Does Your Mediation Marketing Website Engage?

From the Mediator Tech blog of Tammy Lenski.

Research suggests you have as little as 1/20th of a second to capture your website visitor's attention before they click away.

When you consider just how tiny an amount of time that is, it becomes clearer that typical-template, handshake-photo mediation sites are less and less likely to cut it as marketing tools.

To stop that click away, mediation marketers have to:

Solve a problem. Make them laugh. Get their attention (in a good way, of course). Entertain them. Teach them something. Engage them in an activity.

I recently ran across an absolutely brilliant example of the latter two approaches, both in the same website. When you arrive at the World Food Programme's Free Rice Program site, you find a game greeting you. The vocabulary game's instructions are simple and straightforward:

1. Click on the answer that best defines the word.
2. If you get it right, you get a harder word. If wrong, you get an easier word.
3. For each word you get right, we donate 20 grains of rice to the United Nations World Food Program.
4. WARNING: This game may make you smarter. It may improve your speaking, writing, thinking, grades, job performance…

And to make it even more compelling, with each correct answer, the rice bowl on the screen gets a bit fuller, just to remind you what this little game is about.

The vocabulary words don't have anything to do with rice, food or world hunger. They're just a mechanism to keep you engaged by testing you. And when you're done, perhaps you'll click on the links for more information, just like I did.

What will you do to capture your target market's online attention?

Copyright © 2007 by Tammy Lenski. All rights reserved.
Photo credit: Can Can

                       

Tammy Lenski

Dr. Tammy Lenski helps individuals, pairs, teams, and audiences navigate disagreement better, address friction, and build alignment. Her current work centers on creating the conditions for robust collaboration and sound decisions while fostering resilient personal and professional relationships. Her conflict resolution podcast and blog, Disagree Better, are available at https://tammylenski.com/archives/… MORE >