I Don’t Know Who Does What On My Website!
Two days ago I was contacted by a really nice young attorney on the East Coast. She had founded her own law firm and had 5 offices around a large metro area. She was busy trying to run a firm, keep a team of employees engaged and just generally stay on top of things. She didn't have time to wrestle with her website. She reached out to Solspace because she had somehow ended up with a website powered by Craft CMS. I told her that was really good news. It's an excellent system, one of the two that we specialize in. Craft wasn't really her problem though. Landing pages were her problem.
My new attorney client had paused several of her Google Adwords campaigns because she did not like how her landing pages felt. She's not a digital marketer so she didn't really know how to describe exactly what felt wrong about her landing pages. They just seemed like they were not speaking to her potential clients in language that would engage them.
So my new client's landing pages don't feel right. She knows she is wasting money on Google by driving traffic to pages that won't convert. Potential clients are not flowing into her site and turning into actual clients. She's losing money. The good news is that she has a digital marketing firm on retainer. The bad news is that they are not doing their job. They told my new client that she needed to hire a developer with experience in her CMS to update the landing pages for her. The three of us got on the phone to plan the landing page changes. Next thing I know, my client thinks it's my company's job to write fresh marketing copy for the landing pages as well as update it in the CMS. Hey, isn't this the job of the digital marketing firm she has on retainer?
So everyone is pointing fingers at everyone else wondering who is going to do the actual work. My client is caught in the middle having very little idea which specialists do what on the web. Everyone she's talking to is saying, "We don't do that kind of work." In the mean time she's not getting new business leads coming in the door. Someone has to do something! Someone has to guide this poor lady and make sure the work gets done.
I see this problem on the web a lot these days. Websites and digital marketing have gotten so advanced and complex that every niche speciality has a vast array of experts serving it. But we're starting to run out of experts who see the big picture of a website. Of all the web experts out there, isn't there someone who can own the big picture and guide a client? Even if such a person steps up, what methodology will they use to guide their client? What guidelines and rules do they follow? Or is this all just one of the dark arts, all mysterious, sacred and reassuringly expensive?
My argument is that the job of a website is to generate revenue reliably. Reliability is everything. A website that generates revenue reliably is one that empathetically supports customer desire as it flows through the web system. This means customer desire is understood at an emotional level, guided into a website from a vast and crowded internet, guided through a website with minimal resistance and sent out of the other end of the website into fulfillment systems that assure the customer's desire will be satisfied. It's all about flow. I call this set of concepts Web Reliability and I've worked out a method called the Web Reliability Framework for breaking the problem of customer flow down into 9 component parts. When each of these 9 factors are optimized, customer flow through a website is optimized. The result is reliable revenue. I have written a book about this framework, soon to be released to the public. You can learn more here.
In the mean time we still have an attorney with a gang of employees to feed. She needs clients to flow through her website and turn into paying clients of her law firm. You can learn more about Web Reliability in detail if you like, but I'll save you time by saying that my client has a level 3 problem at the beginning of her customer flow. Customers are not being driven into the site. Even if they were, they are not being empathetically connected with and shown how their needs can be met by the services of my client. The Web Reliability Framework identifies this problem and asks how it connects with other aspects of the framework. In this case, we have an additional level 3 problem at the team motivation and team resistance levels. The team that my client has on retainer is trying to get out of doing their job. To remedy our level 3 issues (And by the way, in Web Reliability, level 3 is the worst. It means customer flow is totally frozen) we know we need to get the digital marketing team to do their work. But how?
As of this writing, we are right in the middle of figuring out how to get the digital marketing firm in question to step up and deliver excellent work. In my book, one of my very first chapters addresses this. The chapter is called, "A drive to serve and prosper as motivation". I am hoping that the carrot approach will work in getting the digital marketing firm to do their work. Maybe I can inspire them to serve other humans with compassion and human heartedness. If that doesn't work, we may need a stick to get them moving.
Anyway, the problem my client faces is one that lots of clients face. Someone has to own the big picture of the job of a website. More and more these days experts are punting and expecting someone else to do the work of seeing the big picture. I'm trying to do something about that. I'd love to have your help. Check out webreliability.com.