With the rise of social media, some people say that your LinkedIn profile is more important than your website. In this episode, Tami and Joe discuss what websites are for, how they play a role in your marketing funnel, how they aid in talent acquisition, and why they are an important touchpoint for all of your marketing efforts.
Episode 13 Transcript:
Tami: Welcome to High Energy Marketing! A podcast with us, the digital marketing agency Ajax Union, where we interview our CEO, Joe Apfelbaum, on key marketing topics and we share everything you need to know to properly grow your business online.
This is a question-and-answer podcast, where I will ask Joe questions about different topics and trends in marketing based on his book, High Energy Marketing. You can get the book and follow along with us at ajaxunion.com/book. This is the 13th official episode of our podcast about High Energy Marketing and today we’re going to discuss the importance of having a website.
First, a little housekeeping. If you could please rate us on Apple podcasts, that purple icon, give us a five-star rating, leave a review, and let us know if you’re enjoying this podcast. And before we jump into our topic of the day, Joe, do you want to hit us with a quick inspiration minute?
Joe: Yes, I would love to, that’d be great. So I used to think that I was always the smartest person in the room. And I would constantly judge people that I was with. But I was judging myself for being the smartest person in the room, you have two options. You can either change the room or change what you determine is the smartest if you believe you’re always right, and you’re always the smartest, you lack awareness. The smartest, most intelligent person in the room usually finds a way to learn from everybody. And finding people that are smarter than you ask questions.
Make sure that you’re not judging or shaming people and thinking that you’re so clever. If you think everyone else is an idiot, you might end up seeing them through your ego instead of seeing people through your love through your gratitude. And so as an inspiration minute today, I wanted to let you know that you don’t need to be the smartest person in the room, you need to be the most curious person in the room. The best way to get people to support your purpose is to see people for who they are and create a space for people in your life. And just watch what happens.
Tami: Amazing. Thank you so much, Joe. So now with that in mind, we are going to jump into our topic of the day, which is, do you still need a website? So question one is, given that social media dominates the internet today, everything, all your messages, you basically get through Instagram, Facebook, Tik Tok, Snapchat, or Twitter—is having a website still important? And if so why?
Joe: A lot of people wonder that because if you have a tiny little business, you really don’t need a website, you could just literally open up a LinkedIn profile, open up an Instagram profile and have like a little linktree. And you don’t really need to have a website if you have a tiny business.
But if your business is generating several million dollars in revenue, not only do you need to have a website, you need to have a really good website. Because even though Google sometimes will rank your social media profiles higher than your website, especially if your personal brand is also your company as well.
Having a website that’s updated, informative, and user-friendly is very important, because not everybody will go to your website for information about your company, but enough people will look up your website to make it worth creating as a good representation of your brand. Think of your website as the hub, the place where everything comes together.
A website is a place for your clients and referrals can find more about you and more about what you do. And it’s almost like you’re owning that property because social media profiles come and go. But you want to have that hub that looks really good. That is part of your funnel.
Tami: Okay. So yes, the website is still important, even though maybe people aren’t getting their primary information from the website is what it sounds like? So how does your website play a role in your marketing funnel?
Joe: Your website plays a role in your marketing funnel because your marketing funnel is what ties everything together. When somebody sees you on social media and you drive them to your website, your website is supposed to be the one that basically gets their contact information, that brings them in, and also your website will send them to other channels as well. People will visit your website and judge you based on your level of professionalism based on the amount of energy put into your website.
So don’t make your website an afterthought and only focus on social media. The homepage is the main page where people visit and they come to your website and before anybody scrolls down that concept is above the fold. And if you guys ever saw like you know you can scroll down a website and these days you can swipe right. But the first thing that you see is called above the fold and you want to make sure that the content that’s above the fold on your homepage is not confusing and has a really clear call to action.
Personally, I believe that most of the people that will visit your website are top of the funnel, which means that they don’t know you well, and you want to have some type of way to capture and engage those users to get them into your funnel as soon as they land on your homepage.
So because people spend three seconds on your homepage before they hit the back button and leave, so make sure you have some type of call to action that will compel them to click and learn more information about you. And if you want to hear more about the funnel, we actually have a couple of episodes a little earlier on, Tami, that people can listen to about every aspect of the funnel and how it works.
Tami: Right. Absolutely. So, aside from marketing and the marketing funnel, and the role that your website plays in your marketing funnel, are there any other reasons that having a website is important?
Joe: So, I want to include some things that are part of a user-friendly website that people are expecting to see when they come to your website that they may not see on social media, like about you, services, testimonials, pricing, contact, those are all popular sections of the navigation that people want to see, depending on the type of business that you have.
Sometimes it’s a priority for you to recruit employees, you want to have a careers page, but you don’t necessarily gonna have a careers page on your Instagram. But you want to have a place where it caters to people that are looking for employment opportunities as well. And when speaking to CEOs of companies that have over 10 million in revenue, they often tell me that they’re looking to hire, but I go to their website, and there’s nothing about career opportunities on the website.
So, creating a career funnel can be useful to get people who are interested in working with your company into the process, and will allow you to stay top of mind with them. And also, it’ll give people a link that they can send to their friends if they like your company. So when you go to the homepage, you need to make sure that you have a clear call to action that offers everything that you need right there in a way where people can easily find it, they can get what they need. And that’s really the key are having a good website aside from marketing.
Tami: Okay, so let’s say I have my careers page, my about us page, my homepage, all of that stuff. I have my website done. And am I done? Is my job done? What should I do to make my website the best it can be?
Joe: Well, to make your website the best it could be you need to keep it fresh, a website needs to be fresh, and you need to be really aligned with your business. We recently created a whole web design section on our website that has a short video that explains exactly how the web design process works. I want to make sure that you have a short relevant video, that’s 20 seconds because people will spend the time to watch a 20-second video vs three seconds if there’s no video.
In general, like for us when we’re creating websites for clients, we do a full strategy session with specific exercises that helps us understand your brand, and how it relates to you and your online presence, we create a mood board and a style guide. It helps us collect inspiration from all over the web to inform the style.
So we want your website to really, it’s kind of like the clothing that you wear that represents who you are. So we want to make sure that your website has the right user flow, and that your website is a visual representation of you and your brand. And that it’s updated. And you know, I’ve seen a lot of websites I go to and it said that hasn’t been updated since 2012. It just says Copyright 2012 on the bottom is a simple script you can put in to automatically be updated. And also if your design looks like it’s 2012, people are gonna think that your customer service processes are 2012.
You want to make sure that you have an updated website. If you have a blog, make sure that your blog is updated on a regular basis. The last thing you want is a website where you see the company hasn’t updated their blog in like a million years, or in like you know, five years or whatever it is. You want to make sure that you have a solid website that it’s updated regularly. That it has all the right elements and that it has video. And if you do that correctly, you’re gonna be able to attract traffic, you’re gonna be able to attract people coming to your website. I like having our website to be a resource.
So, I send people to our website all the time like I’m on social media, like on an Instagram story. And I’ll be like, if you want to learn how the marketing funnel works, go to Ajax union go to the homepage, there’s a video that teaches you how the funnel works. Or if you want to listen to his podcast, go to ajaxunion.com/podcast. And people actually listen to it. I was hanging out with a CEO the other day and she told me, Joe, I love your podcast information. So great. And I love the way Tami interviews you. I was literally just telling Tami that, it’s so good.
Tami: So yes, your example of the 2012 design. I think what everyone would really know is the 90s design, right? We all have seen it when we go to someone’s website, and it’s like, wow, this was made in 1997. Like very clearly, this is someone personally coding HTML in a Word doc. Right and putting it online like craigslist.com for example, is an example of that. You know how it looks so old and it works for them. It’s fine, but people can tell when the design is old.
So, what I heard from that is to constantly update your website to stay on top of what you’re doing at your company, and make sure that your website reflects what you’re doing and what you’re offering.
What if someone decides that they don’t need a website, their businesses, such or it’s like a new offering, and they don’t want to put it on their website or whatever. And they decided that they just need a few pages for people to take action, what is their choice, given that they don’t want to have a whole homepage, about us page, careers page, blog, just to have this one page about an offering that they want people to take action on?
Joe: Yeah, you don’t if you don’t need a whole website, and you just need a few good landing pages for your business. I’m happy to have a whole conversation with you about landing pages, which is a whole nother concept of like, how the landing pages work and so on.
But I just want you to know that there is a concept called a landing page, which is separate from your website, where if you have particular products and services, for example, we have the ability for people to watch a replay of a webinar with our company Evyrgreen, so you can go to businessnetworkingworkshop.com, that’s not a whole website, that’s a separate domain.
But it’s actually just a landing page, where you can go there, fill in your information, and then watch a replay of our latest webinar, our latest video that we did like a one-hour training on LinkedIn. But you know, what I always tell people is you don’t need to have a whole website, you want to have a main website with all the regular navigation stuff. But if you’re launching a new product line, we’re launching the Sales Nav Bootcamp, so people can go to salesnavbootcamp.com, there’s a landing page there, it’s separate from the website completely.
So, creating a landing page can be really useful for people that don’t need a whole website. But what I want to say is another thing about keeping your website fresh, a lot of the times we post things on Instagram, and a lot of the time you post things on social media platforms that allow you to have plugins to automatically populate your website with the things you’re posting on social media.
So you can have a two-way street, and you can have your website automatically populate Twitter and LinkedIn. And you can have Instagram automatically populate your website. So there are a lot of really great technologies that you can use to keep your website fresh. So if you’re working with an agency like ours, we’re going to recommend all those latest technologies to help make sure that your website looks fresh, stays up to date, is integrated with the latest technology and social media, and will also rank really well on Google because we’re going to help you with SEO.
Tami: Amazing. Well speaking of those landing pages, that is actually what we are going to discuss next on next week’s episode. But first I just wanted to say thank you, Joe. That was amazing information. And I hope everyone listening got as much out of this as we did. As I said in next week’s episode, we will be talking about how landing pages work.
Joe: How landing pages work and what you should know when you’re creating landing pages.
So yeah, that’s gonna be an exciting episode.
Tami: And make sure to hit that subscribe button to catch the next episode. You can follow us on Instagram @AjaxUnion and follow Joe on all social media platforms @JoeApfelbaum and follow him on LinkedIn at joelinkedin.com.
If you didn’t catch any of that you can check our description for all of our social media links, ajaxunion.com/podcast. If you have questions, shoot us an email at amazing@ajaxunion.com. Our music is by Michael Suarez.
This podcast is produced by Sarah and Shannon and edited by Sami Mititelu. Thank you so much for listening. Goodbye.
