Is Your Website Worthless?
Does your website convert? Are you strategically driving traffic to it and then converting the visitors into leads by capturing their email, which then leads them through a sales funnel that sifts out the unqualified from the qualified and ultimately results in happy clients or customers?
If you answered yes, then you’ll probably be giving me some epic eye-rolls as you read what I learned this week.
As a designer, I was never taught how to measure results—how to actually quantify how the design helped convert people from a lead to a prospect, or a prospect to a client or customer.
I was taught to design in order to communicate—whether that was communicating a message, positioning, belief, story, etc. I wasn’t taught how to convert. Thanks to Seth Godin, I’m learning that that’s marketing speak for bringing about change.
As a business owner, now running Marks and Maker as well as Pre-lance, I’m realizing (sometimes the hard way) just how much I need to learn when it comes to marketing and sales. I’m learning how my website was pretty much worthless for a few years, acting only as a portfolio/brochure but not a marketing and sales tool. [face-palm]
As I’m reading through This is Marketing and working through an email marketing course I signed up for last month, I realized that I have rarely been focused on how design and marketing work together to bring about change.
Over the past month I changed my Marks and Maker site drastically. I am now so much more aware of how many people actually come to my site and how many convert, on which pages, and if that’s even a good number, and how I plan on improving it. Now that I’m aware of those numbers (which, according to the E-Myth, I should be quantifying everythingggg in my business), I can see what’s doing well and what’s not.
It took me a while to learn some fundamental business things like how my business is a machine and there are ways to check what’s healthy and what’s not, and what I should optimize versus innovate. But I’m thankful I’m learning and finally understanding them now.
I’m now becoming more aware on how I strategically drive traffic to my site and how I capture the leads who land there. It’s like a whole new world has opened up to me… one that I feel embarrassed I didn’t learn about sooner.
I guess I was off in design-land for far too long. :P
Melinda
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