I recently wrote about 3 things your website must do in 3 seconds: the importance of quickly grabbing a first-time visitor’s attention and engaging them instantly. This remains true, but Google’s new Instant Preview functionality  takes the importance of first impressions to another level.

Introduced gradually last month, Google Instant Previews is a natural continuation of their instant search results. It’s all about delivering information faster. But what does this mean for our web design strategy?

First impressions play a more important role

In the past, first impressions may have determined if someone stays on your site or leaves. Now, it will determine if someone even clicks through to your site at all.

Design matters more

As people skim through search results, they will have a split second to see which sites to look most visually appealing. It’s important to remember that the new preview only shows a window about 300 pixels wide, see you need to make that layout looks good in a small thumbnail.

Here’s a very helpful design tutorial from creativebits on how to deal with this.

Relevance matters

You can no longer trick people into stumbling across your website. People will find the most helpful site faster.

Work towards being the most valuable resource of useful information, and this will benefit you regardless of how Google displays your content.

The “One Big Thing”

Clear the clutter off your pages and make One Big Thing very obvious through large images and text. This has long been an important part of website optimization, and Instant Previews makes it all the more important.

Ask yourself: What is the one thing I want people to get from this page?

Simplicity leads to clarity – which is the hallmark of effective web pages.

More resources on Google Instant Previews

Here are a few other good posts where you can get more information on this:

• Google blog announcement of Instant Previews
• FastCompany: Google Instant Preview may shake up web design forever
• How to design for Google Instant Preview (very good illustration and design checklist from creativebits)
• Copyblogger: Will your site survive the Google shrink ray?

Three seconds. That’s all you have to make a positive impression when someone lands on your website.

Actually, you may well have much less time to do this. Research reported by the BBC indicates it could be closer to a 20th of a second. But let’s be generous and throw in a few extra seconds.

What do you need to do to get off to the right start so quickly?

Get that page loaded fast

If you have 3 seconds, and your page takes 10 seconds to load there’s a problem.

Think what you need to do to simplify your site to deliver information as quickly as possible.

Visually WOW them

Use great visuals to quickly grab their attention. Photography has the ability to share complex messages very quickly.

Invest in planning, shooting, and adding these images to your pages.

Get them involved for future followup

This may take longer than a couple seconds, but first-time website visitors are a big opportunity for you to connect for further followup.

On the average Web site, 75% or more of the site traffic consists of first-time visitors, and they’ll stay for less than one minute. With this in mind, have a way to turn first-time visitors into repeat guests.

• You accomplish this through involvement devices:
• This could be an e-mail newsletter.
• It could be a blog.
• It could be a Twitter account.

Once you’ve started a relationship, you can continue communication, giving you more opportunities to invite the people back to your Web site.

If you’re not engaging in this process, you’re wasting most of your Web site traffic

Speed is everything for communicating first impressions, so you need to share your message with clarity and simplicity.

Redesigning your website? It’s the perfect time to optimize for effectiveness. Here are 43 design questions that will help you create a powerful web presence:

Big questions

• What’s the #1 action we want people to take after viewing this page?
• How can we avoid clutter and focus on this #1 priority?
• Have we developed guest personas to help us decide what types of content to publish?
• Do we understand site visitors don’t care that much about us, but just want their questions answered?

Sales optimization

• Is our telephone number prominently featured at the top of each page?
• Is the booking form on also top of each page?
• Is our offer front and center – extremely clear?
• Do we have a strong call to action on each page?
• Do we have a best rate guarantee button in place?
• Can we create and display some other type of risk-reversal guarantee?
• Is our booking engine completely integrated with the site?
• How can we cross-sell and upsell to maximize revenue?
• Should we setup multiple domains for mini-sites our sales team can use?
• Do we have multiple landing pages planned for our various marketing initiatives?
• Are we creating multiple versions of important webpages so we can run split-tests for optimization?

Page content

• Do we know the most common guest questions, and are we proactively answering them?
• Could we “let them say it for us” by using guest quotes in page headlines and elsewhere?
• Are our pages formatted with the understanding that people won’t read, but scan, the contents?
• How can we feature press coverage or awards?
• How do we plan to keep this site frequently updated with fresh, new content?
• Can we build on a platform such as WordPress that allows us to publish updates ourselves?

Visuals

• Where should we use video or compelling visuals to convey emotion that is hard to show through written words?
• Could we crowdsource photos and other media from our guests?
• Do the people in photos look towards your page copy?
• Do we really need to use flash?

Social integration

• Which social networks do we want to emphasize?
• Can we include a Facebook page widget on the homepage?
• Can we include Facebook Like buttons on each page?
• Could we include live Twitter updates?
• Should we put a “retweet this” button on select pages?
• Could we make guest feedback and testimonials more credible by posting hand-written notes?
• Could we include YouTube videos or Flickr photos taken by guests?

Search optimization

• Have we created a list of keywords important for our hotel?
• Have we mapped one keyword phrase to each page on the site?
• Is this keyword phrase prominently placed throughout  each page?

Service

• Is it very easy to contact us? Do we provide multiple communications channels?
• Are our email contact forms short and simple?
• Could we provide contact info for each manager at the hotel?
• Should we offer live chat support?
• How will we use Google maps to provide custom directions (and even activity recommendations)?
• Should we provide support for multiple languages?
• Should we go beyond translation to offer localized (unique) content for each market we serve?
• Are we providing a mobile-friendly version of the website?

This checklist is from the Insider’s Circle library. If you want Josiah on your team as an unbiased advisor to help you through a website re-design – or to work on any other part of your digital marketing program – contact us today.

David Morton is a revenue specialist with Bamboo Revenue in London. Today, we discuss what you need to know about encouraging direct bookings.

Our conversation is less than 19 minutes, and I highly recommend you listen to the whole thing – especially if you’re a smaller, luxury hotel:

[Prefer to listen on the go? Download the mp3 file]

For those of you who prefer to read, here’s the summary of the talk:

• Why don’t more guests book with hotels directly? Many hotels release a few rooms to external OTA sites at lower rates, and don’t realize that savvy guests will easily find those rates and book outside of the hotel’s system.
• Avoid retail marketing tactics; maintain consistency across all booking channels.
• For example, “In conversations with hoteliers, I see that some of them have defended [rate disparity] to me, and they’ve explained, ‘Oh, Dave, well actually, what I do, is on my own hotel website, and/or through my luxury brand, I will sell from my second-lowest room category up.’ So, if we’re talking about a historic hotel property, they’ll say, “Well, the old maid’ rooms and the tiny rooms up in the attic, I don’t have on my own website, but I’ll put those through third party websites.’ And again the conversation I have with them is, ‘Look — people are coming to your hotel website, they’re salivating over the gorgeous Michelin starred-restaurant, the beautiful oak-paneled library, your amazing spa. They just wanna be under your roof.”
• This type of behavior “trains” guests to not book directly, and is damaging to the hotel’s brand.
• “If you’re a niche product, as long as you’re in the top ten or twenty of the hotels on Trip Advisor ranking for your location, as long as you’re delivering a good product, good service, you can and you will get a lot of those bookings direct, if you’re offering rate parity.”
• It’s important to carefully control distribution through OTAs and focus on who you partner with. Read the fine print. Don’t assume that “the more partners, the better.” Work with OTAs that are “in synch” with your hotel’s brand.
• Guests prefer to book through sites that are SSL certified.
• Foreign guests prefer to book in their home language and currency.
• “Don’t become distracted by the mass-consumer market, because that’s not the market that you’re in.”

Where and when you ask for something on your website plays a HUGE role in how effective you are in getting people to perform whatever action you want them to take.

This works so well because you’re reaching people in the perfect frame of mind. After someone has emotionally and financially committed to your brand, opting in to receive messages from you is a logical next step.

Take recruiting Facebook fans, for example. You can be like 99% of hotels out there and include a Facebook button on your homepage. Or you can make a compelling offer immediately on your website booking confirmation page. In the limited testing we’ve done so far, Facebook pages that used to idle for months with just a few new fans now have hundreds.

Are  you taking advantage of these “white hot” online touch points?

Hotel Marketing Strategies Insider’s Circle Silver members: sign in to access my favorite places to ask for website interaction, along with screenshots and instructions.

[photo credit: respres]

I’ve wanted to re-design this blog for a very long time, and now its finally live! My friend David did a great job with the design, and I wanted to point out the marketing strategy that went into the layout.

“One Big Thing” on the homepage

Traditional blog layouts – with the newest post on top – can lack focus. There is no “One Big Thing” for a first-time visitor to click. With the new layout, I prominently feature one important post at the top of the homepage.

Quickly display new & best content

I wanted to adopt a magazine-style homepage for two reasons: 1) to quickly show what has been recently published, 2) to display some of the site’s most important content (we’re calling this “HMS 101″).

Encourage email signup

I’ve been talking a lot about email the past few weeks, so by now you should see why I want everyone reading this blog to receive my weekly email summary. Because of this, I’m making the email signup box a prominent part of the sidebar.  I have exclusive VIP content planned for email subscribers, and want as many people as possible to get in on this.

Encouraging participation

I really want to open up the content here to other voices and viewpoints. While I’ve tried to encourage this in the past, I’m making the options for participating very clear in the sidebar design.

Integrating video

Video will play an increasingly important role in the future, and it’s something I want to do a lot more of in coming posts. Our new YouTube channel will be a mix of me talking into the camera, live interviews, and how-to screen captures. Again, I wanted the design to reflect this new priority.

Improved comment area

Blog communities revolve around the comments section. Typically only a small percentage of readers post a comment, so I wanted to improve the comment area to encourage more discussion. The big things we added are threaded comments (so you can reply to others), and comment subscription (so you can be notified when someone replies to you).

Focus on new “Insider’s Circle” program

This is something I’m very excited about: a toolbox for hotel marketers. It contains everything my colleagues and I use for the day-to-day management of hotel marketing campaigns out in the “real world.” So it’s more than theory and strategy – it’s very practical use-it-now stuff.  The “Insiders’ Circle” is opening to the public on Tuesday, and I’ll post an explanation then…

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I would love your feedback on this new design: What do you think? Do you see any little improvements I can make on it?

Landing pages are the first thing people see when arriving on your website. If you can create a special page that matches your email offer, conversion rates will improve dramatically. This is because these pages can focus on the offer received by the email subscriber, so that when they come to your website, they are more inclined to act on that offer. They won’t get distracted by everything else you have on your site.

Images and headlines should match the email creative. Aim for a seamless experience for the recipient.

Design the page layout to focus the visitor’s attention. You may try:

• Increasing the font size
• Eliminate multiple columns and navigation
• Include a very clear next step

If you want to get really fancy, do a two-step landing page sequence to segment your audience and offer – like Howard Johnson did here:

But don’t let complexity scare you into inaction. If you’re currently sending email traffic to a generic page, experiment with a basic web page that mirrors the offer.

Email works best when it is part of an integrated campaign. And building email campaign-specific website landing pages is the first thing you should do to integrate.

For more on this topic, read 10 Ways to Improve Your Landing Pages

Learn more ways to improve email conversion rates in the Savvy Hotelier’s Guide to Email Marketing

A landing page is the first page a visitors sees after arriving on your website. Because people make snap judgments online, they are a critical element in your Internet marketing campaign’s success.

In less than 3 seconds, most people have decided whether they’re going to spend more time on your page or move onto another website.

By optimizing your landing pages, you increase conversion rates and ultimately sell more. Here are 10 ideas for you:

#1 – Understand your visitors. When you know what your target audience is looking for when they arrive on your website, you can provide that information quickly and easily. You’ll be able to develop a message that resonates with the visitor and encourages them to take action.

#2 – Match landing pages with promotional creative as much as possible. Establishing a link between the advertisement that someone sees, and then the first page they see on your website is very important for consistency and reducing confusion.

#3 – Use persuasive images. A recent study showed something very interesting: When a face in stock photography looks away from your copy, people are likely to look away as well. Make sure that all elements of your website — including the visual ones — focus on your sales message.

#4 – Give visitors what they’re looking for… quickly. Provide easy access to the information promised. Prioritize page elements according to their importance. Don’t emphasize something that is not very important.

#5 – Focus on the content: the offer itself. Avoid getting carried away by the latest and greatest new media if it doesn’t contribute to website goals. In nearly all sales situations a focus on the written text – the copy – is what sells and brings you money.

Read more…