Why Your Website Matters and How to Make It Matter More

Hi, and welcome to today's Biznology digital marketing webinar. I'm Tim Peter, one of the authors of Biznology. I'm also the president of Tim Peter and Associates, an e-commerce and digital marketing consultancy building brands and businesses via the social, local, global web. My work over the last 15 years for companies like Wyndham, Charles Schwab, and others has generated billions of dollars in online revenue. And today you'll be hearing from Andrew Shulkind, who will present Why Your Website Matters and How to Make It Matter More. But before we start, we need to recognize our sponsors. Andigo New Media, a content marketing agency helping businesses make the most of their website, email, and social media marketing efforts. BarnRaisers, a full-service digital and social media solutions company. That builds brands using proven relationship principles and ROI. GaggleAmp empowers companies to amplify their social media content by leveraging employees, partners, and resellers. And you should try GaggleAmp for free today. And Garrus Digital, a full-service digital strategy firm that reaches deeper into the conversation than any other agency anywhere. As we wait for more attendees to join, let me review the format of our webinar. Our Biznology webinars last just 30 minutes, so you can easily fit them into your busy schedule. We record each webinar and we'll email you that link later this week. And during our speaker's presentation, you can use GoToWebinar to ask a question. That orange arrow opens and closes your controls. If you have a question, simply type it into the box labeled Questions at any time during the event, and press the send button. I will select a few questions at the end of our webinar and pose them to Andrew. While we're waiting for the last few attendees to join, I'd like to remind you that the Biznology monthly newsletter and daily articles are available for free at biznology.com. So if you're not already a subscriber, we hope that you'll sign up now. Thanks again to all of you for spending 30 minutes with us. We know how valuable your time is, so let's introduce today's speaker. Andrew Schulkin is one of the authors of Biznology and founder of Andigo New Media. He is a veteran content marketer with a track record— excuse me, a veteran content marketer with a track record of helping businesses understand how their websites can be effective marketing tools. So if you have ever struggled with how to make your website your marketing hub, this is the webinar for you. Andrew, take it away.

Thanks, Tim, and hello everyone. Since we are doing this fast, I'm going to jump right in with a question I hope will keep you you will keep in mind as we talk about using your website for marketing. Hopefully, I will be talking to you about some of these broader guidelines that we know have worked for other companies, probably companies similar to yours. But not knowing the specifics of your situation, I hope you will keep this in mind and think about this as we talk about these broader ideas for the next 15 or 20 minutes. Right up front, we have made a promise to you of why and how in the title of our presentation today. And I'm sure it is the how that is of much greater interest. That's where we will spend most of our time. But we really do need to at least review a little bit of the why so that we can lay some groundwork. And that's where we are going to get started this morning. Your website matters for a bunch of reasons. The biggest reason it is still important in this age of social media, email marketing, instant access, on-demand whatever you want to talk about in terms of the buzzwords and the next big thing, is quite simply because you own it. Google, of all people, has handed us an excellent example of why this is the case. Google+, I'm sure you've all heard of and probably very few of you use, is on life support or dead, depending on whose version of the story you believe. And while it's probably not a central marketing channel for most of us, it did matter tons to a bunch of folks, particularly in the tech sector, not surprisingly. So the message here is basically this. Before Facebook, there was MySpace. Before MySpace, there was AOL, and then CompuServe. And you can create that trail all the way back to the Pony Express, smoke signals, and cave paintings if you'd like. In other words, there will be a next big thing. You don't own it, and you don't want to have to start your marketing efforts over from the ground up when the world shifts. Yes, absolutely, your website is going to be replaced at some point, but that change is not going to happen nearly as quickly as the changes we see in these public channels. In addition, your website matters because it helps fill the gaps and complements other tools that you are going to be using for your digital marketing. Email, for example, is a really fantastic tool. Of the fact that there is a very high annoyance factor. But its strengths really come much later in the buying cycle when you've already established some trust with your audience. Early on, your website is going to do a much better job of marketing. In fact, your website is going to help you build your email marketing list. So certainly something to keep in mind if email is a primary tool for you. Social media, another very strong tool. Has its strengths, has its weaknesses, but let's face it, it is one giant distraction. So your website gives you some quieter space in which to do your marketing. Your website also lets you tell your whole story. Social media, email marketing can be limiting. I mean, Twitter is 140 characters. There is a limit to what you can do there no matter how often you post. And too much of a good thing is sometimes too much of a good thing. So your website allows you to paint a full picture, a much more compelling picture than just the sliver that you can give when you are talking in some of these other channels. That is a picture off the coast of Iceland, by the way. I was there a couple of weeks ago with my family. Go. I mean, don't leave now, but go soon. It is really fantastic. I absolutely highly recommend it. In addition to telling your whole story, your website lets you tell your story in a manner that you can walk the walk. You can back up what you are saying. This is a screen grab from a site we have in production right now. It shows their content library, or a piece of their content library where you can see the great breadth of information that is there from speaking engagements, to case studies, to publications and press coverage, blog posts. It is searchable which we are going to come back to that in a minute. But this allows you not just to paint that complete picture, but to do it Very, very important. So how do we paint that picture? Let's start talking about the how. Here are 7 bullet points that we are going to go through here in the next couple of minutes, things that we want to focus on. So we will come back to each of these, and I will have this list for you at the end again. First, and this is so basic that it really is, it's not just Marketing 101, it's the first thing you need to do. What is your message? 15 minutes of the first day of Marketing 101. And I certainly am not wasting your time, I don't think, by talking about this because we see so many clients make mistakes in this. Even if their intentions are good, even if they start off by trying to build a website that is very audience-centric, eventually they lose their way and start thinking in their own terms. So it's not about you. It's not about what you do. It's about what you can do for me. I mean, if you keep in mind that I'm not talking about me, we are talking about the things that I do every day for our clients, but we're really talking about what this means to you and how it can work for you. So keep that in mind, not just for content, because that's fairly easy. I mean, it certainly goes beyond what pronouns you're using, us and our versus you and your. You have to think a little bit deeper than that. But where people really tend to go wrong is when they are looking at how their site is organized how they are thinking about presenting the content, and things along those lines. This is one area where it really makes sense to get outside help just for the added perspective. It doesn't have to be a specialist necessarily, just someone who can give you a slightly different perspective. So once we have created our audience-centric site, we have to encourage action. So the vast majority of us on the call are B2B marketers, and that means our website is not our primary selling tool. We don't do e-commerce, or if we do, it's a really small part of the overall sales story. Our websites have to work to get our audience to take the next step. So that next step can be moving a visitor who has never heard of you, and they just found you by Google search, to explore the site a little bit more deeply. So homepage calls to action are going to be helpful there. It can mean getting a site visitor to accept you as a knowledgeable resource where the library of great content we were talking about a moment ago, that comes into play. You want to get them to trust you enough to invite you into their inbox. So gated content and email newsletter signups are going to work there. So there are all these different things you can use. Ultimately, you want to get them to recognize the value of what you are doing, and what you are saying, and how you talk about the problems that you are solving, to realize that you are a good fit. If you are a good fit. So numerous varied calls to action, that's really what we are talking about here. One good hands-on tip that we can point out here, if you look at the right side of the screen you see resources and downloads and the image for the featured case study. That's a pretty standard setup and it works. Right here in the middle of the page though, there is a pull quote style call to action there. Dealing with this executive's book, inviting folks to learn more. It breaks up the content a little bit which used to be considered a terrible thing to do. Now sort of short attention span theater, it is something much more common. So we certainly recommend trying other things, and we will get to testing a little bit later on. You are encouraging action. You've got to make sure folks can use the website. If you frustrate them, you are going to be in trouble. If you make them think, you are going to be in trouble. Now, Don't Make Me Think is in caps there for a reason. Actually, I suppose it should be in italics. It is the title of a book by a fellow named Steve Krug, K-R-U-G. I highly recommend the book even if you are not the hands-on, you are building it yourself, or you are in charge of managing the team. If you are just overseeing the process, this book and the ideas behind it which essentially are, don't make me think. Don't frustrate me. Don't do anything that I'm not expecting. Adhere to some norms and do them really well. The book is going to help you talk the talk and communicate with your team and make sure that you are all staying on the same page, and that all the things that you want to do along the lines of responsive design, thoughtful structure, and intuitive navigation, they are all going to be a part of the end product. Usability really does matter. And design is a part of this structure as well. We could talk about this all day, as probably any of these slides. So I'm just going to leave it at that. Great content, of course, is a given. There's got to be great content, but folks have to be able to find it. So we talk quite a bit about not just search, but filtering as well. As a matter of fact, my column for Biznology this month appeared earlier in the month was about this very topic. Filtering is important for a couple of reasons. On smaller sites, if you're just offering free-form search, you're going to get a lot of empty results. So people are going to do a search, nothing's going to come up. That is not the impression, of course, that you want to give them. So filtering gives them a way of sort of looking at what's there, what the, the real realm of possibilities are. Even on larger sites, You're going to benefit by guiding users, offering them some clues as to the kind of terminology that you're using. You have to remember that not everyone knows the jargon, especially if they're early in the buying cycle. So search and filtering are something really to pay attention to. Here again, an area where professional help may be required. None of the major content management systems— WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, etc.— are terribly good at search right out of the box. So it is something you want to talk to your web developer about, making sure that they can customize to fit your needs. We very much encourage clients to think about their website as the hub of their marketing activities, or hub of their digital marketing activities. That typically brings to mind the hub and spoke model which unfortunately a lot of people people think of is sort of unidirectional. It's got to work in both directions. You are going to drive folks to social media. They are going to find out where you are on social media through your website. And yet, they are on social media. However good your traffic numbers may be, there are more people on Twitter than are on your website. I can almost guarantee for everyone in the audience. So don't beat them over the head and try and drag them to your website. Go where they are in social media. Go where they are in their email inbox. once you've gotten the trust to get their permission, and work there. Bring them back to the site. Drive them to your social media channels as well. It works out much better for the site and for your social media presence in the long run. Not directly related to your site, but don't forget that social media itself is a 2-way street. So don't just be out there publishing content, but also make sure you are consuming content, commenting, etc. There is a lot to be learned if you are listening. And that's an important part of the process. One of the last things we will talk about here is the sales cycle and building your website out so that it takes into account the reality of what the world is right now. It wasn't that long ago that you walked into a car dealership, for example. You got the beady-eyed salesman to hand you a brochure, and you started learning about the car. Maybe you read a review in Car and Driver, or there was a column in your local newspaper, or you talked to your neighbor who just bought one, which is a very early form of social media, of course. But for the most part, you were at a huge disadvantage. The sales process started much earlier than it does now. So the reason this is important is because where formerly the sales process started with an uninformed consumer, now it starts with someone who already knows quite a lot about what they are talking about. They weren't born knowing that though. They went from 0 to 100 by gathering that information somewhere. Your website needs to be where they are gathering that information. So some of the things that we talked about earlier, homepage calls to action, related content features and sidebars, gated content to get them to dig a little bit deeper, email subscriptions to get them to to get you to be able to create an ongoing relationship and build trust over time. Events, personalized content like a website review, something that is very specific to their particular needs rather than more generic. All these are going to be features of your website that are going to allow you to own that space between where a person doesn't know really anything other than having a vague need that needs to be met, and making the decision to pick up the phone and talk to a salesperson to essentially finalize the deal, really just take those last few steps. Our last piece of the puzzle is measuring your results, which, you know, it's a funny thing. That's some of the tried and truest words about sales. If you don't measure it, it doesn't matter. If you're not measuring it, no one's going to care. All this is true, and yet Measuring your results isn't really what the story is here. I can guarantee almost 100% response if I said, how many of you have created a report for your company that was neither read nor acted upon after you put all that time into it? It happens all the time. So gathering the information isn't nearly as important as interpreting the results and translating the results, as Mike So the little graphic shows. And that's what's going to be the difference between having this ocean of data that really isn't terribly helpful and having something actionable that you can actually use. So the big ideas here, you really need to track things over time. Any particular snapshot, there's just too much noise. Who knows what affected your results for that day or that month even. You really want to track over a long period of time to see what's working and what's not. The kind of testing that really helps is A/B testing among other things, because it can be less expensive than broader tests, though it is certainly not necessarily cheap. You can test content topics, changing those up to see what people respond to more. You should have a broad range of content anyway, and you will be testing this not in an A/B fashion, but you will still be testing. Content formats, certainly worth testing. If you are just putting out written blog posts, well, you are leaving a lot unexplored. Yes, it is a lot more expensive to put together infographics well, or to put together video, but those may depending on your audience produce much greater results. One may be better than the other, and testing against those really does make a lot of sense. A big thing to keep in mind throughout all of this is process versus outcomes, what we refer to as process metrics and outcomes metrics. Unless you are selling advertising as your primary form of income, page views probably doesn't matter to anyone in your organization whose title starts with C. That's just not going to pay the rent at the end of the month. It's outcomes that matter, which isn't to say that process metrics aren't important. They are very important. They are worth watching. They can be leading indicators if you see things drop. In process outcomes, process metrics, you can bet that outcomes metrics are going to follow suit 2 weeks, 2 months, 2 years down the line depending on your sales cycle. So I encourage you to think about measurement really more as a translation process in order to get something actionable out of what you've done on the site and what's working. So with that, I can wrap things up. And these are the areas that we looked at, keeping in mind responsive, marketing-focused, sales-aligned, very much informative, entertaining if you can swing that, certainly matters. Making sure that the site is usable so that people will invest the time rather than closing out and going to a competitor's site in frustration. All these things are going to be important. So I hope I was able to give you an answer to the questions you had in mind. that I posed at the start about how this might apply to your site. And I hope you will walk away with some good ideas on improving your website's effectiveness as a marketing tool. Tim, with that, I will hand it back to you.

Thanks so much, Andrew. I'm really sure that our attendees have a much stronger idea of how to improve their websites. Obviously, he didn't answer every question. I've got several good questions from our audience teed up for you. And I'd like to remind our audience that it's not too late to ask your own question by typing it in the questions box in your GoToWebinar controls. But before we get to your questions, I'd like to let you know about Mike Moran's video course on content marketing. The internet has now reduced distribution costs to nearly zero, so content marketing is within the reach of even the most budget-challenged companies. All you need to do is understand how to identify your audience, layered in their content needs, and meet them, which is actually what this course on content marketing will do for you. Learn how to reach your audience with quality content that won't break the bank. Go to bit.ly/cmcourse2 for more info. We are about to start firing questions at Andrew, but we need to thank our sponsors once again. Andigo New Media is a content marketing agency helping businesses make the most of their website, email, and social media marketing efforts. Barnraisers, a full-service digital and social media solutions company that builds brands using proven relationship principles and ROI. GaggleAmp empowers companies to amplify their social media content by leveraging employees, partners, and resellers. And you can try GaggleAmp for free today. And Garrus Digital, a full-service digital strategy firm that reaches deeper into the conversation than any other agency anywhere. Now, on to your questions. Our first question, Andrew, is you covered a lot of things at a great level in terms of helping people understand what's important and things like that. But our first question is, where is the best place to get started? Where do you recommend that our audience actually starts as they look at this?

Well, I think the best place typically There are 2 answers to that for us. One is taking a look at analytics for an existing site assuming you've got a site in place and see what's there, if anything jumps out in terms of what's working and what's not, and what you might want to capitalize on, what you might want to eliminate as you are rebuilding a site. But really the biggest source of information is your existing audience. Your clients, your subscribers, prospects you are already talking to, figuring out the questions that they are asking and actually sitting and asking them questions about what has been helpful and what has not, that is really a great way to guide any update that you want to make to your website.

That's great. Could you talk a little bit more— this is another question we received— can you talk a little bit more about where you recommend we begin measurements? This is a nice follow-on to what you were just talking about, but what are some of the key measures and metrics that our audience can use when they are looking to see what it is their customers care about?

So there are some basics in— I mean, Google Analytics is the most popular package, so we will sort of stick with terminology there, but certainly this applies with probably slightly different terminology elsewhere. The basics like page views, number of pages per visit, and time on the site are all things to take a look at. But what we really encourage folks to do is use goals and conversions and related things like that which are not the default, not part of the default setup. You have to set them up in Analytics. But those will tell you where folks are coming into the site, what are they doing to get to this goal, whether that goal might be a sale, it might be downloading a piece of gated content, or signing up for an email newsletter. You can track the path that they are taking, find where they are dropping off, and locate problems on your site that you will want to correct, of course.

Great, great, very helpful. We've gotten a question from the audience that asks, could you speak Can you tell us more about filtering and why it matters?

Sure. So filtering, what filtering does is there are a couple of ways it can be used. One is that it provides you a way to almost prepopulate a question. So a form of filtering might go as follows. We are working with a fashion designer right now. Relaunching their website in the next month or so. And of course, the site is organized dresses, skirts, tops, etc. And that makes perfect sense. Those should be your top-level navigation tools. But once you've got someone on the site and she's looking at dresses, and she's found a dress she likes, wouldn't it make sense to also have a search feature that you've prepopulated with see all garments in size 8, if that's the size that she's looking at. That's the kind of filtering that can be really useful both for an end user, and you can build landing pages around that for pay-per-click campaigns. You can build SEO campaigns around that as well. So filtering has a lot of different uses. That's one that I would certainly recommend people think about in trying to prepopulate these questions that make sense, that you know people of a particular audience segment are asking, and sort of lead them in the right direction. Ask the question that they didn't even know they wanted to ask essentially.

That's fantastic, Andrew. I will tell you, I loved that idea in your presentation, in your slides about how great content is only great if your audience can find it. We put so much emphasis around improving search. We are usually thinking about helping Google find us, or helping Bing find us, or helping Yahoo find us, maybe not as much as we should around helping our customers find the content that they actually want when they come to the site. So I think that is a great point.

Great.

Can you talk more about sample calls to action on the homepage, or about calls to action on the homepage? What are the sorts of things that What are some ideas that work well in your experience that can help customers find what it is they are looking for, or take the next step towards a goal?

Oh, great question. So calls to action are probably most easily thought of as shortcuts into some area of the website. So there are pages, I don't want to say buried, but there are pages deeper into your website that are of interest to a particular segment of your audience. Giving that audience segment a clear and easy route in is a fantastic way to get them to dive deeper without creating this mess of a homepage. I mean, that's always one of the toughest conversations we have when we are sitting down starting a project with clients, is that everyone on the client side thinks that what they are working on is so important it has to be on the homepage. So all of a sudden you've got 20 initiatives on the homepage, and that's just not going to work. Nothing is. Is made to be important there. Limit it to 3 or 5, and you can rotate them either seasonally or as business changes or because they are timely and topical. You can focus with those calls to action on particular industry segments, on particular services that you are offering, on particular roles. There is a difference if you are selling financial-related software, for example. There is a different role that a manager plays, and they are going to have different concerns than a CFO, for example. So there are lots of different ways to slice up what you would consider your information to make it into a call to action and put it on the homepage. So all of those would work well.

That's really great.

Perfect.

Thank you so much, Andrew. Now obviously our first commitment to our audience is that we will make sure we We recognize you are all busy, and we want you to be able to get on with your day. So that is all the time we have for today. I do want to thank Andrew for these great ideas, and thanks especially to our audience for your participation and your questions. If any of you had questions that we did not have time to get to today, you can email those to eileen@mikemoran.com, and she'll be sure to get them to Andrew for the answer. Later this week, we'll send you all a link to the recording of this webinar to listen to again and to share with others. We also invite you to mark your calendars for our next Biznology webinar, How Not to Suck at Marketing, with Jeff Perkins, which is scheduled for 11:00 AM US Eastern Time on September 8th. We hope to see everybody back here then. And until then, take care, and bye everybody.

Bye.