Website Strategy

Everyone wants to build a website with “Our Mission” “Our Vision” “About Us” “Our Values” This is appropriate in an employee manual… is it relevant online? Not really. If you must, put it in a footer link, but save your navigation for actionable pages and the answers to your customers questions.

I will make the assumption that you are here because

  1. You have a business
  2. You want more customers
  3. You sell some service, product, or relationship that benefits your customer such that they exchange dollars for this product, service, or relationship

Pretty simple, right? Sometimes, the Keep it Simple Principle really works!

Honestly, though, if you have a business and you sell stuff, people buy your stuff because it satisfies some need they have. Most marketing focuses on adding alternate carriers of value such as a celebrity endorsement, great copy, a testimonial, or a sexy image, to increase sales. These all help increase conversions, however fundamentally, people buy to fill a need, and it is a great service to efficiently connect people in need with the solution to their need.

A website should:

  1. Be functional and get found by a prospect who has a need
  2. Capture the prospect and start the process of turning them to customer
  3. Demonstrate the solution to the need the prospect expressed through their keyword based search, through their browsing habits and predilections, or through their general curiosity

Websites that are designed for leads and action or sales are a never ending process of expansion, optimization, conversion, and profitable ROI.  Growth takes the message wider and broader to people who may not yet even know they have a need, much less know about your solution to this unmet need.

People operate on the ‘what’s in it for me’ principle- I like to call it ‘enlightened self interest’. Others can be more crass. Any way you phrase it, What’s In It For Me, Where’s the Beef, Show Me the Money has a common theme-

People buy your stuff for the Benefits you stuff gives them, and not for Features of your stuff……

Another way to look at this is by paraphrasing one of the best Google Adwords and copywriting coaches around, Perry Marshall. Like many in the Internet marketing world, Perry came to online marketing by a circuitous route, and after stints in multi-level marketing and mechanical and industrial equipment sales, he found his niche teaching businesses how to get great results with Google Adwords.

Perry relates a story of his early days, as an employee writing about a new drill in a trade journal for a tool manufacturing company. He got unexpected but phenomenal results, as he says, by ‘Writing about Holes, not Drills.”

I’m nowhere near as effective as Perry in this parable, but the point is that the readers of the trade journal wanted to hear about the Benefits of the product, not its Features- They want to know ‘That it could rip thru studs like a hot knife thru butter’, as this is much more compelling than ‘1/4 Hp, 650 Foot Pound torque engine with ASTM ISO 2001 certified 10 foot 20 amp cord….”

I hope it’s clear the first example is all about user benefits, the second, just dull features.

So where is this going and how does it relate to web design?

The “Our Mission” “Our Vision” “About Us” “Our Values” pages are important to the business owner and possibly to its investors, but should not be prominent. They should certainly not be the home page, and should really not waste valuable digital real estate and attention in the upper navigation.

Building a Results Oriented website means expanding on the foundation laid in the Keyword Research process- picking the critical and highest traffic relevant words, focusing content and images around those words, and most importantly focusing the reader’s attention on a prominent Call to Action.

This Call to Action can be a form to be filled out, a phone number, a Map, or a coupon to be clipped and printed and brought to the store.

The action is the point of having the site, is it not? Therefore, focus on the Action!