Do you need a website
Identifying your target audience
Understanding your audience’s needs
Setting realistic goals
Strategies must drive tactics
Why content and your website are critical
Sell solutions, not services
Key takeaways
A few years ago, I sat with the managing partner of a mid-size law firm in New York. She had joined a meeting between me and the firm’s marketing manager, and she clearly felt she had better things to do with her time.
“Ours is a high-touch business. Nobody is going to make a decision to hire us — at our fees — without looking us in the eye, shaking our hands, and getting a feel for who we are.”
She was caught off guard when I responded, You’re absolutely right.
“We work almost exclusively with B2B businesses, and very few of them have a ‘buy’ button anywhere on their websites. They don’t expect to close any deals on their website and neither should you. We won’t build your new website with that goal in mind.”
That brief exchange led to a more in-depth discussion about what marketing goals the firm could realistically expect their website to achieve for them, and most critically, what their audience was likely to expect from the site. Our discussion led her to understand that our goal was to make her firm’s website a valuable part of the marketing toolkit rather than a replacement for the human-to-human contact she felt was necessary to land new clients.
You will want to dive into these same issues before you hire a graphic designer, coder, or SEO specialist, so it’s a great place for us to start our journey together.
How to organize your website needs to encourage your visitors to take action
What content will engage your target audience
How that content needs to be presented
How visual design and layout will impact the site’s effectiveness
What features and functionality will enable audience interaction
How your website needs to connect with other marketing channels and methods
The metrics you must monitor to measure success
Those topics may look suspiciously similar to the table of contents. That’s no accident. They are all the topics we’ll cover in depth in the chapters you’re about to read. And they all focus on the elements of your website, and your marketing, that need to work together in order for the website to be an effective marketing tool.
But before we focus on the “how” we want to dive into the “why” of the marketing goals you have as a small business. Your “why” will guide the strategic decisions you make and the direction your marketing takes. And it is those decisions that will help all of your marketing efforts work together.
In other words, strategy is the secret sauce that makes your website greater than the sum of its parts. Beautiful, on-brand design isn’t enough on its own. Nor is incredibly clean, optimized coding. Even a strong message, on its own, may not be enough. So let’s dive into how to make all of these components sing in tune.
Do You Even Need a Website?
You’ve probably heard the expression, “Never ask a barber if you need a haircut.” Chances are pretty high that they are likely to say yes. So you may be surprised to hear a web marketing professional tell you that you may not need a website.
There are many successful businesses who work without a website entirely, relying only on social media channels and email. These tend to be smaller B2C businesses—”Main Street” brick-and-mortar retailers—but even larger B2C businesses sometimes have websites that are far less important to their marketing than they were even 10 years ago. Social media has become so central to their messaging that a website is no longer needed.
For B2B businesses, though, not having a website isn’t likely to work as well. Think back to the lawyer whose skepticism introduced this chapter. She was right to focus on the desire her firm’s prospects have to really understand who her firm is and what it would be like to work with them before they become comfortable enough to add the firm to their shortlist.
Social media will be a part of that, particularly if your social media presence is strong and is informative and conversational, but your firm’s website is still a necessary bridge between getting acquainted and signing a contract.
So do you need a website? If you view your sales process as high-touch, ask yourself whether you are more or less likely to make a major business purchasing decision based only on what you know of a company’s social media presence? Chances are you would not, so while a sale may not happen on your website for a high-touch, high-ticket, complex sale, it’s even less likely to happen over social media.
Discovery on social media → a deeper dive on your website → final confirmation in person or face-to-face via Zoom or other means.
There will be other things going on along with this progression, and social media discovery will sometimes be replaced by a referral or introduction, or discovery via search or PPC or other advertising, but your website will almost always be the step that precedes personal contact.
Interestingly, there has been a shift in social media. I see more and more B2B firms making use of channels like Facebook to reach their audience, so don’t discount it as an option. (Because B2B sales is still a matter of one person selling to another …)
How effective nontraditional channels are will depend to some extent on the business you’re in as well as the demographics and psychographics of your target audience. If your products or services can exist comfortably alongside casual conversations with friends, arguments about politics, and the inevitable funny videos about cats being frightened by cucumbers, you should explore channels beyond business-focused platforms like LinkedIn.
Even if you’ve been reading along knowing that you need a website for your marketing, it’s valid to think about how social media and email marketing factor into your relationship with prospects. The answers you arrive at will be valuable as you plan how your website will work with those marketing tools and others.
What are my competitors doing?
Where are my target audience members already gathering?
In researching your competitors, focus on best-in-class marketers—those with websites and/or social media channels you admire or for which you can readily identify the value they provide to their audiences.
And when researching the behavior of your target audience, focus on your ideal client.
It’s OK to be somewhat aspirational in both cases. At the earliest stages, it is far better to build toward where you want to be rather than settling for where you are now. But …
There is a difference between reaching for your targets and trying to drag an audience along with you. Larger businesses have more leeway in experimenting with market testing; small businesses should certainly try new things, but should do so on a smaller scale to keep risk in line with their ability to absorb a loss should things not work out. Go where your audience is and aim to attract them with excellence and a differentiated message. You can leave the “paradigm shifts” to the B2C behemoths and still succeed in attracting a larger share of your target audience.
Knowing Your Audience
Speaking of target audience, what can you tell me about yours? If your answer to the question, “Who is my target audience?” is, “Everybody,” you have some work to do. Though it may look easy to market to everybody—Coke and Nike and Apple all seem to do it—it isn’t easy and it certainly isn’t cheap.
And in fact, those big consumer brands don’t market to everyone. They invest mightily in thinking deeply about who their target audience is. You should do the same.
It can feel like a silly exercise to make up a persona for each kind of client you are looking to attract. Do you really need to know that, “Sally is a married woman in her mid-fifties with a no-nonsense attitude toward [problem your firm can solve] and enjoys rock climbing and fine dining in her spare time.”
A description like that can seem vague enough not to be helpful and overly specific at the same time. If that’s the feeling you have about persona building, you can skip the more “touchy-feely” parts of persona building and instead create an aggregate of your best clients.
It’s unlikely that you’ll find a statistically significant number of rock climbers or gourmet diners among your top clients but you will find patterns that can help with your messaging and can keep you focused on the most promising prospects.
(And if no one in your organization knows anything about your top clients beyond what they do from 9 to 5, it’s time to rethink your account management approach.)
This is another area where being aspirational is better than staying stuck on what you’ve achieved so far. Build a website and marketing machine that attracts and engages the audience you want to work with. The only thing worse than a website that attracts no new clients is a website that attracts clients you can’t serve profitably.
Understanding Your Audience’s Needs
As you build a picture of who your audience is, you will naturally be touching on what their needs are. I can’t emphasize enough the importance of defining audience needs in as detailed a manner as possible.
What do they want?
In what ways could what they have now be negatively impacting their business?
What will they gain from implementing your product or service?
What are their options—competitors of yours, different solutions, status quo?
What is the cost/risk in not making any change at all?
Site Organization
Site Content
Your prospects don’t care about you.
Your prospects don’t even care about what you do.
Your prospects care about what you can do for them.
It’s still true. They care about what you can do for them, so forget how you think about your business and present information about how you help them—and do it from their perspective.
On the main menu, is the About section (About Us, About the Firm, etc.) the first menu item? Or the last menu item before the Contact page link?
As you read the copy on the home page and primary internal pages—if you’re like most, it’s probably been a while since you’ve done that—what’s the ratio of “we” or “I” to “you.”
For the menu question, which do you think is the correct order? If you said the About section comes last, stick a gold star to your refrigerator. Give your client a clear picture of what’s in it for her and, if the value you provide is a compelling fit for her needs, she’ll dig deeper to find out more about you.
Is the placement of the About section on your main menu really that important? No, but when it’s wrong it almost always points to bigger problems in your site’s content.
The we/you split is perhaps even more critical. Yes, you have to talk about what you do, and what’s special about the way you do it, but that information must be positioned in terms of how it helps them. So “Our product does x, y, and z” isn’t nearly as compelling as, “You’ll experience a, b, c when you implement …”
Are you addressing the concerns they have as they consider their options?
Are you providing information that will help them better understand those options?
Are you painting a clear picture of what their business looks like after implementing your solution?
All of your marketing materials—not just your website—need to address the emotional component of the sale. Don’t underestimate how powerful that part of the decision-making process is. Is there a chance your prospect could be fired if they make the wrong choice? Or passed over for promotion? Or just plain embarrassed?
Facts and figures matter—your solution simply may not fit a prospect’s budget this year—but it will nearly always come down to a gut-level feeling: are we comfortable with this solution? Are we comfortable working with this company?
Does your website provide evidence that you know what you’re doing? Does it provide evidence that you’ve achieved success with similar clients?
Great. It also needs to begin to give your prospects a sense of whether they’d like to sit and have a cup of coffee or a cocktail with them. You may never actually do that, and they may never get to know the names of your kids or whether they play soccer or baseball, but I guarantee you they want to feel like you and your colleagues are people with whom they could do that.
Are Your Goals Realistic?
A corollary to the question of whether you need a website is the question of whether a website will accomplish what you need. It’s entirely possible that you need a Super Bowl ad and a celebrity spokesmodel.
You may not have the budget to make that kind of splash, but not having the budget for your marketing goals is a terrible reason to focus the budget you do have on tactics that simply won’t work.
As you plan your website, the first questions you should be asking are not about design or even content, but about what role a website plays in your marketing. As we’ve discussed, this can range from your website being the mission-critical core of your business—as they might be for, say, a distributor of electronic components for whom sales happen primarily on the website—to your website being purely informational, as it might be for an IT networking firm that needs a way to let prospects know hours, services, emergency availability, and the territory they cover.
Answering these questions first will help you define the content your website needs at launch, the content updates you’ll need to make regularly as part of your marketing, and how all of that content will be organized.
Strategy Before Tactics—Understand Why You’re Doing What You Do Before You Decide What You’re Doing
All of this falls under the broad umbrella of focusing on strategy before tactics. It’s interesting that so many marketers get turned around on this point when you consider how many different shapes and sizes of sites there are on the web. Saying, “we need to build a website” is not a whole lot different from saying, “we need to build a building.”
Is that building going to be a house for a family of four? The official residence of an ambassador? Corporate headquarters? A warehouse or factory? Obviously, they’re all buildings but there are significant differences in what each needs to be able to provide in terms of shelter, access, mechanicals, and so on.
This is an area that confuses a lot of marketers, even experienced marketers, in part because there can be a pretty murky division between what qualifies as a strategy and what qualifies as a tactic.
Let’s take a look at an example of a strategy/tactics pairing that should help you conceptualize strategies and tactics for your own business.
As you read through this example, think about how strategy is generally more broadly focused and tends to center on big-picture items. Tactics dive into the details. Strategy is the “what” and “why” of your marketing; Tactics are the “how.”
Strategy
Create awareness among members of our target audience about the solutions we provide.
Tactics
Create and design an interactive self-assessment tool to help the target audience better understand the problem and present potential solutions.
Promote that self-assessment tool via email, social media, and through partners.
Set up a landing page on our website to capture contact information in exchange for access to the self-assessment tool.
Create and design an email cadence, including additional tools, articles, or downloads of relevance to target audience members who could benefit from our solutions.
Develop an offering that provides an opportunity to grow the relationship with prospects beyond email (Webinar, phone consultation, etc.).
Convert with a compelling offer that encourages immediate action by outlining immediate benefit.
This is, of course, pretty generic, but in some ways that is its power. I encourage you to begin broadly and work your way down into the specifics. I would also encourage you to think in terms of an outline form that creates actionable steps to achieve these goals. Otherwise, you’re likely to get bogged down in a task that seems too daunting to move ahead with.
For example, our first bullet point above is, by itself, no small undertaking. It’s OK for your first draft to include what amounts to marketing projects on their own under a single bullet point even as you recognize that those 21 words (in this case) could represent hours of meetings and weeks of work. Let’s break this down into more digestible chunks.
Define which audience segment this will serve.
Identify goals for the assessment—what action do we want our audience to take once they’ve completed the assessment.
Develop an outline.
Create business rules to define underlying logic.
Design and review visuals.
Developing website/landing page coding.
Copywriting for instructions and other incidental materials.
If you read this quick bullet outline closely, you’ll quickly see that even these sub-bullets could be broken down further. And you should break these down into the smallest possible units you can, especially in your first few attempts at building your processes.
Doing so will take time and thoughtful effort—and will ultimately save you from plowing ahead in the wrong direction, wasting your energy, and missing marketing opportunities.
Why Content? Why a Website?
Earlier in this chapter, we touched on whether you need a website at all. Taking that idea a step further, it’s worth looking more deeply at why you need a website once you’ve determined that you have.
You may think you’ve already answered that question. “Because ours is a complex sale,” for example. Or, “Because our prospects want to know that we’re solid and dependable in a way that social media doesn’t deliver.”
Those reasons are a great start, but we need to dig beyond those first-level “because” ideas into why a website—and content marketing that goes along with it—is the right answer to your marketing needs.
There are some answers that will apply pretty generally. For example, it’s generally accepted that B2B buyers are typically about two-thirds of the way through their purchasing process before they’re willing to engage with a salesperson.
So what are they doing for that first two-thirds?
Consuming content.
Why are they consuming content?
To educate themselves.
What are they educating themselves about?
The true cost of the problem they’re experiencing, whether it makes sense to pursue a solution, the options available to them to solve the problem.
So then they reach out to your sales team? Probably not. First, they’ll start looking at the solutions to see if any feel like a good fit.
And then they call, right? No. Then they start looking at providers for the solutions that seem like the best option. If that’s you, they’re likely still in consumption mode. They’re not quite ready for a product demo, as much as you’d like to provide one. To them, that’s a veiled sales pitch.
They may be open to a webinar, white paper, case study, or similar piece of content that helps them understand how your solution actually works.
As you go through this process you will begin to paint a picture of the kinds of content you need to engage your prospects as they work their way through their buying process.
That will tell you not only why you need a website, but how that website needs to be organized, what features it needs to include, and what other kinds of marketing it needs to tie in to (webinars, trade shows/industry events, email marketing, social media, SEO and PPC advertising, and so on).
Selling Solutions Not Services (or Products)
Perhaps you’ve heard the saying, “Nobody buys a 1/4” drill bit. They buy a 1/4” hole.”
It would be more accurate—though much less snappy—to say that people really don’t want to buy a 1/4” drill bit. They do so because they want a 1/4” hole. What they’re after is what the drill bit can do for them. Namely, they want the drill bit to solve a problem: Something they’re building or repairing requires a 1/4” hole.
That’s true for whatever product or service you and your firm are offering. Yes, eventually prospects will ask you about the details of your solution as they move through their buying process and they compare the various options they are considering.
Their first question can take a lot of forms: Will this solve the problem I’m experiencing? Will it make life better for me and my team? Will it enable us to better serve our clients? Will it save us money? Or increase revenue? Will it do any or all of this more profitably?
Only once they’ve been convinced that they have a problem and what you’re selling is, potentially, the answer will they begin to look at the details. That’s where they dig into the bells and whistles, what’s included and what’s an add-on, what it’s like to work with you.
In all likelihood, they’ll be asking these questions of other potential vendors, as well.
Key Takeaways
Defining your marketing goals is critical to your marketing success.
Your marketing goals must be realistic.
Set strategies first, then tactics.
- Know your audience.
The problems they are trying to solve
Their motivation
The risks they face by making a choice
The costs to them of not taking action
Know that your prospects care only about what you can do for them.
Sell solutions, not services (or products).
Understand why you need—or don’t need—a website.
Determine what role your website will play in your marketing.