Your Website Is Your Business — Make it Great
For most online firms, and for a good number of brick and mortar businesses, the company website still is their business.
It’s a market visibility generator, product/service educator, cool digital storefront, captivating branding statement, helpful customer service center, traffic volume builder, hospitable welcome center, lead generator, prospect nurturer, fun entertainer, and reassuring post-purchase doubt reducer. And everything that’s done on the website makes your staff more effective.
With all the doomsday talk about the web these days, companies are beginning to neglect their websites. Sadly, they’ve submitted to the assumption that the big tech monopolies will vaporize the open web, to imprison the public in their private content platforms — where consumers and B2B users will go to directly. Google, FB, Linkedin, Instagram and others are reducing visibility — it’s called pay to play.
Yet, that death sentence is unlikely. First of all, a website offers immense multimedia power including video and hi res photos, fullscreen display, social media widgets, and interactive elements. It doesn’t suffer the limits of AI LLMs and social platforms. You own it, it’s free, and it’s an amazing asset. It is precious.
And stories presented on your website are more comfortable and trusted — so social posing or hype.
Your Authentic Message
B2B clients and consumers want authenticity, trust, genuine brand experiences, along with direct access to a company and its people.
And businesses want their own “owned platform” where they control the messaging, layout, to deliver a free, focused, noise-free customer journey. Anytime you rely on big media tech, you risk brand and customer erosion. And of course, they can reduce your visibility to zero if you don’t pay up. That’s not nice.
Your owned platform helps you deliver your authentic branded content experience that’s so essential to confidence and lasting success. Renting a platform is risky.
Compare the qualit of visitors generated through search engines (active shoppers) vs the random, by chance eyeballs you capture on FB, Instagram or Tiktok. Outside of impulse consumer products, people won’t buy a house, car, or vacation via social media. If they are buyers, they’ll be more engaged and convert better on your website (with content designed for those social leads).
Creating a Customer Who Doesn’t Want Any Other Company
You don’t have to be the best — just be the only one they want. They won’t buy those long trips to Europe or consider buying a home in that neighborhood, unless they respect your opinion.
It’s way beyond differentiation — to becoming the only one they want. That’s powerful, exclusive, lasting and something you can build on. This relationship with your customer is the only one to strive for, given their brand loyalty is powerful and difficult for competitors to interfere with. It’s deep, heart felt and indelible, taking place on your owned platform – a place they prefer because they’re alone with you. Competitors disappear into the fog.
When we say “brand visibility,” we’re still referring to actual visits to your website. Forget about social mentions, ad impressions, and ChatGPT citations. The real measure of online success is visits to your website and the depth of emotion they feel when they’re on it.
Because site visits represent real immersion in your UVP, brand and persuasive offer, something they’ll remember that keeps their intent high.
Your Best Prospects Will Go to Your Website
When targeted customers are interested in your products and business, they will hunt for your url. I do this, you’ve done it, and everyone does it. We all type the company name into Google – so simple and quick. Who are they really?
How can you feel committed to a company and your purchase if you haven’t visited their website? It’s the heart of the authenticity, intimacy, confidence, self-esteem, and trust they want to feel about your company. They can’t feel the one powerful emotion they want to experience without being on your company website.
Their interest and buying intent is true. They just want to experience it fully and get your help in making it real.
Emotional Convergence — Where their Intent Resonates
It’s this complex cluster of emotions they want to feel before they commit their precious time, self-respect and money to a purchase. As I said, after a while, it gets translated to one single emotion. This is called Emotional Convergence.
When converged, this emotion colors all impressions and experiences, thus uplifting even weak areas of your business and products. Everything gets a golden glow, even if it isn’t all that great. What a wonderful situation to be in!
On your website, you’ll capture that intent, nurture it strategically, build that single converged emotion, and help them celebrate their preference for your company.
Serious customers and brand fans want to get close to the essence of your brand personality and character – because they like you, and likely intend to love your business.
What Should I Do to Maximize the Power of Our Company Website?
- Clarify your value proposition – what makes you the only one for them?
- Design a clean, comfortable, trust-building layout, with your branded personality
- Create genuine, authentic, compelling, irresistible content that helps them care about their desire/intent and care about you as their provider.
- Create content that presents and describes your products and services in the style they like.
- Strategize your organic content and advertising content pieces, and use analytics data to help you understand your customers behavior.
- Use striking, emotion-generating visuals in your content (not just text).
- Guide visitors with clear pathways for an enjoyable customer journey, which makes committing to purchase seem natural.
- Help build customer confidence with useful information, customer success stories and product demo resources.
- Provide frictionless, conversion-ready transactions.
You can orchestrate the solution.
Consider the Business Value and Overcome Your Obstacles
Get creative in finding the money, either through savings, allocating funds from other business operations, because generally, digital marketing isn’t getting the money it needs. Surveys confirm that digital marketing gets cheated of funding and this is the number cause of failure. Sometimes co-marketing might work. If you can find one or two other related but non-competing businesses to work together, it cuts costs significantly. This way, these other businesses (people you know) get a life-saving solution too.
Building Your Dream Team
Definitely hire freelancers, even bring them in-house as key long-term team members. Active, one-to-one engagement is always better than hiring a detached agency that reports every month. Client prospects know I care and I’ve been brought in to build significant expertise that became a valuable asset for them. On occasion, I couldn’t reach the industry elite experience needed. However, these were industries that I didn’t have an afiniity for.
With respect to passion, drive, and capacity, you’ll know it when you read their blog, that they’re authoritative, creative, unique and authentic -– so important. Don’t be passive. Help them find and adopt marketing, production, management and AI tools necessary for peak success. Small gaps are not canyons.
- A creative website designer (they can take a template and turn it into a beautiful online experience, and ensure it will create an effective and reliable online experience).
- Graphic designer (they create compelling, activating branded visuals which can be modified for each PPC/email campaign).
- Creative copywriter (they can research and develop content on the right topics, with a style that makes a compelling, trust-building visitor experience).
- SEO strategist (they can build targeted or massive traffic, free organic traffic, that gives you good, well-placed exposure) and exposure on key industry websites (offsite promotion).
- Analytics expert (they can plan and set up your data collection system, reporting, and tagging across platforms for a 360 view of your marketing success. An expert knows what they’re doing, and it’s wiser to use them.
You may be able to acquire some freelancers with multiple talents such as relevant copywriting, PPC advertising, SEO/GEO and email marketing campaigns. With graphic design, analytics, brand consulting, and website design, service might be rendered infrequently. One-time expertise is worth it, and you’ll learn from them.
A local digital marketing agency likely won’t be willing to have one of their staff become an expert in your field of business. They need their staff to be generalists serving a wide range of clients. Yet, you need to go deep to win today.
Suffice to say, you’ll be working closely with your freelancers. They just need good instructions, a plan/strategy to guide their understanding, and your confidence in them.
Going remote is wise, because you can find the very best. You only need to find those that are sincere, able and ready to be a big part of your company.
And digital web marketing is critical to success because all roads lead to your website. It’s the comforting, reassuring, connecting medium between you and your adoring customers. Tell me they aren’t worth it.
I’ve worked with clients over the years who have taken this approach to building a digital marketing powerhouse. It is manageable and more effective. And I’ve seen some deciding to bring it all in-house, only to watch them fail. It’s a sad thing to see, but sometimes people hear that this is “best practices” and they do it without thinking.
You Should be Their One and Only Customer Too
Keep your freelance team glued to you as the only customer they’ll ever want, and you won’t want for anything. By showing loyalty, support for training, tools, resources etc., why would they work for your competitors?
Your well-conceived and developed website is your business. Without it, you’re at the mercy of monopolies you know you can’t trust. Avoid the worry of renting visibility online and build your owned assets.
Find out more about Gord and how he’s leveraging AI for improved content experiences, while enhancing the emotional connection via genuine, authentic communications.
