Following my earlier post on writing web content I have come across a really interesting test called the we-we test. The idea here is that websites and in fact emails are very rarely read by more than one person at the same time and therefore should be written in the first person directly to the reader. A reader is interested in only two things when reading marekting content - what’s in it for me and and what do I have to do. in this way your content should be written to answer these questions in the least possible amount of text.

The we-we test analyses your content for words such as “we” or your company name relative to customer-centric terms. Theoretically, the more customer focused your content the better for selling. Here is a link to a little online tool you can try - the we-we test.

I tried it out for a couple of my mates sites and the results we as follows:

Calypso Backpackers in Cairns 8:92 (being 8% customer focussed and 92% self focussed)
Base Backpackers: 17:83
Beyond Backpackers: 40:60
Oz Experience: 47:53
Stray travel: 55:45
Spaceships (NZ): 70:30

Congratulations to Neil Geddes and James Rolleston - it is perhaps not surprising as we all know that like it or lump it Neil is a bloody good marketer and James continually reworks the Spaceships site - they have learn’t for a bottle of wine over lunch I will give all sorts of free consulting!!

I read an article a while ago from Forrester Research about moving your business to a design-centric business. This article was concerned about justifying web spend and getting the whole business focused on web design for success. The article proposed that in a design-centric business news of successes in the website are spread across the whole business. It really hit home to me the other day when I was talking firstly with Bruce Thurlow the Online Manager at Adventure Tours and Oz Experience and then the CEO Ken Hart.

I have been working with Bruce for awhile now on their web strategy and recently there has been a host of real successes in the project. For example, following our keyword research we choose to focus on a keyword phrase that took in the terms “holiday package”. Not terms that you would associate with either of these companies, but terms that we discovered are researched a plenty on the Internet. Anyway, since a bit of on-site optimisation and a wait for Google to index the relevant pages, sales of packages have gone up considerably.

It is not the rise in package sales that has surprised me so much, but the lack of realisation by Ken that this increased revenue was a direct result of the effort by Bruce and his team. Most people in an organisation of any size don’t understand the website, or the mechanics of the eCommerce. As such this example bought back the aforementioned article to me that within a web project all successes no matter what size should be promoted by the team responsible throughout the company. Evangalise you successes, tell your company stakeholders, and at the end of the day justify your existence - no one else in the company will.