Customer Carewords - Gerry McGovern - Higher Education Marketing

Customer Carewords with Gerry McGovern

Your Key to Creating Engaging Website Content

Customer Carewords helps you create customer-centric, task focused websites that generate higher conversion results from your key audiences.

Carewords project results are in use at the BBC, IKEA, Wells Fargo, Pioneer Electronics, Rolls Royce and at University of North Carolina's Kenan-Flagler Business School, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University and the UC Davis Agricultural and Natural Resources Division.

Customer Carewords is not just for the web.

Once you understand the words that your customers really care about you can use these words in all your marketing materials, including brochures, print and radio ads, and anything else that you use to bring people to your website.

Customer Carewords goes beyond keywords for Search Engine Optimization.

Keywords bring customers to your website, but Carewords bring them through your website to a point where they complete tasks such as making an inquiry, completing an application, or donating to the annual fund. Keywords and Carewords work together to give you a total web marketing solution.

Keywords are about traffic and Carewords are about conversion.

Customer Carewords and usability are both customer-centric strategies. They focus on what the customer needs first rather than what organizations want to tell the customer. Websites that empower customers succeed. Websites that talk at the customer fail.

Take the next step. Explore how a Customer Carewords program will help improve the marketing results of your website.

Call me at 248.766.6425 or contact me by email at bob@bobjohnsonconsulting.com

Carewords Research is Your First Step to a New Level of Website Engagement

Why explore the words that your website visitors care most about?

You can achieve two important results:
- Higher yield at each stage of your recruitment cycle.
- Higher annual fund participation by alumni.
Your website must engage people. Customer Carewords start that engagement from the first moment someone enters your front page and sees the words that matter most to them.
Your website must speak the language that's most important to those who visit you, especially prospective students, donors, and alumni. Customer Carewords tell you how to start the conversation. And how to keep it alive afterwards in the content you prepare throughout your website.

Don't rely on conventional wisdom or casual conversation to find the important words that will immediately attract people's attention when they arrive at your site. The stakes are too important for that.

Customer Carewords is a program created by internationally recognized web content expert Gerry McGovern (www.customercarewords.com/). Gerry is author of Content Critical, The Web Content Style Guide, and Killer Web Content. He has spent 12 years developing a unique set of tools and techniques to identify the words that are most important to the people who visit your site. Getting these words exactly right is the difference between an average-performance website, and a high-performance one where more people are completing high-value tasks.

Gerry and I have joined forces to bring the power of the Customer Carewords program to colleges and universities in the United States and Canada.

When you implement Customer Carewords, you get:

The words your audiences love. You can immediately improve your website with engaging web content, without having to spend anything on expensive redesigns. Completion of essential tasks will increase when you improve content in critical areas to increase engagement. Carewords identifies what's most important to your visitors so that you don't waste time on less valuable improvements.
The words that your audiences hate. This allows you to say "No" to filler content, and helps you remove unwanted content from your website.
A prioritized and defensible list of your visitors' top tasks as voted for by people who use your website, most often in an email survey. This makes it much easier to prove the value of what you are doing, because you're on the side of your audience.
An audience-driven information architecture (classification, navigation, layout) that will be hugely helpful to set priorities if you plan to redesign your website. Carewords give you strong guidance to make the right IA decisions for the top levels of your website.
Greater search engine visibility. While "keywords" used in searches and "Carewords" that keep people on your website can be different, research results will let you create as close a match as possible to focus the words used in key areas such as page titles and primary page headings.

How Customer Carewords works
It's a three-step process:

Prepare a list of potential Customer Carewords
Get a sample of your web visitors to vote for their favorite Customer Carewords in our survey
Analyze the results

Step 1: Prepare a list of potential Customer Carewords
We have a systematic approach for helping you assemble a comprehensive list of about 100 potential Customer Carewords to test with an audience. We work together to get these potential Customer Carewords from:

Objectives: Analyze the goals and objectives of your university. What words stand out?
Ask the customer: Brainstorm with students, faculty, staff and alumni.
Do an analysis of search behavior of your customers.
Examine other college and university websites, especially your competitors, for important words.

Our master list of higher education Carewords from previous projects and web reviews.

Step 2: Get people to choose their favorite Customer Carewords
We've helped you get your list of potential Customer Carewords. Now it's time to get people to choose their favorites in an online survey. We aim to get a minimum of 100 people to choose. Increasing responses to 400 yields even more valuable information. You need to carefully target your audience and we help you do that.

When asking someone to choose from the list, we make sure the following conditions are met:

People select only the top ten Customer Carewords of their choice, and score these, with their first choice getting 10, their second getting 9, and so on
They do it on their own.
They do it quickly; 10 minutes should be enough. What we want is their gut instinct choices.

Step 3: Analyze the results
We have developed special techniques that will allow us to properly analyze the results, so as to quickly identify the most important Customer Carewords and Careword groupings. We have also built up a database of previous results that allow us to advise you on how your results compare with key trends.

How long does it take?
The entire Customer Carewords process — preparation, survey, and analysis — will take eight to 10 weeks. You will immediately be able to make use of the results to write killer web content that truly addresses what your visitors care most about when they visit your website.

Read about Results from Customer Careword Clients

American Academy of Ophthalmology... New website focused on benefits for members.
Pioneer... Increased customer impact outlined.
United Kingdom Environmental Agency... New online strategy for environmental communications.
University of North Carolina Kenan-Flagler Business School... New content for a more engaging website.
StudyGroup... International student recruitment grows by 142 percent.

Read more about these successful Carewords users.

Praise from UNC's Kenan-Flagler Business School

"Gerry McGovern trained us in a methodology and approach that helps us make the best use of the real estate of our website. This has helped us create content that draws people in and makes them want to read further. It is a more rigorous, statistical and customer-driven way of determining the keywords and specific phrases that we should be using."

— Leigh Adam, Executive Director, Marketing and Communications

Call me at 248.766.6425 or contact me by email at bob@bobjohnsonconsulting.com