Improving Lead Quality: Designing for Your Ideal Customer | Into the VOiD Podcast (Episode 4)

Neil: Hello and welcome to episode four of ‘Into the VOiD; a friendly guide to Digital Marketing’. I’m your host, Neil Cooper, Director here at VOiD Applications and with me is the MD of the same business and co-host of the Pod once again, Chris Carter. How are you doing, Chris?

Chris: I’m good, thanks. You?

Neil: All good, I think so… yeah. 

There’s been a little bit of a change up again, like we mentioned in the third episode, we’ve been going through the routine of figuring out how we want this shot, and, we’ve settled on some different cameras this time. So for the visual listeners who are on YouTube, you’ll probably see some differences again.

We’re just trying to improve, you guys, to be able to take in this stuff in a more leisurely fashion and for the audio listeners, if you haven’t, please go over to the YouTube and check us out.

With that being said, onto the subject, today we’re diving into something that affects every business with an online presence, how your web design can dramatically influence the quality of your leads.

But before we get into the nuts and bolts of designing for your ideal customer, change it up a little bit. I’m going to spring a quiz on you, Chris. How does that feel?

Chris: Yeah, let’s do it. 

Neil: Right. So, I’m going to throw some stats your way. No cheating.

Chris: Uww, okay. No cheating, how am I going to cheat.

Neil: By looking at the iPod.

Chris: Can I use Google.

Neil: Absolutely not actually, put that on aeroplane mode. 

Right so I’m going to throw some stats your away and you have to guess if the real number is higher or lower than what I actually say. The answer that will be marked is the higher or lower, but if you want to throw an estimated percent in, feel free.

So like if you just want to take a random guess of what the actual stat is, but we will be looking at the higher or lower right. Listeners feel free to play along. 

So first question, 40% of people will leave a website if it takes more than three seconds to load. Is the percentage higher or lower? 

Chris: Higher. 

Neil: It is indeed. So do you want to take a guess at the precise amount?

Chris: I think between 65 and 75%.

Neil: Not not as quite as high. It’s reported that 53% of mobile users – 

Chris: Oh okay, lower than I thought then.

Neil: Yeah, exactly. They’ll leave if a page takes more than three seconds to load. It’s something that we tell all our clients. It’s definitely one of those things. If you can’t get to the information quickly, it’s a turn-off, right? So optimisation – it goes back to what we said on previous episodes.

Question two. 55% of users have reportedly said they prefer a site with a clean, minimalistic design over something complex. 

Higher or lower?

Chris: Higher.

Neil: What did I say? I said- I said 55.

Our survey says, approximately 48%.

Chris: – Really –

Neil: Of people cited a website’s design as the number one factor in deciding the credibility of a business.

How does that make you feel?

Chris: Yeah, it makes sense but…

Neil: The cogs are turning I can see – 

Chris: – but, it’s a matter of taste, isn’t it? And whether or not you like complex or more clean (design).

Neil: It’s down to preference. And it depends on –

Chris: But 48% I mean… Yeah, you dropped me in it there then. ‘It was 54%’…

Neil: Yeah, exactly. But yeah, it depends on the pool that they took from as well right.

Chris: I feel quite sad I haven’t got 100% but okay!

Neil: It’s fine, don’t worry, there’ll be times in the future to gain retribution. 

Right question three.

33% of businesses, so an estimated third of this survey is satisfied with their online conversion rates. Higher or lower?

Chris:  Let me get this straight first. The question is….

Neil: They’re ‘satisfied’, 33% – only 33%.

Chris: I would say that’s lower. Less than 33% are satisfied with the leads that they’re getting.

Neil: You sure.

Chris: I’m pretty confident.

Neil: Wanna phone a friend?

Chris: No.

Neil: Good because I wouldn’t know the answer.

Right, around 22% of businesses are satisfied so you was correct. That’s lower.

Which definitely isn’t a lot at all in the grand scheme of things, but it shows there’s massive opportunity for improvement through design and functionality for lead quality. 

Right. So we’ve got two more questions, it’s just five (in total).

Question four; 25% of small businesses do not have a website at all. Higher or lower?

Chris: Oh that’s a good one… I’m getting – getting a little feedback from Nathan over there. He’s going higher, so I’m going to go higher.

Neil: It is indeed higher. 28% of the businesses, according to this survey, or at least 28% of small businesses still don’t have a website. So they’re missing out on a huge potential market.

And like we’ve raised in discussion before, if you aren’t in a position to have a website, but you have premises, then you should be looking at Google Business profile.

Chris: Yeah, some sort of presence on the internet.

Neil: Exactly, yeah. So fifth and final question. 40% of small businesses have optimised their website for mobile use, higher or lower?

Chris: Lower. The amount of websites that we see that still don’t work.

Neil: *Fails attempt at Who Wants to be a Millionaire Heart Beat Sound*

What’s the thing – is it – ‘Who Wants to be…’.

Nathan: Countdown!

Neil: Yea- No! I was on about ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire’.

Chris: That’s definitely not countdown.

Neil: Yeah – right! It is lower.

From a neutral standpoint, it may seem surprising, but 30% of small businesses have optimised their websites for mobile. So for us being in the position, we wouldn’t be surprised if it was actually and factually lower than this value if we was to take an actual value from everywhere.

So with the majority of web traffic coming from mobile devices, that’s a huge area for improvement and a critical factor for improving lead quality. It’s something we’ve touched on every single episode, like every time we talk about optimisation speeds and whatnot, that is the one thing it leads back to as well, because there’s so many users on mobile.

So yeah, there’s no revelations there really is there? 

Chris: No. Pretty good, four out of five.

Neil: Yeah that one was a doozy. I did – I set you up on the second i’m not going to lie.

So that was basically a nice way to lead into what we’re going to be discussing. [I’m going to move this over here. So I’m still in front of the, microphone.] 

All right, so setting the stage for identifying what a high-quality lead actually is, and to do that, I want to ask you, in the context of us, ‘VOiD’, or a digital marketing, slash, agency perspective, what does a high-quality lead look like?

Chris: Yeah, so you really should be having a persona of what your ideal client is, really. So a high quality lead is anybody that fits into that persona, into that ideal customer of yours. So for us manufacturing, engineering companies or companies of a certain size in a certain area who have needs for our services, really. Web design, SEO; ideally for us, we want to be looking at talking to marketing managers, marketing directors, business owners, people with an understanding of what we do and why we do it, and somebody who can make the decisions as well – Ideally. 

So that for us, most people will have, a quality lead persona. A perfect, customer.

Neil:  So we’ve got an idea of an ideal customer, somebody who’s in the role of decision maker that knows what they want, and the way that that they need to move the business in order to do this. So how do you – how do we to begin with, how do we start designing to attract them? 

For example, if we’re just starting out and we’re trying to bag our first ideal client, what would the steps be to take?

So you talked about personas. How do you go through and even like begin to understand that persona?

Chris: A lot of it’s going to come down to the content that you’re using, the words that you’re using.

The getting across the fact that you understand what their pains are. We touched upon this before – but yeah – your ideal customer will have a set of common pains that they find in their website – in their business sorry, that you, as a web designer or whatever you do, services you do, products you sell will alleviate, so your content will be the main key. 

And then it’s about how do we start telling the story from top of the page to the bottom of the page? Because one of your quiz questions could have been, ‘what was the percentage of people that actually get to the bottom of the a web page?’

Neil: Even below the fold.

Chris: On our website we know it’s less than 30%. So all of the really important catching, hooks that we want to use, to get people to really engage with what we’re trying say on our web pages is going to be at the top. 

So you need to engage them as they come into the page, make them realise that you can actually do what they – what you say you can do, social proof, showing what services that you offer along with getting them to understand that you can actually understand their pain points. Without them going into…

Neil: They don’t have to spill, they don’t have to give you everything, you are already you’re showing your authority by understanding where they’re coming from in order to alleviate their stresses with the work you do right.

So with that then, the ideal customer has been identified and fleshed out to a degree. And because you’ve done the research to understand their pain points and what you’re trying to alleviate as a service delivery, what are the key elements then that are most effective in attracting those high quality leads?

What are the vehicles, if you will, so like we use or we’ve gave people to use.

Chris: So again it really is content, but putting your content into sections such as your opening hook, if you can get people to understand exactly what you do and who you do it for, that’s an opener really. 

Then you want to start showing people that you understand their pains. You want to show the user that you can actually do what you say you can do.

So that would be with your social proof – so your reviews, links out to case studies, testimonials, then start answering some questions that they may already have.

What you really want to do is make their decision making process as easy as possible. So when they land on the page, they need to know everything about why you can do what you say you’re going to do for them and get them confident in the fact that you can do it for them as well.

Neil: So some of the proof of concepts, case studies and whatnot, you use these to attract people, get them in, and then you want to turn that into interest into your service and one of the ways that we do it are ‘Lead Magnets’, and when you go to other people’s sites, especially if you’re scouting out your competitors, you’ll always see some sort of lead magnet from the more established businesses.

First of all, what is a lead magnet? What does the term mean? And when we are designing these lead magnets what what is the end result we’re looking for? 

Chris: So our lead magnet is, I believe a very old and tried, tested way of getting leads through and doesn’t necessarily have to be through your website, but, it could be in person, people do it when they’re at, expos and different things. You go to an expo and they’ll say, put your business card in this big old fishbowl and you might win something.

That’s a lead magnet. 

When you come on a website, it might be a pop up that says, “Hey, get your free web audit”, exactly what we do. You’re giving away something for free in exchange for that person’s information. You want that person’s information because you want to either direct market to them or keep them on a drip fed marketing campaign.

There’s loads of things you can do in every industry. Free web audit is probably the most on the nose one that web agencies can do. There’s 50 tips on best web design. There’s, here’s your 101 tips for SEO on your website or getting started with SEO Beginner’s Guide. Different things like that, you’re giving away content in exchange for usually an email address or a phone number or something like that.

They work with every industry, no matter what. It just depends on what content can you give away. It’s got to be compelling. For us, it’s pretty easy because we know, a lot of people are going to have pains in SEO. Why don’t we teach them about SEO? Most people will learn a little bit more about SEO and then realise I ain’t got the time or the patience to do it. I’ll get somebody else in, and then they come to us.

Or you give away the free web audit. It gives them an idea of what they actually need to do with their website, because they might not know. But yeah, just giving away something for free.

Neil: Yeah, so it’s cluing them in without them having to invest as well. So it’s, it’s saving them money in… It’s saving them money before they approach you for any sort of service.

Chris: I think it touches on the point of that social proof as well. Because if you’re willing to give your expertise away for free, you’re showing well actually, these guys are pretty cool. I don’t have to pay them anything for them to teach me something.

Yeah, it works.

Neil: Yeah. So obviously this still needs to be implemented and you can onl –  especially if you haven’t got the expertise, it comes to a point that you’re going to run into maybe some sort of blockage where your expertise doesn’t go over that hurdle and that’s when you’ve got the information, you know, what you’re asking for. There’s less chance of you getting conned into something that you wasn’t meant to be doing.

So, for example, we do the web audit, we tell you these things you can then go out and find yourself – with our web audit it’s, what’s the word I’m looking for?

Chris: No obligation.

Neil: No obligation at the end of it. So if it means you’ve got your own developers, at least then you can go to them – and then it raises the point that if you have this, and you approach them and they don’t know what you’re talking about or aren’t ready to action it, then at least you can question it, the whys and hows, and you’re in a better place to do that. You’re more clued up. 

So, obviously we can make all these efforts and we can put out content and in the hopes that it brings people in. However, how do we track this?

So going through the process, we know what a high quality lead is. We’ve identified them. We’re now at this point designed for them, this is what the lead magnet is for. This is the, authority building that we do on the site to keep people engaged. Give them information. But how do we track our performance so that we can continuously improve upon the formula going forward so that there’s this consistency and it’s not just seasonal upticks.

Chris: Yeah, so you have to track because you don’t know what you don’t know.

You don’t know if you’re getting the leads in. It could be that one thing is working and then you think actually none of this is working, because we’re not not getting enough leads, and then you actually change the thing that was working for you and you get less leads.

So tracking it is really important. 

Google analytics number one tool. Find out where your traffic is coming from, how much traffic you’ve got, what the demographics are, where they’re coming from in regards to source. So if you’re running adverts you can see if they’re coming in on ads or is it organic? You can see how well your SEO is doing, if it’s referrals or social media, you can see all of that stuff. You can see exactly where it’s coming from.

Put tag trackers on your call to actions. So you know what buttons are being pressed, where people are coming from. Track, ‘Thank You’ pages at the end of contact forms to make it easier to know – if you’ve got multiple contact forms, make sure you know which contact form is being used when you’re getting an enquiry.

Neil: So just to put that into context for people that may not be aware, if – sometimes you’ve got a form and you press submit and then the loading circle will come up and then you’ve got ‘Thank You for Submitting’ – and that’s still, it’s on the page, it’s submitted it, but there’s no result of action where that person has been tracked to go to another page.

So it may get lost in numbers that they’ve actually submitted the form and that they’ve gone to another page successfully. So that’s what what Chris is referring to with regards to, redirecting them to a page on successful submission.

Chris: You can then see how many people have actually been to that page and you know that if you’ve set up no follows on those pages, that the only way to get to that page is to have clicked and submitted the forms. But yeah, if you’ve got multiple forms, make sure you know which forms are being sent to make sure the form is telling you this form was filled out on this page. All of that good stuff. 

And Clarity, ‘Microsoft Clarity’. There’s lots of other ones around for Microsoft Clarity, like we’ve used ‘Hotjar’ in the past. We’ve used ‘Lucky Orange’. They’re great, but they’re paid for – Microsoft Clarity came along and basically does what Hotjar does and what Lucky Orange does pretty much. I mean, it’s not really up there with them in terms of the way that – it’s not as user friendly, I would say is a bit of a learning curve with Clarity, but it does exactly what the other two do.

And that is record sessions. So when a user lands on your website, it’ll record  a session, it will then give you heat maps and scroll percentages. That’s how we know that only less than 30% of people actually get to our footer.

It takes a lot of sessions and combines them over a period of time to give you those percentages, so you can see if there’s a really good piece of information on your homepage, for example, but only 40% of people are getting there it might not be the greatest idea to keep it there. You might want to push it up and vice versa.

You can also tell where the hotspots are. So if there’s a button there and there’s a big hot spot on the button, you know, that button’s been used. That with tracking will tell you.

It’s pretty good, and especially if you can get an idea of when you do get a lead for your website, go to clarity. Try and find that recording and see what that journey was, see what that successful conversion journey was. You can get some ideas.

Neil: That’s going to basically outline the steps for the improvement of your plan with regards to designing for your ideal customer, because it is a bumpy road and it’s not something that you can fix overnight,a nd everybody uses these websites or just – that everybody has a different use case scenario, especially when it comes to tracking, as if we’re talking website specific because with tracking you can you can do it in your applications. You can do it on, an array of other things, but for website tracking, especially if they’re using a different browser; If they run into any hiccups, you can you can see that

Machines, it will identify whether it’s a mobile, a tablet, your Mac or your PC. So all of these things come into play. So I think that, ties up neatly into the rest of what we were saying.

Chris: It’s like – and this analogy might not work, but I’m going to give it a go so you can cut that bit out. But, it’s like you’re driving down the motorway, you don’t need to make massive adjustments to the steering wheel.

You make small corrections as you’re going along as the road needs is and as you are in your lanes, that’s what you need to do with your website. When it comes to conversions you’d need to make small adjustments to it. Because if you’re wildly changing from left to right, you’re going to be missing something. You’re not going to really land on something that works.

You need to make small adjustments to the things that already work.

Neil: Of course, that lends itself to a point. ‘A/B Testing’, if you really want to make that massive jump, especially if it’s a case of using Google to see the results and you want to see how your keywords are reflected. Once that page is indexed and it’s comparing the two, it will pick one. So if you do want to, I don’t know, swerve into the other lane for whatever reason that you try to avoid an accident.

Let’s say that’s the only time you should be swerving on the motorway, by the way. If you try to avoid it –

Chris: I think this analogy is going downhill.

Neil: But basically if you do want to try the other lane, there’s A/B Testing, and what we mean by that is just setting up another page for example with a similar link structure. Not the same because obviously they can’t both (exist) – you can’t do that for websites like.

Chris: Just put A or B on the end.

Neil: …and then see how that performs,and then that’s your way of doing a big change for example. Unless of course, you’re going for a complete redesign.

Chris: Well, there’s two ways to do A/B testing in my view.

There’s running ads and literally using A/B Testing. So the ads will present A or B, and then you can see how well it does over a certain amount of time. Or if you want to do organically if you’ve got enough traffic to your website, you can run page A for two weeks. You can run page B for two weeks. You can see that way. Either way.

Neil: Great. So I think that we’re coming to a close with this. So if you kept up with what’s been said, there’s a concise plan of action that can be carried out. It is over a longer period of time obviously you can’t just do this overnight. But all of these things intertwine themselves with what we spoke about on the previous episodes.

The nature of this beast means that there’s always a facet of digital marketing that lends itself to another action, so you can’t necessarily jump over anything. You go through the process and you can’t expect overnight success unless you’re a viral sensation for any reason. Let’s get things into context.

Chris: Yeah, you can’t plan for virality either so.

Neil: Exactly. So talking about our previous episodes, after we’ve understood what our ideal lead is and we’ve designed for them, we need to take into account user friendly design as a whole. Right? So our ideal lead isn’t everybody and that’s something that we’ve encompassed into our site so that we know who we’re designing for. But we we still want to talk to as many people as possible.

So you’ve got to take that into account with your content, and your framing, which has a direct impact on website speed, which is intrinsically linked to analytics which we just spoke about because.

Chris: We’re cutting that bit.

Neil: No we’re not. 

Yeah so all of this has a direct impact on, website speed, which is linked to analytics because this has a major impact on SEO.

Chris: Yeah, I think we’re four episodes in now. They all kind of work together. If you want to get high quality leads, your SEO needs to be where it is. Your design needs to be, high quality, friendly, usable, and obviously it needs to be quick or people are going to bounce. As we found out in the quiz.

Neil: So yeah, processing this episode in a too long don’t read, you need to identify what a high-quality lead means to you and what these desired outcomes of working with them are. Understand what their needs, wants and pains are and how you solve them. How do you fit into this equation?

Take this information in design to attract them via social proof and trustworthy direction. Utilise testimonials, lead magnets and just everything that will make them think that you are an authority in that space.

Chris: Case studies, FAQs, as much, ‘I know what I’m doing and I can prove it’ content basically. 

Neil: And then from that you can monitor the outcome so you can see where there’s an uptake or drop off. So you can further refine your approach and create more opportunities for outreach, and you’ll do that through the analytics – and that will feed into whether or not you’ve got issues or not, and you can solve them. So you’re always coming back to the start to sort out your roadmap to success basically.

So yeah, that’s to wrap it in a bow. Obviously we’ve spoken about lead magnets. We ourselves have one which we’ve discussed and is a free web audit. So if you’d like to take that, you can go to voidapplicattions.co.uk/free-website-audit/ – that’s free hyphen, website, hyphen audit and the link will be in the description of anywhere this podcast appears.

So there you have it Chris. Any final thoughts, words of wisdom for listeners? Other than do your research.

Chris: No. Not do your research – but if you don’t currently have a ideal customer persona, start working on that. It will drive all of your marketing.

Neil: Yeah. Just not to go back into it, but we were stuck for a while. Not understanding how to increase our outreach and bring in the ideal clients and everything began to change when we understood who it was that we wanted. here, we’ve working with us.

Chris: I think one of the things that helped us was let’s look back at who we were already working with. Who do we like, who’ve we really enjoyed working with and that will actually answer some of the questions probably.

Neil: So depending on where you are in your business, your life cycle, looking back on who you’ve attracted before, that’s a massive one. Obviously, if you’re newly starting out, then put some thought into who you want to work with, because a lot of the times you are working with them as much as you work are working for them.

So yeah, with that being said, thank you for listening. We’ll be back with another episode. Please subscribe where possible and follow us on all the channels available. Links will be in description. Once again, I’m Neil Cooper, this is Chris Carter. Peace.