- I've got a story for you.
Sadly it's not one of these, I've done them enough.
This story's about someone called Sally,
a lovely lady who contacted me about five or six years ago.
Now Sally run a travel business, she still does,
and was very, very good at it.
She runs an excellent firm with great feedback.
But Sally didn't know too much about digital marketing,
so when it came time to get a website built,
Sally went to a fairly reputable firm
and asked them to build her a website.
And they said, of course,
Sally, we can build you a website.
Can you do some SEO for me?
Can you get this site ranking?
And they said, of course,
Sally, we can do just that.
So all seemed to be going well,
and Sally had a website that was ranking
and it was getting leads from SEO.
But the one thing Sally didn't know
is how much she should have been paying for all of this.
You see, Sally had paid for the website,
she'd paid for the SEO,
but the SEO agency had added a commission
that Sally would have to pay for every lead
that it generated through this website.
The downside is they hadn't given Sally access
to the website.
They hadn't given her access to the analytics.
So she had no idea which leads were coming from their work
and which leads were coming from repeat custom,
direct traffic, all this type of stuff.
This meant that Sally was paying commission
on every single lead generated through her website.
That is rubbish, that is a disgrace.
Now, luckily this story,
like all of these, has a happy ending.
We were able to rebuild Sally's website for her
and free her from this horrific contract.
But that's just one of the mistakes
that you can make when you get a new website built.
And there are five more.
I've got some great stories to share from you
from my experience over the years.
Number five is really scary.
So if you're sitting comfortably, let's begin.
Here's my thinking,
a website should basically do three things.
It should be rankable.
Secondly, it should set a good first impression
for your business.
Thirdly, your website needs to convert traffic
into leads or sales.
I would argue that any website
that isn't designed to do these three is bad,
and therefore any firm that
is consistently building websites
that aren't designed to do these three is a bad agency.
So the question is, how do you avoid bad?
I've got a joke for you.
Have you heard the one
about the website that missed its deadline?
Yeah, you have.
Websites are ridiculously complicated things to build.
Trust me, I run a company that builds them,
and I've built a fair few myself.
The thing is, a website project is not
a single piece of work,
it's actually loads of different disciplines
all contributing and co-mingling.
You've got design, you've got development,
you might have technical integrations,
you've got SEO, you've got content writing,
tracking and analytics being installed.
All of these are potentially different specialisms.
And anytime you're working with so many different inputs,
you need a really clear process.
Just to give an example,
when we're building a bespoke website here
at Exposure Ninja, we use a seven step process.
Research, wire framing,
design, development,
pre-live quality checks, post-live quality checks,
and post-live performance improvement.
We've even got an entire video on how to plan a website.
So if you're gonna choose a web design agency,
I would ask them,
what is your process for building a website?
And you are listening for hesitation or blagging.
They should be able to tell you exactly
what their process is
and they should have standard operating procedures
for each of the phases in that process.
If they don't, they either haven't built enough websites yet
or they are total chaos people.
And you do not want total chaos people
building your website.
And by the way, you might be thinking,
isn't there a clear conflict of interest here, Tim?
You run a company that sells websites
and you're telling us how
to find a website development agency.
Hmm, feels a little bit suss.
Yeah, well,
yeah, I hear you.
Here's the thing, 200 million active websites out there.
Exposure Ninja, we're good,
but we can't rebuild all of them.
And when we're running a digital marketing
for our lovely clients, we'll often spend a lot of time
and energy battling poorly built websites from elsewhere.
So actually it really does help everyone
if websites are built by firms that know what they're doing.
Alright, want another story?
A few years back I needed a website built
for a personal project
and I decided this is gonna be a really good opportunity
to test Exposure Ninja team
against an external web design firm.
So I sent the same brief to the Exposure Ninja team
as an external firm that I found.
Now to my amazement,
the external firm got back to me with a full design
for my site within about a week.
I was stunned because the Exposure Ninja team
would take much longer than this to build
a design for a site,
whereas the external team has put
this beautiful design together, which looks really cool,
had loads of great colours and loads of design aspects
that I really love.
Alas, it was not meant to be.
All that this firm had done was taken
one of their standard design templates,
changed some of the colours, put some of the images in,
changed the logo, and whacked it back to me.
There was no understanding of the business,
there was no understanding of the target audience,
they hadn't spent the time doing keyword research,
they hadn't understood the market,
they didn't understand what the sales process was
or how to position the first step
in that sales process with a call to action,
they didn't understand how to remove the objections
that someone might have to requesting that call to action.
This site would've gone live,
it would've looked good, but it would've done nothing.
Ouch.
If the website design firm doesn't grill you
on a phone call that lasts ages
or send you a ridiculously long questionnaire,
asking for loads of information
about every aspect of your business, something's wrong.
At Exposure Ninja we do both.
We send over the massive questionnaire
and we can hear the clients in their heads going,
oh, and then we get them on a call
and grill them in even more detail,
because we need this info
if we're going to build a website
that represents your business,
rather than just switch the logo out
on some template somewhere.
Here's a question for you.
Do you think it's better to have your website built
by a firm that only builds websites in your industry?
Or do you think it's better to have your website built
by a company that works across lots of different industries?
Let me know in the comments below.
Now the trend was a few years ago
that you'd have these industry specific website firms.
For example, if you're a dentist,
you would go to one of these firms
that just designed websites for dentists,
and in their backend,
they would have the five different designs
of websites with the pictures of the teeth.
And they would just switch out the name,
and switch out the logo, and rewrite the text,
and there you go, you've got dentist website number five.
The advantage for the web design firm, of course,
is that they could churn these sites out very, very quickly,
they could focus their marketing to sell just the dentist.
Very easy to do, very scalable model.
The advantage for the dentist was that they were working
with a firm that understood their industry,
at least on a surface level.
And they could write copy which sounded native.
Now, I actually started this way myself
before the days of Exposure Ninja.
I used to build websites for trades people,
so plumbers, heating engineers,
electricians, gas engineers,
and I'd have a standard website layout.
And then I'd just switch out the text,
change the details around for the business.
And I could build these sites very cheaply
and sell them very cheaply
because they didn't take very long to do.
But it really wasn't until a few years later
when we'd scaled Exposure Ninja a bit
and started building and working on websites
in different industries and across E-commerce
and lead generation where we started
to realise how much we'd learnt about digital marketing
and conversion rate optimization specifically.
Then when we got a large trade company coming through,
we realised we were bringing a whole new game
to that project.
And the great thing about digital marketing
is there is lots that can be learned
from different industries and applied in spaces
that have never seen that stuff.
So for example, we found that the benefits bar
that you'd see on an E-commerce site
actually can work quite well in lead generation websites.
We found some of the objection handling
that you've got to do on legal lead generation site
actually could do really well
if it sits on the right hand side of a checkout page
in a two step checkout, because as people are going
through two steps in the checkout
they might get a board and dropout.
So if we can objection handle and keep them in that process,
show them the testimonial,
that can improve the conversion rate.
So what we found
is that broadening our digital marketing knowledge
across lots of different industries actually made us better
than when we were specialised just in one industry.
And by the way, if you want an amazing example
of how this kind of broad knowledge
across lots of different industries
can lead to really useful,
specific advice for your industry,
check out the free website
and marketing review linked below.
One of the team here at Exposure Ninja
will take a look at your website and your competitors,
and they'll map you out a process
to generating more leads and sales from your site.
They'll do this even though they might not
have deep knowledge about your industry.
'Cause what they're really doing is they're drawing
on their knowledge of doing hundreds
of these reviews in every imaginable market,
and they're seeing the things that have worked
in this business over here, and this business over here,
and for this business, and they're rolling them up
and seeing how they could apply to your business.
So it is really simple
to request these free marketing reviews.
All you need to do is click the link below
or go to exposureninjacom/review.
There's a questionnaire to fill out the info
and we'll usually send your review to you
within two to three working days.
It's totally free and it's a killer, so go and grab it now.
Not having any hobbies, friends,
or social life leaves me with about 22
and a half minutes per day leisure time.
And I like to spend that leisure time looking
for businesses to buy.
And one morning a broker sent me
a really interesting opportunity.
This business had developed
this E-commerce platform themselves,
they had then sold clients onto this platform,
so each client had their own website,
but they were all using this bespoke platform.
The problem is that the company didn't have the resource
to maintain the platform anymore.
So they had to take the difficult decision
to put the company into administration
and they were looking to sell the assets.
But it was almost impossible to buy this business.
The only person who knew how to run this platform
was the person who built it
who was no longer going to be involved.
So all of these clients have bought their own website,
built on this platform that was now gonna be obsolete.
Yesterday they had a fully functioning site
that was generating purchases,
but today the platform's gone, the company administration
and theirs are being sold off the highest bigger
who's just gonna pitch them
on getting their websites rebuilt.
That sucks.
Now I have nothing against agencies
that specialise in building websites on one platform,
of course it makes sense to develop your skills in one area.
But where I do have a problem
is where those agencies are advising clients
to build on that platform, either because they own it
or because it's the only one they know how to build on.
You should get a website on the platform
that is right for you and for your business.
You shouldn't have to choose your platform
based on what specialism the agency has
or the code that they've built,
which they want to lock you into.
That's not good selection criteria.
So when an agency recommends
that you use a particular platform,
make sure you understand the reasons
and make sure that they actually make sense for you.
So choose your platform carefully, and I would advise,
always pick either something that is open source,
like WordPress.
The WordPress organisation could die
but WordPress as a platform would live on
because it's open source, or back a big winner,
so something like Shopify,
which has built up such huge market share
that it's unlikely it's going to die anytime soon.
Okay, let's talk branding.
Your site needs to look good, it's the first impression,
it's your online shop front, as cliche as that sounds
so it needs to make the right impression.
In our seminars and in our videos,
we'll show people two websites,
website A and website B.
Website A looks disgusting, website B looks amazing.
We'll then ask the audience,
which of these businesses do you think has a better product?
And they will all say, website B.
We'll say, which of these businesses
has better staff satisfaction?
They will all say, website B,
the pretty one.
We'll say, which of these has cleaner staff toilets?
They will all say, website B,
the pretty one, it's surely the best business.
Doesn't matter what we ask, website B is always the winner.
The punchline of course is that they are
a before and after of the same website.
But everyone in the room has judged website B
as being a better company, and we all do this.
We are hideously judgemental creatures.
We are making snap assessments
on very small visual criteria of everyone that we meet
and every product that we buy, it's just who we are.
So I would always advise a business
that's about to go into a website redesign
to make sure that they've got branding guidelines
that they are really happy with.
Do you love your logo?
Do you love your colour scheme?
Is it up to date?
Are you proud of it?
Do you have your tone of voice
the key words and phrases that your business uses in place?
'Cause your website is going to be an extension
of your brand guidelines.
This is why we'll sometimes do a brand guideline refresh
as part of a new site build.
So the thing to look out for
with a bad web design agency is they will focus
on their designs rather than your brand image,
or they won't even care,
they'll just build something that's technically sound
and slap a logo on the top.
Here's the secret in the web design industry,
you've got two types of people.
You've got the creative design folk
and you've got the technical development folk,
and there is almost no crossover at all,
not just with skills, like socially,
they are completely different breeds.
And in the course of running Exposure Ninja
and interviewing hundreds of candidates,
I've known precisely two people
that could both design and code, they are the unicorns,
you will not find them.
Now most small agencies have a personality,
they're either predominantly technical
or they're predominantly designed.
You want to make sure that whoever is building your website
has both the design creative capability
and the technical capability,
because the designers will often focus purely
on look and feel without the technical
and without the code and integrations.
The development folk will focus
on all of that technical stuff,
but they'll make it look like garbage.
You need both.
Oh hi, I've got another story for you.
A few years ago, a solicitor's firm reached out to me.
They just had a new website built
by this incredible French design agency.
This website was be beautiful, it was a work of art.
It had done things with HTML
that I didn't even know was possible.
It had won Webby Awards.
This thing was heralded as the future of the internet.
It was stunning, quite an experience.
But I said to the guy, Mark,
you're gonna have to rebuild this,
because when somebody is looking for a lawyer
they are not looking for a groundbreaking, HTML experience.
They are looking for someone who
is good at what they do, that can help them,
and they're looking for the next step in the sales process
that they can take to actually get this problem fixed.
When they are in legal pain,
the number of Webby Awards won by the design agency
that produced the website is not
in their top 1 million criteria.
So yes, your site needs to look good,
it needs to make a great first impression,
but above all, it needs to convert.
It needs to turn traffic into leads and sales,
and your web design agency needs to be ruthlessly conversion
and user experience focused.
Oh, sorry,
I was just subscribing to the Exposure Ninja YouTube channel
and clicking the like button on this video.
I've told you some of the mistakes
to avoid when choosing a web design agency.
The next step is to start planning your website.
Now we've actually put together a video
with a step by step process that you can follow,
which is based on the process that we use at Exposure Ninja
when we are building our websites.
You can check out this video just here,
and it goes through each step of the planning process
to make sure that when you are building your site
or having a firm build your site,
you get the most from that experience.
So you can either follow this process yourself
or check that your website design firm
is using this process or a version of.
Until next time, see you soon.
(gentle instrumental music)
I've read that one a hundred times, maybe more.
(upbeat music)