How useful is a website really?
Your website can be a really useful tool in your online marketing. That’s all it is. A part of the greater plan.
But for a long time it was the only part of the plan that I was involved in.
I started out studying fine art, and then I switched college courses into design. So of course it was the aesthetics, or look and feel, of a website that I was concerned with when I first started out. Which was back in about 1997!
Before long I learned that “content is king”—because that was the catchphrase back in the late nineties, you couldn’t escape it, everyone was saying it. But it wasn’t my responsibility. I was responsible for design.
And as a result, design was often a struggle.
I would land a new client, discuss the project, put a style guide in place, and then set a schedule:
- Client to deliver website content
- Design concept developed to suit the content
- Website is built & we go live
We would set deadlines for when the content was to be delivered… and then we would watch that deadline sail merrily past. So we would set another. And more often than usual that deadline too would wave as it passed us and drove off into the far distance.
Eventually content would arrive, and to be honest, most of the time it was pretty mediocre stuff. Because writing good copy is hard. But there’s a tendency to think it will be easy until you try it.
On top of which, writing about your own business is probably the hardest because you are so immersed in it you lose sight of what’s important from the outside.
Anyway, I would do what I could to improve the content, based on what I knew about formatting websites, but it wasn’t really my core skillset.
So the website would go live, the client would expect the leads to come pouring in… but quite often nothing would happen.
Because there was no plan.
So I quickly learned two things:
- The importance of high quality content
- The need for a digital marketing strategy
I began to learn everything I could about digital marketing, and I encouraged clients to engage a professional copywriter.
Fast forward to 2015 and I met Marci, who just so happened to be an excellent copywriter. So I married her 😀
Myself and Marci started working together, and learning together, and making it our mission to constantly learn how to help small businesses grow. We focussed on developing online strategies that took full advantage of the incredible tools we have available to us today, while keeping it as simple as possible.
Just recently we rebranded.
We ditched the brand name we had been operating under and we switched to what everyone called us anyway: Frank and Marci. That’s us.
We believe that when businesses of integrity clearly communicate their value to their dream customers, they flourish and grow.
So we seek out and work with people who are passionate about what they do, and have established their dream businesses. And we develop strategies that are built on the foundation of clear messaging to help them attract their dream customers.
Your website can be a really useful tool in your online marketing. But it has to have the right messaging, and it has to be part of a greater plan.
Then, it is extremely useful.
