Is Your Website Design Living Up to the Promises Your Marketing Is Making?

My wife and I aren’t foodies. It’s not that we don’t appreciate good food, ask either one of us and we’d tell you that our waistlines can attest that we enjoy a nice meal. But we have kids. While it’s getting better, often the most adventurous thing we can get them to try is barbecue sauce for their chicken nuggets. That doesn’t mean we don’t like to still look at good food and daydream a bit. Thank God for social media. Even if we can’t always eat as well as we’d like, we can still see the pictures posted by others who can.

My wife is a list maker, and when she sees something that appeals on social media, she’ll show me the picture and jot the name of the place down. When we get a free night where it’s just the two of us, we return to that list and pick out that evening’s restaurant.

We see the picture. We get ourselves psyched up for a dining experience that lives up to the picture we saw. And, usually that’s what we get.

 But … (You knew that was coming, right?)

But, unfortunately, we don’t always get the night out that we were expecting. The service isn’t what we thought it’d be. The floors aren’t as clean as they should be. There’s duct tape covering a tear in the booth in the back. And the food? Let’s say it’s not quite as pretty as the picture we saw online. We were expecting an A-level experience, and, instead, we got a C.

There’s an unspoken promise made when we interact with a business on social media or through marketing. That business is creating an expectation, and sometimes they don’t live up to them. Those restaurants that break that promise with us don’t get moved over to the list of places to return to.

I say all of this as a way to re-ask the question that we originally asked in the headline: Is your company's website design living up to the promises your marketing is making?

Could your website design be costing you conversions?

Every element of your marketing—social media posts, blog posts, downloadable collateral, banner ads—makes an unspoken promise to the person who sees it and interacts with it. That promise: “This is what you can expect from us.” Unfortunately, many of the clients we work with don’t understand that. They let creating the best web design go ignored while they concentrate on doing all the other activities needed to drive leads into their funnel.

The problem is that all those other things, those little peeks at you and your brand that people see, are promising steak. But when those people make the jump from those other marketing pieces to your site—when they do the thing you want them to do—all they get is hamburger. And that's a trust killer.

At Idea Grove we spend a lot of time talking about integrating your PR and your marketing, and doing that is critical. As the marketing and PR landscapes change and the silos that have traditionally kept the two practices apart get broken down, you have to start thinking of them as one cohesive effort. What you also have to think about is the role your website plays in converting to leads the traffic your PR and marketing are driving.

If someone comes to your site expecting linen tablecloths and candles and you sit them down in a booth with duct tape on the cushion, then your site is probably doing you much more harm than good.