A Lack of Vision for Your Website
There’s something very missing these days for websites in general, Vision or lack of. So what am I on about?
The question of what more you can do for marketing regularly crops up. It is established that Marketing is separate from Sales and many companies will now have a head of marketing. In the digital world, however, Marketing seems to have fallen into the following categories.
- Website
- Social Media
- Newsletters
- Google Ads and Pay-per-Click
- Search Engine Optimisation
And I would venture to suggest in more or less this order of importance. So what’s next? And suggesting YouTube Videos doesn’t count because it’s either expensive or part of Social Media.
Increasingly, Marketing Managers are questioning what more they can do. And I want to concentrate on the one area they have the most influence over and more times than not completely forget about.
The website.
Website Impact
Most of marketing is about getting eyeballs onto the website, or at the end goal. But websites these days are becoming increasingly homogenised, and are far too uniform, with banners across the top, works on Mobile, snippets of news, buy buttons etc. They are all the same. When we start using products like WordPress, Wix, Shopify or Magento the results become boringly similar.
I was looking at some template websites for Artists’ websites for 2024, I was hard-pressed to find any recommended examples that were slightly off-beat or different.
The idea of taking a pencil to a piece of paper and drawing a design has long gone, to be replaced with some AI chatbot recommending a bit of this and that from multiple sources.
Vision or lack of
What’s missing is Vision and in many ways a bit of leadership. I suspect I am not a very good leader, I certainly don’t set any credit in my example of a boring website, but I want my customers to start thinking about things a bit more.
Somehow I feel this issue is not confined to just websites, but is in actual fact common across Post-Brexit Britain, it seems we took a momentous decision, slightly accidentally and have been retreating from the new and unknown ever since. There is no doubt in my mind that other countries are not suffering the same ‘blues’ that the UK is.
Be it HS2, a new Building, a new Road, or even a New reservoir in the UK the natural reaction is not in my backyard, we know these things are good for us, we need better transport, we need more houses, we need more customers.
But most of all we need Vision – of what we doing and where we going. I am increasingly convinced that the last time this country came anywhere close to truly moving forward in double-digit growth was when we were building New Towns like Crawley, Peterborough and Milton Keynes. If we truly want to come out of the doldrums, then Vision is probably the most important ingredient we need.
The same is true at any scale, if you want to marry a beautiful girl you can, you just have to ask her, if you want your business to do well, you have to push the boundaries… and the obvious place to start is with the website.
The Financial Side
Any small business will have someone responsible for Sales and Marketing, let’s assume half an annual salary is spent employing the ‘marketing’ part of a person’s time. Now double it because of the office space, computer resources, and meetings they need and have. It’s probably starting to push towards £30,000 a year in costs.
In digital, I would agree a website is on a par with a Social Media following, but if e-commerce is involved then the website is paramount to the operation.
So why dick around with a £350 theme or template – why are people focused on using something that costs peanuts. When the investment is already so big – why undermine it all with a £50 logo and quibble about whether the transition fees are 1.7% or 1.8%, it’s all wrong. You just need the best every time.
The Best Vision
I had a client doing about half a million a year through their website – they invested in Shopify Plus and two years later they are doing two million a year, their attitude was bugger it, it’s only £24k per year. They just wanted the best.
Their website however is still pretty boring and functional for a ‘shop’. But it’s their attitude behind the scenes that counts – just give me the best.
Ture vision means marking a mark, Brunnel, Wren, and Capability Brown all made a true mark, nothing was skimped, and everything was to play for, it worked because it was noticed.
Too many of our websites are done on a budget, with poor planning, they might use bright colours and pretty fonts, but the function is all the same. Really we have to throw the book out on websites and every job has to start again. that’s the one brilliant thing about the Internet, you can literally write and say what you want.
Next time someone asks me what more they can do for their marketing to get more visitors, hits and sales, I now know what I’ll tell them. make a difference, be counted and let’s show some Vision and get out of these post-Brexit Blues.