5 reasons your website is more important than your social media
What do people use social media for?
Daydreaming, passive scrolling, pretty pictures or awe-inspiring videos.
Ok I know they’ve now introduced more shop features to Instagram & Facebook (since COVID-19 hit & small businesses need all the help they can get), but does this make websites now obsolete, cutting out the middleman?
When was the last time you dedicated some time to scrolling on your own website?
(You can’t keep me off mine, always wanting to tinker + tweak to maximise conversions.)
I’m guessing you spend more time thinking about a social media post than you do writing a product description for your website, or thinking about what pages you should have in your header navigation. Am I right?
If you’ve given any bashful or tentative answers to the above, then this is gunna get things straight for you, showing you the real importance of a website in business, and ensuring that your website is doing the hard graft for you whilst you sleep.
Your own website isn’t just a point of contact, something to add to your ever-growing businesses to-do list. Throughout this post, we’ll be looking at how your website is THE tool to:
Draw new scrollers/leads in and maximise sales/conversions
Build your credibility on a scale social media can’t compete with
Solve your customer’s problems on a deeper level
Adapt your content in response to search trends, boosting your organic reach online
Make it super easy for people to start trusting you
...and also how social media really restricts the impact you can have in all of these areas.
1. THE ONE-STOP-SHOP FOR EVERYTHING ABOUT YOU
Say someone lands on your social media page and they want to know about the training you did to become an expert/legend in your industry?
What if they want to know your class schedule or availability for the summer holidays? That’s a lot of frustrating scrolling to find what they’re looking for. And you can’t easily show the extent of your knowledge and experience in just a couple of captions.
When it comes to your website, it’s another story. By having clear website navigation design, it’s effortless to find what you’re looking for on a website.
You can solve people's problems in just a click or two. You can show your business journey, the experiences you’ve enjoyed with past clients, your package offers, FAQs, and so on.
As soon as something becomes convoluted or fiddly for a potential customer, frustration will lead them to that big, scary ‘backwards’ button to get the hell outta there. Not good.
If you’ve paid attention to how easy it is for others to navigate through your website, you’re saving your potential customer a ton of time and hassle, by having everything readily available in one place.
2. FIRST IMPRESSIONS COUNT
Your website is a handshake at the door, a warm greeting to site visitors, old and new.
It’s been proven that scrollers make up their mind about your website within the first 50 milliseconds of being there. That’s really not very long. And an initial first impression is hard to reverse.
Think back to meeting someone and not getting a good vibe from them straight off the bat.
Were there any cases where your first impression of them was wrong? But I bet that it took a good few interactions with them, and even some strong persuasion from your mates, to make you retract your initial opinion of them!
So giving someone the right impression from the get-go is really key (if you don’t want them to click off your website, highly unlikely for them to ever return).
On a social media account the first impression is entirely visual, yet is still limited by the format of the platform, the pre-set layout and design.
A first impression might be good, with the first glance showing a pleasing colour palette, alternating darker and lighter images. But you can’t just find behind a pretty grid.
Who knows what posts or photos someone will click on at their first visit? Each person visiting your profile will get a different first impression of you. The only thing you know is going to be seen is your bio and your profile picture. And getting across your personality and message in less than 200 characters can be quite a feat.
That’s why I’d 100% prefer to rely on my website to get across my personality and showcase my expertise, where I am completely in control of what the first impression is for a passer-by.
And if you know who your ideal client is, you can make choice decisions on colours, fonts, images and copy that is designed with only them in mind.
Strategic design can help lead the eye down the page, highlighting the things you want to shout about, and being fully in control of what info your website visitor is consuming.
Then building that trust-factor is going to be a million times easier than trying to get it across in 3 lines of text on your Instagram profile.
3. DON’T LET MARK ZUCKERBERG STEAL YOUR FOLLOWERS
You don’t own your followers on social media.
Say Facebook or Instagram disappeared, Mark Zuckerberg did something questionable (again) and the “powers that be'' closed down Instagram and Facebook. What would you be left with then?
By having a strong website that successfully translates your personality into the images, design and copy, and clearly gets across what sets you apart from your competition, you don’t need to completely rely on getting new leads from social media.
The way that social media platforms have been designed is to make it super easy for scrollers to just keep on scrolling: they want you to spend as much time on their platform as possible.
That’s why you will always see ‘recommended’ profiles that you might like, that are similar to the other people you are Facebook-stalking, or the accounts you most frequently engage with.
Then an hour’s gone by and you can’t remember how you found yourself on a page that sells cat costumes, and you definitely can’t remember the profiles and accounts you looked at to get to that point.
To try and get out of this horrible cycle, direct people away from social media to get access to exclusive extra content, added value or even a freebie that is only available on your website.
Don’t let them click off your profile to scan through someone else who is doing something similar to you.
Make it your mission to drive passive social-media scrollers to your one-stop-shop of a website, to help make that deeper connection with them.
4. THINK OF SOCIAL MEDIA LIKE YOUR PROMO-GIRL (for want of a better analogy)
If your social media is a bit shallow, indecisive and temporary, think of your website as being your 24-hour marketing specialist, sales rep AND customer service manager.
Your website is one of the most reliable ways of consistently getting new leads.
Utilising your website correctly, it is significantly easier to make conversions (for example sales, newsletter sign-ups or email enquiries, i.e. something that turns a passive scroller into an engaged follower) than on social media.
A professional website immediately creates credibility, that your business is legit and that you’re in it for the long haul. We all see those social media accounts that don’t have a website.
At least to me, it just signifies that it’s a hobby-page, something a stay-at-home mum has undertaken to channel their energy whilst the kids are napping, or a side-project to stave off the boredom of the COVID-chaos lock-down.
Another way to boost credibility and expand your sphere of influence is by ensuring your website is optimised for search engines (SEO).
Performing keyword research and integrating your findings throughout the copy of your site, paying attention to minimising the loading speed of your website, and ensuring that the user’s experience on your website is seamless, effortless and oozes value, will ensure you’re reaching more and more people online.
We call these people ‘cold leads’: people who’ve never heard of you before, who perform a Google search for something in particular and they land on your website because you show up in the search results.
To use this in a real life scenario, imagine you were looking for a new bike. Would you look for recommended suppliers and brands through a Google search?
Or would you type #mountainbike into your preferred social media platform (only to be presented with a load of pictures of bike-fails and cheesy amateur edits with questionable thrash music)? I’m pretty certain you’re going to pick the former...
So in this case, websites have hands-down defeated the lowly social media profile, by helping businesses grow, increase revenue and make those deeper connections with your audience that don’t have the space or attention-span to develop on a social media platform.
5. ADAPT YOUR CONTENT TO SATISFY YOUR AUDIENCE
Ok, so on social media you can see how many people liked your post, or how many people your post reached through hashtags, but the analytics are limited.
Hashtagging also takes a fair bit of trial and error. But on your website, you can easily access a lot more data that can give you a much greater insight into the habits and choices of someone scrolling your website.
Google Analytics is completely free to use and relatively painless to install, collecting live data from the users of your website.
You can see how long people are spending on your website, the page they spend the most time looking at, how many blog posts they read, what keywords got them onto your website or whether it was from someone linking to you on another website.
(I’ve pulled out the key metrics for you to understand AND WHY they’re useful, here.)
By looking at the user’s experience on your website, and their journey from page to page, you can start to understand what is the most popular content, which pages generate the most enquiries or sales, and how effective your copy is.
Try adapting your marketing efforts and time spent copywriting to accommodate these trends.
You could produce more of the types of blog posts that are the most popular and drive the most traffic to your website.
Or reevaluate the page that most people exit your website from, with the view to make it more engaging or enticing.
Even when you're sleeping, your website is your 24-7 doorman.
It’s working around the clock so you can put your feet up with a pint, and know you're reaching new potential clients from the comfort of your sofa/a sunny beer garden.
There are, of course, a bunch of advantages to using social media. It’s not like I think it’s the devil - I use it myself (who doesn’t)!
But I use my social media to introduce things that I expand on in my website copy, to show nuggets of my past work that are shown in more detail in the portfolio section of my website.
I use my social media to build my email list (just in case Facebook goes kaput tomorrow) and to be able to more easily interact with the people that I know are interested in what I have to offer.
I use my social media to reach out to small businesses that have something in common with me and to start a conversion, but it’s always my website I’m telling people about to find my free download-ables or to learn more about something I think that would help them.
It’s the connections with people that are the big difference.
Social media is so transient.
You post one day and in a week or so that photo or caption might not ever have another pair of eyes set upon it.
There’s a place and a time for it, but I’m sure we’ve all been in the position where we feel it’s just a bit draining, a place where each account is trying to shout the loudest, write the funniest hashtags, and with people desperate for their 5 minutes of viral fame.
The importance of a website for your business is a much more authentic representation of you and what you have to offer the world.
So next time you’re sitting down to write out your weekly/monthly set of social media posts, maybe spend a bit of time on your website instead and give it a bit of TLC.
I’d love to know if we’re on the same page or you whole-heartedly disagree…
If your website experience needs a bit of love (having been neglected, in favour of platforms that have a faster feedback-loop)
you might need to borrow my Website Goggles for an hour or two
