You’ve Tried it ALL with Online Marketing: Why Doesn’t Your Website Work?

Are you one of the thousands of Austin business owners who are frustrated because your website doesn’t produce?

I know how you feel.

Even though I “know what I’m doing”, I still experience frustration when pages, funnels, etc… don’t produce like I want them to.

How about your website marketing?

Whether it’s SEO, leads, sales, email marketing, or any of the dozens of marketing efforts you can sink your time into, you’ve tried it.

You’ve taken every step in online marketing that “they” tell you to, yet still no effective results. You just can’t get your website to work. Why?

In all of the hustle and bustle of your day to day tasks in your business, it’s easy to overlook a couple of simple but powerful truths in your marketing:

1. You’re likely the wrong person to have final say on your messaging

2. The Sales Process is King

The first one seems counter-intuitive, but it’s almost a certainty;

You are the wrong person to originate, create and have final say on the messaging in your website and across your marketing.

Why?

The simple truth is that you’re the seller, not the buyer. There are exceptions, of course, but we won’t go into them here.

The point of this post is actually more aligned with the second of the two, but I’ll say this before leaving the subject:

Always test your marketing messaging with people who don’t know you or your product/service.

Trained eyes are the best, but even if you just try it out with strangers, test it. It’s best to test your messaging with people who are squarely in your demo, but above all, test it.

This is easier than it sounds. All you have to do is be active on a social media platform, like Facebook, and look at reviews of your competitors.

Reach out to these buyers, and ask for a review of your webpage, product, service, etc… Get that input, then put it to work in your messaging.

The second of the two truths is the reason most businesses fail (and the real focus of this blog post).

The Sales Process is King.

Without a tested Sales Process, you have nothing to measure or compare, and thus no way to improve.

It doesn’t matter if you’re an Austin SEO Company or an Austin Tire Company, your online sales process has to be working properly to move customers through your website.

If you don’t know what your sales process is, where it starts, or how many steps it has in it, how are you going to know where you have gaps?

Most small business websites are all about the front end of the sales process, a little of the middle, then some attempt at closing (if there’s an attempt at closing at all).

Here’s what a “Greeting-Heavy” website and Sales Process looks like:

In short, there’s lots of welcome messaging, probably a bit about the company and great you are, then some scattered information about specific services, and then…not much.

Many websites never isolate a service on a single page, so the client is left to sift through the information to try to find the call to action to take.

Google Analytics fact:

Let’s take a brief moment and look at a very common traffic pattern I see on websites I manage in my SEO work.

Most website visitors do some version of the following when landing on a website:

Landing Page—> About Us—>Landing Page—> Leave the site.

That’s if they ever leave the landing page. If the page they land on (the easiest definition of a Landing Page) is unclear enough, the customer will just leave.

Analyzing your time on site, then time on page, will really open your eyes to how things really are on your site.

So if we accept that the above traffic pattern is true, it would pay you to have contact info on every page, along with a testimonial. These two additions should drastically improve your conversions.

Back to the Greeting.

The greeting is the first step of any sales process. The greeting could have several steps in it, or it could be a short introduction to your product or service.

The former is typical of a longer close cycle, and the latter typical of a shorter one. Long sales cycles, or close cycles, happen when you have a very large purchase price, and your product or service tends to NOT be a commodity.

Short sales cycles, or close cycles, tend to happen with commodity items or services, and also MUST-purchase items or services, like a water heater that just flooded your house. That’s a one-call sale.

Contrast that with a high-end home sound system, and you can easily see how that would be a longer sales cycle.

Understanding what you’re actually selling is critical, because you can never fix your sales process without that understanding.

Understand your Customer

The next aspect you must understand to address your website is your customer. Use these 5 questions to spark a better understanding of the person surfing your site:

1. How does your customer tend to buy? 
2. How long is their investigation process? How can you use the Presentation step of the Sales Process to address this?
3. How quickly do they tend to want to talk to a human? 
4. Is there any industry-standard collateral they need to make their buying decisions?
5. What is the most common reason you lose a sale? Can you add content or information to fix that? 

What’s your Approach to your Sales Process?

A disciplined approach to your Sales Process will produce more leads, while also producing more measurable data you can use to improve.

Contrast that to the norm: a haphazard array of information a small business owner lays out hoping someone will eventually buy.

Is there a better way? Maybe.

Briefly, I’ll lay out my own approach in my “5 Steps of the Sale”.

I believe that these 5 Steps are in every sales process, even if they have more (your individual sales process will have as many as you need to provide the information and interaction that your client needs to make an informed purchase).

Here are the Steps:

1. Greeting
2. Rapport Building/Investigation
3. Presentation 
4. Demonstration
5. Close

There’s not enough space in this blog post to delve into the “why”, the function or the reasoning of each step.

The point of this blog post is to opine that the most likely reason that your website is not producing leads or sales is a breakdown in the Sales Process.

One of more of these steps is missing or broken.

If you want to start improving your website today, you simply must invest time and resources into this aspect of your business. Without it, you’ll fail; there simply is no other possible outcome.

I offer sales consulting services to help either establish or improve your own Sales Process, and you can contact me for more details.