Designing Web sites that appeal to the Senses

Taking advantage of the Experience Factor

We read the newspaper, watch television and listen to the radio, but we experience the Web, this is what makes 'The Website' the most powerful marketing tools available to marketing executives today. Unfortunately, the conventional wisdom, has stifled the 'experience factor' on site most of the presentations.

Traditional circulation based advertising biases and pitch mandated direct mail practices from metric-minded agencies have limited ability of businesses to take advantage of the capabilities of the Web to provide a more active, creative, and penetrating to promote direct sensory marketing objectives.

As consumers of information that we all filter what our mind considers irrelevant. When we go to a website where we immediately recognize the text and banner ads were placed and continue to ignore the rest of our visit. Even the TV commercials are becoming less effective, even when their cost increases. Yet people also look ahead and look for creative, entertaining advertising that capture our imagination and inform our ability to make better decisions about what we buy and we buy from.

Does Anybody Really Know What Works?

It 's easy to rely on after-the-fact number crunching and projected head numbing statistics to justify marketing campaigns as they are built, rather than on the less predictable, but most important of psychology and human nature. But in reality, the numbers tell the real story, or just protect-your-butt justification designed to ease the mind of everyone when it comes time to commit to a budget?

Take for example the entertainment industry. Here is an area that can tell you how many people saw a particular television show on a per minute basis. So, if these and other brain-cortex-boggling figures are so to speak, because the networks have a difficult time implementing programs that people watch, or is it to rip new potentially successful shows off the air based on their initial numbers before they ever had the chance to find an audience?

Television is like an expensive medium, its practitioners have come to rely on the safety honest, experienced, corny old formula, knowing that it is easier to sell sponsors what used to work, even when they know there is little chance of it working again. The fact is that nobody really knows what combination of stories, writers, actors and producers are going to capture the imagination of the public transport ".

What does this have to do with Web-marketing? Everything. The Web is not an expensive means of production and marketing that allows to experiment with different techniques and creative. Unless the business is a Web-service model based on advertising, there is no reason to limit the creative marketing concepts and worn number based incentive formats that for the most part, no longer work.

Design Concepts and sensory experience

The essence of good advertising and marketing elder brother, is the creative story telling, stories presented effectively, inform, persuade, and penetrate our consciousness based on their ability to tap into our sensory experiences. There has developed in recent years, two new approaches to design that acknowledge this powerful aspect of human nature: Design and sensory experience.

The implications of design and sensory experience can be found in everything from product development to package design. When it comes to design Senex're talking about how real people react to their experience with products and marketing presentations.

We experience the world through our senses: sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste. Stand in a supermarket and watch people shop for fruit and vegetables, pick them up, squeeze them, turn them over and over in search of defects, their smell, and if the store owner is not looking they can also have a taste. When people buy a car, you look at the specifications listed in the brochure, but still go to the showrooms, kick the tires, run your hands along the shinny new paint, the smell of the leather interior, and take that sucker for a test drive to see how it handles. This is to test the product through our senses - is that the sensory experience that becomes ingrained in our memory.

To date, most companies are lagging in their efforts to implement these new approaches Senex marketing communications on their websites because of their obsession with questions of optimization of search engines that focus on traffic volume rather that the quality of marketing message. Business seems to be stuck in a mindset of movement-based advertising and mass-market, which is against nature 'Long Tail' market niche of the Web and its ability to communicate through the presentation of information that appeals to a variety of ways.

Search Engine Optimization Issues

No one can 'deny the desire for website owners to attract a large number of viewers to their sites. But this desire has spawned an entire industry of people who claim to be able to provide website owners with the holy grail of search engine optimization: making first in organic search on your favorite search engine.

Not everyone is willing to pay for a S.E.O. expert to optimize your site can be number one in organic search. And of course there is the issue of paid search placement that trumps organic searches.

Fast as experts in search engine optimization to develop ways to beat the search engines, search engine experts change their algorithms, and my money is on the Google guys.

When it comes to Search Engine Optimization important to consider the following issues and questions:
1. Avoid tactics used search engine on your site degrade, obscure, or otherwise impair the ability of your website visitors to find information quickly?
2. Do not these tactics of search engine hinder your ability to effectively deliver your marketing message in a way that attracts attention, triggers relevant sensory experience, and incorporates the message into the memory of your visitors?
3. Not tactics like outbound reciprocal links and in-line body-text links send people away from your site when you want them to stick around and hear what you have to say?
4. You have excessive repetitive copy of the text on your site that will be indexed by search engines, rather than read by people for clear concise understanding?
5. Have you reduced your complex message or instructions for a series of bullet points that confuse rather than clarify?
6. Your tactics of search engines focus on traffic volume rather than quality?
7. And 'the traffic you're attracting leaving your site faster is coming?

The lesson we should learn from the design concepts Senex is that websites should be designed for people not search engines. The implementation of a marketing message clearly understood obtained by exploiting the psychological and emotional responses triggered by sensory experiences. That's how you need to communicate to an audience separated from you for the vastness of the Internet.

Senex Web Design Using audio and video techniques

People are hungry for information. In today's hectic world the average person needs to constantly update their knowledge of the evolving and more complex products and services. Things that were good for you yesterday, today they are harmful products that exist today will exist tomorrow. So no matter if you are a homemaker, retired, or a buyer for an international company, the need to know is constantly with us, and creates what Richard Saul Wurman has described as "Information Anxiety".

We simply do not have time to study everything you need to know or want to-know-that affects our business and personal life. We need information fast and in an easily digestible format. And we need that the information presented in a way that will make it easier for us to keep it.

The power of the Web-audio and video is their ability to illicit experiences by presenting information in a linear narrative that appeals to the senses of sound and sight. This ability attracts and focuses the attention of an audience and material you want to emphasize that the material is presented in an easily digestible, but clarifies the meaning and significance of critical data, and penetrate the consciousness of the audience so that the information is stored.

The following types of audio and video Senex Web-presentations can be used to deliver a variety of material:

1. Web-commercials and Email Campaigns

2. Special promotions and product offerings

3. Descriptions of products and overview

4. Testimonials and reviews

5. How to Instructions and Tutorials

6. Frequently Asked Questions and QandAs

7. Lectures by experts, analyzes and opinions

8. Background and history

9. Personality, Staff, and Business Profiles

Conclusion

All we want to sell something: a product, a service, a plan, idea, or even ourselves. And anyone who has ever run a commercial service will tell you the best way to sell is through human interaction and how best to emulate that on a Web site with audio-and video that uses design techniques and sensory experience to deliver the message....