Your Website Isn't the Plan

Spend five minutes in any small business group on Facebook and you'll see the same post, a few different ways. Who needs a website? Free website for the first three businesses that comment. Whose site needs work?

The website question gets asked so often that a lot of owners start to believe it's the only question. If the phone is slow, the site must be the problem. If a competitor is growing, they must have a better site.

A website matters. We build them. But it's one piece of your brand, and treating it as the whole plan is how good businesses end up spending money in the wrong order.

What a website actually does

A website is where people go after they've already heard of you.

Very few customers find a local business by landing cold on its homepage. They hear about you from a friend. They see a post, a Google listing, a flyer by the register, a sign they drive past every morning. Then they look you up to confirm what they heard. Are these people legit? What are the hours? How do I book?

That's the website's job. It's the second conversation. The first one already happened somewhere else.

So when a site gets built before anyone has decided what that first conversation says, you end up with a clean, modern page that sounds exactly like every competitor's clean, modern page. It looks finished. It just doesn't say anything.

What comes first

Four things, in this order.

1. What you stand for. Not a mission statement. One sentence a customer could repeat to a friend. "Best coffee in town" is something every coffee shop says. "The place you can sit for three hours and nobody rushes you" is something a customer actually tells people. The second one is a brand.

2. Who you're talking to. "Everyone" isn't an audience. A med spa talking to brides three months before the wedding sounds different from one talking to people who've never had a treatment. A contractor working with first-time homeowners needs a different message than one bidding on commercial jobs. Pick the person, and the words get easier.

3. What you say that nobody else says. Pull up five competitors' sites and read them side by side. You'll see the same phrases over and over: quality service, family owned, customer satisfaction, years of experience. If you could swap the logos and nothing would change, the message isn't yours yet.

4. Where those people spend their time. This is where most marketing budgets leak. A Buford bakery's best customers might live in neighborhood Facebook groups. A Braselton med spa's clients are on Instagram. A contractor's next job might come from a Google search, or from the truck parked in a neighbor's driveway with a phone number on the side. Your message has to show up where those people already are, before they ever type your URL.

Where the website fits

Once those four are settled, the website gets easier to build, and better.

It has a clear job: confirm what people already heard and make the next step obvious. Every page knows why it exists. The copy sounds like you, because you've decided what you sound like. The design follows from what you stand for instead of from a template.

And everything else lines up with it. Your Instagram, your Google Business Profile, your flyers, your menu, your email signature, the way you answer the phone. When all of those say the same thing, the website stops being the only thing working, and starts being the place where all that work lands.

A quick check

Five questions. Be honest with yourself.

• Could a customer describe what makes you different in one sentence?
• Do your Instagram, Google profile, printed pieces and website sound like the same business?
• Do you know where your last ten customers first heard about you?
• If your website disappeared tomorrow, would people still find you?
• Is your site doing one job well, or trying to do every job at once?

If two or more of those made you pause, the website probably isn't your bottleneck yet. The message is.

If you're just starting out

If you're launching a new business and don't have a website yet, good. You get to do this in the right order from day one. Decide what you stand for, who it's for, and where they are. Then build the site to back it up. You'll spend less, and you won't be rebuilding it in a year.

The short version

Your website is one piece of your brand. It isn't the plan.

The plan is what you say, who you say it to, and where you say it. Build that first, and your website finally has something worth saying.

If you want a second set of eyes on how your pieces fit together, the contact form comes straight to me.

Darrow, Brand Growth Partner, Worrad Design