The web design model is broken.

The traditional web design model is broken. Typically, most websites are designed by graphic designers who have very little, if any, understanding of what the client’s process, services or products really are. They don't recognize who the person coming to the website is, or what they are looking for at the moment that they discover the website. As a result, most websites have a really poor conversion rate. The majority of traffic is coming to a site, looking around, maybe clicking on a few different pages to see what there is to see. Then they leave because there's no compelling reason for them to stay and actually do anything. That is a problem for the business owner because they spent a lot of money having a website or landing page built and those pages aren't converting, because there was no thought given to why their prospective patient, client or customer is coming to the page. What are they looking for? What do they need? How can the business help them?

There is a further problem.

It's not just the owner of the business that gets upset. It's also the designer or the web builder that has issues as well because they're not given all the tools that they need in order to do a good job. The business owner often doesn't fully understand their own process for having a prospective buyer go through their sales process to the point where they become a paying customer. That lack of systemization causes a lot of frustration for the web builder because there's no way for the owner of the business to adequately give the required information to them to make the site function in the conversion of prospects to paying customers. All they can do without the knowledge of a system is to make a pretty site.

Now, fortunately, there is a better way to build sites.

It involves strategically thinking about where the buyer is in the process at the moment that they land on the website and not to try to make one page do all the work. When you think about where a prospect is in their journey, they could be problem unaware or solution unaware (or just  unaware of YOUR solution). This means that not only are they not looking for your solution, they don't even realize they have a problem yet.

An example of this could be a person who is in early stages of cancer. They don’t realize they are sick yet as there's no symptoms, they don't feel bad and everything seems to be okay. However, underneath the surface something is going on that they're unaware of and therefore they're not going to be looking for any solution yet. Because they don't yet know they have a problem, this is where you would direct traffic to what is referred to as a cold page where we are educating the prospect about the problem that they may not even know they have. You could, for example, send them to a page telling about an executive or VIP physical so that they could be proactive with their health, finding out where they are now and where they could expect to be in 2, 5, 10 years. That would be an example of a service for someone who is both problem unaware and solution unaware.

From that scenario, you move to where they are problem aware but they are solution unaware. This requires a different conversation to a prospective buyer because they now know they have a problem and are starting to look for solutions to solve it. Using the cancer analogy, they could be looking for a cancer treatment, they could be looking for an oncologist, or maybe they are looking for holistic alternatives to traditional western medicine. They are at a different point in the buying journey now so you need to have a different page for them to go to where your solution is presented in the most favorable way to get them to respond. It needs to answer the questions they will have about what your solution is.

After that level of awareness, your potential buyer is now both problem and solution aware, so now you need to make sure that they are aware of YOUR solution. They are looking at whatever you are offering as a solution and comparing you directly to other service or product providers that are presenting similar services or other solutions to the issue. This is typically where most marketing for small businesses tends to start. Potential buyers are comparing dentists to dentists, or four door sedan to four door sedan. This is the point you need to provide clear reasoning for them to choose you over every other solution, including doing nothing.

Following through their journey, they're at the stage where they are aware of what the problem is, what the solutions are and probably what all their options are. Now, a lot of marketing tends to just assume it to be a matter of price. This is typical to a lot of dental or automotive advertising. Dentists often make a point of comparing how much they cost, competing with other practices in their area. Or you see an ad from a car dealer, and the main message of the ad is the price, with the monthly payment, telling you to come in and buy TODAY. This type of marketing only resonates with someone who has made the decision they're going to buy and now they're just price shopping. This point is very far down in the sales funnel. But doing this kind of marketing, you're not giving yourself any opportunity to differentiate yourself from your competitors in a meaningful way if all you are focusing on is price.

So to  best way to distinguish yourself is to build a website that converts - by using data.

How can you do this, I’m sure you are asking. Instead of building a traditional website, built on assumptions with no optimization and using all of your budget upfront, you use a launch pad site. You build in a compressed time frame, you validate your assumptions quickly using data-driven conclusions and then use your budget to optimize your site.

Once the launch pad website is operational, it's key to collect data as quickly as possible. You want to use as many different tools as you can to find out what prospective buyers are clicking on, what they're looking at, what videos they're watching and how much of each video are they watching? When they watch the first video, are they going to the second video? Are they consuming content on video that is short or are they watching something that is long? You should be using a heat map to track movements on each page to see where they're scrolling to and what they're looking at. All of this data is available, some with free tools and more with paid. If you use this data, you can very quickly optimize your launch pad website and give your prospective buyers the information that they're looking for. In comparison to the traditional website model of building an entire website and then launching, the launch pad with quick iterations is far more efficient at generating business for you swiftly and it allows you to optimize faster.

Another key piece of a website that converts is the process of continuous digital hygiene.

Digital hygiene means that your site is going to be updated regularly. This means using the data you collect, you remove content that is outdated or not being consumed by your buyers. Be sure that everything is current. Remove bios for staff no longer with you and add new staff quickly. Search engines love it when a site stays ‘fresh’. The more you update, the more it encourages bots to ‘crawl’ and index your site . This makes it much easier for you to rank for search engine optimization, and on your search engine results pages.

Be sure you are reviewing your analytics regularly.

Making sure that your analytics are measuring the key performance indicators that are going to give you the best information is crucial. Use the latest version of Google Analytics. Set up tracking of your UTM parameters (short tags at the end of the web address) whenever you're referring to another page, so that you can keep track of what campaign your leads are coming from, what keywords are being used, and what kind of content people are consuming. Google Analytics is an extraordinarily powerful tool. However, it does require effort to look at the data and put it into terms that the average business owner can understand. For Analytics, we recommend hiring a specialist instead of trying to do this yourself.

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Interestingly, even though data can give you a lot of insights into what people are doing on your website, the best option to get this information is still to reach out and poll visitors to your website. This should include prospects, customers, and especially your Tier A customers. These are the people that are going to give you the best feedback on what they do and do not like about your website. Raw data will only take you so far. But going the extra mile and reaching out to your key clients and prospects, you'll have the opportunity to dig deep into what they're really thinking. One of the things you can do and we highly recommend is that you actually get them to look at a specific page and find out what it is they like and don't like and what questions are not being answered. When they go to your page, what is it that they want to know and what do they do when the information they need is not there? Insights like this will help you increase the conversion rates of your website significantly.

I LOVE data. If you need help setting this up, let me know.