Industrial Grade Website

Hey, it's Judd here.

I'm gonna show you how to take your manufacturing company's website from being outdated and underperforming into a source of leads and not headaches.

It's what I like to call an industrial-grade website.

So if you run marketing and the website is your responsibility, this video is for you.

We're gonna do two things.

First, we're gonna go through the most common ways these projects and these websites break down.

And second, I'm gonna show you how how to fix every single one of those.

I've built hundreds of websites over the last 25 years, and today I work exclusively with mid-market manufacturers.

So stay tuned, I'm gonna break this down step by step.

Okay, how do we get an industrial-grade website that generates leads, not headaches?

So tell me if this sounds like you.

You're running marketing at a manufacturing company, you're an industrial marketer, and you are wearing many hats.

You're in charge of trade shows, you're in charge of the website, paid, print, a ton of different things.

And sales, they get all the budget, they get all the resources, and marketing is typically underfunded.

It might just be you, it might be you and one other person helping support you, and the website is on your P and L.

You are responsible.

You're always trying to do more with less.

There's always too many things going on.

And to make matters worse, have you ever experienced disappearing developer syndrome?

The website's broken.

Poof!

Where did the developer go?

Where did our vendor go?

Where did our web designer go?

It can be a lot to manage.

Imagine if things are going so well that your budget gets approved and you start getting the resources that you need.

Imagine instead of a turf war between sales and marketing, that sales loves you because you're bringing in those marketing qualified leads that they can then turn into sales.

And so everyone's working hand in hand.

And imagine when you're out on the road at trade shows that your website is still working hard for you and generating leads.

And imagine at the end of this that the C-suite is happy and you get that raise or you get that promotion and things are hitting on all cylinders.

Well, I'm gonna map out the process and show you how you can go from your website being a source of headaches to a source of leads and something that delivers growth for your company.

Okay, there's 3 main problems when you're talking about your website.

The first one is people can't find you.

You have the greatest website in the world, if if people can't find it, then what's the point?

The second one is, let's say they do find you, your website isn't converting.

Nothing happens.

They show up, they leave.

Your bounce rate and your analytics may be through the roof.

Nobody's downloading anything, nobody's filling out any forms, the phone's not ringing.

And the third one is your site keeps breaking.

It's brittle.

It goes down.

Stuff doesn't work.

Things aren't where they're supposed to be.

Nobody knows how to update it.

It's a pain in the butt.

So these are 3 of the most common problems.

And the the way I think about this is I like to keep things simple.

I call it the 3 Easies.

And this is what you want with your website.

It doesn't need to be any more complicated than this.

Let me map this out for you.

We want to take these 3 problems and make it so your website is easy to find.

This is SEO, this is AI search, this may be increasingly social, this can even be in person.

We want your website to be easy to use.

Easy converts, simple converts, fast converts.

And the last easy of the 3 easies is on your end.

You want a website that is easy to manage.

None of these are your fault.

These are very common problems.

I see this all the time.

I've seen this for years and years.

People can't find you.

They don't know about you.

Nobody's visiting your website.

When they get there, nothing happens.

Nobody's converting into leads.

Things are always breaking.

It doesn't work how it's supposed to.

We want to take you from that to this.

Your website is easy to find.

When people show up on the site, they know exactly what action to take next.

And this should all be easy.

You should be able to update your own website.

You should know who to get in touch with.

You should have a plan for how all of this works.

So stick with me and I'm gonna map this all out and break it down how you go from these problems to a solution.

Okay, like I mentioned, those 3 problems are extremely common.

I mean, nobody wants to have a bad website.

Nobody, nobody does this on purpose.

So where does this come from?

Well, typically it comes from 3 pieces of bad advice or or practices that I see a lot.

And one is treating your website as if it's purely a design project and it's just supposed to look beautiful.

It's like, it's like artwork.

Let me put this on an easel here.

I'm showing my lack of art skills here.

But your website is not art.

It's an instrument to try and generate business.

Treating it like the look is the end-all be-all—it should function, it should deliver a result.

Another common issue is going with the cheapest vendor.

And there's amazing providers all over the place.

I'm not singling out offshoring or outsourcing, but if you just simply go with the cheapest quote, or you go with the CEO's nephew, or you decide to do it yourself- and I mean, nowadays with AI, you can spin up sites quite easily.

What you're looking for on your website—we talked about this a little bit already—is a long-term value and that total cost of ownership, that TCO.

So think think on a 3-year horizon, a 4-year horizon, not immediately right now.

Spinning up a website quickly is easy and cheap nowadays.

What counts is over time, how does this thing support and generate business?

So another common issue is treating it like it's just purely design and aesthetics, or cheaping out.

And a third issue is selecting one of these all-in-one, or, you know, the keyword you'll see all the time.

And apologies to my agency buddies, apologies in advance.

But is relying on the full-service agency that does everything soup to nuts, that does your design, your strategy, your coding, your video- there's a reason there's specialists in every single one of these.

Your full-service agency tries to be all things to all people, and a lot of times they're weak on the website side of things, particularly as your technical needs get more and more in-depth.

That's not to say that some of these agencies don't do a great job on websites, but generally speaking, you cannot be a specialist in all of these things unless you're starting to get up into the 6 and 7 figures in a very large agency and a very large headcount.

And that's a that's a whole different thing, but you are probably not in that position if you're running marketing at a mid-market manufacturer.

So here's the 3 issues that are very common.

You treat it like it's purely a design project, you cheap out or go with the lowest upfront cost on your site, or you end up with the full-service agency and they're not strong at the web.

Let me show you how I think about this.

So you're in manufacturing, which is all about tolerances.

It's about quality control.

It's about vetting of vendors.

It's about setting a standard and then building to that standard.

I treat websites the exact same way.

So one of the things that we always do is we begin with an end in mind and we set that standard, and then we work backwards on how we're gonna hit that standard.

We don't just focus on your website, even though we're just building a website.

You want to focus on your web presence, which the website is the the linchpin of that, but your web presence includes social.

It can include your paid ads.

It can include being featured on other sites or directories, but everything should feed in.

But you think of it- think more broadly and more holistically that your website- think of it as a solar system, and your website is like the sun of this online solar system.

But my philosophy is we think about web presence.

The other thing that's a little bit different about how I work is I do not want you dependent on me for everything.

I believe in something called teach and transfer.

The smarter I can make make you and your team, the more I can enable you and allow you to control your website and control your web presence.

There's nothing secretive or sacred or behind a paywall or anything like that, because I think that's where you get the best results.

I think that's where it's more durable.

And I think that that is how you drive growth, which is what we're all after.

And the other thing is, when you work with me, I work with you as a consultant, and there's a single point of contact.

You work directly with me.

I like to joke, there's one throat to choke.

That's my philosophy.

This is what I believe.

Let me show you how we actually do this.

Okay, we talked a little bit about my philosophy and how I approach building websites.

We talked about those 3 common issues and what we're shooting for, those 3 Easies.

We want it to be easy to find, easy to use, and easy to manage.

Well, let me break this down for you and show you my methodology for how I build websites or redesign and redevelop websites.

So I've developed this methodology, I've been at this, started making websites in 2001, so we're in year 25.

And obviously the technology has changed and evolved several times, but the fundamentals don't change.

We're dealing with people on, on both ends of this.

We're trying to drive business, we're trying to generate leads.

The methodology that I've arrived at over years and years I like to call SMaC.

Typically, this takes- this is a 3 to 6 month process.

The S in SMaC stands for strategy and stakeholders.

This is crucial.

Everything else is downstream of this.

If we're not starting with a crystal clear strategy of what we're trying to accomplish and why, then the rest of it doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter how great it it doesn't matter how slick the technology is.

We start with strategy and we take time to understand who the stakeholders are.

Your website strategy is part of your marketing.

You know, it's a small subset of your marketing strategy, and your marketing strategy is a subset of your overall business strategy.

And if we don't know how this all fits together, we're not gonna hit the goals that you're after.

So the S in SMaC stands for strategy and stakeholders.

The stands for market and messaging.

We dig in and do research on the competitive landscape.

Who are you competing with?

What are the alternatives?

What are people currently using?

What did they used to do?

Where are things headed?

And if we did our job on the strategy piece, all of us marketers, we're constantly talking about ICP.

Our ideal customer profile.

We should be obsessed with this on who we're serving.

You don't know what to say if you don't know who you're saying it to.

So we start with the market and your ideal customer profile, and then we learn about your messaging, what's worked in the past, what's working now, any campaigns you may have going on.

And overall, you know, we look for things like the voice of customer.

We might go talk to your sales team, but we move from the strategy and stakeholders into the market and messaging.

This is all strategic.

This is all information gathering.

This is why you bring in a consultant, and this is why you bring in someone with a lot of experience.

This is the stuff that takes time, it takes effort, and there's nuance to it, and experience counts.

The A stands for architecture and aesthetics.

So in architecture, we're talking about information architecture, so organizing your website and which sections, what labels, all those sorts of things in terms of what is gonna go on your website, how is it gonna be organized, how are people gonna flow and find their way through your website.

And the aesthetics, this is the one that everyone thinks of when you talk about websites and web design.

They think about what does it look like.

But we start upstream of this, and that informs what it should look like because we know who we're talking to, we know what we want it to say, we know from our information architecture how we're gonna give them clear, simple, easy path to do that so that our inboxes and our CRMs are filling up with leads.

C stands for code and configuration.

This is the technical piece.

This is the development.

This is taking some of those visual assets and coming up with this plan, this roadmap of who we're talking to, what we're gonna say, what we're trying to accomplish, what we want them to do, what it's gonna look and feel like, what that user experience is gonna be like, that UX.

This is where we bring that to life, and this is where we get our hands dirty on the coding, on the integrating with your different systems.

And then at the end here, which is the K.

This is that kickstart or the kickoff.

This is where we launch this bad boy.

We get it out there to the market, and the KPIs, those key performance indicators, this is where we start keeping score.

We come up with a report card that can be things like your analytics.

How many people are visiting the site?

How many people are converting?

This is my method for delivering an industrial-grade website.

It's called SMAC.

Strategy and Stakeholders, Market and Messaging, Architecture and Aesthetics, Code and Configuration, and Kickstart and KPIs.

So if you're looking for help like Bellatrix, Septima Tech, or Pier of Den Haag, the next step is to book a one-on-one call where we'll go over your web presence, and you'll leave that call with clarity on what to do next, whether you want to work with me or whether you want to take that plan and implement it yourself.

I look forward to chatting with you.