Intent is essential in establishing a connection to explain and persuade towards an exchange between your organization and a consumer, whether on your homepage, an advertising marketing page, or elsewhere on your site.

When we look at a blog and the articles you’re publishing, or other long-form pages or cornerstone content, intent plays into how visitors will react to your CTAs, and how you can best support that person in taking their next step towards making a purchase decision.

One of the challenges businesses faces when investing in publishing longer, information-focused articles or pages on their site is falling into the trap of thinking like a publisher.

A publisher’s job is to grow time on site by offering more engaging content and promoting the consumption of that content, typically encouraging readers to click on an ad or buy a subscription. As a business, your blog is a tool to drive transactions that support your products and services, not your content, and not 3rd-party advertisers.

Learn the best practices that shift a business blog from being content-focused to conversion-focused with this 8 step guide.

In this guide, we highlight ways you can adapt your blog posts and long-form articles to enable those transactions that draw you closer to customers across all stages of their purchase journey. We’ll achieve this by walking through a series of best practices that helped shift one of our customers from a content-focused blog to a service-focused blog, increasing their service engagement, mailing list growth, and deal flow.

Here’s a look at the overall wireframe of a standard article on our client’s blog

The structure of the blog post was designed to facilitate action by consumers.

As a service provider first (not a news publication), it was critical to guide behaviour toward service transactions. As you scroll the page, various paths to services are highlighted through different calls-to-action (CTAs), with no visible promotional marketing content or other article links until the reader has seen all the service options available.

Let’s examine a version of this wireframe that isolates and highlights the CTAs so you can see how they work together as a user scrolls down the page.

From the top of the page down to the links in the footer, we can map the page by intent.

Let’s review the methodology and detail behind each of the CTAs corresponding to the numbers from the wireframe so you can map your pages by consumer intent.

1. 

   The above-the-fold second column to the right of the article is there for visitors who are ready to buy now. The subtle but consistently placed primary CTA allows people who are there to read to focus on the content. Those prepared to shop can also get started, whether it’s their first visit to the site or they’ve been clicking through a series of articles.

2. For users focused on the content, an inline CTA contextualized to the content leads them into the purchase funnel (rather than related content or articles, which move people sideways across the purchase funnel instead of further toward a sale). Remember, you’re a business first; as a primary and secondary objective, help your visitor take the next step, not get lost in more content. Placing other contextualized service links throughout the content encourages people to take their next step towards a purchase as you build trust with the content. Suppose the user continues to be focused on the content. In that case, they can scroll down and read through while secondary CTAs designed to support people with different levels of purchase intent follow along the side:
3. 

   Not ready to buy today? We can share a reminder when it’s time to renew so you can get the best rate.

4. 

   Did you arrive through a search engine to read our great content? You don’t know much about us? Here are all the services we offer to assist with your needs.

5. As the user reaches the end of the article, there’s a prominent CTA widget to entice into the purchase funnel, paired with a renewal reminder link if they’re not ready to shop today. This structure has the added benefit of working great on smartphones, where the second column on the right may be hidden or unavailable. This combined end-of-article get quotes CTA and renewal reminder is another view of the content higher in the side column. It’s not too close to being repetitive and doesn’t take away from the content. Still, it’s there, so these critical CTAs don’t get lost on a smartphone while supporting everyone in taking the next step towards a business goal as they finish reading the article.
6. 

   From there, we get to our third level of intent: someone hesitant to shop immediately or share their details for a renewal reminder but has connected with the content. Did you enjoy this article? Sign up for our newsletter.

7. Not ready to commit to providing any personal information? Here are some other articles you may enjoy. We’ll ensure to use a similar conversion-oriented wireframe structure on each of those as we build trust with you through our premium content.
8. Lastly, we have a rich footer highlighting services and key links that help illustrate the organization’s capabilities, give everyone a jumping-off point to other aspects of the site, and support SEO initiatives by sharing key content categories and cross-linking on every page. In this case, we also highlight contact information and encourage connecting with the organization by phone, email, or social channels. To the user, the company is a customer-first organization ready to help! Another step toward building trust as the consumer weighs their purchase options.

This progressive, methodical, and courteous approach to providing access to services and information supports users at different stages of their purchase journey.

The journey begins with their arrival on the website from a search engine. It extends to the delightful reading experience in your articles, fast and free quote delivery and seamless purchase process. Ensuring to cover all these levels of consumer intent with your wireframes is a sure way to build towards increased conversions and business success.

Our customer’s results

The improved clarity and accessibility of services, content, and actionable next steps improved deal flow across many articles that were well-ranking on search engines but saw limited service engagement.

A before and after comparison

For this customer, the ongoing investment in content began to drive several improved business outcomes. The mailing list grew, the organic search continued to be a key driver of site traffic, site visitors began engaging with various helpful services that were previously siloed away from the content-focused blog pages, and time-on-site shifted from reading to taking action towards business goals.

In part, these improvements helped bolster Kanetix.ca ahead of their 2018 acquisition by the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan.

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This has been a long time coming for Chris and the rest of the Unata team and we want to congratulate them on all the hard work that went into this launch.

Just over two years ago we were designing mockups for Unata which included Longo’s content and marketing as an aspirational goal. And now that goal has been realized. Amazing!

Available on Google Play and the App Store.

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A description from ‘shop’ owner Fatima Al Qadiri:

If you have an Instagram account, you can slap a price tag on anything, take a picture of it, and sell it. For instance, you could take this can of San Pellegrino, paint it pink, put a heart on it, call it yours, and declare it for sale. Even my grandmother has an Instagram business! She sells dried fruit.

Amazing. This is not only such a low-impact way of testing the market for a particular product, but it’s so smartly circumventing issues around modern shopping cart systems.

Specifically, the sellers can:

1. Easily update their inventory from their mobile phone.
2. Quickly share new inventory across multiple networks.
3. Easily conduct their business from their mobile phones by leveraging low-cost options like WhatsApp.
4. Leverage another network without the need to integrate APIs. In this case, by using Instagram directly.

No storefront maintenance, no hosting requirements, no need for a desktop or tablet, no fancy marketing. Just the goods.

This kind of lightweight testing is great for getting an understanding of market interest in your product and can lead to great insights, just like the four noted above.

If you have an app or product you’re looking to get out into the world and you’re not sure about your product market fit, talk to us. We can help with ideas and resources to test your product before you start building.

Get In Touch

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Product-free retail is interesting, but not as exciting as QR-code-free automated retail.

There’s still the point with QR codes where they don’t really work with produce, fragrances, or other things you want to touch and feel. And they’re slow for consumers. If you want to give all that up, you’d be better off shopping online and saving the trip to the store along with the patience and arm strain of photographing everything.

Both Toshiba and Fujitsu are working on automating the checkout process with smarter scanners.

Fujitsu has its ominous looking tunnel, with a conveyor belt that moves products almost 3 times faster than a traditional grocer checkout, all completely automated.

Meanwhile, Toshiba is using a more traditional scanner (as pictured above) with just enough smarts to read objects without worrying about scanning bar codes or inputting produce codes.

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Sadly, using barcodes as the method of tossing items into your shopping cart seems rather convoluted, but it’s an interesting first step. It would be much easier to touch and go than have to hold up your phone and align it to QR codes. QR codes, of course, mean you can just plaster a wall with a decal and you’re pretty much done, so it’s an easy step technically, if not entirely user friendly (I am no fan of QR codes — at the very least, let the user photograph the product, not a code).

Pretty cool, at any rate.

Update

Mavis Huntley with a first hand review.

Highlights:

A nice surprise was that there was free Wi-Fi in the space. It’s the attention to detail that go along way in executing technically advanced ideas.

I was surprised to find out that the experience of scanning items was also easy to use. I didn’t have to align the scanner exactly to the QR codes, which was good since some of the shelves were out of reach.

Alas, Marina Strauss reports, along my own line of thinking:

Still, while mobile retail is about to boom, the jury is still out on the use of QR codes, said Kaan Yigit, president of Solutions Research Group. Only 20 per cent of Canadian smartphone owners use them; those people are generally male and over half the users are under 30, he said.

For the virtual-store idea to work, shoppers first need to install the app and then use a QR code. “Unless what they are selling is highly exclusive or unique, there are just easier ways to buy the same thing – either at brick and mortar stores or online.”

Photo via marketingmag.ca.

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301 Front Street West
Toronto, Ontario M5V 2T6
Canada

This is all well and good when mailing a letter, but it presents a problem of hierarchy when used in a web form. The specific issue is with the order of the province, country and postal code.

Here’s how you’d generally find these fields organized in a standard checkout form.

So what’s the problem? For starters, every country has different regions (provinces, states, neither, etc.) but the user is being asked to specify which region they live in, before they’ve even decided what country they live in. This creates an issue where the user has to click or tab down past the region field, choose a country, then navigate back up to select their region.

We can make this process a whole lot simpler for the user by putting the country field before the region field, allowing the user to specify their country first. This may then update the form (using javascript) to display the applicable states or provinces for their country. This also gives the us the opportunity to update field labels to their proper values by country. For example, in Canada we have provinces and a postal code in place of states and a zip code.

Just like that we’ve made things a little easier for users. We can take it further, if you’re feeling a little more ambitious. It’s possible to determine the user’s city, province and country using their postal/zip code. To do this, you’d simply put the postal code before the city, province and country fields, and then evaluate it with Javascript which can automatically populate the following fields.

If you’re dealing with a North American audience, we can easily determine if a user is from Canada or the USA by detecting whether their postal/zip code begins with a number (USA) or a letter (Canada). This may throughly confuse your international shoppers, as people from the UK would be told they’re from Canada, but if you’re running a local delivery service, this would be useful.

Let’s focus on the Canadian postal code system first, because it’s nicely structured, and neat how much information you can gather from it.

Using the first letter alone, we can determine what province a user is from. In fact, the entire M designation is for Toronto alone. So if a user enters M, we know immediately they’re in Toronto, and can fill in the city.

Other locations are simple to figure out as well. We’ll simply need to reference the first 3 characters of the postal code, for example, L3Y & L3X are both postal codes for Newmarket.

A simple javascript object could be referenced to return the relevant data about a postal code. This process is nifty, and saves the user time when purchasing a product from your website. You can hop over to Wikipedia and check out a listing of all the active Canadian postal codes, and their respective provinces and cities.

Zip codes in the USA don’t seem as structured. For example, a zip code with the first digit of 1 could be the state of Delaware, New York or Pennsylvania. We can’t determine what state the user lives with a single digit alone, however, we can decypher that they live in the USA, so we can set the country, and update the region list, changing the label to “State” and populating the drop-down.

I don’t know enough about zip codes, but there is likely a pattern in the first few digits that would allow you to calculate what state the user lives in. You can find out more about zip codes at Wikipedia.

It is possible to use this technique for Canadian and American customers when you’re also serving international customers. The best way to do that would be to ask for the country first, then the postal code. That way you can be sure you’re suggesting the right information for the right country.

Be aware, if you decide to use a technique like this on your site, it’s very important to allow users to change your suggested responses. Why? The trouble with making a system smarter is that smart things often make dumb mistakes. There are going to be fringe cases that you can’t account for. For example, H0H 0H0 is the postal code for Santa Claus, but if you punched in H our system would assume you live in Quebec. These fringe cases drive users insane Make users upset when they can’t manually override them.

My personal encounter with such a system involves the Swiss Chalet online ordering system. For some reason, it thinks I live in Stouffville (which I don’t), and I can’t change it. I’ve learned to live with it, since my food always arrives, but the first time I ordered, it was very confusing and frustrating that I couldn’t set my city to Toronto manually.

It’s these little touches that will help make the experience of using your website a whole lot more exciting (yes, exciting!!) for your users. When a user gets to think less about using your site, they can focus a lot more on getting value from your content and services.

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