What is a website, essentially?
If your answer is something along the lines of: a place for my potential clients to find out more about my business, you are on the wrong track.
Sadly, that wrong answer is what comes back most of the time when we talk to fellow entrepreneurs; people think that a website is somehow secondary, or even dormant, in the whole process of making a sale and growing your business.
To be fair, if you live by the thinking that all your sales need to flow first through you, your mentality is somewhat right, but definitely outdated, especially with the increasing appetite of people to look and buy online.
So, with a little switch in mentality, you can convert your website into a great asset for growing your business; I may even say: you can convert your website into a great salesperson.
More specifically, you can convert your website into a great salesperson that works 24/7 without any breaks at all. All you need is to translate what works in real life to a digital presentation; you need to make sure that you are ticking all the boxes that trigger your potential customers to take a desired action.
Let’s start from the beginning and walk you through the process:
Treat Your Website As An Employee With Great Potential
In reality, this is your only line of action when it comes to developing a great website: you have to treat your website as an employee with great potential.
This means that, from the beginning of its existence, your website has been representing you. However, in order to improve the effectiveness of the communication from your website, you need to work on it.
In particular, you will need to do 3 things:
- Manage it: make sure that it stays up at all times. (You will be surprised by finding out how many websites go down due to bad hosting and general maintenance negligence)
- Review its performance: there is little point in having a website made and then letting it just run. You need to keep an eye on: are you getting any traffic; if yes, who are the people coming; what are they looking for; are they finding what they are looking for, and so on.
- Invest where appropriate: both financially and time-wise. Ask yourself: is my copy and design effective; am I staying on top of potential customer expectations, and so on.
Yes, an employee needs to deliver. But, you need to provide the right conditions for your employees to thrive. A website works exactly that way.
Now that we have gotten the basics out of the way, here are our 5 steps for converting your website into a great salesperson.
Steps to Make Your Website Outstanding
Communicate Value First
How often do you land on a website and the first thing they talk about is: how great they are?
I am sure many businesses are doing great things, but is that really what your potential customers are interested in first?
You have the option to have an “about us” page where you can put everything great about yourself. However, for a potential customer to see value in your work, you need to talk about the value first.
Even better, talk about the problems you can solve for your customers.
And when I say: talk about the problems you can solve for your customers, I mean it literally. Don’t hit around the bush; don’t pretend that all of this is obvious; literally, talk about the problems that you solve for your customers.
Giving our own example, as a digital marketing agency, it is quite easy to just bang on about ranking among the top 3 SEO agencies in London on Google, which, even though is proof of our ability, but we cannot just pretend that the person reading the copy automatically understands the value of SEO.
Even if the person reading our page understands the basic value of SEO: more visitors to a website, the actual value of SEO goes far deeper than that.
Therefore, we talk about:
- Employer branding: you will attract the right kind of employees, as you would have made it easier to be found by more people
- Consistency in marketing language: that forms the basis for developing trust with the reader
- Time saving: instead of going and finding the ideal clients, you will have an improved understanding of who is actually interested in your products and services
So, I suggest, literally listing what problems you have been solving for your existing clients. That’s what the potential clients are there for: they want the backing that you actually understand their problems and can solve them.
On that note, you need to demonstrate who you actually work with.
Demonstrate Who You Work With
In business, there is always this temptation to widen your net too much.
As a result, you might end up catching nothing.
In reality, as you progress in your business, you start to realise that your processes bring better results for specific kinds of people or sectors.
For instance, in our case, we have had our biggest successes in the property vertical. This includes everyone from companies that provide the timber for construction to the lawyers who push the paperwork through for completing deals, along with the more obvious architecture and real estate businesses.
Simply, we started off with previous property experience before diving into marketing. And 3.5 years into business, we have realised that we can demonstrate a better understanding of the challenges that businesses face in the property vertical.
However, there is a catch here. If we just put out that our biggest successes have come in the property vertical, we run the risk of alienating everyone else. In all fairness, we have also worked with tech firms and manufacturers. But, this is where things get more interesting too.
Without even realising initially, we have come to the conclusion that, even if there are sectoral differences, the way our clients operate is still quite identical.
We see similarities in their approach to business, their ideas for growth, and even how they behave. As a result, we went and dug in further, finding other similarities among them.
So, what have we concluded?
Almost all our good clients have more than 10 employees and at least 5 years of entrepreneurial experience. And, our relationships are the strongest when we have a good relationship with the financial section of our clients’ business.
The 1st bit of this targeting: company size and leadership experience, is what we put onto our website now because of the kind of engagement we prefer, and where we can add the most value.
I can give you some simple examples here: most of our clients need more than one service because of the size of their business, and most of the websites we have built were 2nd websites of a business.
This means that we are able to provide a more detailed solution for our clients, rather than taking punts with a single marketing shot, e.g. SEO. 3.5 years ago, we started with just SEO, but as we have grown and have had more experience added to our team, we can now provide more detailed solutions, which we try to communicate to the readers of our website.
Next, go even more specific.
Enlist Who You Have Worked With
It’s all well and good to enlist who you want to work with, but that’s just part of the required information.
In order to put the mind of the reader to ease, literally enlist the companies that you are working with and have worked with in the past.
Yes, there is a slight problem of poaching here, but you still need to provide examples.
If you are not comfortable with sharing the info on existing clients, at least share who you have worked with in the past.
Doing so provides a bit of a backing that the products and services that you provide have added value to other, potentially similar organisations.
And, this connects well with the next point.
Provide Case Studies
Again, just enlisting the characteristics of the people that you work with and some specific names of companies that you have worked with is part of the communication.
You need to also demonstrate the actual value you have added.
I am sure I do not need to show you how to write a case study. But, at the least, fulfil the basic expectations of a case study.
For instance, we enlist the investment made by each of our clients and what positives it brought for them. If the return is monetary, enlist it. Nothing speaks louder than solid numbers.
Now, finally, you can finish on your own.
Show Your Team
You would assume that websites are more social now, and it is a general expectation that you will get to see who actually works in a business, but the reality can be quite different.
Most websites will have a “meet the team” section, which at least enlists the key employees.
However, a significant proportion of businesses still don’t bother to include the people who make the business a success. Just imagine the potential impact of this action.
So, we highly recommend including info around your team. At the end of the day, these are the people that your clients will be working with.
In fact, we go a step further and suggest that you include this info on the front of your website.
And if you have more than, let’s say 10 employees, at least include the 1st 10 and then have a button that takes the people to check the full team.
At least in our business, we believe that if you don’t like working with the people in our business, you will simply not enjoy our services. That’s the reality of modern business.
I am sure it is not much different for most other businesses; the products and services are just a small part of the solution. (Well, unless you are selling a small value, cheap item. Then just put the item and the price; you won’t be reading this blog otherwise).
Concluding Remarks
So, here you go: these are our 5 steps to convert your website into a great salesperson.
Just one closing step here: make sure that you make contacting you super easy.
Have your phone number and email address enlisted; provide a form if people want to get it over with there and then; and enlist your physical address to show that you are a serious business. You can even include a direct chat feature, if you are able to communicate with the visitors directly.
Imagine, after putting all this effort, your potential clients don’t know what to do next to get in touch with you.
In the meantime, check our extended digital marketing services here.
