It’s easy to create a website about your business. It’s a no brainer: “we need a page for each department of the business or product range, and we want salesy copy and we want to look great”. That’s what you’re paying for, right?
I respectfully offer this alternative view from a marketing perspective.
(Actually it’s not just my alternative ‘view’. This website has been getting five times the attention the previous one did, and we’re not done yet.)
Start with the needs and desires of your prospects.
Your clients pay you money to solve their problems. Let’s speak to that. Let’s build something that helps your clients and so proves your expertise. Then, who will your prospects turn to when they need help? Who will they believe? Who do they know and trust? Who will new prospects discover when they search in Google or YouTube for answers to their problem?
So in this website for Scarborough optician LocalEyes, you’ll see that the key thing is not how long the practice has been going or how great the optician is (a long time, really great (in case you do want to know)). It’s about family, looking fabulous, answering contact lens questions, health and sunglasses .. we lead on the concerns and desires of our ideal client.
Defining the ideal client is where we start. Note that we are not leading on high fashion or coolness. We’re leading on family and satisfaction. That’s because of our ideal client.
At the time of writing, we are just over three months since the site went live and it’s been enjoying five times the attention that the previous website received in the same period a year ago.
With the previous website we only knew how many website visitors we received. Now, we can also monitor business outcomes such as phone calls from the website and online bookings and track them through to real, new customers in the practice.
The old adage “I know only half of my marketing works, I just don’t know which half” is now all-but solved. We can track enquiries and new clients back to the source, whether that’s ads, Google search or social media.
It’s often hard for a business to see themselves from the outside in. That’s why we prefer to write the copy for a website (and select the images). We start by understanding our client’s customers and prospects, then SEO (search engine optimisation) analysis helps us understand what people are searching for and we build the website around that.
It works, here’s what the client says:
“John is a very experienced marketeer who takes time to explain his website development and virtual marketing in lay terms to agree objectives and measure results. He has the knack of making websites appeal to your customers emotions through his quirky writing style to help to find customers whose values have considerably more loyalty to our brand than most transactional websites. I thoroughly endorse John’s ability to listen to his clients requirements and interpret this correctly first time round, getting a match between the culture of the website and the reality of our business.
Thank you John”
Gary McQuade, Local Eyes Opticians
Get in touch if you would like a new website like this.