Convert: Make your website sell more

Jim Martin

Convert

Make your website sell more

Founder´s edition

A Digital Marketing Journey Series

Contents

Prologue

Foundations: understanding the context

Clean slate

The 4 main levers that affect the way users buy (or not) from you

The first lever: validation

The second lever: branding

Let’s not forget about the human factor

The third lever: traffic acquisition

The fourth lever: websites

Value proposition, positioning & messaging

Value proposition

Positioning

Messaging

The alignment

The offer

Black and white scenario

Black and white after the initial sale

Price anchoring

Traffic acquisition: bringing more users to your site

The new landscape

Let’s get back to the white room for a minute

Let’s say we know about them

Let’s end this chapter by recognising that we have more than one way to get traffic to our site

Funnels: what they are and how to use them

Intent, right… what’s next then?

From funnels to customer journeys

It all starts with mapping the customer journey

New & Proposed funnel

Landing page Optimisation

Landing pages begin with context

There’s a process to follow

Sections: from top to bottom

7 principles of conversion-centered design (CCD)

New vs. existing pages

Types of landing pages

Long vs short landing pages

What about the copy?

Design: putting together solid web pages

Steps

Starting with sections: what do we need first?

Once you put it together: let’s tear it down!

Web Analytics

Analytics with a clear purpose

Ga + Funnels

What about GA4 (the new Google Analytics version)?

What to do with the data?

Attribution: the forbidden word

Website platforms: what to choose?

Do you really need a new website?

Considerations for a new site

Designing my own site

Are WordPress or Shopify any good?

What’s the deal with custom builds?

Testing: bias gets in the way of growth

Why do we need to test?

What kind of tests can you do?

Data-driven testing

Feedback-driven testing

What do we need to run tests?

Quick note about ‘weight’

Research: our marketing compass

Conversion research

In the pursuit of Growth

Margins

Value as a key driver for growth

How does this transform into growth?

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© Editorial Martin

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[email protected]

www.editorialmartin.com

ISBN 978-987-543-237-6

Primera edición en formato digital: junio de 2022

Versión: 1.0

Digitalización: Proyecto 451

Prologue

It was 7.30 pm on a Tuesday when one of the only three employees that were still working that day for a Marketing Agency started to scream: this cannot be happening!!. Immediately, the other two colleagues jumped off their seats and went to see him: what happened?.

With a trembling finger, the consternated marketing analyst pointed to the screen: I found this.

It probably took 5 seconds for the other two to realise what just happened: they were seeing something of a nightmare for any business and marketing agency: the analyst found out that for the past 25 months a Google Ads campaign was running, spending USD10k per month… driving all traffic to a page that didn’t exist.

In essence, that campaign went under everyone’s radar and misspent over USD250k in two years.

While quite fatal of an error it seems the big company who paid for the ads didn’t even realise of that leak. That’s a luxury small and medium-size companies cannot afford.

You’d notice that leak and also, minor ones too. Every single dollar or lead matter to us.

In fact, not only you’d notice a minor misspent but also be asking yourself:

How can I get more leads/sales?

How can I better manage the work agencies do for me?

Why do certain campaigns work, and why some of them don’t?

How can I scale my business?

Managing a business is hard enough to, on top of that, have to go through the vast noise of marketing to choose reliable partners that can help you move your business forward.

The good news is that you are not alone. Not by far. There is a group of people out there struggling with the same challenges. People who are tired of trying with different marketing agencies, who have tried different web designs without seeing much change and that after years of running the business, digital marketing is still a rocky & obscure activity.

Perhaps this time we can do things differently. Perhaps this book can be the beginning of a new way to see digital marketing & websites like you haven’t seen before and, in the process, to find people who share the same pains as you do and who have already found a solution.

Let me tell you: this is not intended to be ‘the 5 step framework to unlock 8 figures’ kind of book. Rather, we are proposing a journey. Cutting through the noise with a sharp marketing knife and giving you the tools you need to see your business, your marketing activities and your current partnerships with a new set of fresh eyes.

Let’s move away from simple tactics that won’t move our business forward and instead focus on what’s really happening behind the scenes of your business, what do you need to do next in order to unlock sustainable, progressive and genuine growth.

Every single page that comes ahead has been the result of many years of work, study, thinking and thinking again. I hope you enjoy it and more than that, I hope it means a difference to you.

Foundations:

understanding the context

In the rush of driving sales we forget immediately that we are dealing with humans. Very quickly we turn to demographics: ‘we’ll market to people in their 40s, that’s our target,’ in a brief attempt to simplify the universe of potential customers and take action. But in doing so, we end up neglecting the experience for those who matter.

As a professional dedicated to the study of web sales (also called conversions), I’ve been tasked to fix hundreds of websites. And when I’m saying ‘fixing’, I’m in reality trying to solve these questions: "Why aren’t we selling more?, Why aren’t users clicking here, filling this form more?".

And so we start digging, like a true web detective. With the tool set resembling a doctor’s one we ask the client to tell us their symptoms: ‘Do you have enough traffic? Were you selling more before and now experiencing a drop?’. And based on that diagnosis we get some initial conclusions like ‘you need to see a specialist… a Google Ads expert, a Web designer, Copywriter, SEO professional...etc’.

Rinse and repeat. In most cases, we hit the root of the problem and we collectively (between all the ones who participate in the client’s digital marketing effort), find a way out, a way to move forward.

But what makes the difference in the long term is not the fact we get to run a diagnosis, or that clients have a number of partners to help around. The difference is that some businesses and marketing teams want to find out more, go deeper and try to get an understanding of ‘why we get to this situation in the first place, and how to avoid it, how to make it better’.

Why is this so important? Because at the end of the day it is not the website that needs to be optimised, nor it depends on the partners you get surrounded with. No, at the end of the day the most important, crucial part of a digital side of a business is… you.

The way you’ll decide what to do, in which priority, whom to trust, what level of energy to invest, how consistently … that trumps any other marketing effort or tactic you can ever put to practice.

This is the true foundation: the way you see and understand web experiences will have a huge impact down the road.

Now, in order to build a solid foundation, we need to be honest with ourselves: you’ve been exposed to a number of marketing strategies, courses, articles, designs and as such, you might have a solidified idea of what works and what doesn’t work.

I need to ask you to have an open mind, to join me in this journey from the beginning, to disassemble what we give for granted and put the pieces back together. But this time, we will sift through a different meaning to them.

Let’s start by highlighting paradigms, that is the given truths you and I will start with:

Nobody will ever know your customers better than you do. Not even the marketing agencies who might be running ads for you.

Your business is unique. You can have 20 competitors but your style, your culture and people will always be different.

We deal with humans. Unpredictable, emotional & varied human beings who might not reveal the true nature of why they do what they do.

You are not alone. Someone else is facing the same pains, challenges and perhaps even has solved & shared the way out.

Bias is the enemy. A friend that tells you ‘this looks good/bad’, an article with the latest trend you might be missing… you’ll have to fight a sea of external noise that will try to tempt you to drive you off the path of reason.

We’ll need to embrace Marketing in order to make it work. When Marketing becomes a ‘I have to’, same as everything else… it ends up having less energy, less attention that it should (it happened to me when I saw the first financial year accounting work to be done as an ‘I have to’! And didn’t end up well, until I reshaped my way of seeing this and embraced accounting as a vital part of my business).

Patience is a virtue. In order to set in motion the changes that will produce that sustainable growth we talked about before, we will need to be patient, have perseverance & follow through. I know you can do it!

There you go: these aren’t the ‘7 pillars of automatic success to unlock 8 figures’ but instead more real premises that will permeate through everything we’ll do next. Are you in? Great!

Clean slate

Remember that scene from The Matrix where Neo enters a virtual room with Morpheus that is plain white and there’s nothing on it? (they called it ‘the construct’). I want us to do