The Real Story Behind What’s Missing on the New iPad

March 21, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Siri isn't on the new iPadThe reviews are in, at least the ones that count. Over 3 million consumers voted with their wallet in the first few days after the latest version of the iPad was released. There’s been the usual mix of reviews praising it as perfection, and others saying it’s not much more than a cash grab. However, what I was both surprised by – and impressed with – was the lack of Siri (Apple’s digital assistant on the iPhone) and Facetime (Apple’s version of Skype) over 4g networks.

Now since you probably already know that I’m a huge tech head, you may be wondering why I was impressed that something was intentionally left out (although maybe not if you recall my “missing list” post a while back) – especially since both are really software issues? 4g is certainly fast enough for Facetime to work well, and Siri would certainly run well on a device that is every bit as powerful as the iPhone 4s. So why did Apple choose not to include them?

Neither met Apple’s own internal minimum standards for delivering a reliable customer experience that they would be proud of. Let me explain. (If you aren’t familiar with Siri, please watch this first)

Siri records sound from your device, and then sends that sound over the internet to Apple servers who interpret the sound and send back a response. This means that on the Wi-Fi only (very popular) versions of the iPad customers would have heard a reply like “Sorry, I can’t help you with that right now” anytime they weren’t on a Wi-Fi network. Imagine if they saw an advertisement of an iPad running Siri and theirs often ”didn’t work” for a reason they likely do not understand – how frustrating! This isn’t an issue with an iPhone because except in airplane mode (or if the user is techy enough to navigate multiple menus to turn off cellular data) it is always connected via 3g to process the data and give Siri its witty reply to your request.

Similar story with Facetime. 4g coverage isn’t wide spread enough to reliable offer a seamless experience, and a customer’s data plan could be eaten up real fast during a Facetime call causing a larger than expected data bill and – again – an even more negative (and expensive) experience.

This is all layered on the idea that Apple products are “just supposed to work.” A perceived failure rate (remember – the software isn’t failing) of even 15% on these two singular experiences could have harmed Apple’s brand. They weren’t willing to risk it, and I applaud them for it.

Some people say Apple thinks that the people who buy their products are too stupid and that is why they make decisions to “protect people from themselves.” I think they have too much respect for their reputation, the product they deliver, and their customers to offer an unreliable experience.

What do you think? Should they have included them? Is it brave or stupid to make a decision like that? Why?

Filed Under: Customer Loyalty, Marketing Psychology, Technology Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

A Builder’s Online Strategy: Elicit a Response

April 18, 2011 By 4 Comments

Elicit a response from your websiteQuick review – the 7 E’s are:

1. EARN Google’s trust
2. ENTICE people to visit your site
3. ENGAGE those “just browsing”
4. EMPHASIZE your differences
5. ENSURE you’re part of the short list
6. ELICIT a response – generate a lead and convert it
7. EMPLOY your happy home owners to earn more trust

The goal of any marketing activity – online included – is to create a lead. Never forget that your website is part of your sales funnel. Yes, it’s also your pretty online model home with lots of great content, photos, etc – but those things are what draw your prospects in, and now you need to get them to take action. The first thing is that taking action must be as easy as possible:
E – Eliminate all requirements except for email address
A – Allow multiple ways for the prospect to take action
S – Sell the benefit of taking the action
Y – “Y” not – don’t make it seem like a commitment

Eliminate requirements

Once someone begins to attempt to contact you, don’t screw things up by requiring too much information up front from your prospect – an email is all you should require. The dating analogy always works well in sales and marketing. Suppose someone of the opposite sex says hello to you – do you require them to show you a clean verified background check and clean testing before you continue your conversation? After all, some will complain, “I don’t want to waste my time if they aren’t good.” This is 2011 – your problem is NOT to weed out all the tire kicker prospects so you have time to work with the “serious” buyers. I’ve already talked to this in other posts, but any traffic (walk-ins, phone calls, emails, referrals) you get in today’s world should be considered “serious.” Any.

Allow multiple ways for the prospect take action

I’m not so much talking about the medium they use (contact form, email, phone, etc…), but I’m talking about the total number of ways to get to connect to your online sales councilor or your on site sales team. On the Heartland Homes main site there are 10 (I may have even missed one or two) different ways to contact our sales team. Wherever the prospect is when they decide they want to respond – we’re ready.

Sell the benefit

Don’t be rude. Asking someone to fill out a form or email without telling them why they should is just plain rude. Make sure it is easy for your prospect to understand why they should take the next step. Common benefits are more specific information about a house type or community than is currently listed, a helpful service, or a free needs analysis to get tailored advice on what will best suit their needs.

“Y” Not

Don’t make it seem like a commitment – that’s why you don’t often see a big BUY NOW button as the conversion method for home builders. Let them know they’re going to be interacting with someone who is “not in sales” – of course they WILL be, but the prospect should never catch a hint of commission breath.

After you make sure you’ve made it easy – then consider ways to elicit a response that are a little more subtle yet effective. One particularly effective way is to listen up and pay attention. Here are a few quick examples of what I mean:

1. On the Heartland Homes site when you view a particular home, the site tracks it without you needing to log in (easy). So that when you visit another community, the homes you’ve already spent the most time viewing will show as a featured home.Listen Up! Featured Homes that change as you browse

2. When you select a particular home type, and then select a community that offers that home – the site displays a brightly colored box announcing the match you’ve created and an offer to customize it for you.Listen up! Selected home / community match

3. If your site has a search box, make sure you are monitoring what things are being searched for. It’s free market research. Take action on the most used search terms by creating relevant content or improving existing content.

Don’t be “that site” that treats everyone the same and doesn’t listen or pay attention. That’s not going to help you stand out – or generate more leads.

So how do you try and elecit a response from your prospects? What has worked the best for you or your company?

Filed Under: Marketing Psychology, Marketing Strategy, Marketing Systems, Selling Strategy Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

A Builder’s Online Strategy: Entice People to Visit Your Site

March 14, 2011 By 8 Comments

Quick review – the 7 E’s are:

1. EARN Google’s trust
2. ENTICE people to visit your site
3. ENGAGE those “just browsing”
4. EMPHASIZE your differences
5. ENSURE you’re part of the short list
6. ELICIT a response – generate a lead and convert it
7. EMPLOY your happy home owners to earn more trust

Entice People To Visit Your SiteThe first two (EARN & ENTICE) are both working to drive traffic to your website, but by using very different tactics.

EARN is working hard to make sure you show up when people are deliberately searching for you or your category when trying to solve their problem. It’s pretty direct – open and honest.

ENTICING people to visit your site is a bit more like going to the “dark side”, but it should still be a part of your strategy.

No, I’m not recommending you run a banner campaign that says “Obama wants to give you free mortgages!” with barnyard animals partying in an infinite loop. THAT is just ridiculous. No, what I’m talking about is much more subtle – yet still effective. There are two ground rules you need to keep in mind:

1. Don’t lie – at least not if you ever want them to trust you again
2. Give value – make the landing page full of useful and relevant information

There are plenty of mediums for enticing people to visit your site – AdWords, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, banner ads, blogs, Trulia.com, Zillow.com, Realtor.com, and too many others to name here.

All of these work to capture those who are on the fringes of becoming qualified leads. Perhaps they are only looking at used homes right now, or they are searching for interior design tips because they are thinking about remodeling – the point is they may miss your SEO work altogether. However, being a home builder you probably have content they would find interesting (I haven’t met a woman yet who doesn’t like to look at pictures or videos of beautiful homes) and you just need to entice them to take a look.

Yes, even syndicating your community, house, and inventory information through a tool like NewHomeFeed or the BDX also counts as enticing because they syndicate that content to many sites that primarily cater to those searching for a used home.

This should NOT be more than 15% of your online budget, and you shouldn’t even go beyond Adwords without having a good tracking mechanism so you can see what works and adjust over time.

Everyone knows how important Adwords are, so I thought I’d give you an example from a recent Facebook campaign I ran over the course of only one week. I created a targeted ad to run and used an ENTICING message – subtle but relative to those who may soon be thinking of moving. The result? 899,956 impressions (those were free) and 453 clicks (those cost me $259.90).

Example Facebook Campaign - Builder Online Strategy

I can hear the hecklers – “so what – it was probably all worthless traffic.” Nope. The average visitor stayed on the site for over 5 minutes, viewed 8 pages - they ended up having a significant interaction with our brand. Best of all, 5 people went on to request additional information bringing my cost per lead for the campaign to $51.98.

Filed Under: Marketing Strategy, Marketing Systems, Technology Tagged With: , , , , ,

A Builder’s Online Strategy: Earn Google’s Trust

February 28, 2011 By 7 Comments

Earn Googles Trust - Home Builder's Online StrategyI was recently asked to give a brief outline of my online strategy for home builders, and I thought it would make for a great series of blog posts. So here it is in an easy to remember form – the 7 E’s of a home builder’s online strategy.

1. EARN Google’s trust
2. ENTICE people to visit your site
3. ENGAGE those “just browsing”
4. EMPHASIZE your differences
5. ENSURE you’re part of the short list
6. ELICIT a response – generate a lead and convert it
7. EMPLOY your happy home owners to earn more trust

First up…

EARN Google’s trust

Building a meaningful relationship with Google can be harder than it was to find and marry your wife – but the benefits are nearly as great. Recent reports still show Google with a commanding lead of the search market with 65.6% share. The closest competitor, Yahoo! only has 16.1%. By climbing to the top or organic search results for the right search terms you’ll see very high ROI.

Home Builder Analytics Search Breakdown

Here is a sample analytic report showing my builder's search engine breakout - guess who's #1?

Like any relationship though it takes time and you have to build trust. You do this through smart SEO work, and by creating original content that others will link to and find helpful (note – this may, and probably will, mean that the content does not do a hard sell of your product or service). Did I mention it takes time? The good news is that the time will pass anyway, and at least you started before all your competition to get a head start… right? (warning: don’t go cheap on this… remember, it’s your highest ROI)

Before employing a fantastic professional SEO team – organic search accounted for roughly 30% of our website traffic. It now accounts for 60.3% of total traffic. Remember, that’s traffic where my cost per click is now $0!

Home Builder Analytics All Lead Sources

This screen shot shows you the percentage of web traffic currently coming to my builder's site via search engines (PPC = $0)

 

What’s your strategy for earning Google’s trust?

Tomorrow I’ll talk about online strategy #2 – ENTICE people to visit your site

Filed Under: Marketing Strategy, Marketing Systems, Technology Tagged With: , , , , , ,

The iPad For Home Builders – Must Have Apps

January 11, 2011 By 1 Comment

iPad Apps for Home BuildersOver 8 million iPads have been sold and yet one of the most common questions I’m asked when someone sees the one that I carry with me (everywhere) is “has that been useful for you?” The answer is an absolute yes – more useful then I ever would have thought. The hardware is beautiful and packs some amazing tech, but as always the most important thing is the software that’s installed – and for an iPad that means apps.

There are now more than 300,000 apps available for the iPhone and iPad, but don’t worry. I’ve cut through the clutter to give you a list of the must-have apps that will make you more efficient while in the office, in the sales office, or on the job site.

Todo
First things first – you need to get (or stay) organized. Todo helps you focus on what matters most, keep track of everything, and allows you to integrate the Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology or your own. It’s good for short notes as well (use Soundnote for long in-depth notes at meetings). It also syncs to the cloud so you can view your lists/notes from any web browser. Very intuitive.

Teamviewer
With TeamViewer you can remotely control any computer as if you were sitting right in front of it – even through firewalls. All you have to do is start a small application, which does not even require installation or administrative rights. It allows me to have access to the speed and power of my laptop at the touch of my fingertips (as well as access to my company’s files on the internal network). This app may not be your IT manager’s favorite thing, but it will quickly become one of yours.

PDF Highlighter (no longer a top pick – see updates below)
Highlighter is a powerful PDF annotation tool. You could also use it to read your PDF files, but iBooks does that better. You can add text notes do freehand sketches of a custom option or change order — all saved directly to the PDF file, so that you can review them later on your Mac or PC using standard software like Acrobat Reader.

Adobe Ideas
Adobe ideas is basically like an “Adobe Illustrator Lite.” You can draw on a canvas to make notes or communicate ideas. The best part is that you can use any photo on your iPad as the canvas to allow you to draw over the picture. Want to review how the new landscape plan will make that old spec home feel new again? Or perhaps you just want to show the trim carpenter exactly how you want that mantle around the fireplace to look – this app does the job!

Dropbox
Dropbox allows you to sync files from multiple sources (home pc, work pc, iPad) and is one of the best ways to organize files for your iPad. Many other apps support Dropbox as well, so for example if you need to open a blueprint file in PDF Highlighter to mark a custom change… you can open it right from Dropbox.

SoundNote (no longer a top pick – see updates below)
Have you ever wished you had more detailed notes of important meetings you attend? Would you like to have 100% complete notes, and only need to type a handful of words? SoundNote is the answer! It records audio of the meeting, and syncs the timing of the audio with the words you type on your iPad. The final result? All you need to do is type the headings when the topic changes and you’ll pick up playback just as you start talking about that subject.

Skype
The same powerful voice communication tool is available for use on your iPad (and video calls on your iPhone as shown by Mike Lyon and Zach Schabot). Grab this one now for the audio alone, and when the new iPad is released with the cameras then you’ll be able ready to join the video calling party.

Flipboard
You don’t want to fill up your iPad with too many redundant news readers to stay on top of current events and social trends… so just grab the best news aggregator around and make your own digital magazine based on topics you enjoy reading about. It also keeps you informed on your Facebook and Twitter connections by displaying them in a fun tabloid layout. There’s a reason why many web sites named it the app of the year.

Golfshot
You can’t be working ALL the time, and this app will make even those who have trouble breaking 100 have a blast on the golf course. It uses the built in GPS to follow you around the course and give you accurate yardages – and it allows you to track your stats, club selections, etc for good laughs after the round is over.

Of course, you also need to grab the full array of social media apps – Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, LinkedIn, etc… that goes without saying (although you’ll be amazed how much you can do in Flipboard).

I’d love to hear what apps you’ve discovered that you can’t live without. Let me (and everyone else) know by commenting below!

UPDATE: December 26th, 2012
Here are some new updates and additions to the list.

PDF Expert
If you find yourself working with PDF files a lot then this is by far the best one for you. It allows you to sync directly with a Dropbox or other cloud service for easy access to your files. This feature alone makes it a must-have, but it still has all the same functionality that PDF Highlighter had as well.

Notability
If you liked the Soundnote app, but wished for more organization for your files then this is the one for you. There is no app for iPhone yet from this developer, but you can export all your notes to dropbox for viewing on your phone. This app has everything AND the kitchen sink for note takers.

Filed Under: Technology Tagged With: , ,