How to Drive Business from Your Company Website with Adam Binder

In this episode of Smart Tech Spending, we invited Adam Binder of Creative Click Media to discuss how companies should evaluate their existing websites and when it’s time to invest in a website revamp that will drive sales and improve customer experience. 

What you’ll learn in this episode:

- Is social media a good alternative to having a website?
- Results to expect from investing in SEO and website content v. social media
- How to leverage a website to drive new business
- Examples of must-have website content
- Common website design mistakes that professional service companies make and how to avoid them
- How to repurpose website content for social media

Adam Binder’s Bio
Adam Binder started Creative Click Media, a full-service Internet marketing and SEO company in 2011 as a one-man operation and built it up to a double-digit, award-winning digital marketing firm.  He’s a member of the Forbes Agency Council.  Adam’s digital marketing recommendations and advice can be found on Forbes.com.

Resources:
Connect with Nicole Lefsky: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicolelefsky
Jersey IT Group's Website:  https://www.jerseyitgroup.com
Connect with Adam Binder: adam@creativeclickmedia.com
Adam’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamnbinder
Creative Click Media’s Website: www.creativeclickmedia.com

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Transcript

How to Drive Business from Your Company Website with Adam Binder

[00:00:00] Adam Binder: While it's true that social media is a great way to connect with potential customers, it's not a substitute for having a well designed website. Social media platforms change and they change rapidly. They dictate a lot of the policies and they can take the traffic away from you just as fast as they, they gave it to you.

[00:00:17] Jersey IT Group: You're listening to Smart Tech Spending a podcast designed to help businesses gauge the success of their technology investments. If you're looking to overcome the challenge of measuring the ROI of technology tools and services, avoid unplanned expenses, and uncover hidden costs, you've come to the right place.

[00:00:37] Let's get into the episode. 

[00:00:40] Nicole Lefsky: Hi, and welcome back to Smart Tech Spending. I'm your host, Nicole Lefsky, Managing Member of Jersey IT Group. Today I'm joined by Adam Binder, who is the Founder and Creative Director at Creative Click Media, which is located in Manahawkin, New Jersey. He started Creative Click Media, full service internet marketing and SEO company in 2011 as a one man operation and build it up to a double digit award-winning digital marketing firm.

[00:01:06] He's a member of the Forbes Agency Council. His digital marketing recommendations and advice can be found on Forbes. com. Adam, thank you for joining us today. So happy to have you. 

[00:01:17] Adam Binder: Thanks for having me.

[00:01:18] Nicole Lefsky: It is our pleasure. So something you said before our call today began that I thought was really notable and I wanted to kind of kick off our discussion today with it.

[00:01:27] You said that social media is not a substitute for a well designed website. What did you mean by that?

[00:01:33] Adam Binder: Yeah, so, you know, I've had a number of clients, you know, basically say that they didn't need a website. Clients, existing and potential clients, "You know our social media is doing so good, why do we need a website?" "Why do we need to revamp our website?"

[00:01:49] While it's true that social media is a great way to connect with potential customers, it's not a substitute for having a well designed website. Social media platforms change and they change rapidly. They dictate a lot of the policies and they can take the traffic away from you just as fast as they gave it to you.

[00:02:06] What we've seen happen is where several clients actually have come back to us and hired us to do that website that we suggested because with Instagram in particular, once the algorithm changed, a lot of them lost a lot of traffic. You know, we've seen it even with you know, we're very good at managing social media accounts, but it's been harder even for us to, to get the same results that we did prior to some of those changes. With the website you own it. It's yours. It's really the only thing that, you know, they can't take from you. Look at MySpace. You know how quickly that went from the hot thing to basically vanishing. The same could happen and probably will happen at some point with the platforms that are around right now.

[00:02:45] Nicole Lefsky: Well, I know you mentioned Instagram can you give us an example of how you saw the impact of the Instagram algorithm? How it affected a local business that you do work with? 

[00:02:56] Adam Binder: Yeah, we were working with a yoga studio who you know, yoga is really big on Instagram. Some of the biggest accounts are related to that topic.

[00:03:04] And, you know, overnight a lot of the engagement, the traffic disappeared. The business owner was really, really excited about all of the buzz that was built around her brand and it was kind of heartbreaking to see it all just taken away so quickly, you know, with no warning and really with no recourse.

[00:03:25] Nicole Lefsky: So they kind of went back at other marketing online and marketing presence that they had and said, "Okay help us...you know... What should we be doing here?" And at what point did you redirect them and what did you do exactly with the website? I shouldn't say exactly, but give us an idea of what path you steered them down. 

[00:03:43] Adam Binder: Yeah, well, I mean we always advocate for you know keeping the website fresh and SEO. A website should be evolving constantly.

[00:03:51] What did I say? The only constant in the world has changed, right? You know, and your website should reflect that too. You know, especially a business like that where there's constantly different teachers coming in on and off the roster, different events happening on and off site. You know, there's all these different things that are happening.

[00:04:06] And the website should be vibrant with that information. It should get people excited about it. The information should change on the events page. There should be different banners on the homepage. You know, and you want to make sure that you're adding useful information for search engines as well. 

[00:04:19] We were able to convince the client to allow us to do that. And, yeah, and it worked. I mean, you know, fortunately You know, it's not a really hard genre to do SEO for. It's not like a pizzeria where there's like one on every corner. You know, maybe there's one or two in a town. You know, so we were able to, to get them ranked. And, and we did drive a lot more traffic to the site.

[00:04:38] You know and all is well, I suppose. You know, the client was happy. You know, SEO tends to drive really targeted traffic where social media is more top of funnel. So I know that it had a really good business impact for her because you know, we've talked about it and it produced a good outcome for them. They're happy.

[00:04:54] Nicole Lefsky: Based on what you've said, it sounds like everybody took a step back and then said, "Okay, how are we going to strategically look at our website now? How can we leverage it?"

[00:05:04] You mentioned that you know, it can offer a lot with SEO. So let's start with the basics. Twenty years ago or more when they first were available as like your online brochure, you know, it was a place to capture maybe your mission statement, a little bit about the executive team, key services that the organization provided. That was pretty much it, right? And then blogging came to be something and then there was the evolution of SEO and leveraging the website. So let's dive into that a little bit. Let's talk about, you know, I'm very curious your perspective on truly what a website is and how to leverage it or its content for businesses today.

[00:05:47] Adam Binder: Well, I mean, a website is really just a vehicle for achieving your business goals, right? It's more than just a brochure. Certainly, it's become a lot more than that. There are still plenty of clients that come to us with that brochure site.
And you know, even they are starting to mostly realize that they need a lot more than that.

[00:06:03] Content marketing has exploded you know, I mean, between blogging, vlogging videos you know, even interactive content. What used to be enough to get you to rank and to convince customers that you're a good choice for their needs - it's evolved and the standards are so much higher because everyone's doing it now.

[00:06:22] And some industries are far more competitive than others. It can be really challenging to keep up. That's why we offer all those services, as far as developing ongoing blog content, developing video content. We do some really cool interactive content stuff as well. You want a website to be useful.

[00:06:39] So some of the things we've developed are calculators, quizzes, personality assessments, they're kind of BuzzFeed style, product configurators or, product generators. You know, let's say you enter in some details about your skin and it can recommend specific types of skincare or makeup or, you know, different things like that.
 
[00:07:00] So interactive content is huge. I think you're going to start seeing a lot more of it in the coming years. 

[00:07:04] Nicole Lefsky: You know, it's interesting to see the evolution of it because now, as you mentioned, it's a tool, right? It's something that every business should have and it shouldn't just sit on a shelf and be there.

[00:07:16] As a company that's providing a service, let's just say a medical practice - services don't change that much as opposed to like the yoga studio where they have new classes. Things are evolving. They have guest instructors. So let's say you have a medical practice. They have a specialty. They have physicians, providers there at the practice Not a lot changing. So in an example like that, when you have an organization that provides a service and the services don't change that much, you know, an accounting firm, an architectural firm, professional services. Like what could be the potential impact on their business by leveraging their website, the content, optimizing it with SEO. If someone's unfamiliar with that. 

[00:08:02] Adam Binder: Yeah, I mean, with all the businesses you just mentioned, I mean, it's all about generating leads and thought leadership. You know, in professional services such as the ones you listed - trust is a huge factor, right? So if you present helpful, thoughtful, truthful information on your website, that's gonna be certainly good for SEO and it's going to generate trust and help to generate leads.

[00:08:25] You know, it's really important to optimize your site so that you can be there, but also so that people can get that information and will reach out to you. You know, your website's also a good place to show your human side. We're currently redesigning our own site and you know, there's a lot of things about that are dated, but a lot of people have told methat they hire us because of our About page - because it's humanizing - because there's pictures of our team, pictures of my son, which are quite old at this point. You know, and we just look like people. You know, it's, it's important to not forget that part. People do business with people, and to portray that on the site.

[00:08:59] Nicole Lefsky: Yeah, there's certainly a lot that goes into it. And something that you mentioned in, in a conversation we had before the show started, which I really thought was interesting was - I think I posed a question to you, like, "What's the biggest mistake that you see businesses make?" And you said, "Something that all companies need to do is they need to design with a purpose." And I thought that was really moving because I think that when people think of revamping their website, they focus on the design of it, but they're not looking at it through a lens of how can a potential customer of ours or client have an experience with us before they experience working with us? Can you tell me a little bit more about that? I think you called it the the user's journey. 

[00:09:44] Adam Binder: You know, some websites are simple where there's maybe just a single goal. But for a lot of websites like a multifaceted medical practice there could be different user journeys.

[00:09:55] You know, there could be 20 different services and, you know, people need to be able to find what they want quickly. It's good to have a clear purpose for not just the site as a whole, but, you know, to have well defined user journeys. You know, you can look in your analytics and get a lot of data from that within Google Analytics.

[00:10:11] It shows you how people meandering through the site and what pages lead to other pages and where you're losing users. Really valuable information in there. And it can help you plug your leaky holes and develop better funnels to get people the information they want and get them, ultimately, to take a desired action, whether that's filling out a form, picking up the phone, buying a product, whatever it is - That y ou can get people where they want quicker.

[00:10:40] Nicole Lefsky: So if a company is looking at making change or really leveraging new aspects of marketing, what would be the first couple of steps that you would recommend someone who makes decisions around marketing and revamping a website or creating a website, like to evaluate what they currently have or to start new?

[00:10:59] Adam Binder: Yeah, well, I mean, the first thing we do is look at the analytics and, you know, to see what's going on. It makes it easier to fix something when you understand the problem, you know, and to decide if it's something that we need to fix or something that just needs to be totally redone.

[00:11:12] Now, if the problem is more visual, you know, sometimes a client will come to us and their site hasn't been redone in 15 years. You know, and then maybe that's a different approach where it's clearly, you know, it's just not up to par and still, I like to look at the analytics and see what's going on, you know, but we also do an audit of the site you know, from a technical perspective especially if the site is newer, and if the design is good, you know, maybe, maybe it's not a design thing, but the website's still not performing . Then we really go in depth and do a technical audit and figure out why it's not performing.

[00:11:43] You know is it the content? Is it the fact that, you know, maybe it's not meeting Google's latest standards as far as page speed - performance? So there's a number of different things, but I like to start with the data. You know, like I said, unless it's just an obvious design issue.

[00:12:01] Nicole Lefsky: What are some of the top two or three pieces of data that you'd like to look at that you review with your client to show them the impact of the work that you're doing? 

[00:12:12] Adam Binder: Well, it really depends on what the work is, but you know, for a lot of our clients, I'll say it's you know, visitors, obviously we want to increase visitors. For sites where we're creating a lot of content, we want to check the time that is being spent on those pages and where they go - where does the user go after that page?

[00:12:30] So if we design like an interactive cost calculator for a company and once they fill that out, they're redirected to a contact page, we want to see how many people are actually filling out that form. I mean, so there's a number of different things that, that we look for.

[00:12:45] An interesting one is the percentage of new users. Now, the percentage of new versus returning users obviously is a piece of 100. And so it's always an interesting question when they ask, "Well, what's better - more new or more?" And the answer for that is different based on what type of business it is.

[00:13:06] Some businesses can get a lot of repeat customers. Or are you getting more repeat customers because you've got poor customer service and they're coming back to find answers. Sometimes it's more, you know, the data is a starting point. What I think sets us apart is that we really try to marry that data with information that we learn from the business owner. You know, really try to match and figure out is, does the data correlate or corroborate with the actual things that are happening in the business? Can we prove causation? Is one event causing the other? Is it a coincidence? Are they related at all? So I think it's really important to dig deep and try to put those pieces together.

[00:13:51] You know, a common mistake that we see - we always ask new SEO clients, have they done SEO before? And if they have , a lot of times we will look at the keywords or something. Say, these are not good keywords. Who researched these? You've got to really tie the business objectives to everything that you're doing or else what's the point.

[00:14:11] Nicole Lefsky: And that's interesting what you say about keywords, because the keywords that, you know, like any industry - you know - I'm in technology, you're in SEO, web design, digital marketing. If you ask someone who works in their field what the keywords are that people would search, they may be very different than what their prospective customer or client would search, right? Because we're all a little jaded with that.

[00:14:35] So you really have to put yourself in the seat of the customer, not the company in this case, right?

[00:14:42] Adam Binder: Yeah, well, you know, as we were talking earlier about it, I was saying, you know, I train all my guys to think like your customer's customer. And I think that's so important because, you know, you can understand what your client's objectives are, you know, usually make more money by generating more leads or more sales like that of course, that's like the obvious part. But, what is it that their clients want to achieve? You know, because you, you generate business by serving them. By giving their clients what they want. And yeah, I think that a lot of marketing companies miss that angle. Yeah, I think it's really important to do that - to put yourself in your client's seat, but also to think like their customer, like their clients. It's really enabled us to do some pretty cool stuff... to get great results and really I think it helps us create great ideas.

[00:15:32] Nicole Lefsky: And then from those great ideas, you can leverage that content, right? It doesn't just have to sit on the website

[00:15:38] Adam Binder: Right. 

[00:15:38] Nicole Lefsky: What are some of the ways that in working with your clients that you've been able to leverage some of the content that's been created for the website in other ways.

[00:15:47] Adam Binder: Yeah. So the website I look at as like the central hub for all of the marketing. It's the origin point for most of the content and where all the content lives, but you can take snippets of that and use bite sized pieces on social media. I love that QR codes are popular again because we've been doing cool stuff with them. I made custom business cards for different speeches that I gave and put different pieces of personalized content on certain pages. I gave a presentation using Tetris. I mean, classic video game as a visual metaphor for the topic I was speaking about. I set up a custom landing page and I created a custom business card with a QR code so that the people could go there. It was really well received because it was so personalized and yeah, I had kind of included a little bit of a personal story with the speech. So personalized content is huge and people love it. The more you can personalize it to the needs of your audience, the more successful it's going to be.

[00:16:43] Nicole Lefsky: I think that the fact that you can repurpose some of that content and utilize it in other venues whether it's on social media or you can maybe use part of it in a presentation. Using those snippets I love because you can direct people back to the website, then it's all leveraged, right?

[00:16:59] And then it becomes more efficient in managing that whole process when you can utilize it in other areas of marketing as well and cost effective as well as it gives insight I think to people making decisions around website design work...what to invest in it...what areas to invest more in... in terms of am I having a website designed or is there an SEO component? Because to have a design but have no SEO doesn't really serve a big purpose, right? What are some of the challenges that can arise for someone who's new to SEO or they're revamping their website.

[00:17:36] Adam Binder: Well, I mean, kind of going back to what we said before, I think a big challenge is making sure it's designed for the target audience.

[00:17:43] I think a lot of times businesses just make a website that they think is cool or that their customers will like. I see it all the time and we try really hard to, to, to not be order takers in the sense that we try to guide our clients. Sometimes they insist on what we consider to be not good decisions, but we always do try to educate. At the end of the day, the site should serve your customers.

[00:18:08] You know, we want our clients to like their website, but it should serve their clients. That is the first you know, the primary and possibly only purpose. You know, it's kind of a bonus that you like it. It really should serve the needs of their customers. You know, and what we've seen sometimes is that we'll design a site that the company loves, but it doesn't produce the result that they want because they didn't take our advice.

[00:18:33] Nicole Lefsky: What's one big takeaway that you'd like listeners to get from this episode?

[00:18:38] Adam Binder: You know, a website is an essential part of doing business in the modern world. Even if you have a strong social media presence you know, even if you get a ton of referrals, you should never place all your eggs in one basket, just like I would never tell them not to have social media or not to work on referrals. It's all important. But your website gives you control over your branding and your messaging. It's a stable platform that you can rely on. Make sure to invest the time and money into making it the best that it can be. 

[00:19:05] Nicole Lefsky: You really have given people lots to think about, you know, it's time for everyone to take a look at their website and I think say to themselves, is this working for us?

[00:19:13] If anyone wants to reach out to you, you have a ton of great information on the Creative Click Media website. I know you post great articles on Forbes as well as other places online. What's the best way to connect with you? 

[00:19:27] Adam Binder: Sure. Yeah, I would say email is probably the best way to connect adam@creativeclickmedia.com. 

[00:19:32] Nicole Lefsky: Okay, great. Thank you so much for joining me today for this conversation. We could probably go on and on and talk a lot more about it. But thanks for helping our listeners get a feel for not depending on social media as its only area of marketing online and looking at the website as a business tool that they can leverage to drive interest to their brand.

[00:19:58] Adam Binder: Thanks so much. 

[00:19:59] Jersey IT Group: You've been listening to Smart Tech Spending hosted by Nicole Lefsky.  Make sure you never miss an episode by subscribing in your favorite podcast player. And if you enjoyed this episode, we'd appreciate it if you'd rate and review the show. 

Thanks for listening.