Why are Most Web Sites Terrible? And What is the Best Web Site Strategy?

Eric Eden:
0:59

Welcome to today's episode. Our guest today is James, and he is an expert in websites and digital marketing and he's going to share some stories and some best practices with us in that area today on how to make great websites and how to get people to engage with them. Welcome to the show.

James Hipkin:
1:18

Hey, Eric, I'm really happy to be here.

Eric Eden:
1:21

We appreciate you making the time to share a story and some ideas with us, so why don't we start by you giving us a little bit of context who you are, what you do and then we can get into your story after that?

James Hipkin:
1:36

Fantastic. You know how digital marketing is super, super important but, oh my God, it is so confusing and so complicated, and I'm on a mission to demystify digital marketing for business owners who really want to invest in this very important channel. And that's my background marketing strategy at a very high level. I've done marketing work in four different countries on three different continents. I've done marketing work in four different countries on three different continents. Twelve years ago, I had an opportunity to buy a vendor and this company focuses on websites. Why websites? Your website is the most important digital asset that your business owns and, sadly, most of them are terrible. And they're terrible for a common reason an absence of strategy. And since my background is marketing strategy websites are so important the missing piece is often strategy seemed like a pretty good fit.

Eric Eden:
2:39

Why do you think that is? Why do you think people don't prioritize it and come up with a strategy for the website, when it's the front door to their business? Why do you think people don't prioritize this?

James Hipkin:
2:50

generally speaking, I think some of it is what I call checkboxism Right, they've got a business. They're told they need to have a website. They got their nephew to make a website. See, I have a website.

Eric Eden:
3:02

Check the box Right as opposed to the website being an integral part of their overall digital marketing strategy, and is it also that people don't take the time to be curious about what does a great website look like?

James Hipkin:
3:19

That, and again it comes back down to strategy in the sense that another very common problem I see when I'm auditing websites is that they are inside out. They talk about themselves. The visitor to the website doesn't want to hear you talk about yourself. The visitor to the website wants to hear you talk about their problem. They're on a mission, they're on a journey to solve their problem. They run into this front door. That is not about their problem. It's about how awesome the business is, right and or. All kinds of facts and figures are regurgitated onto the home page and it's up to the poor visitor to figure out what's important to them and what's not important to them.

Eric Eden:
4:12

So why don't you tell us a story about some of the the best work that you've done in this area, that you're most proud of?

James Hipkin:
4:20

I'll tell you, a few years, a guy came to me and he had a small e-commerce business. He had been in a professional career, he was leaving that professional career and he wanted to turn his advanced hobby into a real business, and what this guy did is he sold a very specific kind of orchid not orchids in general, not houseplants a very specific kind of orchid. He was using one of the website subscription platforms. He had no idea what he was doing. It was a disaster. He wasn't getting much in the way of sales or traction. He was in Instagram, he was in Facebook, he was all over the place and he had no email list. So we redesigned his website with the view of making it very easy for visitors to the website to understand his offer and to find the product that they were looking for, and we coached him on.

James Hipkin:
5:34

Stop trying to boil the ocean. Your audience is older. Chances are they're going to be in Facebook. Forget all that other stuff. Just focus on Facebook and in the world of digital marketing, there are only two assets that you own your website and your list. That same older target audience is going to be very receptive to email marketing. So you need to stop doing all this other stuff, start focusing on Facebook and start building your email list. He followed through on this advice and I was speaking to him about a year later and I asked him so how are things going? And he said I have more than doubled my business and the only appreciable change I made was the website and less marketing. That's that now, that same business. He's into solid six figures annual sales, still doing the same things, still only selling one kind of organ, the privilege of focus, right, oh yeah, yeah. But he posts a picture up on his Facebook page. He'll get 1,300, 1,400 engagements.

Eric Eden:
6:58

Wow gets 1300 1400 engagements. Wow, I think that's one of the things is, there's so many different things you can do from a digital marketing perspective. It is probably better just to pick the right one and focus on one rather than trying to do everything, because then it just.

James Hipkin:
7:19

So often that is the case when you figure out what's working. Water the flowers and prune the weeds right. You've probably heard that old expression If it's working, give it more gas, do more of it. Don't find other things to do. Figure out how to do it better.

Eric Eden:
7:38

And I think this is a pretty common thing that I hear is, when people get that right strategy and the right focus, it's very common that they can double or even triple their business. Sometimes, and that's ponderous to me when I think about that, because in more brick and mortar businesses I think about that because in more brick and mortar businesses not online businesses it's much harder to do things that move the needle that much. You can do some things that might move the needle by 10%, but with a business where, with a website as your front door and you have the right digital marketing strategies, the ability to scale is just with testing and finding out what that right strategy is. It's huge right Right.

James Hipkin:
8:22

Exactly right. And B again. You only own two things in the digital world your website and your list. If you focus on those two things and you create a website that will actually support the buyer's journey, you're going to have not only are you going to have success on conversion, but you're also going to be getting the right customers for the right reasons and they will continue to be your customers. When I go in and this particular case I was just describing and I've done this multiple times but you will go in and look at his audience and you download and do the data analysis on his audience. 80% of his sales are coming from 20% of the customers.

Eric Eden:
9:06

Very interesting. The one thing I always realize when I'm working on websites with companies is that everyone always approaches it that it's such a big project. It's like they're redoing amazoncom, but in the reality, the focus is really just on a couple pages and most notably probably the homepage Right and homepage and the about us page, and really the whole ball game is settled in a very short amount of time Right, that's right, that's right, that's right.

James Hipkin:
9:41

One of my little things here. It's a bit controversial. Are you up for some controversy?

Eric Eden:
9:47

Yeah, absolutely.

James Hipkin:
9:49

I want people to stop saying call to action.

Eric Eden:
9:53

What should?

James Hipkin:
9:53

they say. Instead, call to action is inside-out marketing. It is the marketers shouting at customers and telling them what to do. I want people to start thinking in terms of creating pathways, pathways that call out to sub-segments in your audience and invite them down a pathway to gain more information and more insights about the things that really mean something to them Effectively. It's exactly the same thing, but the mindset shift is really important.

Eric Eden:
10:30

So you're saying that people choose their own endings. I like it. I think that having a megaphone and trying to shout at people to do something very specific is less appealing, for sure, but I think that when I look at Google Analytics, what I typically see is less than 20 seconds to really get people to get hooked or not. If you don't have the right things there, if you don't have the right strategy, like you were saying, the right pathways, the right hook, then you lose people in 20 seconds and you start to think about what can you get through in 20 seconds? Not a lot. You have to have maybe a headline and maybe a sentence and some visuals. People can't process that much in 15 seconds 15, 20 seconds.

Eric Eden:
11:21

If you think about writing a 15 second ad, it's really hard actually, right.

James Hipkin:
11:25

And I'll tell you something else to keep in mind that 20 seconds doesn't start when the page appears. That 20 seconds starts when the page is asked for, right? If your website's taking four or five seconds just to load, you've just used up a good, healthy chunk of the time that they're willing to give you. Yeah.

Eric Eden:
11:54

So, with this in mind, what advice do you have for people on coming up with the right strategy and getting people to go down the right pathway in such a short amount of time?

James Hipkin:
12:05

I'll tell you there's. Get the page to load quickly. That's way more important than people realize. It's important from a Google rank point of view, but it's also important from a user experience point of view. Make sure that they quickly and instantly recognize that they're in the right place. If they're looking for remarkable marketing, then you need to have remarkable marketing proud and up in the upper left-hand corner so they can instantly engage with that. If they're looking for Eric Eaton, then your name needs to be there. So what is it they're looking for? Make sure that they instantly recognize they're in the right place.

James Hipkin:
12:49

Both page load speed and are you in the right place are trust events. They help establish a relationship. Then give them a benefit-oriented reason to stay. Poke the pain. Really go after what are the problems that they are trying to solve? Then provide them some reasons to believe. Why should they believe that you're legitimate? Testimonial carousels pushed to the bottom of the page are a waste of digital real estate. One powerful testimonial right up near the top of the page will do way more for you. Then make their pathway clear. Make it very clear where they should go next because, eric, when they choose that pathway, two very powerful things have happened. They've told you exactly who they are and they've given you permission to give them more information. That's how you'll get them through the 20 seconds.

Eric Eden:
13:52

That's great. Love that advice. It's interesting Over the years, as I've had people build websites front-end website designers, for example it always has been ponderous to me that those folks didn't put as much thought into the digital marketing side of how do I get people to the site. Like you're spending all this time and effort to create a great experience on the website, but then there was almost no thought into how am I going to get people here, Whether that's SEO, whether that's digital marketing, which is the right digital marketing channel to use. And it was ponderous to me because if you're doing all this effort and you're going through all this labor of love to build something so great, wouldn't you care how many people see it? They're like, no, that's someone else's job. But the reality is, for a business, you have to think of both parts, right, and you have to do all the things you just said to have a great website experience. But then you also have to think how do I get people to come to the website?

James Hipkin:
15:04

And how do I get people to come to the website for the right reasons? I sometimes call it the hub and spoke strategy. The website is the hub, your digital marketing channels are the spokes and your content messaging strategy is the rim that holds it all together.

Eric Eden:
15:24

And what you end up with.

James Hipkin:
15:25

when you think about it that way, it's a whole. Individually they're nice, but they don't have much value.

Eric Eden:
15:32

The power comes from the connections and it's all held together with the messaging strategy, which comes from really deeply understanding who your audience is and what they're looking for nothing's worse than when you're looking at the google analytics and you have a really high bounce rate, right like you're seeing like 80 of the people come there and bounce in a very short amount of time. That's, I think, one of the main indicators I've seen that you haven't implemented the right hub and spoke strategy. So so it's not just about traffic. I do measure for the companies I work with almost always how many unique visitors are to the website every month, because it's interesting to see. Is that just a on a month over month basis? Is it a flat line? Is it growing? You'd like it to grow, but I think what's also important from that is what sort of engagement or activity comes from the website and is that activity growing over time? And if you don't have the right hub and spoke strategy, then you can't achieve that.

James Hipkin:
16:40

Absolutely, and it's also important with analytics to understand the relative aspects of analytics, for example, bounce rate on sub pages. A sub page can have a high bounce rate and that's not necessarily a bad thing If that sub page has a high bounce rate and the average time on the page was way above the average for the site, what that's saying is that the visitor got to that page and found information that's really valuable to them.

Eric Eden:
17:16

They spent the time to consume it, so what advice would you give marketers broadly if they want to achieve these types of results of doubling their business or massively increasing their conversion, like you did for that client? What would you advise marketers to do to get to that sort of remarkable result?

James Hipkin:
17:44

Understand your audience. It's so funny when I audit websites and I'll audit three or four websites a week. People contact me to audit their website. I'll spend the first half of the time not talking about the website at all. I'll spend the first half of the time talking about who is your audience. Who are your best customers? What are the problems they're trying to solve? Do you have a customer avatar? Fantastic, you have one. Can you show it to me? Oops, you can't find it. Huh, that's a problem. Have you mapped the journey that the customer is on? Do you know what kind of questions they're asking themselves at the top of the funnel? Do they know what kind of questions and research they're doing in the mid funnel? Do you know? Do you know what matters to them when they're making a decision? All that mapping the buyer's journey is customer is on. Your sale will stop being a sale and start being the next logical step in their journey, which is how you end up with loyal customers.

Eric Eden:
19:02

That's great advice. If people want to learn more about some of these strategies, where can they go? How can they connect with you?

James Hipkin:
19:11

The best way to get in touch with me if you go to VIPchatwithjamescom. That's VIPchatwithjamescom, all one word. You could book some time on my schedule and we can talk about your website. We can talk about digital marketing. We can talk about all how the warriors are blowing it this year. There's so many things we could talk about your website. We can talk about digital marketing. We can talk about all how the warriors are blowing it this year. There's so many things we could talk about.

Eric Eden:
19:36

Amazing. All right, well, thanks so much for spending time with us today, sharing your stories, sharing these ideas and best practices. We really appreciate it. Encourage everyone to share this episode with your friends so they can get these ideas too.