How to Design Client Websites the Right Way

How do you build an agency that allows you to live the dream that you have for yourself, for your family, for your community, for your team, while at the same time helping your clients knock it out of the park and doing it all profitably? These are the big questions that we tackle here on the Agency Journey podcast. I am your host, Andrew Demski. Now let's get to it.

All right. Welcome into another Agency Journey podcast episode. This week I have the pleasure of interviewing Nathan Butcher from Spinfluence on the podcast. Nathan, how you doing, man?

Hey, good, Gray. Thanks for having me on board.

I'm excited to have you on. It's been, it's been a while in the works. Now we're getting to connect and talk about what you have going on. So let's first start off with. And you know what, I'm going to even skip through. I'm not going to get into all the accolades that you guys have. I'll let you tell us about that. But Spin Fluence, first of all, people are gonna get it. You're from Australia. Very quickly give us the. Give us the background on the agency and even if you want to, how you got into it.

Yeah. So I'll try and give you the. The short version. So a little bit about me and maybe a little bit about Spinfluence and how we came to fruition. So me, like 20 years ago, had a little agency called White Media, so ran that for a bunch of years and then got lured into the action sports industry and a couple of sales and marketing roles, moved up to the US and things like that, and that was a great experience. And then decided after a long time in the action sports industry to go back to my roots and create another agency and five years ago created Spinfluence. So Spinfluence is obviously a HubSpot partner. We specialize, I suppose, in inbound marketing, like most HubSpot partners and cos. Or HubSpot CMS website design and development.

That's awesome. So. And you guys have won a good number of awards from HubSpot and a lot of those are around like graphic design, website design, which seems to be like that seems. I'm curious in terms of how the agency is set up, the website, by the way, huge props on that. And I don't remember. I know it wasn't that long ago that this was redesigned and launched. The website, by the way, for anyone wondering, is spinfluence.com au the website is awesome and it's so different from so many of the agency websites. That are on there. So that definitely sticks out. But in terms of the way the business is set up, is the project side or website and graphics side of the business is that the bigger chunk of services are you doing inbound retainers? What's kind of the service breakdown?

Yeah, we're obviously focused on inbound and websites. If we break the company up into two, basically split it down the middle, 50% is doing inbound retainers or marketing retainers because we don't just do inbound, we do other things on top of inbound. And then the other 50% of the business is doing websites using growth driven design, so we have retainers there Also. Moving into this year, we made the decision to only do websites using growth driven design, basically off the back of the success that we've seen over the last couple of years of doing it. We were lucky enough to win the agency of the year for Growth Driven design back in 2016 by implementing a bunch of changes and analyzing sites over that year and making real inroads, I suppose, for a couple of our clients. And thanks Heaps for the website for the comments there. We spent a lot of time on that back in going through from August through to December last year to go through about 5 million design changes, as you do for your own site sometimes. We launched that probably about five days before Christmas. So it's really fresh and new. So we're glad that you like it. Thanks, Heaps for the comments.

That's awesome. How was the transition? Curious about the growth driven design thing. We get a lot of questions around that. How is the transition from. I'm assuming, correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm assuming most of the website things were project based before that someone comes in. And the traditional playbook for website, how is that transition for you guys?

Yeah, so what we did or what we continue to do is obviously there's a big education piece around growth driven design. When you're pitching to clients or talking to clients, the way we go about it is obviously there's an inquiry about a website and we have a discovery call like most people do. During that discovery call, we touch on growth driven design and why it's a better option to build your site over time versus a project based. And then what we tell people is we're going to give you two proposals. One proposal is going to be traditional project based and the other proposal is going to be growth driven design based. We then jump on a call with them and walk them through both proposals and nine times out of ten they're going to go for that growth driven design one purely because they see the value in doing it over time. And we have a couple of nice case studies that go in there that prove a few points and help move them forward.

Right, that makes sense. That's awesome that you guys have gone whole hog. I love when I talk to people who actually tested things out and they've seen one thing work better than the other and just completely shut down the other one and say, like, we're going 100% into. Even though there's still people who just want to buy a traditional website, just double down on what works better for people. So that's awesome.

Yeah, yeah. It's night and day. If you start to really get into it and see the changes that it can make. I mean, we've seen one business go from having two salespeople in their team to 10 salespeople within six months purely with improvements to their site and obviously generating more leads for them.

Right. In terms of the website leads coming to you or where are people coming from? What are the primary funnels for you guys? Is it referral based or is it largely inbound or is it cold outreach or where does that come from?

Yeah, we don't do any cold outreach and unfortunately we, like most agencies, you're too busy doing your own marketing. So we do get the majority of our leads off the website and then probably 30% of them would be referral based. This year there's a big focus for us to obviously get back into gear and do more of our own marketing. We've got a lot of assets that we've created ready to roll out in February. We've got a new starter coming on board in February who's strictly going to be focused on marketing the agency, which is something that definitely has been lacking for our brand over the last couple of years. You know, you could jump onto our social channels and whatnot, and it's a wasteland. Unfortunately, we're looking to change that around this year and obviously, you know, traffic for us and website leads is growing. Obviously winning a bunch of HubSpot impact awards is helping us as well. A few people are finding us there, which is great.

That's awesome. So I have two tools that I wanted to ask you about and I'm going to start with what I think is going to be the. The shorter one. So this is not something that I've seen. I've seen a couple similar examples, but I haven't seen one roll out in this format yet. And that is the Website Cost Estimator that's on the site. We'll make sure we link this up in the show notes as well@dmi.com podcast so people can check this tool out. But. Or I'm sure if you Google spinfluence website Redesign Estimator, Website Cost Estimator or just go to the site you'll find this as well. But it's basically taking all the inputs from a user and then giving them a rough ballpark on here's what the price is going to be and your next step is contact us and let's talk through the project and everything. But you do it in messaging or bot form. What was that like to build that and how's that working for you?

Yeah, look, we get plenty of hits on that thing. It's a tool that we built basically to qualify people that want to or have the budget to build a bespoke custom website with strategy that's really going to drive good value for their business. A lot of people at the end of the day searching online or they're looking for a marketing agency or I need to build a new website. The biggest question on their mind always is how much? What's it going to cost? So we kind of made a decision to put it out there to tell the world or tell all of our potential prospects. This is how much it's going to cost to a or do inbound. We've got pricing on our site for that or to build a website with us. The tool itself is all JavaScript built on the HubSpot CMS and we build it in a. It's a dummy chatbot basically. It's not a chatbot but we tried to make it conversational so you could call it a conversational form.

Right. So Nathan, I'm a little bit torn on the chat thing. There's a good way and a bad way to do it or I think there's pros and cons to this. And the con is when one of the things that drives me crazy is when you know that the thing is just programmed to work and they still do. Like there's a four second typing animation. Like the thing is the three dots are going like it's sending something back. So there's a lot of poor examples of like people just trying to do bots because bots are like hot right now and it just takes a long time. But I think there's a bunch of pro and there's a bunch of pros and cons. But what I love about this one and this specific application is still quick, but what you're able to do is if you just present all this all in one place. And first of all it could be a lot of information for people to try to go through, but you're able to lead people through a process when it's one piece at a time. It's like one step. You answer this one thing, just stay focused here, we'll give you the next thing and you just keep feeding them. So you're able to kind of walk people through your process versus if you just write out, you know, four examples of here's a normal website, here's all the things that go, that would go into this one and here's the cost. Everybody just scrolls down and looks at the price and you don't really get a chance to walk them through the process there. So I thought that was a cool usage here with that tool to kind of, kind of walk people through the process and you're giving them commentary along the way of what type of website do you want? And here's why. We like growth driven design versus custom website. But if you want to the traditional type of website, you can pick that option and we'll give you pricing on that too.

Yeah, great. Yeah. On that point of kind of walking people and breaking it down into bite sized pieces, you probably notice on our website as well, all of our forms now are step forms. So instead of a traditional form where you see all six or ten fields, we break that down into bite sized pieces as well. And we've rolled that out for a couple of clients as well. And the conversion rate on those films versus traditional ones is a lot greater, that's for sure.

Is it really, Is there any. I don't know whether you probably don't have like an exact average, but any off the top of your, off the top of your head, Any rough approximation on what the difference might be?

Yeah, I'd be willing to say at least a 20% increase in conversion. We have one client who they're in the, the recruitment space and we convert. They'll probably getting about. They obviously try and get CVs or resumes from people and they were getting about, you know, let's say for example, 400 CVs being submitted by their traditional forms. We switched out to step forms and that jumped up to 750.

Wow, that's crazy. It's the power of micro commitments. Just like if you just break it down and it's not once people have taken some action, they're definitely more likely to take A subsequent action. So if you can break down that initial barrier, it makes sense. It just hasn't been that popular.

Yeah. Then they're a little bit of a challenge to build and a little bit of challenge to maintain, though. Yeah. HubSpot do some updates and sometimes they can break, but we just need to be across that.

Right, that makes sense. Well, what I want to transition to is a totally different tool that you guys have built out. So for anyone who hasn't seen it yet, Dream Designer IO is the. Is a site. So basically you guys have built out Dream Designer to be. We can talk about why you. Why you built this out, but basically like a drag and drop HubSpot builder where people are able to visually kind of put together things and be able to purchase that template that they just built visually to use in their housetop portal. So I'm excited, like, I was really excited to bring you on and dig into this a little bit. And so I guess probably the right starting place is the reason that this is built. Is it? So a lot of agencies try to build software stuff. A lot of agencies, there's some success stories. There's a lot of agencies who think the grass is greener on the software side of things or on the product side of things. So we'll try and do that. We have this marketing capability. Maybe we can market that really well. A lot of that falls flat, but the ones who do kind of have a bunch of things in common. And typically it's not purely just the grass is greener. If I go in this direction, it comes from a genuine desire to help people. So I'd love to hear the backstory on Dream Designer and then I'd love to talk technically how this works and. And some of your goals for that.

Yeah. So I'm glad you discovered that. It's a new tool launched obviously, a couple of weeks ago. So it's an exciting time for us. Should I say the reason why we created Dream Designer is being a HubSpot agency. We're obviously generating a lot of requests and a lot of leads for HubSpot websites purely through the Spinfluence brand. And a lot of those HubSpot customers and. Or agencies that are reaching out to us for quotes or proposals to build sites don't have a lot of budget, unfortunately. So we saw a little bit of a hole in the market there for people that don't want to build a bespoke website. They don't have any budget for strategy or anything like that, but they still want an amazing looking website that converts really well. So for all of those agencies or HubSpot customers, they can jump on over to this tool, dream Designer there. There's 570 custom modules we've built out now that you can basically build effectively. You could build an entire site or let's say an agency site with 10 pages and a blog and a couple of landing pages. If you've got a good eye for what modules are going to convert the best, you could build a site within 10 or 15 minutes. When you're actually building pages, we show you the price as you're building. So it's not kind of a retainer based program. You literally buy a module at a time. So if you wanted to, for example, build a Contact Us page, you would drag in a Google map, that's going to cost you $10. You want to drag in a form for conversion, that'll cost you $5. You drag in a header, there's $10. And you can literally just jump in there and build a page if you like, for $50 or $100, depending on what you want. Another kind of reason why we built it is for people to be able to build things ad hoc. So if you thought about a lot of companies or hey, we're having an event, we need a new landing page or we need a new page to talk about that event. Oh, we've got to go back to the developer, we've got to go back to an agency to get that done, or an agency that needs to be able to build something like that really quickly for their retainer clients. It solves that problem for them also.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So I've got so many questions. Technically, are all of these custom modules? Is that how it's all set up?

They are, yeah, exactly. So when you actually build a page in there, that page will port that over to your HubSpot portal and they all are custom modules. So you can then reuse those modules anywhere across your entire site.

Okay, that makes a lot of sense. And as those get pulled through, what does in terms of customization? So a lot of these modules on the site right now and there's things, there's different sections, you know, hero modules, team sections, form sections, pricing, image galleries, different types of designs and building blocks here. And a lot of them have relatively similar themes. So I'm sure, anyway, there's an image that's an image field that people can plug in and move around or whatever. As far as a lot of the editing with this, colors wise, is A lot of that stuff built into forms to enter in hex codes or RGB values and customize that. Or is that done via css? That's pulled in as well.

Yeah, so it's a bit of both actually. So the whole. I suppose all the templates that are in there are all based around one theme. So we call that theme Dream and we'll be loading in more themes in there. But all of those because we want people to be able to build a site that's going to obviously look the same across. All right.

It's coherent.

Yeah, coherent. So once those you've built out all of your modules, you can change colors of call to actions and things like that directly in there. Right now you can't edit text or photos within the Dream Designer itself, but once those custom modules are put back into your HubSpot portal, that's where you jump straight in and edit your text and images and change color text if you like, make global CSS changes. So we just. It's all one style sheet, so there's not a matter of going in and changing the CSS for every module. If we make a style change on the master style sheet, it'll affect your entire site and your modules.

You're reading my mind. That was going to be one of my next questions was how that works out. Come in is components with self contained css. That's awesome that it's just a single resource to load. As far as are you guys using. So it sounds like you're not using this at all at Spinfluence for your clients. I'm sure there's reusable pieces that you're using, but it's not like people are coming to you and you're just kind of leading them through this process and building it out. Or are you?

No, no, we're not using it internally. All the sites that we do at Spinfluence are all bespoke, all custom. So the Dream designer tool is literally for businesses, small businesses and or agencies that, that just don't have the budget to build a bespoke site with strategy. Spinfluence itself as a brand, we like to kind of pride ourselves on originality and design is a great, I suppose, focus for us as a brand. If things work beautifully and look beautifully most of the time, they provide a better customer experience and convert better. So yeah, we focus on that. But the tool itself we don't use internally. No.

Yep. Okay. So that makes a lot of sense. It seems like as far as the agency space for the Agency who doesn't have the web design team internally to handle stuff, or it's just completely booked up, or has the client base that just doesn't have the budget to afford a full site. To be able to point somebody like this to a site where you can go in and you can still do a custom site in here, just with all the different building blocks, putting it together in the right place, it seems like you could add a lot of value to a client by basically working with them on the content side, the messaging side, the inbound and the SEO side, and use this to, on a tight budget, kind of streamline how the site itself gets built out. If that's a starting building block, which it is in a lot of cases for agency clients is, hey, we need to revamp the website or scratch completely what we have currently and build this out. So that's awesome. I love where this is going. And initially what's out there looks really slick. So how do things. I'm just curious. On the back end, somebody builds their site on Dream Designer, then they go to checkout, they purchase it at that point. Then are they adding you guys as a user? Is this automated, or do they have to add you as a user and then you just transfer those that template that's been built into their portal?

Yeah. So right now we are working on automating the transfer over to HubSpot. With HubSpot at this point in time right now, you jump in, like you said, you go through the checkout process. We're sent an order automatically for all of the modules that you purchased in the order that you purchased them, how you constructed your pages. We then have that over into your HubSpot portal, usually within about five to 10 minutes. But we like to say, look, give us 12 hours at the point of checkout, just in case you build at 3 o' clock in the morning. Obviously we don't want to wake up and get that done for you, but yeah, during business hours, five to 10 minutes is about as long as you wait to get that up and running for you. But we will need access to your HubSpot portal. Yes. Just to quickly move them over, then you can kick us out.

That's awesome. Well, that makes a lot of sense. I'm excited to see where that goes and how the two pieces, having Dream Designer on one side and spinfluence, how everything kind of works together and you guys continue to grow. Nathan, this has been awesome to kind of get inside what you guys have going on. This is really cool to just kind of get inside your head and what's going on with the businesses. So we'll definitely link up the resources here in the show. Notes as far as people who want to reach out to you, learn more about Obviously they can check out the sites, but is there anywhere else you'd point people to connect with you?

Yeah, probably just email me nathanpinfluence.com would be the easiest way and I'm happy to have a chat with anyone at any time.

Awesome. Well, thanks so much for sharing here, Nathan. It was great having you on and look forward to seeing you continue to grow.

Thanks Greg. Great to have the chat.

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