Website Woes – Part 1
Mark Lauzon
Special Contributor
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The Fordham Marble Home Screen: “Experience Creating Excellence.” They appeal to their high-end market in New York City and Connecticut with a properly crafted tag line, a stunning kitchen photo, and emphasize their long history (110 years) and commitment to customer service. |
I’ve heard it a thousand times: “We don’t really care about our website… It’s not how we get our customers… and even if we did get them from the web, we have more customers than we can handle.” Or, “All of our customers come from word-of-mouth referrals.”
Really?
Would you like to make more money per square foot? Do you have customers that you wish you could fire? Tired of working for the middleman? Are you sick of getting beat up by flooring stores, who make more money per square foot selling your countertops than you make building them? Tired of being shopped out on your quotes?
You might want to think differently about internet marketing and more specifically your website. It’s not 1999. When I first started fabricating, having a nice little ad in the Yellow Pages mattered. I’m talking about real phone books, not digital analogs! They were thick, heavy tomes that actually had yellow pages. It was how potential customers found your business. I’ve not looked at a phone book in years, have you?
The point is, customer acquisition methods change and evolve over time. Companies that fail to adapt and adjust accordingly miss out opportunities to capture the “right” customers. When we talk about customer-facing marketing we should ask ourselves a very simple question: “What is my company about?” The answer should include, who, what and where. You could come up with many different answers.
- ABC Countertops provides the most affordable countertops in Chicago.
- ABC Countertops provides countertops for the commercial and hospitality industry in the greater Seattle area.
- ABC Countertops is Seattle’s Premier Fabricator of Exotic Stone for your home.
- ABC Countertops offers the largest selection of stone slabs in Los Angeles.
It’s critical to understand what you are trying to sell when you are developing your marketing and branding message. Now that we’ve crafted a message, let’s take a look at the homepage of your website (if you have one), and determine if the look and feel of your website matches the message you are trying to project. Is the message clear and understandable at a glance?
If your home page details incredibly complex work, uses luxury imagery and fonts that are associated with luxury branding and you have a call to action header that reads, “Countertops starting at $29 a foot!” You might have a discordant marketing message. High-end customers will be repelled by the low dollar call to action, and low-end, value-seeking customers will expect high-end work for peanuts. (And what’s worse than that?)
When developing a design language for your website you should think of your message as a touchstone. Every page, every sentence and every image should shore up and support your marketing message. Anything that does not support it should be omitted. Brevity leads to clarity. When things are clear to your customer, it creates trust and confidence in you and your product offerings. Clarity is critical for the potential customer to take action, which hopefully is making contact with your business – not your competitor.
Web design and design language is an ever-evolving process. If you know what you are looking for, it is possible to determine when a website was built by analyzing the way the site is built.
Old websites will appear small, as resolution requirements have changed over time. Older sites will have jelly buttons and shadows, etc. You will find a mashup of fonts. Images will be low resolution. It’s one of those things…you know it when you see it.
If your website looks tired, it’s time to do something about it. More importantly, odds are that if your website looks old, it probably isn’t engineered to comply with current guidance from Google. Not following current Google guidelines will cause your site to rank low in organic search, and potential customers will never learn about your business.
Google looks at several key statistics when determining your placement in organic search results. One of them is called the “Bounce” rate. A bounce happens when someone types into a search bar; “Granite Countertops Chicago,” clicks on one of the search results offered up, lands on your homepage, looks around for a second, and LEAVES. The bounce indicates to Google that your site was not what that customer was looking for. This damages your search engine rankings. If you want to lower your bounce rate, you need to project a clear message so that the visitor is engaged and begins the process of exploring your website. I could write a dissertation on this topic alone!
I don’t want to teach you how to build a website; my goal is to make you aware of what’s involved so that when you start looking for a professional to work on your site, or if you decide to tackle your web marketing on your own, you will better understand what goes on behind the scenes.
Now, if you are sitting there wondering, “How do I know what my bounce rate is?” you should have Google Analytics embedded on your website. This will allow you to track key statistics that provide the intelligence needed to understand how your website is performing in searches. A properly optimized site is the by product of understanding how customers in your market react and interact with your website.
Web marketing tactics will vary by region. What works in Los Angles, California, may not be as effective in Lawton, Oklahoma. The only way you can understand what is working is to understand the analytics associated with your site.
Google wants to know how much time a search customer spends on your site. Duration is directly associated with engagement. Once you’ve captured the customer’s attention with a properly crafted tag line and a visually engaging image to prevent a bounce, the goal is to keep the customer engaged with your website for as long as possible. This is done with compelling, interesting content. Videos, images, and frequently asked questions are a good place to start. The longer you keep the customer engaged, the better your site will perform in search. The better your site performs in search, the more customers will find your site. Getting the picture?
One of the hardest things to wrap the brain around in marketing is to understand the cost associated with the customer that might have purchased something from you, if you only had a great website/web marketing plan. They did not contact you, so you have no way of quantifying the loss. If your website is not producing results, then you are obviously acquiring customers through other means. That’s awesome – now think about what you could accomplish with an ever-growing pool of customers to choose from, as a result of effective web marketing. Having more customers gives you choices. Do I raise prices? Do I increase output? Do I fire that annoying flooring store?
Think for a second about how you use the web. If you need new tires and a friend says, “I got my tires at ‘Fred’s Body Shop,’ what most folks will do when they get home is do a search in Google to figure out what “Fred’s Body Shop” is all about. If the site looks like crap and does not mention tires, it creates a very negative first impression. Don’t see tires? You might “Bounce” and go look at a competitor’s site. Worse yet, if Fred does not have a website, you might assume that he has gone out of business.
Whether we like it or not, the web is here to stay. Fail to adjust your marketing to adapt to this dynamic medium at your own expense and peril. Marketing work is easy. Making countertops is hard. Do more of the first and you will make more money on the latter.
I’ve assisted stone shops with marketing and built dozens of websites. I look forward to sharing my insights and experiences with you. In the future, we will explore how website design can be engineered to generate certain feelings. Your website is a visual medium that should be engineered to generate an emotional response from a potential customer. We will explore how feelings lead to buying decisions, and other subtle ways to supercharge your marketing efforts.
If you have specific questions feel free to email me at stoneworks@mac.com or visit my website www.marklauzon.com. I look forward to hearing from you.
When Mark is not selling Sasso Five Axis Saws, CNCs and inline machines, he stays busy doing marketing and production consulting for stone shops.