“Customer Carewords” Presentation by Gerry McGovern

Gerry McGovern is clearly excited by the way the web has demystified the economy and empowered consumers. By tapping into their collective wisdom, customers and citizens can make better decisions and finally get big business and government to pay attention to them. As he opened his talk, he contrasted this informed society with the information society we’ve already heard so much about.

But that wasn’t the main point of the event. This presentation was about “customer carewords,” the very small batch of words that describe the main ideas and tasks that customers have come to your web site to learn about or accomplish. These words typically have a positive connotation, and they alway resonate with the customer’s gut impressions of your business. Figuring out what these words are and using them appropriately on your web site can result in big improvements in sales and other web site activities.

One of the biggest disconnects between customers and businesses is the language they each use. Companies have their internal lingo, and it all too rarely meshes with the way customers articulate their needs. Airline customers are looking for “cheap flights,” but airlines continue year after year to promote “low fares.” College students are looking for “career” help, but colleges are pushing “courses.” HR departments push “learning,” but employees are looking for “training.” (This, by the way, is why I’ve always favored search engine marketing over other forms of marketing - in order to effectively promote your web site to search engines and their users, you have to get out of your own head and into your customer’s.) Anyhow, the lesson here is, Use the language of your customer, not your internal jargon, to address your web site visitors.

Gerry has developed a three-step methodology to identify these customer carewords. His system is designed for big enterprises with tons of resources and the ability to poll large numbers of people, so it is of limited use to small businesses and independent professionals, but I’ll talk about it a bit anyway.

His method involves 1) brainstorming and other research to come up with a list of about 100 possible carewords, 2) polling a few hundred site users to see which words they think are most important (you’d be surprised, he says, at how many folks are willing to fill in 100 boxes to indicate their top word choices), and 3) analyzing the results. He says it’s remarkable how consistent the results are - you can pretty much always reliably identify the top 3-5 carewords with a sample size of 100 and the top 10 with a sample of 400. Companies (his clients include Toyota, Rolls-Royce, and the BBC) have seen huge improvements of click-through rates in on-site calls to action by replacing old copy with carewords discovered this way.

I talked with Gerry after the presentation and asked him if he could imagine a way to scale this methodology down for us small-business folks. He couldn’t (it’s survey data, after all, and you need numbers for that), but he’s open to possibly being polled about careword research best practices some time in the future. I urged him to explore the idea of developing a careword research tool, something analogous to WordTracker, but I got the sense that it won’t rise to the top of his to-do list any time soon ;>

A couple of ideas I took home from this talk:

1. Even if you can’t employ Gerry’s detailed methodology in the rigorous way he does, do what you can try to figure out what the “long neck” of your customer’s careword distribution is. That is, try to figure out the top carewords (the “long neck” is the left side of the typical keyword distribution chart that shows the most commonly used terms, the right side being the “long tail” of less-commonly-used terms) that matter to your customers. You’re probably already doing a lot of the stuff in his preparation step if you’re doing keyword research for search engine marketing campaigns (using WordTracker and other keyword research tools, evaluating competing businesses’ keyword strategies, looking at your web analytics data, etc.). Instead of a full-on poll, you can do mini-polls of a few customers at a time and begin to get a sense of which words keep percolating to the top. I’m going to buy Gerry’s book, Killer Web Content, and try to figure out other ways to bring his enterprise-level content strategies to the small-biz world.

2. The search terms that bring customers to a web site are often/usually different from these customer carewords. Someone searching for a “cheap hotel” won’t respond well to a landing page with a headline that says “Stay at Our Cheap Hotel.” Search terms get people to your site. Once they’re there you need to use customer carewords in your calls to action and other content to address their needs in the terms that they expect. Or, as Gerry put it, “Search gets them to your site; carewords take them through your site.”