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The Interest Stage of the Funnel ... Tell Me More

how do you design fans? And welcome back? It's pretty exciting. We're getting close to the end of Section one, which is great because that means we get to drink more bourbon, right? Which is totally normal, right? You you drink when you finish the section, so that's that's pretty cool. Carrying on from the last lecture we spoke about awareness and more more particularly that stage in the funnel and how it relates to effective and clear web design. Let's take a few minutes, I'm going to jump into some slides and we'll talk about some interesting aspects of how to design effectively for visitors who are in the interest stage of the buying final. So the idea here in the interest stage, we have a higher level of commitment of commercial commitment for your website visitors, People who have progressed, they are aware of your products, but now they're actually interested to learn more. They're not that highly committed yet. They haven't developed a desire for your product, but there's a medi...

um level of interest, the interest ages, it's actually more similar to the awareness stage and it is the desire stage. It's, it's a really not a high level of commitment. Your users are still in the process of determining what they need. It's less about what you offer and more about what they're in the market for. Okay, that's that's really um kind of the idea of people get into the interest stage very quickly, right? We spoke about in one of the previous lectures that the buying funnel is much, much more complex than just those four stages. There's a lot of back and forth. There's a lot of nuances in the stages and just a fleeting level of attention towards one of your products or services or towards a specific element on your landing page is enough to get somebody actually interested in kind of geared up about what you sell. What's very important to remember about interest is leave the marketing, leave the jargon. Leave, sort of, all these nice selling points that you might have for the final stages, you might have all these elements on any given landing page, which is fine. But as you understand, you want to develop an understanding of your website, visitors. It's important to understand that people who are just interested in your product or services that level of interest needs to be self directed and self selected. You're never going to convince somebody that they're interested in what you sell. Okay, That's important. You might convince somebody to buy what you sell if they desire what you sell. You might convince somebody that you're a better option than the competition. That's your job as a marketer, but you're never going to convince somebody that the should be interested in what you sell. Okay. That's an important distinction to remember. I want to take a minute to discuss this idea of person based election versus needs based selection and it's I'm gonna show you something really cool and it's quite relevant to how you display and how you offer information about your products and services. Person based election refers to giving content, giving information about your products and services that help a person identify with who they are. Their actual individual characteristics. People are identifying with how you relay that information on your website. And right over here on the right is a perfect example of this. This is a screenshot from a website called General Assembly dot com. There are large training company based out of new york city and as you see, they have a few different options for a person to navigate further into the funnel full time, part time online. Right? Those are characteristics of you of the user. They're not necessarily characteristics of their products. Are you a full time student? Do you identify as a part time student? Do you identify as an online student? I agree this is a bit of a hybrid. It could be identifying parts of the actual product, but mainly people are identifying with, oh, I'm a full time student, I want to learn more or I'm a part time student. I want to learn more. So they have a very good way of displaying that information and conveying, helping people self identify and self select based on the person based election method. Another advantage of the person based selection method. It gives users clarity and context that helps them make a decision faster. We're gonna talk in a second about needs based selection methods or needs based self selection, But a person's needs are more fleeting. Even a person's own consciousness. Their specific needs at any given time are less concrete in their mind than who identify as a person who are or who I how I identify based on my own individual characteristics. So it's oftentimes a very quick way. two in a very clear way to tell users oh, this is where I want to go on your website. This is the type of product I want to look into. This is the service that I want to continue to explore. Okay, that's another advantage of the person based selection system. And once again, this is a example of general assembly and you'll have all these slides. You can take a look at these pictures as you wish. Now here's an example of of needs based election and we're gonna talk about this image in a second, the needs based election method. It allows users to identify with a particular need that they're looking to meet or a specific question that they want answered. And the way you display your product information is ultimately going to be try to be aligned with the different potential needs of your visitors. Not all your visitors will have the same needs. Not all your visitors will have the same questions that they're looking to have answered this sort of system of the needs based election. Could it could increase interest by offering contextual and relevant information with little cognitive strain. There's no right or wrong way whether or not you should be offering your information or designing your site based on the needs based election method or the person based selection method. It all depends on what's gonna be most effective for your visitors. I'm gonna show you an interesting test that I ran in in a minute here. Person based election, it's usually more effective and relatable but like I said, it depends on your business. The reason why a person based election is better, like I just said, is it gives a person the clarity, a quicker context in which to identify what they're looking for because they understand their own characteristics in a much clearer and more easily defendable way than what their needs might be in the context of your products. Now take a look at this screenshot on the right. You see this is a this is a screenshot from a company called lendingtree, another big company. Many of you may have heard they know that a lot of their visitors to the site are looking for lots of different types of things. They offer lots of different types of products. So they have a really great breakdown with a needs based system. So they have over here mortgage loads, personal loans, credit cards, business loans, auto loans, student loans, right? And then you can also get a free credit score. These are none of these things identify the person. Are you poor? Are you rich? Are you depressed? Right. Those are things that are that are you a student, are you a stay at home mom? Those are all things that are characteristics of the person themselves which may relate. They might, there might be an overlap two Specific types of products and services. But lendingtree decided. And I'm sure that they have tested this, that having a needs based selection system towards the top of the funnel is more effective for their visitors. So that's a really cool thing over there. I want to talk to you about the preference usability test. We spoke about the five second test. We spoke about it a lot and we're gonna show you some more interesting five second tests in section two of this course. But the preference test and usability is also a really cool test. Um and this is the second usability test that we're gonna talk about. It's basically very simple. You're giving users at least two different images or two different product designs, mock ups, wire frames, it could be an icon, it could be anything two different iterations at least two. And you're simply, you're simply asking them Which one do you like better. But what makes a preference test? And you're gonna be running your own preference tests And I hope that you continue to run your own preference preference tests for many years to come. You want to give the user specific instructions and context to what they're looking at before you show them the images and ask them what they like. Better. If you're trying to test a color scheme, then you want to make mention of that. If you're trying to test a navigational structure, you want to specify that to the user. This is not like the five second test where you want to give the users as little information as possible and ask them these questions. This is a different sort of test. Also, what's important is the what, who and why? So give them a scenario, you're coming to the site and you're trying to find the right light bulb for the lights in your garage and you need to find information about the color temperature or the wattage, whatever it might be. So, when you're running a preference test, you want to design the preference test where the user could kind of step in the shoes of the type of visitor that you're looking to test. It's a very good test for getting an objective measure of clarity, you know, and for figuring out the best approach and which is the most the best design for your website. Once again, this goes back to admitting we have a problem often times, um, you know, the person who gets paid the highest in the company is the one who makes these designed these design decisions without much testing. But this preference test is very good for logos is very good for color schemes, could be a headline and call to action and it really does kind of outsource and take away the subjectivity or the opinions of just one or two people in your company or even your own opinion of what might be the best design. And here's a really really cool thing that I ran. This is a screenshot of a company's website and the company's name is Blue Host and this is from a page of their website where users could select which package they want for web website hosting. They offer website hosting solutions. They offer a bunch of different types of services. This is their main offering and this is how they have labeled their products, shared hosting, V. P. S, which stands for virtual private server and dedicated hosting. They're using a needs based selection system. Right. Do I need a shared server which is great for low traffic websites. Do I need a virtual private server which is good for kind of mid sized companies and websites that are getting a high level of traffic? Or do I need a dedicated server just for my website which is typically required by larger companies and enterprise level websites with very very high traffic volumes. Right. So they are using a needs based system as you can see here, it's those are the titles of their packages. Now I decided to make some modifications to this screenshot and I said let's see if their customers would better identify and prefer to be presented with package options that helped them identify based on a person based identification selection system. So I just changed the titles. All I did I left everything else the same. I just changed the titles of their packages. So the first one now is for bloggers and students. That would be the shared hosting package. Which is what the shared hosting packages for. It's for you know, smaller websites, bloggers and students. The VPs would be for small businesses that want to have, you know, more guarantees on site speed. They don't want to have any um traffic clogging whatever it is. And the and the dedicated for large companies. I dropped the names of the need of the actual product and I replaced them with self identifiers. And I ran this test we asked 25 respondents from Canada, the United States and the UK. This is the person based election. This is the two screenshots side by side. If you want to quickly see them as a comparison the needs based system on the left. The person based election system on the right And look at these results incredible. Wow, 84% of respondents Preferred the person based election system and only four people 16% of respondents. So they preferred the needs based system. Right. So statistically this has a 99% statistical confidence interval, which means that you could be 99% confident that these results are statistically valid. They would repeat themselves over and over and over again. Every time we ran this to 25 new respondents and that they're not just happenstance. They're not just chance. These are statistically valid results to a 99% confidence interval. So that's that's really, really interesting. There is no right or wrong when it comes to helping your website visitors develop interest in your packages, in your services and your products, how you display that information, whether whether it's going to be a person based election or needs based election, of course we know it's always self selected. You can never just mark the people in a gaudy or annoying or kind of obnoxious way. It's gonna always be self selected. Is it a person based election system or is it a needs based election system and there's no right or wrong answer. But as you can see in this test, there are times where one is clearly better than the other. So it's important for you to understand who your website visitors are and to get a sense of how you should display this information that will make it as clear and as easy and as simple for your website visitors to understand. So here's a quick exercise. Very simple right run your own preference test. You could be testing a logo, you could be testing a color scheme headline, a sub headline, a call to action your entire hero section a pricing table whatever you want to do. But don't forget the who, the what and the why. It doesn't really matter how many people you ask, try to ask four or five different people. This should be easier. You don't have to find strangers. You can find people, you know, there are a lot of tools online that you could use to kind of modify what a live web page looks like. So you could kind of mock up your own company's page real quickly and just take a screen grab of the two different styles and just ask different people which one do you like better And then ask them why what they would appeal to them about the decision about the design that they chose that they like better. And I think you're gonna get some interesting results if you've if you've gotten some interesting results from the previous exercises that we've had so far in this course, I hope you did. I definitely think you're gonna see some interesting and insightful results in this lecture as well. In the next lecture, we're gonna talk about desire that stage of the funnel and some some aspects that relate to web design and effective and clear design that are most relevant to your visitors who are in a further stage of the funnel, who are developing a desire for your products and who hopefully are leading towards the ultimate goal of acting and transacting and becoming customers and evangelizing and referring um and all the good things. So thanks for taking with me through this one, and we'll see you guys very soon in the next lecture.