What Makes People Click: General Principles of Marketing

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What Makes People Click:
Marketing an IEP Program on the Web
The following was prepared as part of a Demonstration held at TESOL 2003, Baltimore, MD, USA, in March. It is an ongoing project. Go to the Main page to see the rest or take a look at work that has already been done for previous presentations:
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General Principles of Marketing

The world of business and marketing may be something we, as academics, tried studiously to avoid, but let's face it: we have a product; we are selling it; and if our potential customers don't know it's there, we'll go out of business. It's a little different on the web than in the brick and mortar world, but many general principles transfer and it's useful to know a little of both general marketing and web marketing.

General marketing principles

1. Don't make your customer angry. Sometimes when we do this we're not even aware of it. For example, when our user's machine freezes; when his/her backbutton is disabled; when he/she receives a 404 message; when he/she can't find necessary information; when flashing lights distract him/her from important text...these have all contributed to user anger to some degree, and sometimes it is built up over time until it explodes at an unlikely opportunity. Other times users leave, never to come back, and don't give you a reason why, as they are not completely aware of why, or it is too much trouble to write it down and tell you why.

2. Know your purpose. We are selling an education here; but remember, the purpose of your website may also include representing yourself well to people who are not your customers, and providing information to people who were attracted to you from another source. Some of your websites may have additional purposes: showcasing student work; providing resources, etc. Make your purpose clear; don't trick your user, or you'll violate the rule in #1.

3. Know your target audience (see ch. 4). The short version is: this is more complicated than it seems. Our target audience may be in any of the world's countries; may be more techno-savvy than we are; may be on an old or borrowed computer, or in a computer lab or an internet cafe; or may actually be the parents or relative of the student who is actually expected to attend.

4. Concentrate on holding their attention before trying to get their money....stated somewhat crassly, this came right out of the business world, but is nonetheless true for us. If they stay on our webpage, they like us, they bookmark our pretty site, our chances are becoming better all the time. They (we must consider the entire family that is sending one person) are spending a lot of money here and are not likely to decide quickly.

5. Know your Value Proposition: This is defined as the perceived benefits of what you offer from the customer's perspective...in other words, what do you offer, that others don't? What makes you unique? What can you provide, that you can provide better, cheaper, or even faster than someone else can? Sometimes it's a combination of things; i.e. good IEP program, good engineering school, big city with plenty to do, good weather, etc. The student often is more concerned about a long-range goal, which often includes returning home with some kind of degree, but which may not be attainable without effective English training, and he/she may have specific ideas about that training which you may have to guess.

6. Be aware of all the parameters of what you offer....you may not have been aware that some of your students really cared about what kind of opportunities they would have for, say, skateboarding, in your town, yet that may be important to someone, and perhaps already has been. Some are interested enough in a certain hobby or avocation to type it into their search query. Are you prepared? (see Ch. 7)

Good marketing is based on the assumption that someone out there would want what you offer, if only they knew you were there. We in our small town are not truly competing with schools in New York City, since there are very few people who really don't care what kind of place they will spend the next few years in. There are, however, places that are similar enough to us as to be indistinguishable to many prospective students, who may not understand the subtle differences between, say, Illinois and Louisiana. Our goal is to make sure they know about and find us quickly. And another goal, often underrated, is to represent ourselves correctly, so that they aren't so overtaken with disappointment when they arrive here, that they're unable to function. The web can provide orientation that will make them very comfortable and ease their transition, or it can deceive them and set us up for failure. As many in the ESL/EFL business know, Hollywood has already set up some expectations, that is, unless life in our town is exactly the way it is portrayed in the movies people have been watching.

Principles specific to the web

1. Usability is generally more important than design. It is true that design influences credibility (1); it is also true that design will influence your user's image of you in many ways, some of which we can only speculate. However, what is really important to the user who is clicking through your site is more likely to be price, location, calendar, size, number of students of his/her nationality; in a decent city or city nearby (to buy his/her kind of food)....and more mundane questions such as these. Can the user find them easily? With limited English? Within a click or two of the main page? If not, you are fighting the limits of their patience, the time they have allotted for their search of different sites, or even the budget, as many can only be on the web for short periods of time and even that is at great expense. Give them what they want; it's easier, and if they aren't coming to your place anyway, for whatever reason, you'll waste less of their time.

2. Their reaction to your site is based on expectations established from where they've been. For example, if it takes their computer a long time to load JavaScript (common problem) and your site requires it, they may not be so mad, if they're used to it and have plenty of time (2). However, if JavaScript is rare in their world, and your site takes twice as long to load as most others, it's got two strikes against it; if they leave, they're less likely to come back, and you may never know why.

Worst perhaps are the sites that are too busy. If a site is like Times Square to a cowboy, how much is a person really going to see? Nothing. You have to decide if your purpose is to dazzle someone, or draw them into a place where you want them to go. If they do find the place they're looking for, for example, the price, and like it, they are still damaged by the overall impression of a place that they would have trouble fitting into; a place where too much goes on at once.

3. Don't expect the same ratios that you get from print media or the phone. Why should you? It's a different media. If phone calls were free, you'd get more of them, but they'd be less serious. In web marketing of intensive English programs, we measure hits, inquiries, applications, I-20s, and actual students, with some variation in the process for some programs (3). Set up your own statistics and compare them to each other; don't compare too quickly to what happens elsewhere in the office. Most people are using all media simultaneously and are going to use the web specifically for what it does better than the phone or fax: provide a picture, provide access to e-mail addresses for instant, low-cost communication, provide specific important information, i.e. starting date of summer term or travel information. When they need to hear a voice, they use the phone. When they need to send money, they'll make their decision based on many factors. So it's also futile, to some degree, to try to separate "web traffic" from other kinds.

Footnotes

1. Credibility is actually quantified and quantifiable (see Internet news.com, 2002); this is at the same time a distatsteful aspect of marketing, and an intriguing aspect of the computer. Since the computer is frequently used by people to get health information, this can be a life and death issue. In our case, questions like these arise: How much do misspellings ruin one's credibility (in the eyes of people who don't know English well - perhaps not much)...or, when making a page in a foreign language: when we are presenting ourselves as language professionals, what is the consequence of unknowingly allowing stilted language on these pages? (see Ch. 8)

2. It's worth mentioning the JavaScript scare of 1999 or thereabouts, when large numbers of people disabled Javascript because of fear of a Netscape virus that was transmitted through it. In some places where passing viruses is a competitive art, Javascript may be disabled in more machines than those which have it, and, it may be disabled for a number of other reasons; this is certainly the case for Flash and some of the newer innovations (see Ch. 6)

3. The master at measuring this is Clark Egnor, of Marshall University, who has given several presentations on the subject in general. I am grateful to him for forwarding information to me, but I haven't included it in the presentation.

Sources:

Contois, A., and Reynolds, S. (n.d.). Marketing on the Web. Cyberfirms Web Development.
http://www.cyberfirms.com/marketing.html

Internetnews.com (2002, Oct. 31). Study: For site cred, looks matter. http://www.internetnews.com/IAR/article.php/1491871

Nielsen, J. (2002). Top Ten Guidelines for Homepage Usability. Alertbox 5/12/2002.
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20020512.html

Search Engine Forums (2001). Top 10 ways to irritate your visitors, an introduction to what NOT to do
http://gethighforums.com/Forum7/HTML/000264.html

Resources:

Web marketing of IEP's bibliography
Web Design bibliography

Copyright Thomas Leverett, 2003

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Photo above (Spider Web) by Jim Leverett.

What Makes People Click:Marketing an IEP Program on the Web

General Principles of Marketing

What Makes People Click:
Marketing an IEP Program on the Web