The Upstream Decisions Behind Websites Success

There are many reasons websites fail. Slow loading time, poor responsive design, bad UI/UX, weak copy, and so on. But before you address any of those, there are six upstream decisions that you must get right first.

These are:

• where you situate your site within a funnel

• not over-relying on information delivery

• committing to a conversions-first strategy

• identifying how you will differentiate and be distinct

• adopting an iterative approach to success

• deciding whether you want to be recommended or ignored by AI

Get those six decisions right, and you set yourself up for having a website that is a revenue centre and not an expense. Here's your guide to each:

Location, location, location: Why you need a funnel for your website

A bad website can outperform a good one.

Let's say you have a poorly optimised website. It's badly designed, has weak copy, but you have a solid offer, something people are willing to buy. Now, let's say your competitor has a similar offer, but a great site. Without changing a thing on your site, you can outsell that competitor. How?

Send more traffic to your site.

If you convert at 0.5% and they convert at 2%, you can outperform them by sending 5 times more site visitors. In fact, you don't even need 5 times more if you send better-qualified leads.

Your site's success will depend on how many quality visitors you can send to it. That's why your site needs to be placed inside a funnel that sends quality traffic its way.

But if you Field-of-Dreams it ("build it and they will come"), your site will be a beautiful tropical island no one even knows is there.

RULE: Build your site with a clear plan for how you will drive traffic to it.

The Information Trap: Why you can't educate a lead into becoming a buyer

You sit down to write your site's copy. You imagine what your buyers would like to know and write that. That seems like the smart thing to do, but it's not.

If you think like a buyer, your focus is, "I need information so I can make a decision". So, you write a site that has all the information you think a potential buyer needs.

That's pretty much every DIY business site out there, and there's a very good reason why professional copywriters don't write sites like that. They don't work.

They don't work because of something called the Information Deficit Model.

The Information Deficit Model believes people would make better decisions if only they had enough information (Schultz, 2014).

It's the logic behind vaccine education and road safety campaigns. But the billions spent on these information campaigns have taught us that information isn't enough, otherwise we'd all drive under the speed limit, eat healthily and get off social media.

For your website, the Information Deficit Model fails you because it makes two incorrect assumptions:

• people aren't buying from you because they don't know enough

• people make their buying decisions based on logic

Writing a website based on these two premises means you're writing for Mr Spock.

Decision-making psychology is an entire field of study. People win Nobel Prizes for their research in it. Write for humans, not pointy-eared aliens.

RULE: Write your site with a full understanding of the psychology of decision making (Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D.,1981). Ask: What must your ideal buyer know, understand and believe about you, your offer and themselves before they will say yes?

The Focus Gap: Why you need a conversion-focused website

What is your website for?

Peter Drucker, the father of modern management theory, said a business has only one function: to create new buyers. He said it does that in two ways: innovation (better offers) and marketing.

Likewise, your website has one primary function: to present those offers to your ideal leads and convert them into buyers. That's it.

I've worked with plenty of companies whose sites accommodated everyone who put their hand up during the planning stage, even if they were outside the room. Every department had its own little digital plot on it. But every page, every line you add that isn't in the direct service of converting leads into buyers, dilutes your site's selling potential.

And notice that I said 'converting'. Your site is in the business of converting people who are interested into people who are ready to make a buying decision.

RULE: Write your site to convert leads to clients or customers. Be ruthless in protecting that focus.

The Competitor Gap: Why your site must be benchmarked against your competitors

Unless you are the sole provider of the goods or services you offer, your potential buyers will check out your competitors. And the last thing you want to be is interchangeable with those.

You need copywriting that clearly differentiates you in terms of brand, solutions offered and value delivered.

You must never be interchangeable with your competitors.

If you don't give your site visitors a clear reason why you are the best possible choice, you will end up competing on price. That's a race you don't want to win.

And separating yourself from your competitors needs more than differentiation. You need to be distinct.

Why do you need distinctiveness as well as differentiation?

Differentiation matters; that is well established. But so too does being distinct (Byron Sharp, 2010).

Differentiation operates at the level of logic. It is registered as unique value propositions and in your educational/lead-nurturing content. Being Distinct is far more primal. It is registered as emotions and unconscious preferences.

You've seen this in action.

The Gorilla playing drums in that iconic Cadbury's ad from 2007. Cadbury's, which had seen a 2% drop in revenue the year before, credited the ad and a new product with a 6% boost in sales.

You don't need a gorilla. But you do need something in your brand that is distinctive. For most brands, that will include your brand story and the work your designer does for you.

Distinctive equals memorable. Done well, it means positive emotional regard.

(If you ever wondered why ads with animals do well, now you know.)

RULE: Make sure you differentiate and are distinct.

The One-Shot Trap: Why you need to treat your website as an ongoing, iterative process.

Most marketing fails, and it fails for two reasons.

First, the underlying assumption was wrong, like when Coke switched to New Coke (1985).

(New Coke is also a great example of how logical thinking fails in marketing. Coke only tested the taste, not how the switch affected brand sentiment. People don't buy Coke based on logic.)

The second reason, and this is far more common, is that you can rarely one-shot a marketing solution.

Marketing doesn't work like that. You try something, collect data and refine or drop the idea. It is exceptionally rare that a Facebook ad campaign is a hit right out of the gate.

Your website is the same.

You develop your site and track data from it: visitor numbers, sources of traffic, what people do on the site, what button gets clicked, and so on. You then use that data to make changes and see what the new data tells you.

DIY business owners and hit-and-run marketers launch a site and move on. Professional marketers launch, collect data, and make it better.

RULE: Don't try to one-shot a marketing win. You need to test your way to success. That's how successful marketing happens.

AI Visibility: Why your website needs to be written for AI as well as your human visitors

Here's the reality Irish SMEs are living in today: Deloitte Ireland reports that 64% of Irish consumers were using AI to research and make decisions by 2025, rising from just 35% in 2023.

In other words, your future buyers are using ChatGPT, Google AI and other models to find and vet you. They are asking AI who it recommends.

Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) is how you become that recommended business. It's how you make sure AI sees you, understands you and has a very good reason to recommend you over your competitors.

Regardless of how you feel about AI, your buyers will ask it for those recommendations, and it will give them an answer. You need to decide if that is a spot worth competing for or if you are happy to cede it to someone else.

RULE: You don't have to like AI to love what it can do for your lead generation, but unless you have a very good reason not to you need to add GEO to you lead-generation strategy.