Hello. My name’s Issy Nancarrow from Nancarrow Marketing. And today I’m talking about website success for scale-ups. Now, I am not a web designer, but I work with scale-ups to improve the results from the digital marketing efforts, to help them to grow from the stage of having a few uncertain clients to much greater stability, and much greater cash flow and revenue coming in.
The reason I’m talking about websites is because it’s a common problem that I face with my clients when I work with them. And often what happens is, in a founder-led company, is initially the website is set up with the resources that you have available, and it represents the product in the way that you would like it to be represented. It doesn’t so much reflect what the buyer is looking for, and what stage they are in the buyer journey.
So to do this, we’re going to have a look at one website, which is not a website I’ve been involved in, just so you know, but I want to use it as an example of the do’s and don’ts.
So here you have it, it’s Databox. Now, imagine that you already know who your buyers are. You already know the segments, you already know how to reach out to them. Now this is absolutely crucial. You need to have started with having had conversations with your prospective buyers. And those buyers now might be different to your ideal buyers in 1 year’s time, 2 years’ time, 3 years’ time, but that is part of the journey.
You need to understand exactly how they talk, how they talk about their their problems, to reflect that language. And every time you want to add something about your product, about your software, about your tech, think about it from their perspective. Think about how they describe the challenge that links to that product feature. Okay. So that is what you’re reflecting on the website in terms of your buyer segments.
Now, they are at different stages in the buyer journey. So you will have people that have challenges, and they’re talking to AI about them. And this is where you want that long-tail content in, in your articles, in your blogs, to to get those AI mentions, to draw the right people to your traffic. So this should not just be things that are regularly um discussed in AI. These should be things that are uniquely specific to you, and you should be answering those questions very specifically in your articles, segmented out within the H tags, so that it’s easily referenced by AI.
That’s getting people at the top of the funnel. Then further down from that, you’ve got people that identify there’s a problem, and they’re open to looking at solutions to help them to solve that problem. So these people are more interested in what actually does the product do, how is it different to other solutions, is it something that they could practically implement in their organisation, or practically introduce? And these are the people that are more interested in the representation of your product on your website.
Now as a scale-up, you can’t rely on the trust of your brand, because you are not a known brand, and you don’t have the history um that known brands have. So to build that trust, you need screenshots. You need pictures of the tech. You need things that show people what it actually is, what they would actually experience.
And anything else you can do to build trust signals in terms of case studies, quotes, videos, to really show them what it would be like to bring that tech into their company, how they would use it, how it would look, how it would change day-to-day operations. What it has that they don’t already have? What pain would it take away?
For instance, when you’re splitting up product features, which sounds like an easy thing to do, but from my experience, I’ve never worked with a founder that’s found it instinctively easy to separate in the same way that buyers would actually separate, to split up the features of a product that reflect the buyer challenges.
And then within each of those sections, when you’ve identified what they are, you’re continuing to build those trust signals, because each person will choose a different one of those depending on what their current problem is. They will go straight to the one that is hitting their biggest pain point.
You need to keep building those trust signals. Keep having those photos of the real product. Keep putting in more um more examples. And you can see on this website, it’s very image-heavy. There’s not a lot of text. It’s very easily skimmable, which is great. And you need to have that, because not everyone involved in the buyer decision buy decision is going to be reading the detail. But you also need the detail. And that’s where your website journey is really important.
You need them to be able to skim, to see overall what they do, and then to drill down into the sections that are most important to them. And that’s where the interlinking comes in. It’s extremely important in your website. Because if you imagine the difference between someone that’s um got a problem and they’re looking for a solution, they go, “Oh, ah, okay. This might help,” and then they’re taken down this journey of how it solves their problem, how it makes their life easier, and then how they find out more information, and then how they get a demo. It’s a much more natural flow than someone reading through a large amount of text trying to find the thing that’s specifically relating to their problem.
This alone will massively impact your conversions to sales calls, to demos, getting that journey and interlinking right on your website.
And then we’ve got you’ve got the people further down in the sales pipeline. Now they are at the bottom of the funnel, so they are looking at options. They’ve got a budget, and they are looking at, okay, do you have the integrations? Can I integrate your product into what we do? So you need to make that very easy to access, and then with more detail further down.
Pricing. Pricing pages without pricing tend to just frustrate people. If you’re going to have a pricing page, put pricing on there. If you’re afraid of having a pricing page because you’re worried that it’ll either look too cheap, or it’ll put off buyers, and you want them to see the product first, well that means that your website isn’t properly reflecting what your product can do. And that’s where the piece of work needs to happen first.
Because what you want people to do when they land on your pricing page is self-qualify. And you want this page to filter out the people that can’t afford you, and that’s fine. You don’t want to be wasting time on sales calls with people that just aren’t right for you. Traffic on your website isn’t equal to qualified leads. It’s the qualified leads that are more important.
The other thing that they’ve got here is plans for business, plans for agencies. Now if you’re B2B but also B2C, it’s likely that your main page is focused on B2C, but you want to make it really easy and visually clear for them to be able to switch between the two. And you might have different pages, or it might just be the different pricing page. But you want them to self-segment so that everything is much more specific for who they are.
Now, what you have in here is under resources, so this is all of your rich information that people want, for people that want to get more information. And what is good to have is a comparison with your competitors, so that they can easily see what you can do and what you can’t do compared to your competitors. Again, they’re self-qualifying. That’s great. That saves you time, and it helps them process in their head whether you are suitable or not.
Iif you don’t do something that they want, well, you want them to know that, otherwise they’re not going to buy your product. You’ve just got to pitch it in the right way on the website, because your product is not designed for them, it’s designed for somebody else. Get the right leads.
And that is my quick snippet into how to increase the demo leads. Now, the idea of just making your website easy to use, easy to navigate with the right content sounds simple, but it really isn’t, and you really need to think strategically about it. And essentially have in your head an avatar of, “This person represents the person that is in this target segment. What will their journey be through the website? They are at this stage in the buyer journey. What what will they be thinking in each stage? How do we take them from interest A to booking a call over here?”
That’s the best way to do it, and it will really massively help the conversion rate of your website.
