So, we drew heavily from our heroes of simplification.
Simon Sinek.
(Inventor of Finding your ‘why’)
Marie Kondo.
(Authour of The life changing power of tidying up)
Tony Buzan.
(The inventor of mind mapping.)
Ryder Carrol.
(The inventor of the bullet journal)
I’m not saying their websites are what we drew from. While some work, our needs are specific. What we drew from them was their thinking.
Strip down to the basics.
Simplify.
(We obviously agree. Which is why the foundational framework that we apply to every. Single. Project. Is called 5 degrees of simplification™)
And we like to think that with a charming mix of paintbox-effect visuals, iconography, uber-simplified, mind-map-like UX delivery, and barely over a couple 1000 words of text in the entire website (barring the resources/blog) we think we’ve given people an idea of who we are and how we can serve.
But we wrote 1000s of words in the planning of this.
And drew 100s of sketches.
And 100s of process flow and UX and journey mapping diagrams.
There may or may not have been tear steaks amidst all that. We can’t confirm.
Simplification was achieved.
Because, as Newton said (ish), people won’t do shit (on your home base) unless you make it easy for them.
Go see what we did to ‘make it easy for them’.
And if you like, or have comments, or want to chat simplification/website pet peeves, you know who to drop a line.
Peace
Susan
