In this week’s episode of The Engaging Marketeer, I’m going to talk about something that is a little bit different to what I would normally talk about. So, it’s not so much about SEO, Google Ads, or Facebook Ads, or anything like that.
Many people come to us and say, look, can you help me with my SEO? Can you help me with my Google Ads? Can you help me with my Facebook Ads? Can you help me with my email marketing? Can you help me drive more traffic to my website? I need to get more traffic.
In most cases, pretty much every single case, it’s the website that’s a bit of the problem, because it wouldn’t matter if you drive more traffic to a website. If the website’s not converting, if the website’s not making sales, if the website’s not generating enquiries, it doesn’t matter how much traffic you generate, it’s not actually going to work.
Then the flip side of that is some people think they need a new website. My website’s not working. It’s not doing what I want it to do. I need a brand new website. In many cases, that’s not the case either.
What I’m going to talk about today is what makes people choose you when they come to buy from you. What makes people decide that you are the person they’re going to use?
So, why do buyers choose you?
Now, many people think that there’s something called the buyer’s journey, and I’ve taught this myself at events. So I’m not saying this is wrong in any way, shape, or form. I’m saying it’s more complicated than this.
The buyer’s journey starts with awareness. It then moves on to interest, consideration, decision, and then support. I would add after that you’ve then got upsells and lifetime value of customers.
First of all, people need to be aware of you before they make a decision. So, you would use maybe some sort of Facebook advertising for that, an awareness campaign, so people see you. Maybe you would put posters up around your town, or you would leaflet around your town. Awareness. Make people realise that you are there.
Then you would generate interest. So you would explore the buyer’s challenges, offer solutions to what they’ve got, so they say, “Oh yeah, I’ve seen this business. I think that might be right for what I want.”
Then you go into consideration. So the buyer is doing their research. They’re looking at what it is that you do. They’re looking at what your competitors do before finally they make a decision to buy with you.
This could be over the course of a day. It could be over the course of a week, over the course of a month. It could be over the course of several months if your product or your service is high value enough.
Then eventually they go into support. So once they become a client of yours, you then support them. It’s like a funnel where you get lots of people in awareness and very few people come down into consideration.
Now, I’m not saying that is wrong. What I’m saying is, when people come to your website, they don’t necessarily go through this big long list of awareness, interest, consideration, decision, and support. Sometimes it’s a lot quicker than that. Sometimes it can be pretty much instant.
So, what I want you to do is think about the last time that you bought something online. Think about the last time that you paid money on a website for a product or a service.
I’m not talking about Amazon, Marks and Spencer, Asda, Tesco, or something like that. Not a well-known brand. Not Apple. Something where you weren’t aware of the actual business before you got to it. Maybe it was a service. Maybe it was a software subscription. Maybe it was a product you found by a Facebook ad.
Think about the last time you spent money online on a product or service from someone you didn’t know who they were. Now think about how much you researched that business. How much of that website did you read? How much of that website did you go through?
Did you look at their terms and conditions pages? Did you look at all of the reviews for them before you spent the money? Did you go through their About Us and find out about their team, their company history? Did you go through their location details and see where they were and what their support was like? Did you read everything about the delivery? How much information did you go through?
I’m willing to wager that most people would have just skimmed it. You’ll have looked at the site and you’ll have got a gut instinct on whether or not that business was worthy of your money, worthy of your trust.
That’s the key thing here, worthy of your trust.
You’ll have made a gut instinct decision, and there are a number of different things that influence that gut instinct decision. Many people aren’t aware of that.
We’re taught these funnels. We’re taught the awareness, interest, consideration, decision, support funnel, but we are not taught this gut instinct thing. We are not taught what it is that makes people actually buy.
That’s what I want you to think about now.
People make shortlists very fast. They don’t go away and research things for days and weeks on end. Some people do, obviously, but most make it very fast, and they make two or three options before deciding which one they’re going to use. If you’re not in that two or three shortlist, then you’re not going to be decided upon.
So first of all, being there, appearing there, from an SEO perspective, a Facebook Ads perspective, or a Google Ads perspective, whatever you want to do, being there is important, yes. But then you need to answer the problems when that person gets there.
So when somebody lands on your website, or when you land on somebody else’s website, these are the three questions that this person will ask, or you will ask, when you make the decision.
The first one is, do I trust you?
They will land on your website and they will say, do I trust you? Do I trust this person?
Then they will ask, do you understand my problem?
So, if it’s a service that you’re looking for, or a service somebody else is looking for, do you understand the problem that that person has?
The third one will be, do I feel safe taking the next step?
So, do I trust you? Do you understand my problem? Do I feel safe taking the next step?
Now, if your website cannot answer those three questions adequately, then somebody will leave. They will not buy from you. They will not give you their business.
The worst part is they will not tell you why. You will never know.
So they will ask, do I trust you? Do you understand my problem? Do I feel safe taking the next step? If any one of those is a no, they will leave and you will never find out why.
Buyers don’t look for reasons to buy from you, because they buy on instinct. They buy on gut. They look for reasons not to buy from you, and there are lots of things on your website that can put them off.
For example, your website may have lots of vague claims, and I see this a lot on people’s websites. Vague claims like, “We put our customers first.” Well, I should bloody well hope you do. “We pride ourselves on customer service.” Everyone says that. “We’re very passionate about what we do.” It’s very vague. It doesn’t actually mean anything. It’s just waffle.
I see a lot of websites that say that. A lot of websites.
So, look at your own website. Does it say vague stuff like that? If it does, it needs to be changed.
You might provide no proof. No proof that you do what you say you’re going to do, that the problem people have is something you can solve. You have no case studies. You have no testimonials. There is no proof on your website that what you say you can do, you can actually do.
Your website could be outdated, and again, this is a really common one. It shouldn’t be a problem, but there are a lot of websites that look like they were built in the ’90s or the early 2000s. They don’t fit well on mobile. They’re difficult to read. They basically look really old.
If you’ve not updated your website, then quite frankly, why would you update your service? Why would you be any good at what you do?
So the website needs to not put people off.
You might be hard to contact. This is a strange one because if I had a penny for every time I went through somebody’s website with them and it was extremely difficult to find the contact details and they weren’t aware of it, I would be very rich. I am doing all right.
For example, when somebody’s on your website, is the contact form on the homepage? Or does somebody have to click to go to the contact form? Or does somebody have to click a contact button, then go to a contact page, then scroll down to a contact form to find it?
Does somebody have to click to the contact form and then it opens up a form with 13 different fields? Do they have to fill in their life history before they can contact you?
Does your contact form ask for too much information? Does your contact form work? Is it slow? Does it whirr for ages before something actually gets through?
All of these things are putting people off. All of them are putting people off and stopping people contacting you.
Is there too much text and no clarity? You would not expect somebody from a digital marketing agency to say this. Is there such a thing as too much text? Not on your website itself. But on the pages that matter, yes, there can be.
If you’ve got too much information on the homepage of your website, on the product page, on the service page of your website, then it’s going to put people off. It’s going to be a problem.
So you need to cut that down and make sure that it is streamlined, so that when people visit your website, they know exactly what they need to do and they’re not going to be distracted by it.
What I want you to do here is open your website in a browser. Go and have a look at it. Be absolutely brutal and score yourself from one to ten.
How much trust would I put in my website? Ten being I trust it implicitly. One being, do you know what, I don’t think it’s that good.
Give yourself a score from one to ten on clarity. How easy is it to find what you do? How easy is it to understand what you do? How easy is it to find all the information on the website? Ten being, wow, it’s brilliant. It’s seamless. It’s so intuitive. One being, do you know what, it’s a bit of a mess.
Then give yourself one to ten on enquiry. How easy is it to enquire with you? If you’ve got a form that pops up on the screen and all they need to do is put in their name, number, and email, yes, give yourself a ten. If you have to find the enquire button, which then goes through to another page, which you then have to scroll to find the contact form button, you shouldn’t be giving yourself any more than a five.
So do that yourself now. Give yourself one to ten on trust, clarity, and ease of enquiry, and see how well you actually do.
Another thing you need to be looking at is the trust stack.
How much trust does your website give somebody when they look at it? Because trust isn’t just one thing. I don’t go to a website, or your customers aren’t going to go to a website, and say, “Ah yes, I trust them because of this.” It’s a number of different things on the website that build trust, and you need to do that to make somebody enquire with you.
For example, visual credibility. Have you got logos on the website which show what you do, that you are part of an authorised body?
If you’re an electrician, for example, are you NICEIC accredited? I think I said that right. If you are an architect, are you part of whatever it is, the architects’ association? Do you have all of these logos and branding on your website to tell people that you are trustworthy, that you are good at what you do, and that you do what you say you do?
Does your site use clear language?
The number of times I’ve seen businesses and websites where they waffle, they use long-winded terms and technology that other people don’t understand because it makes themselves sound intelligent. IT companies do this a lot. Financial investment advisers do this a lot. They’ll use loads of acronyms and initialisms which mean absolutely nothing to anybody outside their industry because they want to make themselves sound more intelligent, but what they’re actually doing is alienating their customers.
Does your website do that?
Social proof. Do you have testimonials? Do you have case studies? Do you have pictures of people on your website who’ve used you, or logos of companies that have used you?
When I say case studies, I mean actual case studies, not somebody on the website saying, “Yeah, I used J&J Systems and they were brilliant. They were really good to deal with. I’d recommend them to anybody.”
No. What problem did you actually solve? What was the situation when they came to you? What was the solution you offered? How did you solve the problem? What were the results afterwards?
An actual case study that shows you are good at what you do.
Authority. How much authority are you showing on your website? If you’ve spoken at industry events, is that on there? If you’ve been published in magazines, newspapers, TV, or radio, is that on there? How long have you been in business?
Don’t go overboard on that one because nobody really cares too much about that. They just want to know that you’re good at what you do.
What authority have you got? And how are you reducing the risk?
If somebody were to enquire with you or use your services, what is the risk reduction that you are offering? Do you have a money-back guarantee? Do you have a cooling-off period? Do you have an onboarding sequence that people are going to get straight away? Something that’s going to reduce the risk and make you good to deal with and safe to deal with.
Each one of those layers helps the buyer feel safer, but there’s not one in particular you can use and that’s it, and it’s going to be okay. They all need to be layered up.
Each one of those that you don’t have is going to reduce the likelihood of you getting a conversion.
I hope that makes sense.
What I think you should do, and I’m going to take a sip of coffee here for a minute because my mouth’s getting very dry, is go through your website. Don’t look at it and think I need a redesign, I need a new website, because that often is not the case unless your website is really, really old and really rubbish. Most people don’t actually need a new website. A lot of small changes can actually help.
What you want to be doing is going through your website and looking at your homepage headline, the top of the homepage. Can that be rewritten to be something a bit more specific and tailored towards your audience?
So rather than, for example, “Welcome to JJ Systems Limited”, something that actually helps. Say you’re a roofer, I don’t know, “We help people stay dry during storms”, that sort of thing. Something that’s actually going to be relevant to what they do.
Put some strong testimonials on the website near the top of the page. It’s the first thing people see. Remember, these testimonials really should demonstrate the results of what you’ve got, not just say, “Yeah, you were great to deal with.”
Put some real photos on the website. This is a huge thing now. It used to be, a few years ago, that everybody was using stock images. So you’d get Adobe Stock or Microsoft stock, those office photos of people in blue-tinted offices shaking hands in suits, and they were all clearly American.
Now it’s all AI pictures, and as good as they are, we can tell.
So have real photos of you, your team, your building, your premises, the jobs that you’ve worked on. Don’t use AI. Don’t use stock images, please, because it just detracts. It absolutely detracts from what you do.
Make the contact obvious. If somebody’s looking for the contact button, make it really easy to find. Get rid of any unnecessary steps in the website. The number of times I’ve seen people have to click through to read a second page and then click somewhere else before they get to contact, it’s just totally unnecessary. Remove it.
Don’t make people go to the contact page to contact you. Give them a button on the page so the form pops up, or the form is always there. Make it very easy for them to find you.
Then what I want you to do is write this down.
I want you to find three things that you can do now.
One thing you should stop saying. Something on your website that you keep saying that you should stop saying.
For my industry, for example, it might be, “We provide SEO.”
That is something that people in our industry would always say. “Oh, we do SEO.” Yes, we do SEO. But SEO only really means something if you know what it means. If you don’t know what SEO means, it’s pointless. Even if you dig down into it, SEO, search engine optimisation, so what? Who cares?
It’s not about search engine optimisation. It’s about getting more eyeballs on your website, getting more potential clients, more potential customers to your website.
So we’re going to stop saying SEO and we’re going to start talking about what really matters.
That’s one thing to stop saying.
One thing to prove better. If you claim that you can solve somebody’s problem, don’t keep saying that you can do it. Show that you can do it. Demonstrate why you’re able to do it.
That’s something you can prove better.
And one thing to simplify. Maybe it’s your enquiry process. Maybe it’s your onboarding client process. Maybe you’ve got a request a callback button on your website that is complicated because there are too many fields.
Something you can simplify.
So write them down. One thing you should stop saying, one thing that you can prove better, and one thing that you can simplify, and make those changes on your website.
I think that should really help you in your task because then, when you start using services such as email marketing, Facebook, or SEO, it’s going to mean that the people who land on your website are more likely to enquire. It’s going to give you a far better return on investment, because there’s no point spending money on marketing if people are not actually converting when they get there.
As one final point, while I’ve talked about this as being relevant to your website, which it obviously is, this isn’t just about your website.
Everything that I’ve just talked about today also applies to your ads. If you’re running Facebook Ads, if you’re running Google Ads, if you’re putting ads in magazines, the content, the text that you write in there, this is relevant to that.
If you have landing pages, say you’re running pay-per-click Google Ads and you’re sending people through to landing pages, this is relevant to them.
If you’re sending emails out to people, so you’re doing email marketing, or even if you’re just sending emails directly out to people on spec, it applies to them.
It’s not just the written word, it’s the spoken word as well. If you’re making sales calls, if you’re doing video calls, if you’re doing pitches at networking events, it applies to them.
Everything I’ve just said applies to all of these.
So don’t just think of it as your website. Think of it as everything that you do within your marketing going forwards.
I hope that’s been useful. Thank you very much for listening to the podcast. If you’ve got any comments, any advice, any questions, please pop them below the YouTube video or send them in through the usual channels.
Don’t forget to subscribe as well.
Thank you very much. I will catch you on the next podcast.
About your host:
Darren has worked within digital marketing since the last century, and was the first in-house web designer for video games retailer GAME in the UK, known as Electronics Boutique in the States. After co-founding his own agency, Engage Web, in 2009, Darren has worked with clients around the world, including Australia, Canada and the USA.
iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/engaging-marketeer/id1612454837
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/darrenjamieson/
Engaging Marketeer: https://engagingmarketeer.com
Engage Web: https://www.engageweb.co.uk
