Salesmanship First: An Alternative Approach to a New Website

When developing a new website for your business, you may be forgiven for thinking that the ‘look and feel’ of your company’s digital storefront should come first. But when you begin drawing up design concepts before you start thinking about sales messaging, the structure and content of your site won’t be optimised for marketing. The secret to the success of our client websites? Our Salesmanship First approach.

What is the Salesmanship First Concept?

When we take on a new client website project, we start by preparing and applying solid marketing plans and sales strategies long before we begin thinking about aesthetics and code. The marketing then underpins the development of the new site. The core messaging we develop will inform everything from the copy, to the graphic design, to the site navigation and its architectural structure. 

By focusing on salesmanship from the get-go, we ensure high conversion rates when future customers click through to your content and landing pages. This way of thinking has generated powerful and profitable results for our clients. When we’ve taken over projects from other agencies and rebuilt from the ground up, we’ve doubled online sales for our clients. That’s a big return on investment. But how do we achieve this?

Step 1: Understanding Core Sales Messaging

The starting point and backbone of your new website is salesmanship, salesmanship, salesmanship. Our first task is to identify the marketing propositions and to implement those to effectively communicate three core messages to your potential customers:

• What do you offer?
• Who do you offer it to?
• Why should they care?

We make sure that clear and captivating answers to these three questions are echoed throughout your site. Communicating these core messages properly is far more important to making your website work harder for you than almost anything else.

Step 2: Site Mapping and Navigation Strategy

Strong messaging will help to organise and prioritise your content. We need to guide potential customers to the right content at the right time. 

If you have too much information and too many pages cluttering up your site, users won’t find the path to your core pages and you will lose out on conversions. Our approach:

• Creates a simpler path to calls-to-action.
• Leads users to the primary messaging quicker.
• Significantly improves your metrics.

Step 3: Wireframe Development

In the next stage, we work on organising, prioritising, and laying out your copy, imagery, and assets. We identify key sales messages for each page template and start creating wireframes focusing on user experience (UX). We establish which headlines to highlight and how to display the content across each page to achieve clear and easy-to-consume messaging. 

Based on this strategy, we will start to write copy for the template pages in the style best suited to your target market and Unique Sales Propositions (USPs). Conducting Split A/B tests, we will better learn which messaging is the most effective for your consumer base. 

Step 4: Design and Graphic Communication

Design is at its most powerful when it graphically communicates your sales copy and helps the reader consume the messaging quickly and easily. That’s why, unlike most web agencies, we wait until the copy and wireframes have been finalised before creating a graphic concept. Our approach will make your USPs easy to see and obvious to understand. 

Step 5: Site Development

The final stage of the journey is the development of your site. With the wireframes approved, we can prepare the technical specification and get code written. The end result is a website that isn’t only clean and crisp in terms of graphics, but in terms of its marketing and path to conversion too.

Each step of our Salesmanship First approach layers web design and SEO best practice onto the core online marketing strategies we develop for your company. Get in touch with us today to see how we can set your brand up for success.

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