Nate Stockard: Hey everybody. Nate here with Blue Atlas again. Happy Tuesday. I hope you were able to catch the Monday Marketing Minute to learn a little bit more about this week’s topic. This week, we’re discussing redesigning your website and planning for that redesign. Before you even jump into graphic design, what it looks like, and everything else, you should be planning things a little bit more.
This week, we’ve put some things together to help you do that. Today, we’re talking about actually setting marketing goals and setting goals for the website. Now, I hope at this point, you have some business goals, revenue goals, lead goals, new industry goals, and all kinds of things for your business. But a lot of times, we encounter situations where when it’s time to redesign a website, those are completely forgotten, and you haven’t even talked about how the business goals will relate to your website’s marketing goals.
Why does it matter when you set goals for your website? We spend a lot of time, sometimes a lot of money, and put a lot of effort into building a website, which doesn’t do anything for us. You look back and you go, “Why did we do that? It was a waste of money. What’s going on? What went wrong basically with the redesign?” Nothing necessarily went wrong with the redesign of the website, the problem is you never connected it with a business goal.
When you connect it with a business goal, the website starts working for you, and you understand why you want to redesign it. Let’s talk about goals, and let’s talk about connecting those goals. You probably– you should have business goals, and you should immediately start to think, “Okay. Well, this goal saves maybe the amount of leads we need. We need a hundred leads a month. What will the website do to help generate those hundred leads a month?”
You may already have that mapped out. If you don’t, I want to give you some things to consider as you plan those goals. I want to mention that we discussed this on Monday’s Marketing Minute. We have a website redesign planning kit for you. You can see it in the post, and if you leave a comment, any type of comment, send it to me, and I’ll send that link directly to you in the comments.
Obviously, you’ll find out where to get that kit. It’s packed full of worksheets. In one of those worksheets, is mapping out your goals for the website. Let’s jump into what you really should be thinking about. If you don’t already have some set business goals, or have really any concept of what you want to do for the website. The first thing is consider, in today’s age, the website really is there to support sales. What is it going to do for your sales team?
In small businesses that you’re the owner who’s about the redesign it, so what is the website going to do for you as the owner, as the sole business development person? As your company gets larger, and your sales team starts to grow, you still have to think about what is the website going to do for your sales team? Is it going to be as a lead generation tool? Are you going to put landing pages and little kits? I’ll show you exactly, kind of pull the curtain back.
The redesign kit that we’re talking about, that’s a lead generator for us. Obviously, we want to help you redesign a website if you’re a business owner, and you’re watching this. We would love to help you if you’re going to be redesigning the website, but we also have to give you some value and something that’s worthwhile for you to download in order to become a lead. Those are the things that you may want your website to do. It needs to generate leads.
Any website from a sales perspective, could be more support for it. We work with a lot of companies that say, “You know what, nobody is going to come to our site and buy a $500,000 engine from us by filling out a form, and download some key piece of content, and then next thing you know, they’re buying an engine.” I completely understand that. But your website can still support your sales team.
What can the website do maybe as further information, maybe as videos, all types of content. One thing that I argue with a lot of B to B, industrial oil and gas, any of those type of clients. One thing I argue with them, is people are still researching. Even if you think it’s a handshake, and it’s a network that you’ve had forever, and everybody knows everybody. People are still researching online about new products, new uses, problems they’re experiencing, and things like that.
That can actually be a sale support technique for your website, but you’re not necessarily generating leads, but you’re generating some interest and some traffic. Maybe, it’s case studies, or how a certain pipe remediation tool may help solve this particular problem. It can still support sales even though it may not be the lead generation component as you may see in maybe a service-based business, or some of the things that you see in E-commerce.
If you’re talking about e-commerce, then obviously your website is everything sales, and you’ve got a lot of sales goals that you probably already know and talk about at this point. Really, who I’m talking to are those people that are going, “Well, let’s make sure we talk about us, and talk about our services, but we don’t know what else it’s going to do.” Your website should support your sales goals.
Now, let’s talk about customer service, and some of those things I mentioned really start feeding into maybe some potential customer service goals that you could set for your website. Let’s say you get a lot of questions about the same things over and over. You can start to think about, well, how can our website maybe be a source that would say, “You know what, why don’t you go here” in automatically generated emails, maybe after support ticket’s sent. Maybe you can send an email that says,”Why don’t you check out our FAQs?”
Even as a service based business, you have a ton of the typical questions that you get, say, as soon as you onboard a client. Well, you could put a whole kit together on your website that talks about those things, that answers those questions. It saves you time but it also gives your clients and your customer something to refer back to and to share. There’s a lot of ways that the customer service aspect can help. I mentioned support tickets, if you don’t already have a support ticket system but you have a lot of requests from clients, maybe it’s for maintenance or it’s for updates on something or changes for something else, you can create a support ticket system and put something like that in place, so that would be a consideration for your website. A new goal is: we want to deal with customer support through the website, through an email support ticket system. You could also do this with case studies and solutions by using your product. You have X widget and there’s maybe 10,000 uses for it, well, all your customers probably only know about three, they probably bought it for one or two reasons and found another one.
Well, if you maybe build a database of videos or little how-to guides and things like that of how to use your product, you start to build a little bit more of a loyal fan base or customer base because your customers now are starting to use your products more but they’re also looking back to you as a credible resource and you’re helping with the customer support and customer service aspect of your business. I highly encourage you to take a look at both of these areas: how your website can support your sales team and how your website can support your customer service efforts. There’s a lot of other goals that you can put together, there’s a lot of other goals that you can connect your website.
But, really, what we’re trying to get is, this is a step in the planning process before you even get to “let’s go build a website”, do this on the planning process. Come to the table before you even get to the design phase already knowing what you want to do. Too many times we see cases where we start building a website and there’s not a huge amount of direction so we try to design based on what our client’s looking for, what we think we want the website to look like, what competitors maybe look like. And some of that design will alter, will change, based on goals that come up later. But if we knew that on the front end, the design from the beginning could be perfect and spot on and really tailored towards those goals. Have these things together in the planning process.
I want to leave you with this today, the reason why I talk about goals because in the end, the website has to do more for you today. In today’s society its no longer a brochure website. Back in 1995, you could basically throw up a business card on the website and you were cool because you had that one page that had your phone number and your email address and maybe your address to your location and you were cool because you had a page on the web. Fast forward to today, things are much different. Things are much different than they were just a couple of years ago, people expect immediate information, immediate gratification and the attention span of a gnat far exceeds the attention span of an average Internet user.
You’ve got to get their attention to give them something right now, on the spot, to get them going. You’ve got to have a purpose, make sure that your website has a purpose and this is the time that you start connecting the website purpose to your business goals and making all of that come together and be worthwhile. One of the things I want to leave you with this today too, as you’re thinking about that purpose, it’s going to start directing you to maybe some calls to action. We have a habit and a lot of the trends have been like big sliders, big images, lot of graphics and things as soon as you hit the site but the problem with that is that people are on their phones, people are looking for information quicker so, you’ve really got to get straight to the point.
I’ll tell you one site that has really changed drastically over the years is Constant Contact. If you go to their homepage now, you’re redirected to a page that’s pretty minimalistic and all they want you to do is sign up for Constant Contact. They used to have some really cool graphics and they had bigger images and vector images and all this fun stuff that you can look at but they have scaled that back and it is now, in my opinion, pretty ugly sight. But their focus is they want you to fill out and start a trial membership. That’s their focus, that’s the whole purpose of their website. They really could care less if you know anything else about them or worry about anything else. They just want to get your trial started because from there, they’re going to market to you in other ways, they’re going to send you emails to say, “Hey, have you tried this? Or have you looked at this? Or check out this part of our website.” But the first step for them, for their website, is to get you to sign up as a trial with a trial email subscription. And you need to be thinking the same thing.
Too many times, small businesses look at the website, “We’ve got to have this, we got to have that, we got to tell them about this and these people are going to use the website for this and these people are going to use the website for that.” And it’s just not really the case. Too many times, we try to put too many calls to action or too many different things for people to do on a website and they’re just not going to do it. You’ve got to step back a little bit, as we’ve talked about the customer avatar and your perfect client, you got to step back just a little bit, think about how your perfect client’s actually going to use your website and build it for that purpose. Have that call to action that’s going to actually hit your target market. Other people are going to use your website, they’re going to find your blog, they’re going to find videos like this sitting on your website. That’s okay, that’s what you create them so that people can find it in other places. At the end of the day your perfect client is going to use your website in a certain way. Create calls to action that go directly to that particular call, that particular target, and how they’re going to use your website and start thinking about that from the beginning.
Guys, I hope your Tuesday’s been going great. Here about midday and hope the rest of your Tuesday goes well. Check out tomorrow, we’ll continue to talk about the planning for a website redesign, we’re going to be talking about the baseline metrics that you should be taking before launching a website and almost no one ever takes these type of metrics to see what the change is once the website is taken in place. We’ll be talking about that later this week. We’ll also be talking about preparing your website for the new launch and not losing any of your SEO on rankings and things like that that could really hurt you in the search engines.
We’re talking about that later this week as well. Hey, this is Nate with Blue Atlas. Hope you have a good rest of your–
[00:11:02] [END OF AUDIO]
