“Wayne knows websites – and how to measure their success.
Questions we discuss:
Why don’t most websites help entrepreneurs reach their goals?
What is the number 1 mistake entrepreneurs make when having a new website built?
What can/should people do today to improve the results they get from their website?
Be sure to have a pen and pad ready to capture the “353 rule”!”
Click here to listen to this podcast interview with Bill Black and Wayne Mullins!
Bill Black:
Hi everyone, it’s Bill Black, the exit coach from the Exit Coach Radio show. One of the biggest questions I get on the show is what exactly goes into a business exit plan and when should I start creating mine? Well, I always tell people that the best time to start was five years ago, but the next best time is now because you never know when you might need it. So we put together a free report that describes what an exit plan is and what you should know. You can get it free by texting “exitplan” with no spaces to 44222. That’s “exitplan” to 44222. Again, text exit plan to 44222.
Welcome to the Exit Coach Radio Show. The show for baby boomer business owners who are looking for cutting edge information as they plan their three to 10 year business succession and exit. Every week we interview top professional advisors for their best tips, strategies and precautions so you can be well planned. And now here’s your host, the exit coach, Bill Black. Thank you for listening today. We really appreciate you being with us. My next guest is Wayne Mullins and he’s going to talk about three reasons that your gorgeous website may not actually be doing anything to grow your business. Wayne, how are you doing today? Thanks for joining us.
Wayne Mullins:
I’m doing fabulous. Thanks so much for having me.
Bill Black:
My pleasure, my pleasure. This is an interesting topic as well, because this so much is relying on websites these days, what’s going on the internet as opposed to face to face, nobody walks by the store anymore, so let’s talk about this. Tell us a little bit about you and your background and what you do for business owners?
Wayne Mullins:
Yeah, absolutely. So my background started in this specific business, building websites and helping people with their marketing. It actually started back when I had a separate business where I was going out actually hiring experts to build websites and help me with marketing and those types of things. And what I quickly learned and discovered was that a lot of the people out there building websites view them as a showcase piece. They love to build something that’s beautiful, something that will get attention, maybe something that’ll win an award. But what I discovered very painfully and very expensively is that they knew very little about how to build a website that is actually going to help drive leads and drive sales into a company.
Bill Black:
So everybody, I think in the beginning was like, well, I put my website out because everybody has one and maybe they put something together they think is beautiful and they don’t realize that doesn’t always work, you have to attract attention for your website to become more than just an online brochure. That was kind of the beginning of everything and then all the metrics of what attracts, what puts you in the top listings and all that kind of stuff has changed and evolved over the years. So why don’t most websites help entrepreneurs reach their goals, let’s talk about that first?
Wayne Mullins:
Yeah, absolutely Bill, you’re so right. The evolution of the way we present ourselves online has radically changed and shifted over the years, but here is mistake number one and the thing that is most important for everyone to remember, and it’s this, that a website is nothing more than a marketing tool. So when we begin treating our website as something different than that, when we begin thinking of our website as a showcase piece or as anything more than a marketing tool, we begin to lose focus on why it even exists in the first place. So the first mistake we see people making is they lose sight of that fact that it is a tool in your toolkit, your marketing toolkit, and it needs to be designed and it needs to be treated as exactly that.
The next thing that we’ve kind of learned over the years Bill is that, when people think about a website, they assume that everyone who comes to a website is the exact same. And so what we do is we end up treating people and talking to people and communicating with people in the exact same manner. And what we know to be true and what to be true if you think about your website is that as people move further into the process of maybe just learning about you to actually pulling out their wallet and handing you money for your products or services, is that they experience or they go through your website in a little bit different ways. So for someone who lands on the home page, for example, and then they may be leaving, they may be just browsing, but if someone is reading the about page or if someone is on the contact page, that person is now slightly different. Even though it may be the exact same person, that person is now slightly different than just the person visiting the homepage.
And so when we approach our websites, we must approach visitors on each page as individuals and we must make sure that the language, the text, everything that we’re communicating on each subsequent page brings people down the path to where they trust us enough to pull out their wallet or to input their information to schedule a consultation or whatever that next step is in our buying process.
Bill Black:
That’s very interesting. That makes a lot of sense that the first page is to make a first impression and draw people further into it, but once they get into it, then what you’re saying that now you have someone who’s slightly interested but they’re maybe looking for more analytical information or more details and so those subsequent inside pages should be crafted differently. It makes a lot of sense. It seems like today a lot of people have gone away from a hundred page websites to one really long page on the about that you keep scrolling down and there’s different information on it and less information per page. Can you address that whether I’m correct or not about that because that’s been my observation?
Wayne Mullins:
Yeah, you are correct Bill, and here’s what we run into, the problem we run into as business owners and marketers is that we end up copying what we see our competitors doing, believing they made a wise decision or strategic decision in that effort. In other words, when we see a competitor take what used to be a massive website, let’s just say a hundred page website and they condense it down to a 10 page website, or we see a competitor who had maybe a 20 page website and they have now instead taken it and converted it into a single page, that’s a much longer page, we assume that there’s logic and sound judgment behind that decision. And the reality is that in most cases that is not true. That is not the truth. And so we must be careful, we must guard against this kind of reactionary response of when our competitor gets a new website that’s beautiful and shiny and it has all this cool movement or whatever it may be, that we don’t naturally assume that that is the thing that we should do.
Wayne Mullins:
We shouldn’t be out done. They must have done some research, they must have made these changes for some strategic reason, therefore we should do the same. So we would save ourselves a lot of expense and a lot of trouble if we wouldn’t allow that emotion to rule our judgment when it comes to our website.
Bill Black:
Makes sense. I just think about it, the problem with when someone is required to click to say another page, they could also just as easily click to get out of your website. So I thought maybe that was behind it, maybe a scroll is better than a click. I don’t know, there’s a lot of different things going on, you would know better. But what can people or should people do today to improve the results that they get from their website? What are some of the best tips you can give us there?
Wayne Mullins:
Yeah, absolutely. So I’m going to give you a number and the number is 353 or 3-5-3. So I’m going to make some points about each of those. So the very first three, is that we need to remember when we look at a website, that design is made up of three C’s. There are three C’s when it comes to designing websites. The first one would be the composition, the next one would be the contrast and then the final one would be the content. So contrast, composition and content. Now the order of those doesn’t necessarily matter, but I can tell you this, when you go to most design companies, most designers, freelancers, your nephew, whoever it may be, chances are they love design, so they’re going to lead this process of your new website with contrast and composition. So the contrast simply means the color variations, the shades, the textures that end up on the page, the composition part is the structure of the page, the layout of the page, and the very last thing that they typically think about is the content.
But here’s what you and I know, we know that our content, our message is what matters the most, so the design should support our message, not the other way around. And unfortunately, most designers start the opposite way, they believe that the content should fit into whatever they design. So that’s the first three in our 353, the three Cs of design is the first one. The five is what we call the critical five. So when you approach your website, each page on your website, you should ask yourself these five questions: Who’s here? What do I want them to do? When do I want them to do it? How do I want them to do it? And why should they do it? Not why should they do it from our perspective, but why should they take that action from their perspective? We call those the critical five.
And here’s what’s so interesting, Bill. When we look at our website, we believe that those critical five change from page to page as we already talked about earlier, when we approach our page, who’s on our contact page, it’s probably slightly different than who’s just on the homepage. So we must use those critical five to go through page after page and I’ll just repeat them just briefly, Who’s here? What do we want them to do? When do we want them to do it? How do we want them to do it? And lastly, why should they do it from their perspective? So that’s the three, the five, and then the last three is this. Now more than ever, you only have about three seconds for someone to make a snap judgment about whether they want to stay on your website or not. Those three seconds, those initial three seconds are crucial. That’s why it’s imperative that we understand our audience, we understand who it is that’s going to be visiting our website and what that first three second experience is going to be like.
Bill Black:
Wow, that’s great. That’s a great run through those major factors, you cover a letter ground with a 353 and I appreciate that. These days, when you look at or let’s say someone says, “Hey Wayne, can you take a look at my website?” How many times when you look at someone’s website do you say, “Wow, that’s great, nothing needs to be done”?
Wayne Mullins:
Yeah, the answer is it happens more frequently than you think and here’s the reason. It’s not that we couldn’t fix or change or tweak or adjust a website, the reason is the motives coming into the conversation. It’s very, very common. The number one reason people reach out to us asking for a new website is because a competitor of theirs just got a new website. And so that is completely the wrong motive. That is completely the wrong reason to begin the process of building a new website. Now, if that’s the spark that leads you into a more strategic decision about our website is a tool like we talked about a bit earlier and this tool is not serving us well right now, how can we make this tool more effective and efficient for what it is that we do? At that point, we can have a meaningful and engaging conversation about redesigning, rebuilding a website from the ground up.
So we want to work with people who understand that it’s a tool and who understand that it does no good for us to say send 10,000 visitors to your website tomorrow if those 10,000 visitors aren’t interested in what it is that you sell or what it is that you do, we would rather work with people who understand that if we can put your message, we can put this tool for you and in front of the right people, the people who are interested in learning more about what it is that you provide or what it is that you do. That’s the people we want to work with. They’re not enamored by numbers for the sake of numbers, they’re enamored by results, will the cash register at the end of the day.
Bill Black:
Makes sense. And to start with that, they would start with their current metrics. What are my current results? Is it anywhere close to what I think it could be? Are there comparative metrics for every industry that you could point to and say, well your current results aren’t very good relative to what others in your industry are pointing to. There’s all kinds of data out there. There is data out there to support you’re not doing well or you’re doing pretty good compared to your peers.
Wayne Mullins:
There is all kinds of data, you’re correct Bill, that you can look at and see, but it gets very convoluted and very confusing very quickly and the reason is people often are tracking the wrong metrics. They’re tracking, for example, web traffic. That’s a great metric, it’s a great metric to track, but if you don’t understand what percentage of that web traffic is actually booking a consultation or what percentage of that web traffic is actually adding a product to the cart to begin the checkout process, you’re tracking the wrong metrics.
And so what we’d like to say is, let’s establish a benchmark and a baseline for where you are today based on your actual data. And then month over month, let’s improve those metrics every single month. Let’s work to improve those metrics because it doesn’t do us any good to look around at the world around us if we’re down here at ground zero and our competitor that we envy and want to be like, is that the very top of the class. Sure we can work in that direction and we can look at their metrics. But again, we have to start with where we are today and make improvements each and every single day.
Bill Black:
I’m looking at uglymugmarketing.com, which is your website and I should have said that at the beginning of the show, sorry I didn’t, uglymugmarketing.com. And it’s very interesting. It starts with just a statement When Results Matter and has a lot of interesting video content behind it. And then each time you scroll down it hits on one point, which is kind of what I was talking about earlier without having looked at your website, which is, you don’t want to overwhelm people today and that’s kind of where we’re headed in general marketing these days is you don’t want to overwhelm people because I know a lot of people, you look at their website and they try to jam everything on one page and that’s just compel people as much as it used to, right?
Wayne Mullins:
You’re exactly right. As our friend Donald Miller, the author of StoryBrand says, “If you confuse, you lose”, so if people are confused when they land on any particular page of your website, you’re going to lose their attention very quickly and on the next site they go.
Bill Black:
Yeah, it seems like that’s the world we live in. Just Do It has been working just fine for Nike for a lot of years and I think they were one of the first ones to really narrow it down to a very eight letters or whatever it is, kind of a marketing campaign that became very effective. What other tips would you give our listeners as they think about looking at their website? What would you tell them? A first step would be as far as deciding whether they’re getting the results that they want and forget about what the competitor’s doing? For instance, maybe if they haven’t done anything in the last three or four years that they should probably be looking at a refresh. Is there anything like that you can tell our listeners?
Wayne Mullins:
Yeah, absolutely. So generally speaking, you’re about right. So a three to five year window is typically when from a big perspective that the design styles have changed across the web. And so once your website reaches that threshold, there’s a chance that it’s starting to feel a bit dated compared to the other site that your audience may be looking at, so that is one that is very important. The other two I would say is this, so it’s important to know the traffic coming to your website, in other words, how many visitors are coming. But two other metrics that matter more than that, these are if you don’t sell directly on your website, would be the number of people who are actually calling you from your website. In other words, using the phone number there, they’re clicking on the phone number on the top of your website on the contact page.
And the other would be the number of people who are either entering a funnel, a sales or marketing funnel from your website or filling out some form of contact form. So again, what we’re looking at here, we want to track the leads coming in through our website and there’s some simple ways that can be set up these days.
Bill Black:
Wayne, very interesting content. I really appreciate you coming on and sharing some very valuable tips. The website is uglymugmarketing.com. Is that the best place for people to start, one thinking about working with you or looking at the type of work that you do?
Wayne Mullins:
Yep, that’s the best place, Bill. All of our contact information is there and links to all of our social channels are there as well.
Bill Black:
Really nice job with the 3-5-3, the three Cs, the critical five and the three seconds. Really appreciate you keeping it simple for our listeners and providing such valuable information. And I would hope maybe you can come back, give us some more tips and the next quarter or so and keep us up to date on what we should be thinking about because it’s an always changing environment.
Wayne Mullins:
Absolutely, Bill. I’d love the opportunity. Thank you so much.
Bill Black:
Thank you for listening to Exit Coach Radio.
