Andy Crestodina 4:44
No problem. Okay, so it sounds a bit like this. It’s a classic debate. It’s like, do you lead with features are dealing with the benefits? As in like, do we want to tell people straight up in as few words as possible to category the business that we’re in what we do for a living, or should we go to more The emotional side of it, what is the outcome of this? What’s the benefit of working with us. So you’ve led with the benefit. It’s like how a b2b business can create a referral and client pipeline. So you’re basically describing the outcome rather than the path to get there. So what this assumes, and any website that has a header that’s called the h1 header in HTML, that does not explicitly say what the business does, as in the names of the service, is you assume that the visitor will go deeper, or you assume that the visitor has been here before, or you’re assuming that the visitor has been referred to this website by someone else who was you know, word of mouth. If those things are not true, then you have a disadvantage because the visitor who lands here and doesn’t yet know what you do doesn’t see what you do. There’s also a search disadvantage, because you’re not telling the search engine, the business category that you’re in. People are not searching for b2b business, create referral client pipeline, it’s not likely the key phrase that you’d ever hope to rank for. Even if you didn’t rank for that, it doesn’t really indicate strong intent. You know, it’s not like podcast, production, management and promotion. So it’s a it’s a, in fact, every marketing idea should be properly described as In fact, his hypothesis. I actually don’t know, no one really knows you’d have to test and find out and you could easily test him by now. But the thesis is, but the hypothesis here is that, be clever, be weird, be cool, get to the benefits, you know, be used marketing, speak and taglines. But do that after you are explicit about what you do, because the first question that every visitor has to every web, every webpage, and there’s a true story in life of every one of your visitors is, am I in the right place. And when you just take those few words to pass what we call the backyard barbecue test, if I met you at a backyard barbecue, and I asked you what you do, and you said I help b2b businesses create a referral pipeline, I wouldn’t really know what you do yet. So that’s the idea. Be explicit, be clear, and then be clever.
Jeremy Weisz 6:53
Yeah, no, I love it. So anyways, we’ll because it’s not, you know, you have to actually have an intent of learning more or scrolling down. And so I want to, so thanks for for pointing that out. Because there’s a lot of different and everything’s a test. So you have to test it, like you said, it depends where someone’s coming from, if you’re driving them from, you know, a piece of content or an ad, they may already know who you are. That’s right. So yeah, it all depends. But let’s go through because you obviously have thought this through, you’ve done this 1000s of times. And, you know, I was looking at you also have this service page checklist that you go through that you talk about. So I want to walk through yours for a second. And or maybe just you could just tell me to scroll down, but just walk through some of the elements, why you have them and maybe mistakes people make of not having or having certain things on there. So
Andy Crestodina 7:48
no problem. First and foremost, you’re zoomed in a little bit. So you’re unlike the tablet view, which I know from analytics is not the most popular view and not the most popular device from this. So your screen sizes is a responsive website. So there’s a couple things here that look a bit different than what most people would say, doesn’t matter. The navigation labels are descriptive. It says web design development, analytics and optimization portfolio blog about. So you can tell at a glance what we do. That’s, as we just said, also my header, my homepage headline passes the backyard barbecue test, Chicago web design and development. And I’ve added a tiny bit of evidence to it to support the assertion that we do this well, award winning. So I’m differentiated a little bit and an explicit right up front, I have a call to action that says show me the portfolio because I know that visitors who go to the portfolio are more likely to become a lead. Again, that’s analytics driven. So that’s the idea. Below that I got a little like a before and after thing. We’re reconsidering this. It has a tiny testimonial ended example of what what the site looked like before we redesigned and then after we redesigned,
Jeremy Weisz 8:50
syncing it, I like it. But why? The reason
Andy Crestodina 8:54
is that these, these are real examples. And they’re a bit explicit, the visitor who has an opinion about the design we did may not dig deeper, if we made that more abstract, like some kind of illustration that just shows more generally of web design process, that the visitor won’t form an opinion about the work itself yet because we this is an insanely prominent part of our site. It’s the top of the homepage. So you know, that’s a photograph from a client’s website. There’s a percentage of visitors who might see that and think that we do with that website suggests we don’t do that we do the site itself. Anyway, but I like about this though, is the face and the name, the face in the name and the testimonial underneath each. So as your screen as you keep scrolling down this page is basically designed to to show evidence, a bunch of reason web design projects, answer questions, me describing the ideal process for building websites and how you know how they interact with a psychology visitor. I did that in videos that’s upgraded. When you scroll down, you see more evidence, a number 1000s of websites and the kind of the bullet lists of the boxes that a good site must check A lot of considerations right miss even one of these in your website will be a failure more or less. Below that I’ve got a testimonial, the testimonial has been upgraded from text to video, that’s a client gushing about our services. Even if they don’t watch the video, we overlaid on top of the video a little quote. So at the glance, the scan visitor doesn’t have to watch the video to see that this is strong evidence. Video Thumbnails very powerful, very important. And if you scroll down this, you’re basically you’re moving down the page where this page is sort of emulating a sales conversation. People always ask us, who might I work with? These are the people, you’re looking at the faces of my team. That’s, of course, differentiation. We’re the only company with these people. But the way to look at a website is is to ask yourself, like, is there anything on this that is totally unique to us? Or is everything on my page just super generic that any company including a startup born yesterday could show? The answer is no. No other company can show these things I’m showing you, they don’t have that portfolio or those testimonials of these team members. So that’s another and here’s another kind of blockbuster client, we did a bunch of work with Ben with the NBC, a client of ours, and you can see a testimonial from someone to be in a beef. And then as you go down, it’s just sort of emulates that sales conversation. I know what clients need to know. So I know what they’re going to ask. I know, these these page blocks are in a general order that answers those questions, like how do I improve conversion rates? How do we use data to help inform decisions? Where does keyword research fit into our process? And thrive, you’re finding calls to action now calls to action like a buy button? Because that’s a different psychology, but low low commitment call to actions like start a conversation with a web with a strategist? So you know, it’s it’s a basically, this is an example of a page that guides you through a prioritized series of messaging that is aligned with a visual hierarchy. That’s our web design is creating a visual hierarchy that goes from answer evidence, answer evidence, answer evidence, call to action. And we generated 600 leads last year, way more than we needed. We only did 55 projects. So we’re in the lucky position of being able to really turn down most please honestly, Jeremy, we don’t,
Jeremy Weisz 12:16
where we are demand it for you.
Andy Crestodina 12:21
A lot of our clients are like 20 plus million dollar companies. There are some smaller ones, our smallest fastest projects are $45,000. And our typical projects are more like 7080 90k. They take 500 plus hours from six specialists on average. These are 20 week projects. And our clients have very high expectations for ranking in search engines and turning visitors into leads. So I’ve been on a gazillion podcasts. And it’s really nice that you asked that question. I’ve never had the chance to answer that sort of on a show. But that’s the ideal client profile that they’re not specific to an industry. Yeah. But they’re a mature business with serious expectations for ROI from digital.
Jeremy Weisz 13:07
Yeah, and you could tell we’re gonna go through I plucked out. I mean, I know a lot of these brands actually on your website. And I think a lot I don’t think it’s just because I’m in Chicago, but there are some like Lumo, noddy’s and homerun and pizza and some of those, like fan favorites. But we’ll go through a few here. And, you know, I want to give a shout out to Matt Inglott from Tilted Pixel, who introduced us even though we are in each other’s back yard, each other and so check out the episode today with Matt, but that was that was great. And thanks, Matt, for introducing us. Um, and before we get into we’ll dig in some of the sites also talk about the thought process in decision about a certified B. Corp.
Andy Crestodina 13:52
Well, it’s an easy choice for us because I’m an environmental alarmist. We are, this is a an interesting and very concerning time to be alive. Not just environmental issues, issues of social justice, issues of just big time picture, big picture societal issues, the wealth gap, lack of transparency, lack of equity. So it’s just something that as soon as we heard about it, we pursued it. And we were one of the first B Corp in Illinois, we’ve been a B Corp for a very long time. I’d have to go look it up 10 plus years, it’s getting to be a bigger movement. Now. I think it has more recognition but the B corp believe that business can be a force for good and we prioritize the triple bottom line of people profit and planet. We seek to be sustainable and transparent and equitable and in all, in every relationship with our clients in our teams. And it matters a lot. It’s important,
Jeremy Weisz 14:53
you know, so, um, let’s go and I do at some point I want to hear some of your favorite books, you know, you mentioned breakthrough advertising, things like that. So we will get into that because I know that you are not only a teacher, but a student, a student of this as well. And you can see, like I went through, I don’t know how many pages and pages that are because I went through, I think, five pages, and they were still going have these portfolio pages. And I just was like, what looks interesting, you know, to me, you know, that can kind of represent a certain type of business. And there’s like the health health business. So I pulled out advanced dermatology, and I’d love for you to talk through some of the pieces in thought process that went into this.
Andy Crestodina 15:40
Sure. Unlike our classic clients, which are, you know, websites and supportive b2b lead gen programs, advanced dermatology, you mentioned home run in Luminati. As I mentioned earlier, Vanna beef. These are actually business to consumer brands, which have very different challenges. A lot of b2c companies are really prioritizing top line visibility and brand awareness. They have there’s there’s very little middle of funnel content. These aren’t companies that have podcasts, for example, you know, he this is a format where a now that is really strong at growing, deepening relationships. So the b2c companies tend to be there, they’re more likely to be a transactional decision. But we love them for a bunch of reasons. This was a very early client in our history, this was this is going back, I don’t know, 15 years. This is a website we’ve designed over and over again, I think this was the third generation of that site that we got to build, like, its ultimate compliment client. And that’s pretty cool. Are you again? Yeah, yeah, this is one of those sites where we’ve done it three times over the years, which is speaks a lot not just to the design process and the strategy and outcomes, but the the support team, the ongoing help, right, no one comes back and hires you again, if he didn’t take care of them in the in the interim between website projects. But it’s a, it’s a beautiful site that generates lots of leads, the SEO strategy was to build pages that are relevant to both the conditions and the treatments, because there are people who are simply problem aware. And there are other people who are both problem and solution aware. So to capture both of those types of visitors you need to have, in this example, pages about skin conditions and pages about skin treatments. You can
Jeremy Weisz 17:33
see if you’re listening to it, we’re looking at the page so I would I would you know recommend you know going to insert inside and watching the video but you could see there’s acne skin cancer, you know, they list all these different rosacea, probably common things that people come to them with. I love to hear any because I know you are big and deep into analytics. Okay. And I have I have a title of your new book whenever you come out with it not separate from the one you have from from my research, okay? Okay, cuz I love this line that you say, and you call it the report of Broken Dreams. I don’t know who came up with that, or, or whatever. But that’d be a great title. Maybe then the tagline is, you know how to, you know, whatever with your website, but I love the report of Broken Dreams. So you go deep and analytics, and you show this at one point of here, the broken dreams, right? You show links where people are just, I’m out. So I love the you probably the reason I mentioned that is because when you go from first generation, a second generation website to third generation, you’re probably looking at the Linux and you need to revamp things. So I don’t know if you remember, but if there’s some things that you remember from either first, second or second or third that you’re like, Okay, here’s what we’re seeing. Now we got a we got to revamp this.
Andy Crestodina 18:49
Yeah, Javelin is to do no harm. So any website has been around for a while is getting traction from something almost certainly getting traction from something. So preserving existing rankings is a really important part of our job. And to do that, you need to first identify the pages that have equity in search in one of two ways, either they rank and attract visitors or they have links from other websites, building the websites authority. And so there is a big audit in a giant spreadsheet where you have to care you have to record everything that’s working on that current site, and then carefully make your decisions about whether or not to change URL structure. Unfortunately, a lot of companies that just go ahead and like, Oh, we’ve got a new content management system. So let’s completely change all the addresses of all these pages. Big problem, but huge weird mistake, almost always huge mistake. So that’s do no harm, preserve, you know, meet the baseline, but then capture new opportunities are going to research new key phrases and this is an industry dermatology is when there’s innovation. There’s new products, new new procedures and techniques and treatments. So that comes from qualitative research, really enter Giving the client understanding the trends and deciding how to prioritize. As I mentioned, web design is about building a visual hierarchy, that priority that aligns with the messaging priority. So you got to say, then you know how to prioritize the content. So some of it is analytics. Yeah, some of it is literally talking to the doctors.
Jeremy Weisz 20:17
Do you remember anything that was a profound change from version two to three? I’m not sure if you remember,
Andy Crestodina 20:24
I was not super involved with this project. But I remember it being in in some of the meetings where they were doing a lot of discussion around new types of treatments. Hmm. It’s like, micro dermabrasion, or something. And like, wasn’t as much of a thing 20 years ago, and 15 years ago, when we first met them and started working together. So I think some of that, also, there’s sometimes just business strategy changes. So they had launched a skincare brand. And that worked well for a time and then became less important over time. So that became that moved down in visual prominence. So it’s, it was a, you know, all the photography changed. They had read on their office. So there was, you know, the visual assets all need to be updated.
Jeremy Weisz 21:12
Yeah. Things like that. Also, oh, go ahead.
Andy Crestodina 21:16
Well, there were no more there was no such thing as mobile responsive design when we first designed this. So making sure there’s a tappable phone number at the top of the page, if you’re on a phone was was, you know, something that became important far after we originally designed the site in the first generation.
Jeremy Weisz 21:34
That’s how long you’ve been doing this? Like there were no mobile phone? No, it’s like a
Andy Crestodina 21:38
Yeah, free smartphone. I mean, you know, we Well, we started this in 2001. So that was still the era when there were Flash animations and skip intros on websites. Um, talk about, you know, I
Jeremy Weisz 21:51
reference report of Broken Dreams give a little context to that.
Andy Crestodina 21:55
Yeah, if you, if your site, you’re gonna play that, you could say that about several reports, basically, any report that shows that, it gives you clues into the ways in which your site is unsatisfying to visitors. The the time when I first thought of calling it that was when I was doing analysis on someone’s Site Search reports. That’s a little search box you’ve got on your website. So if you have Analytics set up properly, you can see what people searched for. And it’s in the search terms report. So behavior sites, search search terms. And in that report, if you scroll over to the right, you can see percent search exits. So if people have a lot of people search for a key phrase, then the percent search exits is high. That means people are searching for that phrase, but then leaving before they click on anything. So the visitor isn’t clicking on a search result, after searching for a key phrase, there probably isn’t a good search, you know, they’re not seeing what they need. So go search for every phrase in your search terms report. And ask yourself, have you satisfied for this visitors intent. And if not, you found a, you know, a gap in your content, or, you know, you need to rename something, you’re calling it something weird that they don’t call it. So that idea of reported broken dreams is just one of the several places in analytics where you can see ways in which your site is unsatisfying. Because there’s a content gap or some friction, something that frustrates people. Another example, Jeremy is if you go to the, if you have an FAQ page, and you look it up in this is remembering and pitching analytics in my mind, behavior, site content, all pages, and then go to the FAQ page and click on navigation summary. If you see which of your pages is sending people to the FAQ page, you know that those are pages that have content gaps, there’s an unanswered question there. People would prefer not to go to your FAQ page, they’d rather have the the answer right in front of them. So the navigation summary previous page path for your FAQ page is also a kind of a report of Broken Dreams.
Jeremy Weisz 23:56
So consider that for your next book title. Or maybe me like that. Yeah, analytics. Maybe it’s the subhead I don’t know. Um, so the other one I pulled up that I thought was interesting was the Pat Tillman one. And when it loads up here, we’ll take a look at it. But, um, you know, again, because we talked about the medical space, and now this is a big foundation. So I thought and I love for you to just talk about the thought process with this.
Andy Crestodina 24:26
How long this conversation, we’re talking about everything but b2b lead gen, which is awesome. You’re This is unlike so many conversations. I have my chest. Yeah, so this is a foundation. This is a well funded foundation. They’re they’re pretty well established. So in these examples, you’re not just building a site. That is it’s not like a small scrappy program. These guys are making big impact. So the Pat Tillman Foundation is, has all kinds of programs. There’s all kinds of content on this site. It has a high levels of you know, relatively high levels of traffic so far. It’s not like a live strong thing. But it’s kind of on that path. So it was an honor to work with them. We do work with nonprofits. In fact, we do a B Corp type stuff. Again, we do a pro bono project every year. This year, it’s for Chicago cred. So we give away, we’ve given away together with partners, I think $800,000 worth of marketing services over the years. It’s just a good thing to do. Even if I was being greedy and selfish about it, I would do it because it’s, you know, the team loves these projects. These are these are in this has an impact, this stuff matters. But this was a in some ways, you know, not a small, scrappy site. They had strong visual assets, they had a lot of a big body of work already. They have good writers, there’s a team of savvy marketers there. So it was, it was a fun project in a lot of ways. It’s like any nonprofit, you know, how do you trigger donations? What are the stories that trigger emotion and drive behaviors? But it was it’s one of those nonprofits that we were just thrilled to work with,
Jeremy Weisz 26:06
you know, and we’ll get to the b2b lead gen conversation and promise but but talk about, you know, you know, you mentioned in the past, you mentioned breakthrough advertising, are there any other works that you really go back to is foundational for you or anything lately that you’re you’ve been consuming?
Andy Crestodina 26:26
Well, there are. So these are some of the classics, I really got into content marketing, not long after reading in Handleys, content rules. I understood content marketing, and much better after reading Joe Pulizzi. His content Inc. When he mentions the tilt, he calls it now he’s got a new brand called the tilt. But it’s about differentiating your content targeting different things. And then he
Jeremy Weisz 26:47
spoke his I think he was speaking you spoken to this conference before? I’ve had him on the podcast? Yes.
Andy Crestodina 26:53
Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I’ve been a speaker, a Content Marketing World for many years. And then really anything by Mark Schaefer. He’s almost gone beyond marketing. I mean, this, you know, he published, known, which is about personal branding, and marketing rebellion, which is just a strong foundation. That just explains why things are the way they are in marketing. But his latest is called cumulative advantage, which is not necessarily even a marketing book. It’s just kind of a big picture business book. So my book is more like a how to it’s like a reference guide. It’s not going to inspire anybody, but it tells you how to do everything. Those three books I mentioned, are really, the things that put a lot of us on the right path.
Jeremy Weisz 27:38
Yeah, thank you. Yeah. I mean, it doesn’t spur people to take action when it teaches you how to do things, I’m sure. Yeah, people love that. Um, and what I want to talk about, you know, again, we talked about digging into the analytics, and we’re gonna get to, again, like if you’re looking at this, there’s so many I’m on page three of their portfolio. There’s, there’s pages and pages of this, but I know we talked about mine tickle. And so I you know, I want to at some point in the conversation of, you know, some tools and software that you utilize, I saw one video where you showed someone their eye movements, and you know, where where our mouse goes is different from our eye movements, as well. But talk first a little bit about AI mine, tickle.
Andy Crestodina 28:22
Sure, is not a brand that most people have heard of. But there are they’re a well established fast growing company, big company. They do sales readiness, software, sales, onboarding, sales, training, managing sales assets. And they were going through a rebrand during the web design, which isn’t that strange, but it had some interesting challenges. And we had to kind of thread this needle of it’s being specific enough for the visitor to know, like clever versus clear, specific enough for the visitor to know where they are, and that this is a good option for them. But broad enough to start there, imagining how much better things could be. So it’s very careful combination of visuals and text, things like you know, the the headline here is be ready to create sales excellence, revenue leaders trust medical sales readiness platform, the category leader in that, and that’s a known thing. Actually, I wasn’t familiar with it. But as you scroll down this page, it has it checks so many boxes. There’s evidence, in this case data, you can see the numbers building this video, that that without even having to go to a second page, you can begin to get your demo right here in the in the second page block, right top of the homepage, almost. And then there’s, as you flow down, there’s pictures of the team, the screenshots of the software, the different use cases are in like this little carousel with different options, page blocks, we call interrupters. There’s the content is promoted here. It’s sort of a minor masterpiece of one of those sites that Both answers the visitors top questions, again emulating a sales conversation and shows evidence to support those those answers, answer evidence answer evidence call to action. That’s the general structure of a high performance b2b lead gen site. How do you
Jeremy Weisz 30:20
again, what are some of the tools that you like to use to analyze?
Andy Crestodina 30:26
Well, the tools are always used in the service of a specific use case, usually the answering a question. So for example, this, you’re scrolling down, and you can see when you see a bunch of logos, their client logos, what percentage of visitors to this page see those logos? Well, Hotjar as a scroll heatmap that shows you what percentage of people on average, make it down to how far on each page, very useful. How do people use the navigation? Are there anything in the navigation that’s adding just visual noise that getting clicked? Ah, as I mentioned, the Google Analytics in the navigation summary, you can see what people click and what people don’t click, that’ll help you. As I said, you’re in a smaller view, this is more like a tablet or mobile view, what percentage of visitors are on mobile shows and analytics? What percentage of visitors or see a second page? What’s the most popular path? Oh, Jeremy, here’s a simple one. If your website or a city, there’d be a highway flowing through it. And if it was a city, you’d know, exactly right. Like the Eden’s, you know exactly where the highways are. Most people have no idea what the top path is through their website. How can you do marketing? How do you know where to put, you know where to put the billboards, if not on the highways. So everyone should take a look at the navigation summary from their homepage, look at the next page path reports or look at the behaviors Flow Report. And, and just have a good understanding. Like if it was a retail store, you’d see where people are going, but also crowded, what aisles are empty. But but a lot of people, you know, have websites and they really don’t know the performance of their navigation, or where their visitors are tend, tend to go when people hit the back button. What’s the best content on your site that’s getting missed? Very important.
Jeremy Weisz 32:12
You were mentioning, I was watching the video where you were, you know, kind of talking over someone with the eye movement. And I thought it was interesting. You made a couple points about when people get confused where they start to look. Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Andy Crestodina 32:27
Yeah, I have an eye tracking rig, it’s a little, it’s a little like double camera that that is magnetically attached to the bottom of the monitor. So you put someone in your chair, you calibrate it for their eyes in the position of their of their face, and then you hit record. And it records the their voice, their face, their mouse cursor movements, and this gray blob starts flying around the screen, when you play back the recording of where their eyes went. And some things just immediately jumped out at you, when you watch these recordings. People’s eyes move extremely fast, much faster than the mouse. People tend not to read, I can tell you, you know, if I’m doing an analysis on your site with a mini focus group, or the hallway study, you sometimes call it I can tell you what people read what they don’t. I can tell you what people skip out, or they you know, so yes, eye tracking tools are really valuable and powerful UX tools, not always relevant. Some lot of sites, it’s, it’s, um, the results are not very conclusive. But it’s definitely true that the eye moves much faster than the mouse. Really, we don’t move the mouse until we’re most until we’ve got a good sense for what we want to click on.
Jeremy Weisz 33:39
Yeah, and you’re saying the person was getting confused. So there’s certain sections of the website that people should really look at improving because of I mean, people are bound to get confused with the website, regardless of how good it is, right? So
Andy Crestodina 33:56
yeah, there’s a lot of research on this, the number one reason why websites are fail is because the visitors unable to find important information. So they’re not there to see pretty pictures, they’re not there to check to see what color palette you used. They’re not there to watch a video per se. They’re looking for an information. So with that in mind, you know, any page that fails to answer a question, you’ll see the eyes jump start to jump around quick, right? They’re scanning, scanning, scanning, trying to find something that that they think well, you know, satisfy their information needs. Again, there’s a true story in the life of every visitor to every web page. If you don’t know what that is. You really don’t know how to write your site. You don’t know how to make a page. And once then the next level of thinking is yes, you answered their question, but now put a witness in the witness box, right? Add a testimonial to support the answer you gave. That’s really the difference. Bad sites. It’s very generic. They don’t give much information. There’s no specificity for images or stock photos. This Nothing on the page that is unique to that brand. And that’s where so many websites fall down.
Jeremy Weisz 35:06
You know, I went on a stint of interviewing some of the top copywriters, direct response marketers in, they would say exactly all of them would echo that. 100%, which is like, do you have support for everything that you’re saying? Do you have proof you have scientists, or studies or research or something testimonial saying, backing up what you’re saying? Reasons to Believe, um, I want to break down a couple pages for a second and maybe start with, you know, serve their service page checklist, what are a few things people should think about when they’re creating their
Andy Crestodina 35:41
service page? Well, so starting from the top, you would say that it would have a header that answers people’s questions about where I, where I am, I’m in the right place. That also tends to check the second box, which is, is the page keyword focused? Does it tell the search engine what the page is all about? As you scroll down past that, I think it’s really, really helpful to have quick visual credibility, Logos of clients or awards that you’ve won, or something that just shows that you’re legit, right, that differentiates you, that feels a bit separate. Other things to include data is a type of visitor who’s very affected by by numbers, right. And the site has to work for everyone. So is there data to support your case? Are there testimonials with quotes around them to support your case? Are you showing pictures of your team? As we already said, is this is the page answering visitors top questions. And then when you get into the minutiae that there’s just a classic flaw on websites is that they have sub heads above above a section, but that the sub head says almost nothing at all. Like there are embarrassingly, you know, an embarrassing number of websites that have a subhead that says what we do. You don’t need to say that it doesn’t have any value that doesn’t answer any questions. It doesn’t mean anything. Why don’t just say what you do. No podcast does, you know management, production promotion, something like that, instead of writing the three words, what we do. Same for navigation labels. Why would you have a navigation label that says what we do? Why not just expand your navigation so that at a glance, the visitor can scan through and see the list of things that you do? Plus, you’re such a massive company that you can’t, you know, you need to have a really generic label and inside this piles of sub navigation. So, yeah, there’s some sites fail because they they’re thin content, not enough detail. Some pages fail, because there’s no calls to action. What is the path? What do you want this person to do? So yeah, the next level down from answers, evidence and call to action is no faces data, social proof, calls to action, meaningful sub headers, keyword focus, depth, deep depth and detail, descriptive navigation labels. And then, you know, capital off at the bottom with a fat footer, they call it a footer with lots of sub navigation inside it, because the visitor maybe didn’t find what they were looking for, you can send them you know, give them more more options to convert or contact or click down there in the footer. That’s sort of that’s at a very high level, those are the key ingredients for a high performing b2b service page.
Jeremy Weisz 38:16
Thanks for running through that. And I love what you said about what we do. I remember I had Kevin Rogers is a copywriter, and he calls it clearing your throat, like, you know, people clear their throat sometime, whether it’s in their website or in an email, and they could probably cut out the first couple sentences is they’re just starting to introduce what they’re saying. So I love that you you mentioned that because I’m sure we do that on our site and don’t even realize it. But um, the the other one I want to talk about, we’ll talk about this one, Adam street partners in a second, but I love your thought process on the thank you page and what makes an awesome thank you page, specifically, even what happens after you, you know, hit contact. So talk about the mistakes people make with that.
Andy Crestodina 39:02
Yeah, I can summarize the goal of all digital marketing. It sounds something like this, build a bridge from a traffic source to your thank you page. Everything we do, right, all the publishing and all the formats, all the writing and all the pages every you know, everything you record and write and, and design. It’s all in service of that bringing them to that final thank you page. That’s what that’s literally the definition of success. When you set up Google Analytics is the destination of the goal. The conversion, the person took action, they were a visitor another subscriber or another registration or neither a lead or an e-commerce customer. Yet, so many sites fail to do anything interesting either. thank you pages at all, even though that is the first moment when you’re communicating with your new prospect. Roll out the red carpet. Put on the white gloves. Welcome them. Tell them when you’ll be in touch. Tell her Get those familiarity, some other action to take your thank you page, the person just filled out a contact form, they’re at their peak of interest, they’re past the psychological hurdle of interest. So now offer them a second conversion, subscribe to our newsletter, follow us on social media, the click through and conversion rates are very high. We have around 300 visitors a year who fill out our contact form and then immediately subscribe to our newsletter. It’s amazing, it’s like free subscribers. So if nothing else, you know, make sure there’s links to your your highest value content. Another way to say it, find and remove every dead end on your website. Thank You page is probably one of them.
Jeremy Weisz 40:40
Yeah, thanks for going in detail on that. Because I thought that was a fantastic insight. AdamStreetPartners.com walk me through this one.
Andy Crestodina 40:50
So this is a their header says global leader in private markets, which is a strong assertion and a in the category of private equity, private markets, private capital. So do they stand behind that is do they have data to support that? Yes, they do. 50 pixels away, there is a 49 billion in assets under management, 50 years of being in business 490 direct investment like so this is it’s very it, you immediately before you even touch the scroll bar, you can’t help but see, the top of the visual hierarchy is powerful, quantitative evidence, the call to action right there is viewed the strategies and solutions because that’s the next level of thinking is how or what want to see the service they offer. Below that there’s what you call an interrupter page block, it’s like overlaps two different background colors, that is promoting content. And they have interviews with economists and thought leaders that they’re promoting high on the page, they need to do that, because like a lot of your clients, Jeremy, this is a middle the middle of the funnel content important, you don’t just suddenly just you know, you’re not going to invest $50 million. With a click, you’re gonna have to have some conversations. First, you need to see some evidence. Recent Insights is next, they have a partnership with the economist that you’d see if you drilled into that, then then they get into this, the strategies go investment growth, equity, private, primary investments, private, private credit. So anyway, when you every every click is, in fact segmentation, that’s a good way to think about navigation. You want to segue, you want the visitor to self segment, the pages where you can speak to them more specifically. And so it’s on those deeper pages that go into the philosophy and the methodology and more evidence and the team. So all over this site, you’re going to find people, if you go to the dropdowns are also a thing of beauty. If you hover over strategies and solutions and go to say co investments on the far left, you’re going to see their approach to that. And then right below that you’re going to we’re going to start showing off their people. Because that’s the difference. That’s what you need to know before you give a company piles of you know, you trust them with your family’s wealth. So what are the backgrounds? What do they think? So right here, they’re the faces professionally done headshots, they’re the names, you can click to go into each of their bios, which describe their education, their years in business, their expertise, their industry, expertise, Industry Focus. So it’s both a site that is sparkling with strong evidence, but also very human. It’s filled with people. And that’s a big differentiator as we already said, it’s a website without faces. It just looks sketchy now. It’s that it’s you got a problem. You don’t put someone on there. And I’m not talking about stock photos. I mean, real people.
Jeremy Weisz 43:48
I love it. First of all, at this is fantastic. I appreciate you sharing your wealth of knowledge with everyone I want to point people towards if they want to learn more if they know someone who obviously needs this Orbitmedia.com and just opt in I mean, he puts out content after content piece it’s, you know, just giving value and delivering value to people. So check it out and check out more episodes InspiredInsider checkout Rise25 in Andy I want to be the first one to thank you. Thank you so much.
Andy Crestodina 44:21
My pleasure. Thank you.
