I spoke to a prospect a while back and this person made a shocking statement. I can’t remember the exact words but it was something to the effect of:
“People still use websites?” or “Websites are still a thing?”
And for a brief moment, a shooting emotion of fear entered my body and the thought occurred to me, “Whoa, what if this person is right? What if I’m just old school and outdated now?” 😱
But logic and truth finally took back control of my brain and I realized that’s the furthest thing from the truth.
Some people think a popular social media account is all you need to run a successful business. And there’s some truth to that. A good social media following can get some people far. But for most businesses, you can’t and shouldn’t rely on a social media account as the lifeblood of your entire digital presence.
Let’s unravel this.
A website is YOUR online property. For the most part, no one can take it from you.
Your Facebook page, profile, Instagram account: these can be taken from you. You can lose access to them, and you may never get them back.
A large reason why this is the case is because they’re free. Meta doesn’t owe you anything. If you lose your account, or it gets hacked, oh well. You get what you pay for.
Don’t build a business on free stuff where there is no recourse. Ever.
I know so many people who have lost their Facebook and Instagram accounts and could never access them again. All the work they put into them was lost forever, and it was devastating to their businesses.
If you register a domain name and build a website for your business, it’s your business’ legal property.
Think about how powerful that last statement is.
You have protections, rights (including copyrights), and most importantly, you own your digital real estate.
You can never own an Instagram account or a social media handle (@yourcompanyname). These accounts belong to the social media companies. They can close your account for any reason at any time and they don’t have to spend one second servicing you if you’re in a jam.
Next, let’s spend some time discussing this digital real estate concept. This is where it gets exciting!
You can develop online real estate. You can turn it into an inbound marketing machine, or do something wildly creative with it.
A website can be a simple one-page site and serve as a digital business card.
It can also do a lot more than that.
The beauty of a website is it’s a fresh canvas.
Almost anything you can think of doing can be created.
The sad, sad truth of online business is 99.99% of businesses never do anything TRULY creative with their website.
When it’s time to build a business website, it usually goes something like: A) Find a template B) Fill in some information. 😔
Is there a better way?
If you can create a website that is useful and people routinely come back to it (and tell others about it), you’ve found the Holy Grail 🏆 of digital marketing.
There isn’t a recipe on how to do this, but if you spend some time thinking about how you can turn your website into a resource or be of use to your target audience, it will be time well spent. As a matter of fact, it should be your #1 priority as a business owner. Put all your busy work on the back burner for a few days and figure out what your website should be, do, and function as.
And before you go into brainstorming mode, remember: Having your audience come to you is very powerful in business. Most people spend all their time, energy, and MONEY trying to get in front of people with ads, social media, flyers, conferences, etc.
Having a steady stream of potential customers coming to you 24 hours a day flips the script.
Why chase prospects when you can have them coming to you and you have their attention?
When you advertise, you don’t have your prospect’s attention. You are interrupting them and hoping you can get them to stop doing what they were doing to listen to you. And as we all know, no one likes being bothered by business propositions. Advertising usually happens at the wrong time, and more importantly, when your prospects aren’t even in the right mindset.
Why not let them find you when they are ready AND are in the right mindset? You’ll have a much better chance of converting them into actual customers.
Does this strategy sound familiar?
What we have noticed over the past ten years is that most businesses have abandoned the practice of attracting customers to them. We used to call this “inbound marketing.” It was a popular topic in the world of digital marketing between 2009 to 2015, but slowly the term vanished somewhat.
What we think happened is:
- Social media got popular over the past 15 years,
- People, including business owners, got more distracted than ever,
- With more distraction came less time in the day, less focus, and more frustration,
- Many business owners are now scrambling to find any silver bullet activity that will somehow miraculously save and/or grow their business.
There is no reason why business owners can’t come back to the world of inbound marketing. You can do it yourself, or hire a creative agency to help build an inbound marketing strategy and corresponding website foundation. The good news is that there is an easy thing you can do right now to switch to inbound marketing mode.
At the most basic level, at least create pages that discuss what you do.
We understand that not everyone is hyper-creative. And everyone has a busy life. Maybe you don’t have time to dream up the perfect inbound marketing website concept. But there is one task you can work on now that will help.
The biggest blunder we see most businesses make is that they don’t create web pages for the services they offer.
The easiest way to get business is to write about what you do, publish a page about it on your website, and let people find that page.
Search engines comb the internet, read information, and index it. This is how people find out about websites when they do Google searches.
If you don’t create pages that discuss what you do (and do it well), you’re leaving a lot of money on the table.
To be honest, we’re absolutely dumbfounded at how many businesses fail at this insanely simple concept.
At Judicious, Inc. We Create Service Pages For Our Clients To ATTRACT Customers
We figure out what pages businesses should create to get targeted website traffic to them. We have tools that will tell us what language should be on these pages and how they should be configured, and we create them for our clients.
Most importantly, we do research to see what language your customers use when they search for your services so that we build pages to attract the most searches.
Let us attract customers to you.
If you’d like to discuss how Judicious, Inc. can help your business attract customers, then feel free to contact us via text, email, or schedule a Zoom meeting.
Let’s discuss a couple more ways you can employ the inbound marketing strategy.
Why not use your website to become an industry thought leader, publication, or trade journal?
One of the best ways to market your business is to become an authority in your space. Authorities usually build trust in an industry and with those interested in the industry. Being the go-to trusted source usually means customers will also trust you when it comes to doing business with you.
One way to do this is to create a blog or publication section on your website.
Some Important Things About Building A Trustworthy Blog
There are plenty of businesses that try to blog or run a publication but end up doing a bad job at it. Here are a few things you should do to keep it looking top-notch:
🧑🎨 Have it designed and styled to look better than the New York Times
Believe it or not, this isn’t that hard to do. NYT doesn’t look that amazing but it’s a good website to use for comparison-sake. Carefully compare your fonts, letter spacing, line height, margins, and headings. Does your blog look professional? Does it look really good? If not, keep iterating on the design, typography, and layout until you get it looking A+.
Perfecting the design and layout of your blog will do wonders in terms of building trust with your readers.
💎 Your content must have value
You must publish topics your audience cares about and that are valuable to them. You also need to not gloss over information in your content. Give them the details that they are seeking. For every post you come up with, ask yourself: Are you wasting their time or are you giving them value?
🖨️ Be consistent
Blog and online publications need a regular publishing frequency. You’re trying to build momentum and you want to give your audience what they want. If you take years off between publishing dates, you’re going to fall flat.
🥇 Make it a priority
This strategy is worth your time. It may take a while to figure out how to get it started, but inbound eyeballs are worth it. It’s usually much better than advertising. You’ll know you’re on to something when people reach out to you to advertise on your site!
✍️ A word on hiring writers
It’s really hard to find writers who truly understand your audience. And that usually means content written by hired writers rarely connects with your audience. Especially in niche industries. Usually, the best content will come from your in-house team.
Now, a professional copywriter can be hired to polish your content before it gets published. And it’s possible that after the copywriter works with you for a while, they’ll be knowledgeable enough to write content on their own that will be a hit.
🧙 Speaking from experience
I ran a blog for a software company (KISSmetrics) and the blog became exceptionally popular. We had such a massive following after a couple of years that we released a weekly webinar series. This became our main source of lead generation. The entire business was driven by inbound marketing. We didn’t spend a cent on advertising.
Is it a lot of work?
Building a business blog or publication can sound daunting. However, it’s just a matter of staying focused and working on it every week. It’s totally manageable. Especially when it becomes a main objective of the business. However, organizations that have a hard time with focus or commitment will struggle with this strategy.
REMEMBER: Most business owners forget how powerful a captive audience is. In the long run, it’s a much better strategy than relying on advertising.
And one more angle: Focusing on educational content
A lot of businesses spend a decent amount of time teaching their network and prospects about something related to their business or industry. For example:
- People who sell supplemental Medicare insurance will give seminars about Medicare Parts A, B, C, & D.
- Real estate agents will break down why their local real estate market is behaving a certain way.
- Home inspection companies will give presentations on the dangers of mold and how it can be removed.
Most people in business are educating day in and day out without even realizing it.
You can kill two birds with one stone by turning this educational material into website or blog content. Again, this content gets found by people doing Internet searches thanks to search engines. And the beautiful thing is you only have to create this content once and you can use it in email newsletters and as social media content. Written website content goes a long way!
The really amazing concept here is once you publish written website content, people keep coming to it for years. As long as those pages are up, people keep coming to them.
A word about contact info and hours
As simple as this sounds, this is really important.
A website allows a business to post their:
- Phone number
- Contact form or email
- Address
- Hours
Think about how important that is.
Anywhere else on the internet, that information can be WRONG.
And any consumer, customer, or prospect with half a brain will know to go to your website to get the correct information.
Again, you control your website, and you can always update and keep that info current. Be the authority on that important information.
Another Judicious, Inc. plug: We keep business websites updated and make any changes our clients need to their website. If you need help with that, please contact us.
Final Thought: Social Media is Becoming Less Free
All social media platforms began by offering free profiles and had no advertising programs. They had to attract the users first in order to grow.
And those were the glory days.
You could grab a free profile, start networking, start promoting, and things were good.
After a few years, these social media platforms were running out of venture capital and needed to start making money. So naturally, they opened up advertising programs.
And they also dialed back organic reach. The free reach.
The ol’ bait and switch.
Now even connection requests are getting dialed back on platforms like LinkedIn and Alignable. If you want the same organic reach you had on Twitter a couple of years ago, you now need to pay a subscription fee.
All of these platforms are going to trend this way because they are businesses. They need to make money at some point.
Social media companies had an informal contract with users: “Come set up a profile and we’ll give you free marketing value. Our venture capital will keep us afloat. But when that runs out we’re going to have to find a way to charge you.”
As you can see, we’re at the point of being charged now.
Now we’re back to the days of inbound marketing and the website being the hub of all digital marketing activity. We should have never left that world, but here we are. Let’s get to work!
Let’s Work Together
If you’re interested in exploring an inbound marketing strategy and need someone to execute, then Judicious, Inc. is your answer. Please reach out to us here via our contact page.