Can you remember the single best dining out experience you’ve ever had? Whether it was the best steak ever, stir-fry to die for, or that anniversary dinner at the Killer Italian Place, do you remember what it was that made the meal memorable? The company probably had a lot to do with it, but the context and environment had a BIG part in the whole thing, too.
This same principle holds for your content and whether it is share-worthy or not. If that serving of shrimp linguine had arrived in a Styrofoam container with a packet of generic grated cheese and a plastic fork, the night might have been memorable for entirely different reasons! You expect premium content to look like premium content, too.
You’ve slaved over this great piece of content, so don’t kill its transmission before it starts. Your site, the links from Facebook or Twitter that lead there, the process by which visitors get access to the content all communicate the value and attractiveness of your content. Your site and the landing page where your content is found are prime avenues to the world. The first impression you generate might determine whether the visitor bounces from the page or stays long enough to find out more about you and what you are up to.
There is an extension to this first impression, too. I’ve mentioned how your fans can closely identify with you, share, and promote you because they’re excited about the value you deliver and really like working with you. This gets rolled up into your site…if it looks good, is informative and entertaining, others will feel totally confident about promoting it. It becomes an extension of their self-identity. If your site is clunky, hard to navigate and unattractive…..well, you might want to think about a redesign and refresh!
One more thing about how visitors experience your site: when was the last time you checked your analytics to see how many are coming to your site from mobile devices of any kind? Especially since Google’s “Mobile-geddon” update earlier this year, you want to make sure that anyone visiting your site on their phone or tablet has a great experience. This goes hand-in-hand with the quality of the site (you can have a site that-mobile optimized and still looks pretty cheesy…), so make sure you work closely with your web developer and have a clear idea of what you wish the whole experience to be like.
You’ve all have “challenging” experiences with business sites. What is the absolute worst business or content #FAIL you’ve ever seen?
Authentic Voice 