#WTFWednesday – “Advertising doesn’t work.”

WTF? Why would someone that makes a good chunk of his money from online advertising and SEO tell you that advertising does not work? The answer is simple. If your advertising does not convert audiences into leads and sales…then don’t do it. There is a case that can be made for advertising for the purposes of branding. That said, more often than not what I see in the marketplace as the main reason for lack of conversions is the company website. Yes..the website.

At this point most businesses understand that the buyer journey begins online. Even if a sale is completed in a person to person transaction the path to purchase starts online. Advertising may be the starting point for a buyer’s journey. After the advertising has taken place inevitably a prospect will wind up on a business’ website. This is a fact that businesses are comfortable with. They are comfortable with this fact because most all of them think their website is perfectly fine. And that’s where they’re wrong.

The overwhelming majority of clients’ that I work with have websites that are bad at converting visitors to leads and sales. A business owner can gauge this based on bounce rates and time spent on the site. The reasons can be as simple as a website not quickly or effectively saying what the company does or making contact information not easy to find. Or it can exist as a much larger issue of too much information on a home page or making it difficult for prospects to find what they need. These are UI/UX issues (acronyms for user interface/user experience). Poor UI/UX leads to poor conversions.

More often than not businesses come to me and want me to help them rank high on search engines (SEO) or advertise on Google and Facebook (SEM) so that ultimately they can drive traffic to their website. They do this because they think that if they can get the right audiences to their website these audiences will convert into leads and sales. It can do this but not if the UI/UX is poor.

So when I tell clients not to waste their money on advertising their first response is usually, “WTF.” Once they understand that it is a waste of money to send internet traffic to a website that does not convert we can get to the business of making sure the website is in the best possible condition to convert visitors to leads and sales and then look at advertising.