So how do we decide who is your website for? What is it about this subject that made you want to record this podcast next?
It's because I think mainly it's a conversation that we have to have a lot with clients, right? Fundamentally, people come to us and say, I want my website to do this. I want my website to look like this. And always the question we end up asking them is, well, you know, who's your website actually for? What are you trying to achieve with it?
Understanding your market and more importantly, understanding your buyer personas, which is marketing speak for understanding who are the people who are going to buy the shit that you sell? How do you figure out who it really is for and how do you figure out what they what they're looking for and what they need?
I guess from a digital marketing perspective, looking at people's search behavior is probably one of the easiest ways of trying to kind of understand your target audience and find out who they are, isn't it?
Okay, welcome back to the From the Coalface podcast. Digital Marketing From The Coalface. Should we try that again? I'm just gonna leave it. I never, ever get that right. And it's not even intentional. And today, Alex and I are going to be talking about websites. And primarily the subject is who is your website for? And we've got a list of podcasts that we're going to do. And Alex decided he wanted to do this one. And right now I'm going to look at Alex and say, what is it? What is it about this subject that made you want to record this podcast next?
Always dropping me in it, aren't you? It's because I think mainly it's a conversation that we have to have a lot with clients, right? That there are kind of fundamentally people come to us and say, I want my website to do this. I want my website to look like this. And always the question we end up asking them is, well, you know, who's your website actually for? What are you trying to achieve with it? Um, I think a lot of people kind of come into, into the, the world of digital marketing, if you like, with the assumption that their website is for them primarily, right? It's to make their business look good. It's to, I don't know, solve their ego to make them feel good about the company they're running or to make them feel, you know, that they have a fantastic web presence. Um, but I don't think that's really the case.
Yeah. So basically they think their websites, a brochure for them to set their stall out and tell the world how great they are. And we do this, we do that, we're great, etc..
Yeah, I mean.
It isn't you're saying that that isn't what the website's for.
Right. Um, yeah, that's exactly what I'm saying. I'm saying that the website is primarily it has to be for the people that you're trying to do business with. But I think that is a novel thought for a lot of people. I mean, you know, just to go back to the point I was making before, I was reading an article in Forbes that was published last year, um, called Why Every Business should Have a Website. Right. And in it, they were positing this theory that people will. Once they've decided that you can supply what they. Whatever they want. They may go online and Google you, and you better have a website there so that they can verify that you're a good business and you know all of this and that it would be a kind of advantage if also your website sometimes generated you some leads. And I think that kind of back to front way of looking at it is something really kind of pervasive, I guess.
Yeah. I mean, it's a strange one, isn't it? Because for us, that's not a back to front way of looking at it. That's the only way to look at it. And the way we've always looked at it, it's like, who's the website for? It's for the potential customers. Yeah. And by having a website that's for those people, you've got more chance of it generating enquiries than just having a site that sets you stall out to say and tells everybody what you can do, what you what you do for a living. And that isn't to say websites shouldn't say what you do. Of course they should. I mean, clearly you need your website to.
Have an About Us section.
Exactly. And show the products and services and everything else. But if that's the only thing that you've got on your website then. Then there's a problem.
Yeah. And I think, you know, it's fundamentally as well about how you approach kind of designing and building and filling a website with content, isn't it? It's not just about describing what you do. It's about selling something to somebody. It's about using your website as a tool to generate leads. And if you're not kind of going into it with that mentality, it's not going to work.
And to sell to people in the twenty first century that you start by helping them, not selling to them.
Yeah, I think that's exactly it, isn't it? I mean, I think we've said in this podcast before that, you know, all of these kind of the best websites or websites that answer questions that solve problems.
Almost like they ask you answer.
Right. That famous book by.
Marcus Sheridan, great book worth worth grabbing a copy of. Um, so I guess what we're saying is that a lot of the time, website projects are little more than vanity projects.
Right. And I think what we're also saying is that if you're kind of going into this thinking about, well, how does this make me feel about my business? Or how what does this say about my business? And not from the perspective of, you know, is this answering people's problems? Is this kind of solving problems and helping people kind of, you know, what's the point of any of it if you're not doing that?
Yeah. I mean, one of the things, if I feel I've got a good enough relationship with somebody when I'm talking about a web project, I would maybe say to them, look, start with nobody cares. Nobody actually cares about you or your business. All they care about is their own problems trying to solve their own problems. And it's, it is harsh, I realise that and it's, it's, it's a little bit, um, I don't know, it's, it's a, it's a, it's a tough thing to try and take on board.
Yeah. It's definitely a bitter pill to swallow, isn't it? That whole idea that, but, but I think it's it's also, you know, if you look around online nowadays, you know, for, for anything, whatever you're selling, whether it's blue widgets or what's your other favorite one? Cars, lawnmowers.
Cars is one we often use. Yeah.
There are already thousands of people out there doing it. Nobody cares because there are a billion people doing what you do. So if you want to stand out, you've got to be doing something slightly different. You can't just be another blue widget manufacturer.
Yeah, yeah. It's, um, where do you start though? I mean, if we're going to use this vehicle, this episode, this show, this podcast to try and help people do digital marketing better, build a website that's going to help them grow their business. And if we're saying which we are, that your website is for strangers, it's for people out there who don't know about you, who are looking to try and solve problems by carrying out searches in Google, which for the most part are questions how do I do this? What's the best this? Yeah. You know, how much should I spend on this? That kind of thing.
At risk of being whipped with your newer cord that that's your target audience, right? Yeah.
No, it is. So understanding your market and more importantly, understanding something that Julie talks a lot about. Uh, and maybe she should have joined us for this podcast, but understanding your buyer personas, which is marketing speak for understanding who are the people who are going to buy the shit that you sell.
Yeah, I think it has to start there, doesn't it? Absolutely. Trying to understand and appreciate what they're looking for, what they're interested in, what they want to see in a website. Right? Yeah.
And that's not to say it's always the case, is it? Because I mean, if I go to a car dealers website, because we use car dealers quite a lot, we pick on them. Um, if I go to a car dealers website, All I really want is to look through their available stock, especially just now because there's a real shortage of second hand cars just now. I mean, I've I put my car on there. What's that thing called? We buy any car? Yeah. And it's actually worth four grand more than I paid for it just over a year ago. It's absolutely bonkers at the moment. There's a real shortage. So if I if I go to a, a car dealers website right now, um, like there's some, there's a car dealer in Banchory, which is what, fifteen miles away. And all I want to see is what stock have they got in. I want to be a filter that's stock by brand or price or fuel type, and that's it. Their website doesn't have to help me in any other way other than show me your stock, right?
Because it's a very simple problem, right? You're going to them kind of at the end of that journey, you've decided that you want to buy a car, and you've decided probably how much you're willing to spend on it, and you've decided probably what brands you are and aren't happy to look at.
I've probably decided exactly what I want, right? So I'm really just interested in whether they've got one.
So I guess a fundamental level, there are some businesses and some websites out there that are just kind of purely transactional, right? I mean, I guess to a degree, Amazon are doing this, right. They kind of thrive from people coming to them and saying, I want a pink umbrella and I want it tomorrow. And they're saying, okay, here's the answer to your problem. Amazon don't do any content marketing. They don't do any. Oh, yeah.
Well, just I mean, you've just said that and as you were saying it, I was thinking to myself, but Amazon is where I go to educate myself about products. And I do that by reading reviews, which is user generated content. So you're dead right. I don't think of Amazon. If I'm doing some research and I want to read some articles on whatever it is I'm researching. Again, going back to cars. So I'm thinking, oh, you know, should I go for a diesel car, a petrol car? I mean, the big one for me at the moment is whether I get rid of one of the cars and go for an electric car. And so I'm interested.
Because I'm also having that conversation with my wife. Yeah, yeah.
That's right. I think a lot of people in the, in the UK just now, especially with, you know, the fuel prices gone up and we're getting, you know, all sorts of incentives from the government to get electric cars. So we're actually trying to educate ourselves on which electric cars would suit our requirements in terms of range and all the rest of it. Mhm. So I've completely forgotten what I was talking about.
Well, so you're asking about the local car dealership and whether or not they needed to bother answering your questions. And I guess.
And then you spoke about Amazon. And although Amazon, I, I can't think of any anywhere on the Amazon website where it's, they've got like resources they might have, but I've never seen it where they talk about, um, you know, products or, or, or whatever, you know, anything, but they're very clever because they've got user generated content on every single page pretty much that has a product for sale. They've got user generated content from people who've already bought it who say, don't buy this, it's rubbish, or I've bought this and it changed my life. I mean, and, and I, I don't know about you, but if I read a review. I can read like a bunch of reviews like, yeah, it's good. I bought it. It works. Yeah, it's good, I bought it. It works. And one person says, this is absolute trash. And I'll sometimes I'll immediately hit the back button. Right, right, right. One person's negative review. Yeah. One negative. And it could just be some idiot who never even bought the product. You know, I don't know.
Yeah, absolutely. I think I mean, yeah, I mean, I think touching on there, the danger of kind of user generated content, right. And how to verify whether it's real or the impact that it has on people who are buying. I mean, yeah, you have to be really careful with that kind of thing.
So Amazon's website, if you if you go back to the question, you know, who is your website for Amazon? Know that their website is for people that want to buy shit, they want to buy it and they want, and they want it to arrive the next day. Yeah. And they already have. And then they've let those same people write the content that helps you decide whether whether or not to buy that particular product. Yeah.
It's pretty.
It's pretty impressive, isn't.
It? It's really smart.
Clever people.
They've designed a very good website for their audience. Um, going back to your original point about the car dealership in Banchory, um, I guess the, the problem there is that their audience is literally just people who have already decided they're going to buy a car. They're the only customers they're going to get are people who have thought, okay, I'm going to buy a car. I'm probably going to buy this brand. This is my price range. What can I get? And I guess the point is, for most businesses, there's far more kind of potential customers out there who are still at the stage that you were talking about before where they're saying, you know what, what kind of electric car do I need? Can I have an electric or do I need a petrol? If you can reach people there with your website, that's a much bigger audience than the people who are at the end of that process have decided that they're going to buy X car.
Yeah. So how do we for people listening to the to the show, how do we decide who the website's for? If we agree that the website is not for necessarily anyway internal consumption. It's not, um, there to make us feel good about ourselves. I mean, and in the early days, certainly lots of websites were built as vanity projects. Sure. With funky graphics. And actually from a user's perspective, they were pretty much impossible to use because people tried to be too clever and tried to use. There was a term that used to kick around, which you'll resonate with Caron, who was on the other side of the office, but they used to call it hidden meat. So it was like you had to move your mouse over some component on the web page, and that would reveal a menu or that would reveal something else that you had to go looking for it like it was some sort of game. Yeah. You rarely see that now because people are not really interested in that. They just want the information, whether it's a video or an image or some words.
What's the whole idea behind this kind of user centric design, isn't it is. You know, you're designing websites for web users, not yourself. You've got to make it a fun and pleasant experience for people to navigate. Otherwise they'll go somewhere else or find a different website.
Okay.
Um, so the question you were asking is how do you essentially find your target audience, I guess? Yeah, yeah.
If your website isn't for you and it's not for your team, it's not for your staff, it's not for people known to you, you know? How do you figure out who it really is for, and how do you figure out what they're what they're looking for and what they need? And this, I suppose there's a danger that this could kind of wander into the realms of something that I know you want to talk about in one of the next podcasts is keyword research, trying to understand what your audience is actually looking for, what problems they're trying to solve.
Yeah. And, and also, I guess we have to kind of wander into the world of traditional marketing a little bit, don't we? And talk a little bit about the idea of, like you said before, buyer personas and kind of audience research and that kind of thing. But yeah, I mean, I guess from a digital marketing perspective, looking at people's search behavior is probably one of the easiest ways of trying to kind of understand your target audience and find out who they are, isn't it? I mean, we use, I think it's fair to say for most of the, the clients that we onboard, we end up using a mix of kind of Google Analytics, um, SEMrush and Google Search Console to try and figure out.
I really think you're going to get away with that.
Yes, I nearly did. It was close.
So we use tools that let us see what's happening on the website. And Google Analytics is one of those horribly complicated tools which kind of does that.
It does fantastically interesting things, doesn't it? Like you can literally head into Google Analytics and say, you know, what is the kind of average age of somebody using my site? What is their kind of gender? What's their.
I think they just make that shit up, don't you?
It's supposed to be accurate as to how accurate it is. I don't know. And I guess there's another danger there, though, in using kind of tools that are measuring data about your pre-existing website, which is that you're kind of confirming a bias, right? It's like if your current website is only attracting men aged fifty to sixty, that doesn't necessarily mean that's your target audience. It just means that's the audience you're currently capturing. But you know, that said, I think looking at those, those tools and that data that's already available to you, you can start to build up a decent picture of who it is that is using your site and who it is that is buying off you.
Mhm. Okay. So I think, um, to help people get something of value from this, then we have to talk about buyer personas, which we've already mentioned. And that means sitting down and figuring out who actually buys what you're selling. And I know most businesses in our experience anyway, say, oh, anybody, everybody can. Everybody's our.
Customer. The classic answer is, yeah, anyone who'll buy it.
But that's that's right. Yeah. And that's not the case. Um, but how do we arrive at who, who is, I mean, I remember talking to, um, strangely enough, a client who is a car dealer. Um, and we haven't done any work with, with Craig for quite some time and we, and we were talking about this very subject and his immediate response was, oh, anybody anybody's a, you know, a potential customer because I, I sell cars and, um, everybody.
Drives a car, right?
Yeah. That's right. So it was just anyone's a customer, right? Uh, and then he was like, although we predominantly specialise in pickup trucks, right. And we predominantly sell them to guys who are sort of in their mid to late forties who work offshore and just have always fancied a funky truck. And now they come. And so within like two minutes of the conversation, he'd gone from everyone is our customer to pretty much specifying the, the age and sex and, uh, you know, um, net worth, if you like income levels of the people he was targeting.
I think that's the thing though, isn't it? It's, it's exactly what most business owners, most people running businesses probably do already know. It's just you have to ask yourself the right questions. Do you have to think in terms of what you say? Gender, age, income?
Yeah.
Geographic location.
Something just occurred to me. Um, because let's see if I can articulate this. We help companies with digital marketing, right? You know, one of the things that we do of the many things that we do is create websites, right? So you could say that any business is a potential customer because, you know, because most businesses need a website. And so anyone, any business is a potential customer of ours. However, we then define further, define that group of people based on other criteria. So first of all, we want to work with customers who want to make a significant investment in the digital marketing. If you want to spend two or three hundred quid a month on your digital marketing, we can't help you. We can't possibly. We're not the right agency. We can't possibly help you. So we're we are now starting to define our own subset of all of the businesses out there who need a website. We're starting to decide who we want based on what we're trying to achieve with the agency. You know, we're trying to get to a point where, you know, to go along with our visions and values and mission and everything else. You know, we want to be valued by every client that we've got, every customer that we've got. And in order to do that, we need a decent budget in order to be able to do the work that we do and get them the results that will help them grow their business. So we're actually, although on the face of it, you know, our customers, everybody, because, you know, everybody in a business sense, that's not the case. And what we're doing the fine tuning.
Yeah. And then I think, you know, it's fair to say probably, you know, below that there's another layer of, of kind of decision making that goes on, isn't there, where, you know, we prefer to work with business to business clients. For example, we prefer to work with people in kind of technical industries. We there's a lot of that that goes on. I think maybe even subconsciously when we're kind of weighing up whether or not to work with the client. And I guess these are the things that other people are doing too. They're just maybe not as aware of them. They're not kind of thinking, that's exactly what I need to.
Okay, so if we want to further refine this idea of, of buyer personas, ideal customers, and somebody in a position where they're struggling to do that, then going down this avenue of thinking, right. Well, in an ideal world, yep. Then it's not everybody. It's people who are earning a certain amount of money, who live in a certain geographical area are, you know, a particular type of person, or there's all sorts of things that, you know, to tease that out.
You know, it's interesting. I just had a little light bulb moment of my own then when you said that in an ideal world, and I guess that's the thing about a target audience, isn't it? The idea is that it's the the people you'd like to target. In an ideal world, who would you actually like to be doing business with? Not who do you think you can do business with, but specifically, who do you want to chase?
Yeah, and you're allowed to do that. I mean, it's your business, you know, I think you should you should have a strategy and you should understand where you're going. And you can decide that you want to work with a, you know, with a particular, um, type of customer.
Yeah. And I think it's fair to say that nowadays, especially people prefer to work with businesses that are very specific about the people they want to work with. Right. People like to feel that you're kind of targeting their specific needs, not that you're a generalist that can that can supply everybody. I think that is the kind of nature of the game nowadays with digital marketing, isn't it?
Yeah. That's right.
Make people feel special, I guess.
Yeah. So going back to, uh, who is your website for question then? It's for the people who are gonna help your business thrive and shine, right?
Yeah. I think that's a really good way of looking at it. Not just. Yeah. Who it's not just for your customers. It's for the ideal customer that is going to help you move things forward.
Yeah. That's right. So, you know, again, car analogy, the Mercedes garage ideal customer is somebody who earns a decent amount of money and is prepared to pay three, four, five, six hundred pounds a month on a PCP to buy a nice fifty sixty thousand pounds car. Yeah, that's their ideal customer. Yeah, yeah. And it's and if they, if they stray away from that, which they could because they're going to get cars coming in, traded in older cars, etc. so they could say, well actually no, we've got a little bag and corner over there, cars, you know, for thirty bucks. And then suddenly it's like a very mixed message that they're giving out. And the people with the money are also saying, oh, but they sell cheap cars as well. That's not where I'm going sort of thing.
So I think that's something that most people that will resonate with most of the people listening, right? We've all been on a website and thought, oh, like, I'm not quite sure this is for me. I'm not quite sure this is targeting me.
Or are you saying that's by design?
No, I'm saying I'm saying it's largely by accident, but I'm saying it's very easy to water your brand down by doing things like, like you say, putting a bargain corner or a sale section on your site when you're trying to market yourself as a premium brand or trying to capture an audience that's that's broader than it should be, because it's very easy to tell, even if it's only on a subconscious level that actually somebody's trying really hard to drum up business. And they're not specifically saying, I can solve your problems. They're just trying to solve everybody's problems. I think that's something that we don't have very much patience for.
Yeah, yeah. That's right. Um, I think you see that a lot with businesses, don't you, where they're not clear about who they're for.
Well, we had a client once who were a software design client. Right. They built some custom software and their whole thing was we can build whatever custom software you need for anybody. And that was something they were really kind of attached to. But that's a really kind of, you know, that's not gonna win anybody over. Because what if you come to a software developer with a specific problem, you want to know that they can solve that problem. That's their area of expertise. You don't want to work with generalists. So positioning yourself as one, I think is often a big kind of turnoff.
But yeah, it is. But it's so tempting, isn't it? It's so tempting to think that your audience, your potential customer base is everybody. And and you don't want to turn your nose up at any business, right?
And I think this is a struggle we can relate to, right? Without, without kind of airing all our dirty laundry. This is a problem we have in that we want to help everybody. We want to we know we can help lots of different businesses. But if you start down that route of trying to help everybody, you end up helping nobody that's going to help your business grow, I guess.
Yeah, you become a busy fool usually, right?
And I think that's definitely true of people's websites. If you don't stay focused on the target audience you want to acquire, then you end up attracting a lot of I mean, we see it all the time, don't we, with, with marketing campaigns that we run for people where we don't think they've quite got the kind of brand right, the kind of the target, right, that, you know, you just get a lot of people clicking on your website and looking around and nobody enquires. And that's, that's, I think a really common problem. Like, why doesn't my website generate leads? Like the honest answer is because you're not appealing to the right people. You've, you've spent time appealing to the wrong audience.
I think in almost all cases, when you get a situation like that, at the risk of repeating myself, then you're going to be you. The website in question that isn't delivering somehow at some point morphed into a vanity project.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I know I've used that term a lot, but I use it a lot because we see it a lot, right? A lot of websites are just exactly that.
I think, yeah, I think it's fair to say that anybody who works in digital marketing will have this ax to grind, because it's incredibly irritating when you come across a website that could be really successful, but it's hampered by this desire to say, oh, well, you know, we can service every type of client or we can do anything we want to. And it's, you know, it's not true and it's not helpful a lot of the time.
I mean, one exercise which we encourage people to, to, to play with is, you know, on their website, everywhere they say we. Yes, change it to you and somehow figure out a way of writing what you've just written in a way that's all about your target market, all about your ideal customer.
And most of the time, because I've written content for sites before and you've come back to me and said you've used the word we in there a lot. And most of the time, in trying to kind of unpick that mess and make it a you message, the message completely changes because you realise that, you know, what you've been saying is all good and well, but it's not actually solving somebody's problem or explaining the benefit to somebody. And I think that's a really important exercise to go through.
Yeah. It's interesting because on our own website, the hero text, you know, the big message on the homepage is we help businesses thrive online. So we've, we've used the we right there.
We should go and change that.
We probably should. I mean, we agonised over that for a long time. Um, I think, you know, the superhero text kind of qualifies it a little bit. But you're right. I mean, and I think it is interesting when you start to rewrite your website. So it's speaking to the prospect, the potential customer everywhere. It's, it's a really, I kind of quite enjoy it.
Yeah. I mean, it forces you to really evaluate what it is you're actually kind of saying and selling, I guess to, you know, it's, you know. Is it peace of mind? Is it happiness? Is it you know that somebody can go home and sleep easy at night? You know, what is the actual benefit of what you're doing for people? And it does force you to kind of go through that process. I think it is really useful. I think I will say, though, that it's probably worth pointing out that these are not kind of absolute rules, right? We're not saying if the word we appears on your website, you've.
Kind of like I just said, I mean, we use it on our home page. You know, we help businesses thrive online. You know, we're saying, don't say we and, and we say we.
There with the exception that proves the rule.
Well, yeah. That's right. So the, the website that, you know, the who is your website for? It's simple answer. It's for your ideal customer. Yeah. And you then develop an understanding of the problems that they're trying to solve. And then you make sure that it's speaking to them. And pretty much with every piece of content that's on the website, every headline message, everything should be speaking to them. And that brings me on to this idea of for every web page on your website, ask yourself the question who is it for.
And what problem.
Problem are they trying to solve? And again, we'll cover this when we when we do a podcast about keyword research. But, you know, how are they going to find it in the first place?
Definitely.
And, and that's where, you know, understanding the words and phrases that people are using when they're searching in Google is important in order to make sure that your content, you know, is written in a way that gets found and then appears in search results. But like I said, we're not going down that particular rabbit hole in this one.
No, definitely. Um, because I was going to say, it's kind of like it's something we've talked about a lot before, isn't it like how to write content that kind of appeals to, to specific problems and that sort of thing? I think, you know, by and large, we've covered those topics previously, but I think it is worth saying that, yeah, that exercise that you were talking about there, where you go through every page and say, what problem is this solving. If it's not solving a problem, it's probably wrong. Do you know what I mean? It's yeah, you can. You can make it much better. You can make it much more productive. Um, and I think a lot of it is just about putting yourself in your client's shoes and saying, okay, if I were new and I knew nothing about this brand and I had this problem, what would I want to see on this page? And then kind of going back and recreating that experience.
Yeah, yeah. And I think it's also fair to say that that most businesses, certainly a lot, maybe most businesses still just don't get this anywhere close to. Right.
Yeah.
They're still talking about we, this, we that we're great. Buy it from us.
Yeah. And I think to be honest with you, the best thing to do is to try and do this. Even if you end up doing it wrong, right. Because ultimately, even if you end up answering the wrong questions, at least you're still kind of moving in the right direction. The important thing is to get away from this kind of we, we, we messaging and this whole feel of a website being there to kind of, well, you referred to them before as brochure websites. And I think that's exactly it, isn't it? It's websites that are simply there to tell people about the business. I mean, nobody wants to be told about your business at the end of the day. We're being told about people's businesses all the time.
Like, that's why I said at the start. And I admit that it's, it's a harsh thing to try and say to somebody, but start with nobody cares. Yeah. And, you know, quite often in the past we had conversations with people and it would go something like, right. So on the home page, we want to say this, then people will click this. And on this page we'll say this. And then we want them to click this and we want them to click, you know, and it's like, when was the last time? Yeah. But when was the last time you, you know, patiently picked and clicked your way through somebody's website because you were so fascinated by them and you really wanted to know all about them. And I mean, hardly ever.
Well, it's fair to say that in the process of developing our own kind of, um, conversion optimisation, um, strategies that we.
Come on, expand.
Come on. Um, I should have known better. I should, I should know better by now on episode nineteen or whatever we're on. Um, so yeah, when you're trying to make your website, uh, more conversion friendly when you're trying to make it persuade more people to buy whatever you're selling, I feel like you'll do a better job of playing it.
I think you, you did a kind of mediocre job of that.
Oh, well, thanks. Great. It's, uh, damned by faint praise. It's, uh, that's the, uh, read either way. Um, in.
A nutshell, when somebody looks at a web page that you've created, you want them to do something. Yeah. And conversion optimisation means that you play with that web page and run a series of experiments until they start to do what you want them to do.
Right. Well, yeah, but that's the point, isn't it? So in the effort, in the process of trying to do that to your web pages, you spend a lot of time looking at like, um, things like hotjar, right? Which is a tool that lets you see where people have moved around your website and what buttons they've clicked and that kind of thing. And what you learn very quickly is that the average user visitor, whatever you want to call them, is very unpredictable. They'll do whatever they feel like. You know, they'll see a shiny color that appeals to them. They'll see a button or an element that looks clickable. You can't predict for any of that behavior. You can't really design for it either. You have to kind of learn what what people want to see, what they want to do. And I think another of the things that we see a lot of that's really frustrating is when people go in, like you say, with a kind of idea of how people are going to behave on their website, and they're like, oh, we're going to put this there, and people are going to click on it, and we're going to put a downloadable form here, and everyone will give us their details in return for this e-book. And you can't really know any of that kind of prior to trying it. You just have to kind of be receptive, learn, look at what people are actually doing and try and design for that. I think.
You do. I think I agree totally. Um, and you know, you rightly say it's called conversion rate optimisation and tools like Hotjar, which let us record people's sessions on the website. It's just a screen recording of what they're doing. You can't see who they are. You don't know. You don't know who they are. But you know, some people find it a bit creepy. I get that, but it's really useful, right?
Because you get to see people doing things like clicking elements they think should be clickable, they think should be billions of times out of frustration.
And more annoyingly, not clicking that beautiful design button that you spent a lot of time, you know, you know, crafting the words for and hoping that they would click it in order to jump down to a form and fill the form in and say, I'm interested in talking to you.
But I think this comes back to the whole like vanity versus reality debate again, doesn't it? It's like you don't design something because you think it looks pretty, and don't be too attached to things on your website because you think they should work or they look nice or anything like that. You design for users and you design for their behavior.
Yeah. And that does come back down to the essence of who is your website for? Right. And I've lunchtime, I went for a swim. I've decided to go back. I haven't been swimming since before Covid actually. Yeah. So I've decided, right, I'm going to go back and maybe a couple of times a week, I'll go for a swim and I've got some swim fins and I've got some swimming goggles. And I bought them all from a website called something like Mike's Shop or something like that, unless it's changed. And I found the website through a search and I landed on this website, which looked like it was, um, built when God was still in short pants. I mean, it was really old crappy looking website, but something about what they were saying, it just, it just looked honest. And so I bought, I bought quite a lot of stuff from them and I've recommended them to other people. Now, you know, it could be that someone has put a lot of thought into that. Yeah. And they've gone for this kind of retro honest thing. Or it could be completely by accident. I've no idea. Yeah.
Maybe equally.
Yeah. That's right. But equally, you could have a website that's like a real vanity project, really shiny and isn't as successful as, as Mike's swim shop or whatever, whatever it's called.
Well, so I think that's the whole thing, isn't it? It's like you see a lot in, in industries where people are, you know, kind of really value authenticity and like you say, kind of that whole kind of like honest trader persona. And then you see people go into that space and say, I'm going to put up a website that looks just like Asos. You know, it's going to be modern and shiny and slick, and they don't get the fact that those other websites are all there and successful because that's specifically what that target audience doesn't want to see. They don't want to feel like they're shopping out of a brochure site or, you know, in Argos picking something out of a catalogue. And I think, yeah, it just comes down to really, you have to understand your target audience and you have to understand what they care about. And you can't ever dictate to them like you're not in the driving seat. And I think that is a really difficult thing as a business person to hear, isn't it? It's like you don't actually get to decide what people like. You just have to provide what they're looking for. Mhm.
I mean, how do you how does that stand shoulder to shoulder with the need for protecting your brand and making sure that people feel the way about, feel the way they feel about your brand, the way you want them to. I mean, there's a there has to be an element of that, doesn't there, in all this.
Yeah, there's definitely not. But I think that's the thing, isn't it? Ultimately, like when you look at the brands that really resonate with you, they are brands where a lot of thought and attention has gone into making that brand appear in a very specific way. Mhm. Yeah. I mean, I think I'm just trying to think of some good examples of this, but.
But do you think the brands, I mean, are they being true to their brand, irrespective of what they have found out, what the what the research has shown them about their audience? Or is their brand that way because of their audience? It's probably the latter, isn't it?
Well, like I'm going to be really cynical and say, yeah, all the brands that we kind of know and love, that somebody somewhere has sat down on a lot of research into the target audience and designed something that is, is kind of calculated to resonate with you, if you like. It's not by accident that you think Aston Martin sell really swanky cars. Like that's that hasn't happened by accident and they don't maintain that brand, you know, by not constantly reiterating that message because they know it sells them more cars to their target audience. And I think that's the thing, isn't it really? Ultimately, you know, in traditional marketing or digital marketing, a lot of thought and attention goes into those kind of the people who are good at it, the people who are successful.
I think the Aston Martin example is a good one because I don't know the exact numbers, but I think Aston Martin, which started in around about the thirties, um, some tractors building tractors or something. Anyway, they obviously now build luxury, very, very special cars. Aston Martin have gone bust I think seven times in their history or something like that. Yeah. And that's, you know, kind of like if you want to be true to your brand and ignore what your customers are telling you, then by all means do it. But like even brands like Aston Martin have paid the price for that.
Yeah, absolutely.
And there are there are probably other examples. I mean, Delorean, you know, built that, you know, back to the future car. And it never it was never successful, I don't know. I don't know what the full story is behind it, but I mean, a lot of thought went into the branding of that. And I'm sure they thought about their target market and everything else and whether they just got that wrong or I don't I don't know the full reasons. But, you know, there's a lot there's there's plenty of examples. Yeah. Of luxury brands going bust. Yeah. Whether it's style over substance, I don't know.
And I think there are a few very kind of niche examples of companies that, you know, refuse to, to be kind of moved by markets and that do their own thing in spite of everything else. But they are very few and far between. And it's probably not a good idea to model your business on the exceptions.
Unless you, you know, you're doing it for different reasons and you don't need the money or anything else if you're trying to grow a business. And then then. Okay, so all right, just to sum up, then who, who is your website for? It's, it's, it's primarily for the people that you've decided are the people you want to work with, sell to the people who are going to help you create something of value and create a successful business. It's not for you, the business owners.
And it's not for the general public.
It's not for everybody. That's right. Yeah. And the more time you spend figuring that out, the chances are you're going to have a successful outcome. Yeah, I would say yeah.
Yeah, definitely.
Okay. Don't do death.
Simple.
Yeah.
Okay. Sorted. Problem solved.
I think uh, well, yeah, it's one that will just keep coming back and no doubt we'll discuss it in lots of different ways, uh, in the future. Um, okay. That's been, uh, Digital Marketing From The Coalface.
You did it.
Yeah, yeah. For the.
first time.
In a long time. Um, it might be episode nineteen unless we put one out before it, but yeah, almost certainly. Um, if you've got any questions, any digital marketing related questions, feel free to send them in. You can just fill out the form on the contact page. And we'll see you next time.