One of my favourite articles of the month coming up. It’s possible that your website is for customer support alone, and it’s possible that you have an online store, but my guess is that the primary objective of your website (you do have an objective, don’t you?) is lead generation. So let’s look at improving a lead generation website.

In 5 Simple Tips for Lead-Generation Sites on FutureNow’s Marketing Optimization Blog, author Bryan Eisenberg gives you some food for thought, with one tip standing out for me: use a two-part lead form. You need to find out more than a lead’s contact details, but you don’t want to put any off. This is the solution.

Here’s something where we in industry might learn from consumer websites. Many of these found long ago that “reviews” (or at least more descriptive pieces) worked far better than dry spec sheets in selling products, or at least getting response. Yet your average industrial website continues to reproduce data sheets, and that’s it.

Now, of course you need to have data sheets on a website. Customers need them. But they’re not enough. You need to sell the products too. I suspect the real reason that products often get no more than a data sheet is because the website was put together by web designers who had no idea what the company’s technology was all about (sound familiar?), and quite frankly, it took so much effort to brief the designers that the company just handed them their data sheets and said “get these on the site, that’ll do”.

But it won’t do, really. And if you’re going to make a serious effort to climb up the Google charts and to get serious traffic to your site, a bunch of PDFs is not enough. Read Why Product Reviews Are Better Than Product Descriptions on the Marketing Optimization Blog for more inspiration. Maybe it’s inappropriate to “review” your company’s products in glowing terms on your site, but certainly a chattier, more enthusiastic description would do more justice to the people who worked so hard to create them.

I’m assuming your website has one or more forms on it (if you’re not trying to capture visitors’ details you may as well pack up and go home now) …but have you tried to break those forms? You know the sort of thing - leaving vital information out, entering impossible email addresses, etc. Having a form which doesn’t ensure the right information is entered is like taking someone’s business card and not glancing down to check they haven’t given you their rail ticket instead.

The thought just occurred to me when I read the short post Noticeable Errors on Future Now’s Marketing Optimization Blog. It just shows how a good error message should Look. After all, someone filling in a form on your website actually wants your stuff, so make it as easy as possible for them. Even if they can’t fill in a form correctly.

In marketing, not being able to see the wood for the trees is our worst enemy. Today’s article is no quick fix to this - in fact, it’s quite a challenging read. But do find the time to think about See Like An Outsider In 3 Not-So-Easy (But Worth It) Steps from Future Now’s Marketing Optimization Blog because it really could get you thinking in the right direction.

I know that more than a few readers will be thinking of experimenting with online video to promote products and services, so it’s worth considering the particular requirements of the business market. Naturally, video isn’t as obvious a tool for us as it would be in the consumer space, but have a read of iPhone 3G Shows How to Use Online Video to Sell Products on Future Now’s Marketing Optimization Blog. Apple is, unsurprisingly, good at most aspects of marketing, and we can often learn a lot from watching what it does. With the iPhone 3G, Apple is making a measured pitch at the corporate market, so it’s interesting to see how it has tackled an area where we might expect the company to be slightly out of its comfort zone.

Today’s recommended reading is a relatively short article which appears to be the introduction to a series, but which is worth thinking about in isolation, especially for marketers like us who probably don’t have enough time to read really in-depth analyses. Superhero Copywriting Tips: ‘Holy Persuasion, Batman!’ from Future Now’s Marketing Optimization Blog looks at superheroes’ distinguishing traits (bear with me on this) and suggests how they could be applied to writing marketing copy.

Yes, it sounds silly. But sometimes it’s trivial-sounding stuff like this which actually sticks. Sometimes it’s the only stuff you can keep in the back of your mind when engaged in the task it’s supposed to be helping you with. I think you’ll get the idea of how it all works. Have a read.