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Everyone wants to grow their business, but not everyone has the time or patience to learn all the ins and outs of marketing, sales enablement, and making the most out of a CRM such as HubSpot. Join the Web Canopy Studio team, a HubSpot Diamond Partner Agency, as they chat about various topics all designed to help you grow your B2B business.
(00:00):
Hey, everyone. In today's episode, we're talking about the six keys to creating a highly converting website and how you can actually make all these modifications on your own, regardless of your experience with coding or not. My name is John akin. I'm the CEO of web canopy studio. And this is the website conversion show.
(00:26):
Okay guys. So we are asked all the time from clients, from prospects, from other agencies, from people in the HubSpot community from just everywhere, all different walks of life. We get asked all the time, do you guys see trends in what makes a website work really well or what makes a website really successful? And a lot of the time the misconceptions that come out of that are we have to spend an asinine amount of money to make a really great website, or we have to be constantly producing immense amounts of content on that website to make it do everything that we want to do. And, you know, that's to say sometimes that is the case, but overwhelmingly it's not that it is not that. So as a leadership team inside of our company, as we start to think through what are the biggest, most impactful things, elements, categories that each website, that we would constitute a successful, meaning a website that is bringing in lots of leads doing its job growing the company's lead database and so on.
(01:45):
What are the trends? What are the things that emerge that we notice? And so we've compiled six different categories that we evaluate websites on and that we walk our websites through when we are doing any kind of design or development with our clients. And so today, what I wanna walk you through are these six keys to a high converting website. And for those of you that are watching the video, you can see on the screen here, we have a graphic that we call the website conversion framework, and this kind of emerged out of those discussions. And it's really the process by which we go through website development inside of our own company. And for those of you that are listening, there's a triangle on the screen it's divided into six sections. And you can see the image in the show notes, there should be a link.
(02:36):
So what I'm gonna do is walk you through each one of these and visually you can see it on the screen here, there are those six categories like I was saying. Start to evaluate how well you feel your website is performing in each section. You'll be able to kind of take a step back and know this is where I need to zero in based on what John's saying. This is where I need to go and spend my time. So we're gonna go through each section now and kind of talk through the six keys. Okay. I hope you guys are ready. Get out your pens. You're gonna wanna take notes on this one. So the first element, the first area that we're gonna focus is called platform and tools. Now, this could be a bit skewed into thinking like, oh, we've gotta just completely re-platform to something else.
(03:17):
And that's not necessarily the case. This one typically is the deciding factor of if we need to spend a really good amount of time, making sure we're in the right place or not. But I would argue if your website is not very easy for you to use, it's not very easy for other people on your team to use and to make updates and modifications without having to hire a developer. It's probably not the right place for you to be. And there are considerably vast amount of options that you could move to. So evaluate based on how easy is this for me to use? How easy is this for me to update, how scalable is this, but almost more importantly, how secure is this? Is this something that I need to run a bunch of third parties to make my website do what I need to do?
(04:10):
Do I need to rely on all these different kinds of plugins and these developers who have no clue who their companies are, and I'm gonna insert them into my website. Just so it works. I don't know if that's the best bet. So you wanna make sure that your platform is the right one for you. That it's gonna be able to scale with you. It's easy to use and it's easy to update. The next key is arguably in my book, the most important one, right? So we're looking at positioning in messaging. This is 95% (complete made-up statistic) of what constitutes a successful website. So if your website tells the wrong story, if it's not saying what it needs to say, you have no chance that you're gonna get conversions. And I'm willing to bet that a lot of you listening to this or watching this are sitting in that situation where you're not getting a lot of people that are coming to the website, converting, and becoming a customer.
(05:11):
If you're not doing it at the volume that your sales team needs, you have a serious problem in this area. Fixing this is one of the most critical pieces of the entire website. And that's why it's important to mention, you don't need a developer to change the content on the website, right? You can make some of these modifications and we'll go into how to do that in a little bit, but those are really kind of critical pieces and the biggest key to making sure that your website does what we want it to do: positioning. It's saying the right thing. And it's looking at your company as the mentor of guiding your clients where they need to go. If you're spending most of your time on your website, you could just pull up your website and quickly look, if it's talking more about you and your services or your product, if it's talking more about what you know, your accolades or just anything about how your features are the best thing in the world, you're not spending the right amount of time talking about your customers and not spending the right amount of time talking about their problems.
(06:19):
So that's where we want to get to, we wanna make sure that we're positioning in that way. Next step, design and development. So again, this does not mean we need to redesign our website. This does not mean I want you to think about how pretty your website is. It does mean we need to look at the website from the perspective of the tools that are on the website. Does the interactivity of the website help engage our customers, our prospects, the visitors to the website, or does it detract from, or does it not exist? Your website should lift your brand up and it should enhance the message. So again, I'm a firm believer of positioning and messaging first and then using design as a way to build that message and that brand out.
(07:13):
But if you don't have an existing the ability to do a bunch of different design work, you can make some of these modifications on your own. So in the design of the development, we were looking at enhancing that message, making sure that we are enabling conversion using tools like landing pages, forms, maybe there's a third party that you have to acknowledge and get into there to collect those leads. If you're not on a platform like HubSpot, but making sure that we have features that are engaging features that are bringing people to our, our company, into the CRM so that we can continue to work and nurture them, which is the next component of the website conversion framework. So looking at nurturing and how do we get people to come back to our website? How do we deliver an experience beyond just the lead?
(08:08):
So many marketers focus on collecting the contact information, getting a lead, and then sending them to sales or sending them a couple of emails as a follow-up. And then we give up. What happens though? People don't do what we want them to do. They don't come back to the website. They don't end up booking a call with the sales team. They don't get a demo. And so now you're stuck with all these people inside of your database that are just sitting there and they're taking up space. It's like you're paying for this inventory in the back room. Right. And they're just sitting there. So this is about delivering an experience. This is about delivering the right kinds of things to the right people after they convert, after they make some kind of, of, of interaction with your company. So what does nurturing and automation look like from a CRM perspective?
(09:03):
Well, I want to engage the CRM as soon as somebody becomes a lead. And so at the base level, we wanna make sure they're created. We wanna make sure that there's a up of some kind to them. So that's important. But I also want to segment the lists, the kinds of people that are engaging, I wanna segment who they are, what I want them to do, and what information they truly need. And I wanna make sure I continue to provide that information to them. We're gonna do that through different things with content on the website. We're gonna do that by engaging things like lead scoring and pipeline automation inside of the backend of your CRM. So this is really really important to help influence those contacts and make sure that they are not just sitting as stock inventory on the backroom. Next traffic and SEO.
(09:59):
This is the most misunderstood component of a successful website. I can't tell you how many conversations I have had with companies that are spending thousands of dollars on SEO. And when I ask them, I blow their strategy up every single time just by asking me or asking them, can you show me the report that shows your return on investment? And we have like an awkward pause and they're like, ah, I can show you that our site visits have gone up and got tons of traffic from all these other places. And I'm like, that's great. And they're like, I can show you our keywords are performing better. And we're getting all these other people coming to the website and I'm like, that's great. But what kind of return are you getting from your revenue, from the customers who are purchasing again, what is happening?
(10:51):
How is SEO helping to improve the overall revenue? And can you tie that back and track that? And at some point, they will get to that, that ability to do that. And a lot of times it's tied to them not using the right platform, right? So we're going back again to that root of the conversion framework. They're not using the right platform. So what should SEO be, what should that traffic source be? If you know, in order to get a bunch of traffic to the website, well it is supposed to get a bunch of traffic to the website. But if your website is not converting, if your website is not already doing the things you want it to do, there is zero sense in trying to send a bunch of traffic to that website. It's like, you're dumping gasoline on a fire that doesn't even exist yet.
(11:45):
It is not gonna deliver the results you want. Sure. You're gonna get the website traffic up. Sure. That's gonna lift up the credibility of the website. And that in itself is great. But if your website doesn't convert, I would not spend a bunch of money trying to make more traffic to happen when I should be spending time, spending money, spending my resources and making sure that the website is converting and doing what I want it to do. Let's say I'm a marketing director, newer at the company, and I'm not putting calls on the calendar for the sales director. My head is on the chopping block within six months, marketers are the fastest, most commonly replaced position in a business. And as scary as that may sound, it is the absolute truth. So how do you get job security?
(12:35):
You attach yourself to revenue. You attach yourself to bottom-line revenue. In order to do that, you're not gonna spend a bunch of money on top-of-line vanity metrics that have no impact until you really get into the weeds in the profit and the revenue column. It just is not a good use of time yet. So I'm a firm believer in SEO. I believe that it is critical to every successful website. 100%. I am an absolute believer as well that is not an effort until you establish the five or the four other categories to get to this one, right? We to go through the others to get here first. Okay. Lastly, conversion rate optimization. This is like the pinnacle of the six keys here. Your website should be constantly improving. Your website should be continuously generating more leads.
(13:31):
It should be growing. It should be always up updating. If you haven't done a website update or a launch of something on your site in the last six months, it is already outdated, especially if you're in the tech world. If you're selling a SaaS, some kind of software product, a B2B enterprise-level things change so fast and you guys know that already. So how can we make sure that the website does what we need it to do? Well, we need to keep running tests, right? We need to keep running optimization checks, AB test split tests. We need test content. We need to look at new tools. We need to look and see how pages are performing and okay, it's at 1%, what are the tests we can run to get that, to perform and to, to convert at 3%, what does that do to the overall lead flow, into the overall calendar bookings with our sales team and to the overall bottom line.
(14:20):
They're very easy ways to track these metrics once we get going. And so that's really where we're going with all of this. That's the pinnacle of a successful website is that the website's never done. It never stops. And in reality, once you're at that conversion rate optimization level, you can start looking back to the bottom of the pyramid again and start working your way down. And so those six elements are what make up that website conversion framework. And so again these are the six pieces that we use at web canopy studio to go through and evaluate what a good website is. And we are following and building that roadmap that needs to be there, right? So that's a wrap on the overview of website conversion, you know, making sure your website checks all these boxes and each category of the framework, really is your fast track to a highly converting website.
(15:15):
So one thing I wanna tell you about this is if you want to streamline this process completely and really see what areas you should focus on next, you should go to our website and take our free assessment. We have a website assessment. It's a conversion assessment. It's at webcanopystudio.com/assessment. And inside of that, we have a series of questions around each of the framework categories that will help you see how well you are performing at all six of these different categories. And as a follow up, when you fill out this assessment, you're gonna get a personalized report that shows you exactly what areas you need to focus on. First, you're gonna get detailed descriptions. You're gonna get checklists of items that you should work on. And not to mention again the majority of what we're providing you in this assessment are things that you can address on your own. You don't need to hire developers and designers and all these things to take care of it. If you want to fast-track your way into this, I think it's a really great way to get started. Check out webcanopystudio.com/assessment and see how you fare. I think that's it guys. My name is John Aikin. Thank you so much. And we'll see you next time.