5 Tips for Making Your Website Support Traditional Marketing

Hi and welcome to our short webinar about the five tips for making your website better support your traditional marketing efforts. Every great salesperson knows that about 90% of new prospects have visited your website before they ever talk to anyone in the company. They also know that 100% of those people will visit your website and check you out before they actually buy. So here are five tips to better make your website support your traditional marketing and sales, your trade shows and face to face meetings, that type of thing. So first of all is to create trust.

When somebody lands on your website, you’ve got maybe five max of 10 seconds to create trust that they’re in a place that they recognize and they’re willing to look further to do business with you. Second is deliver the right message at the right time for the buyer and where they are in their buyers journey. Third is to sell your culture, sell your teamwork, sell your enthusiasm, sell your engineering expertise, those things that make up your key company culture. Your website is a great place to sell that. Fourth is make it easy to buy from you.

So many websites make it really difficult to find even a phone number to call you, or certainly don’t have e commerce yet to make it really simple to purchase from you. And that varies from company to company and the size of sale you’re making. And last but not least is to show that you’ve done it before. So have good case studies, resources, stories, videos to show that you’ve done the kind of problem solving before that your prospects are looking for. So I’m going to show a couple of examples, some good and some bad, from each of these five tips.

So, in creating trust, it’s things like having the logo show up in the right place up in the upper left corner, having a phone number in the upper right corner, having a proper image that shows the kind of picture, having messaging that makes sense, and just making things simple, trustworthy, and, as people expect, not be too tricky. Here’s an example where my first impression on this website is I’m not sure quite what’s going on. It hits me in the face with a shopping cart over there, two videos. I’m just not sure what they do. Something about electric and circuit breakers and things, but I’m not sure I really like being here.

And we talk about messaging. Here’s a good example of a contract precision manufacturer who we worked with who has really a difficult time conveying exactly what they do, but we were able to work with them over a period of time and give some really good marketing messages based on benefits to the buyer and where the buyer was in their buying cycle. Here’s an example who maybe doesn’t do that right from the start. They talk about using copper nickel in their products which are coolers for boats, work boats, that sort of thing. But copper, nickel may or may not be what the buyers are really looking for.

They probably just want reliability. So, next in culture. Here’s a good example of a company we work with for many years. The picture, the video shows two engineers working over some plans. And what this company does is custom stainless steel manufacturing.

So the picture, the words convey exactly what they do and creates a culture right from the start of the kind of company they are. Here’s an example of one that could be a little better. I really like this company. I like the people. But the website doesn’t really create their enthusiasm for their fire prevention systems that I know they have.

So it’s just an example where it’s a great company, but the website could do better at selling the culture. Next is make it easy to buy from you. Now, this is my favorite website for ecommerce. It’s a do it yourself website for canvas working, leather working, that sort of thing. But every product they sell, they sell related products.

They have videos that explain to you how to use the products. They have PDFs to download. They have buyer’s guide. It’s just incredibly easy to learn about their products and to buy from them via ecommerce. Here’s an example whose I work with, and they’re similar.

They do custom hinges. And it’s a great little company up in Long Island, New York. But the website has a lot of information, which is great, and I love it, but it makes it really hard to buy anything from them. So you end up really having to speak to one of our customer services agents on the phone. Just an example of there are probably some simple ways they could make this website better to buy from directly.

Last but not least is show that you’ve done it before. This is our own website, where we have probably five good concise case studies of things that we’ve done before. Another way to show that you’ve done it before is to have a video testimonial from a client that shows it. That’s probably even a better way. So things like that prove that you’ve solved customer issues before and you have the experience to do it.

For the new prospect, this is an example that could be better. This company does a lot of really custom work with stainless steel and nickel alloy metals. But the website doesn’t convey the custom work they’ve done. It does an okay job of showing the stock products they’ve done that they sell, but doesn’t really convey the systems engineering capability the company actually has. So just to quickly review the five tips.

First is to create trust. Second is deliver the right message at the right time and the buyer’s journey. Third is to sell your culture. Each company has a great unique culture. Sell that on your website, make it easy to buy from you.

Whatever you’re selling, whether it’s million dollar products and services or $50 products online, make that as easy as possible and show that you’ve done it before. So hopefully that was helpful to just some things to think about to improve your website to support your traditional marketing better. Please call us if you got questions about growth and digital marketing. We love to audit websites and give recommendations, so give us a call.

Thank you very much.