Well, Hello everyone. So Hello everyone, I'm hoping that some of you have managed to join me on my first ever YouTube live! I'm looking forward to sharing some knowledge and information with you, but just before we get started, if you could just pop in comments that you can see me and hear me okay, that'd be great. And that would just help me to just see that everything's working okay, I'll just hang fire for a second.
Okay. I think we're good to go. So Hello again and welcome, my name is Farzana from SF digital, and I've been running SF digital since 2002 with my husband Uzair Kharawala. As you will see from our YouTube channel, lots and lots of video, lots of content, but I'm like an exotic bird, I have not really come on the videos as much, but today I am producing this for you all, because so many people have asked me to cover this topic and I keep having these same conversations, especially over the last few weeks while we've been in lockdown.
So today we're going to be talking about best website practices, why do websites matter, how we're going to improve performance; just using some very simple tips and tricks, and what to do to get great leads. So just to give you a bit of background I'm originally from the print industry, I have a printing degree, and so from a very young age, I've always prided myself on my attention to detail.
I will pick up errors within print and that skill set has translated really well when we were photographers, where again we had to pay attention to detail. And now as we get involved with people's advertising campaigns, and also obviously their websites. Why we're different at SF digital is that before we go anywhere near sorting out your website, looking at the design, looking at layout, looking at functionality, we actually want to get a really good understanding of what you're trying to achieve with your website, because websites actually are one part of the delivery of your message, they're not the whole picture.
So before we go running off, we really want to get a good understanding of what your end game is, and then we can put the pieces in place. So really who should be watching today? If you're building websites, and online marketing is all outside of your comfort zone, something you've probably steered away from and really struggled to get a good understanding of, then obviously I'm hoping today will be helpful for you.
It's also really useful I hope today for those that may have built their own websites, and are still not getting any leads, and are not getting the traffic that they are after, and then hopefully again that will help those people today. Also it might be you're a small business owner and you don't really have a budget to invest in another website, so you may already have got a website built, may not have been a self-built, but of course now you're hitting some blocks and you know you need to put a few things right, but actually haven't got the money to spend again, so hopefully this will help you.
And also same thing, If you paid to have your website built and you're still not getting results, I'm going to show you a little bit as to why marketing, online marketing is really the starting block of all of this, and not necessarily the website itself. I would be very Frank here and say that if the last few weeks of lock down, as we've had here in the UK, and obviously this has affected pretty much every country around the world, in some shape or form in terms of lock down, and you still don't think you need a website for your business.
Please, I would say, save yourself a good hour, because this really is about opening your eyes to the potential of what your website can do for you. Again it might be that your not actually interested in attracting loyal followers, you're quite happy with what you've got already. And again, that's fine, that might be where you want to be within your business, and that's absolutely fine, you don't need to possibly do anything to tweak anything on your website.
And again, you may not be looking to grow your business, you might be quite happy with your loyal following, you've got your repeat income and you've achieved what you need to achieve. To get started, I'm going to be coming back to this quite frequently, and today while we're talking about websites and what they're trying to do for you.
I want you to remember that Google's mission is to give the user the best possible user experience. And I repeat this so frequently during my conversations with business owners, because once you get that into your head, everything you do with your online marketing will all start to make sense. It will all start to fall into place as to why you're doing certain things in a certain way to get your following.
And rather than me pointed to this strap line, every two minutes, Google mission, is to give the user the best possible user experience. If I could put that in one word, it would be the word trust, because that's really what we are trying to do. The internet is a really cold, hard face. And how do we make ourselves personable, authentic and build trust with our future audiences, and hopefully lead to conversions, and needs, and ultimately sales, if that's what you're after.
So why do we go to Google? It's back to that same word, we trust them. So if I started to type in, as I did, red dress to buy, automatically I got the help from Google that other people have searched for this, it's given me a suggestion to buy online, and straight away, I get pictures of red dresses.
I don't get green dresses, I don't get other colored dresses, I don't get trousers, I get what I'm looking for. And so all of us have come to trust Google. If we're going out, looking for a solution to a situation, a challenge, a problem, we will get the right answer. So straight away, I know that Google is going to give me what I'm looking for.
So it becomes a win, win, win from a customer point, from a advertising point of view, from a business point of view, forget for a moment that we are a Google partner, and we set up Google ad campaigns, YouTube campaigns; this is not just about the paid traffic to Google. A lot of people have a lot of mistrust, you know, smaller businesses, I'm not going to give my money to Google, I don't see why I should be doing that.
Well, actually, if Google is trusted by the end user to get the right audience in front of your business, because you marry up to that end user, then you're the winner as the business owner, Google's the winner, should you be using paid advertising, but the end user is also the winner. And so this is why if we all work together and understand what your website is doing, you are going to see that benefit.
So, as I just said about, what do we mean by these users? We tend to focus quite heavily as small business owners on the end user, but actually often, and I often advise this to smaller business owners with websites, start to think about your own behavior as a user. What do you do when you go on a website, how do you use Google to filter results?
And as we all know, so back to those pictures, it's so highly visual, the first thing we are seeing are those shopping ads. I don't almost, I don't even need to scroll further down on that page to go and find a website that sells me red dresses, chances are with this highly visible positioning of ads, I probably see, Oh yeah, actually that's the kind of style I'm after, here I go with the clicks.
Without digressing too far away from today's topic, I won't go into too much detail, but again, there's often a lot of mistrust in the ones that are paid ads. People often click second or third down on these ads because they think, well, I'm not going to go in that one, because that one has probably paid lots of money to go to the top.
Actually, it's the reverse, because Google back to the best possible user experience, they are finding the most relevant ad that fits your bill. And chances are that this person has paid less than number two, and number three, to get to that position, It's all to do with the calculation for bidding, etc, a whole different topic. And so actually Google is doing all the hard work, they know that this is a really good website, It gets lots of visitors, this one has great red dresses, so they are putting the right audience in front of you.
Of course, if I was to scroll down, I didn't do a full screenshot, obviously you would then see the SEO. However, this is a very generic topic, so there are lots and lots of online shop alternatives for me, the smaller outlets didn't even get a look in. So while I remember I'm going to put an invitation out to you all, If during this time, if you like the feel of this, and you're brave, please do pop your URL into the chat on the right hand side of the screen.
And if you're up for it, if we get time at the end, I'll be very happy to just click into your website and just talk you through, some of the things that I can see could possibly do with a tweak, and give me that challenge and see if there's anything that I can help you with. It will be done live, like I say, assuming we have enough time at the end.
Okay, so I'm going to sort of go through a little bit, a common thing that comes up, the difference between website designers, website coders, and what we are - a slightly different breed, website or online marketeers or, strategists even. So often when I'm doing a website audit for people, I will see, I can normally tell very soon whether someone has gone to a website designer, or someone who's better at website coding, and perhaps they've done a self built, which is a whole different thing.
Now, website designers, clearly highly visual, probably have a very nice layout at first glance, and then you dig a little deeper, and you'll find that actually the functionality of what you're trying to achieve, is just not there. So for example, one I was looking at earlier this week, the website designer, and I will call them a designer, because it was clear they came from a photographic, and graphic design background; But they start to steer away from learned behavior of how we behave on websites.
So what they've done is put the, they didn't have an active navigation bar, so you couldn't click to go further to any of the pages, where you would normally expect to see anything, and the sort of the three, four line type of dropdown menu, which we call the sandwich, that was hidden in a very pale color, overlaid over a photograph.
Now I look at websites day in, day out, so I knew what to look for, and have a good old dig, cause I knew that navigation bar would be somewhere. But when I did click into that sandwich, I then see a cluster of items that you would normally associate with the navigation bar on the homepage, tucked away.
And of course those headings are quite meaningless when there are only one very short word. So what we are doing now is introducing all these barriers to the end user, actually making meaningful contact, and gaining the contact that they're looking for, and basically it's a turnoff. So you start to fight with these subconscious psychological barriers, to actually converting your end user.
Website coders, now these are normally great people who understand coding, they might be working in HTML, they might be using plugins and so on. However, unfortunately they rarely are very good at actually looking at the visual sight of a web site. Because you can have the most brilliantly coded website that does fantastic things, great on servers, great on search engines, etc, but if it doesn't look appealing, your end users never going to convert.
Because you're not actually doing anything to appeal to them, but then come to online marketers like ourselves. We are not too worried initially about what the site looks like, we are not initially worried about what the coding is going to be, the first thing we want to do is work out with you, what is it, you as a business are actually trying to achieve?
It's not always actually sales, it could be that you want to grow your email information site subscription list, you could be an academic, you might be a charity. So you may be looking for interested parties, who may in the future become great donors, and sponsors, and add to your charity fundraising. Or it might be a straightforward sales transaction, where you're actually looking to grow your sales, through shopping and ecommerce, etc.
Only when we've mapped out that journey for your end customer, and your end client, can we then say, okay, we know where we're starting from, we know what we're trying to achieve at the end. So these are the stepping stones we need to put into place to make those happen, and then to make those stepping stones link up, these are the coding, and the designs that we're going to use to join those dots together.
And we are looking to do things once, and rinse and repeat, we want to then really get great value from that activity. In fact, today what I'm doing is a prime example of that yes, we are doing this live feature, but from a business perspective, this will go on to over 250 steps of creating content for our online business, because creating that content then brings us clients.
So our sales funnel becomes very inbound, just from doing this activity. So all of these things, website designers, website coders, website marketeers, we at the end of it are looking at behavior. Because if we visit a website, and for example, need to scroll right across to the other side of the page to find what we want to actually do, I'm going to just quickly click into our own website for a moment, to show you, we'll be coming back to this.
So generally speaking most, you know, I forget the percentage now, generally we are, majority of us are right-handed. Now, if I had to drag my mouse, so I can see it's just subconscious and psychological, the things I want to click generally tend to be on the right hand side. We're designing a website, all this activity is on the right hand side.
If I had to click on something this end of the screen, It actually feels really unnatural, to have to go right across to the other side, and so this is why I say this is about behavior. While this popup has turned up, I digress, but this is one of my pet hates, when a pop up is too soon, so this one probably came up after this had been running in the background for a good 20, 30 seconds.
So I've got a chance to understand, do I want to buy into this site, and find out more, or not, some popups come up virtually immediately, as soon as you go onto a website, that's really frustrating I find; Because you haven't even bought into the message yet, and you're being asked to possibly do something, which is a one off.
You're only going to see this pop up once, do it now, otherwise you're going to miss out, but at this moment in time, if it's too soon in that journey, you don't even know you want to engage. So as the advertiser, or the user of that pop up, the business, you have missed a trick, because you've now actually disengaged with your audience too soon in that journey.
So it's really important that we're looking at behaviour, because if a website designer understands that actually the end user is visiting this site, their behaviour subconsciously, is trained to find a navigation bar across the top, to start, their behaviour indicates that they prefer to work on the right hand side. Then that kind of information and knowledge is what's going to help you, the business owner, to design a website that is actually not just fit for purpose, but is actually hopefully going to convert.
So what's the right order, for the above, and where should you actually start? So I'm going to give an example of building a house. Let's say you want to have an extension done on your home, you may well think I'll go off to the builder first, you know, get them to pop round, give me a quote. But the builder can't build anything, until the architect has come around and said, well, where's everything going to go, and these are the elements you need to think about, and this is the actual design of everything.
But actually before the architect can do his job, on that extension and get you what you're after the, you need to be clear, the end user, the user of the extension, the business owner, what's the purpose of that home extension. What's the purpose of that website? Because without those questions being answered, neither the builder, nor the architect will be able to match what you're actually trying to achieve with your website.
So this is why it's really important to sit down and map out what you're trying to achieve. So for example, a conversation I had with a lady yesterday, someone I've known for about eight years now, excuse me, it's very, very warm today and I'm already feeling thirsty. Okay. Now she trusts us, I think, I believe she does, I know she does, she likes us, and there have been times in these 8, 10 years where sometimes she's been our client and actually because I like, and trust her business, I've been her client.
So she phoned me, obviously we've known each other a long time, a great relationship, and sound advice, both ways when we need it, very supportive role. And came to me with an idea, "Farzana I have this idea for my business." It's a spinoff related to her current business, but slight spin off. "And I think I need a standalone website, probably just one page, and do you think you want to do it, but if you don't, obviously I could find other people, but you know, I just wanted to run it by you first." And actually what I said to this lady, is actually park the fact that we do website builds, I am not interested in you coming to me and say, I think I need a website; and we say, okay, that's fine, here you go, here's your price, here's the one page website.
That really is not what we are about, we actually went deeper in the conversation and talked about, well, how does this business model you're suggesting, actually work? Because potentially there's another third party involved, who's going to take responsibility within that new business, for delivering the product? Who's actually going to take the headache of the marketing of that product, where is the balance in all of this?
And so before I even take on that job, I would rather have that honest conversation about what is the business that you're actually trying to create here. And these are the areas where there could be a huge budget drain before you see any return. And I'd rather have that conversation with people right at the beginning, perhaps even another conversation just about the business than be worrying about the website.
The website is just a vehicle for your message, It is not the business itself, so that's why I'd rather rather do that. Now, there are some things on websites, that I call money on the table, and I have had this conversation in the last few weeks, every time there'll be at least one, two, three of these missing.
Because people... often when they are self builds, more so than if they've actually asked somebody to commission the website as a build, like I say money on the table. Now, regardless of whether you are in any kind of transactions on your website or not, whether you're a e-com or not, you must have this padlock, the SSL certificate, active and locked on your website.
And again, trying to take you back to one of the earlier slides, which is all about trust. So, as I said before, this is not about being a Google partner, even on your organic SEO, this the natural SEO, Google wants to help those that give the end user the best user experience, ie trust. So if you are not secure as a website, you could be a spam website, you could be some kind of weird hack, you could be some weird cover, but by having that in place, Google gives you, I call them brownie points.
Yeah, that one ticks the box, that site is credible, It's secure, it's safe. Fine, we can help them on their organic SEO, when we are trying to figure out amongst the many thousands, if not millions of websites out there, how can we get everyone on the first page? There has to be some distinction of how we're going to do that.
So this is why it's really important that that particular element, check your own websites, please make sure it's active. Again, another person I was doing this for a few days back, it appears locked on their particular browser, but was not coming up as secure on Chrome. So make sure that it's secure on all the typical browsers, some people do prefer Firefox, we tend to be heavily into Chrome ourselves.
So do make sure that is secure. Copyright, so for ease, because I don't want to use anyone else's websites, I'm using our own. Please make sure that you have a copyright line at the bottom, and I shall be having words with my husband, we need practise what we preach, our 2020 is missing. Put the 2020 on there, that's really important because again, when Google is looking at how to give the most current, trustworthy knowledge to people out there, that's another way where they will help with relevance and most up to date information.
So obviously a 2020 website would win over a 2019 website, that's another thing that I call money on the table, that needs to be looked at. The next one is the privacy policy. Now, sometimes people get very worried about where to find privacy policies, sometimes they will suggest to their website designer, you put it up there. Well actually, as website providers, we don't know what your privacy policy is, so again, I should just whizz down to our own privacy policy.
This is something that we do within our business, It's really important that obviously as the business owner, you've got to go through and see whether these typical items work for you or not. Now you can find some online, It's probably worth paying a solicitor to generate a standard privacy policy. Once it's done, it's done, going forward obviously you could probably make minor tweaks if things change, but at least you'll know it's done properly.
And equally important is making sure that your contact details are in there, that is a big part of the privacy policy. Again, this is to do with trust, Google, giving the user the best possible user experience. Now having my contact, our contact details on here, if your transaction value, let's say I'm buying a red dress from a website that I've never heard of.
It might be a few pounds, it's worth a punt, It's not a big deal, It shouldn't happen, but should I lose my money, it's probably not going to be such a problem. But if you're making quite a high value purchase, then you want to check that actually this is an authentic site, I will get my conservatory turning up or whatever it might be.
You want to be able to authenticate, who these people are, that are going to be selling you a service, or a product. And again, this is something that Google will be doing on their checklist, when they're looking at how to rank businesses, has there been a policy put into place for a particular website. So again, make sure you've done that, if you haven't already done so.
And a slightly less obvious one, but really important for converting people, you know, your potential clients, and customers to you, are strong representation of your testimonials, qualifications, if they're relevant, possibly professional bodies. So again for ease, I'll just go to ours. We've got Google reviews on there, we've got logos of customers that we've worked with, we have put some proof of where we are working, that are important within our industry.
But more importantly, most people tend to put these either on the standalone testimonials page, or possibly just on their homepage, it's actually really important to put it on every page. So if I was to click in wherever, you will see that we call this a common footer, It's repeated again, the reviews are there, the testimonials are there, and logos, etc are there.
Because when a visitor first comes to your website, they may not have bothered to read that to such, as they hopefully win over your trust and start to like what they're seeing, they'll probably go onto other pages, and that's why it's really important. But what they may have missed on the homepage is testimonials, etc, are really, really important, to still be visible so that they can delve a little bit further.
Okay. Right, Websites again. Now, one of the things, one of the first things I see on most people's websites, we are based in the UK, a lot of our calls are in the UK, maybe it's a British thing, we don't like to ask, we're not very good. We're a bit shy to actually ask what we want someone to do, so if you go on our homepage, I've just taken a screenshot.
When we first open up, just explain for those that may not know, when you first go onto a web page, I'm on a desktop, everything you see full screen on my screen, we call that above the fold. So for the purposes of today, I've taken a screenshot of what appeared above my fold. And in that small amount of space, people might not be ready to do it yet, but I counted up 11 calls to action of what, how they can contact us, talk to us, watch a video, have a WhatsApp chat, have a chat bot, give us a call, go to a different page.
Even if technically you wanted to lump this all together, and call this one call to action, to go to a secondary page, I still count that as I think, seven calls to action. So there's something for everyone. Again, if you watch this on our homepage, you will see that as a shortcut, rather than making a very long ugly list, of all the different things we do within our business; we've just added a little bit of dynamic typography, that can change as we go along, just to add a little bit of interest.
Something else we've done, which is slightly different to the norm, is inserted a vertical video. Obviously a landscape video tends to take up a lot more space across the screen, but this just looks very neat and tidy, and it just means that it doesn't take over the whole of the area. So, again I've taken a screenshot, but if we were to go back to our website, as we scroll, again this is something that's often missed by people, freeze your navigation bar.
Because there's nothing worse, especially on a one page website, where you may have made the page very, very long, when this starts to disappear, because at any time, if I want to flick out from this homepage, and go to something else I've seen, that's caught my interest, I can do so. But something that's really important is as I'm scrolling, nav bar is frozen.
Here are my services, nicely summarized, these are more likely to convert, than me going into services, and finding what I'm looking for, because actually the navigation bar is pretty much duplicating whatever is on the homepage. So back to that, and I just quickly counted up, I make it 16 calls to action, on that particular section, because we've got the nav bar, all the activity that was happening before, and various six different boxes to our key services, rolling in to find out more information.
And you'll also see that as end users, think again, think of your own behavior when you're visiting a website for something you're looking to do, we're lazy! We are becoming increasingly lazy, partly because we are time precious, we've got so much to do, we haven't got time to be looking at lots of information. So the headings, they just are very clear as to what you will be finding, If you were to dig deeper within that arrow, so make it really clear and obvious where you want people to do.
And it's not an accident that there are arrows, because psychologically our behavior, when we see an arrow, we automatically know, right, that is an action, that's positive. I'm going to do something, It's going to lead me to something that's going to hopefully help that person's solution. So it's not just a static window, that is just a link, we've got something where people know they have to do something.
I'm going to quickly just talk about importance of language, and visual cues. Again, back to the beginning of this presentation, I talked about the word trust, and what Google is after. And as a spin off of that, as business owners, that's exactly what we're trying to do, we are trying to copy Google. We are trying to build up trust with our audiences, we're trying to be liked by our audiences, and if you look at the language on our particular home page, one of the words is trust, official Google partner, recognize, our language, bearing in mind that many of our customers are based worldwide.
It can't be too colloquial, It can't be too English, If that makes sense, as if it's somebody based in the UK, the language needs to be able to appeal to whoever it may be, whose first language may not be English. So by putting in words that can hopefully connect with our audience, we're using best practices, we're using experts, certified, professional, recognize, all of this is really quite deliberate.
And just as building a website by yourself is fine, if that's all you need to do, copywriting is a whole different process, especially when you're talking about keywords, and how to use them. So pay attention to the language on your website, think about who your end audience is, yours may not be an international audience, yours may be national, may actually be very, very local, if it's something that you work within a certain radius.
So again, think about that language that you're using. And again, visual cues, so again, it's very deliberate, we could have used bullet points here, but tick subliminally in our minds, we automatically assume that to be something right, something good, something positive. So we've got some little ticks there, just again to reaffirm the message in summary of what we've got in that body text, as you will see again, even in this short paragraph, rather than it being just something to read, we've still got two calls to action.
We've got the video to watch, and we can start a conversation. So, I'm going to go to another section, of blogging, and also how to use videos within your business. Now, when I ask the conversation of, are you blogging? I get a mixed response, and the question I will normally follow that with is, who's the biggest reader of your blog, and I can normally hear on the phone, this deathly silence, or if I'm seeing a person face to face, I can see all the cogs, and wheels turning, where they think there's some kind of trick question.
It's not a trick question! It's actually just a little reminder that yes, our blogs are for good quality engaging content. Yes, we are looking for our human audience, but actually the biggest reader of our blog, is Google. Because back to golden strapline, best user experience, if Google and it's bots are trawling through the internet, finding the most relevant, and most up to date information, one of the quickest, and easiest ways, of updating your own website information, is not to change your website every two minutes, It's by blogging.
Because Google will pick up the fact that you are putting up new content, and in Google terms, that's again, back to those brownie points, that you are able to demonstrate, you are the expert, you are a leader, you are working with current situations, there's lots of things out there at the moment about the virus. And so Google will help you by giving you extra points, that yes, they are really up to date.
It's a good website, people are coming on there, they are engaging, they're spending time on there, let's help their organic SEO, again, nothing to do with the paid advertising. So that's why the blogging side becomes really important. Now, again, most people struggle, because they think they are too busy to be working on blogs, now I can assure you, I, my husband, our teams, we are very busy, but a big, big part of the work that we do, is our own content marketing.
Because by doing that, we are actually building, and growing our business, because if we're too busy to do this part, everything stops eventually and as our business, I will tell you a short story in a moment of our journey, the last two years in particular, all our enquiries now are inbound. We do not go out selling our services, looking for people to come to us for website builds, or you know, marketing in any way, because people engage with our content, normally on video, on our YouTube channel; like what we do, see how we are presenting that, and then the enquiry comes to us.
So actually they are already a warm lead, so if they're already warm from what they have seen, it's just down to us to find the right solution for that person. And the chances are, they will probably convert, If we get as far as having a conversation, I would say our conversion rate is probably 90%, because of the solutions that we present to people.
Now, yes, we were guilty of being very busy, January, 2018, I can just recap in our business, in the December of 17, I told my husband, please do not take any more studio portrait bookings. We used to have a full on working studio, we still have the same studio, I'm stood in it now, but we use it for our own internal work, and for our commercial work, we do not do any, what we call social photography anymore.
And my husband at that same time said, you know what? We need to do something about our YouTube channel, because although I'm doing all these campaigns for other people, our own channel hasn't got any content on there, nothing, nothing major anyway, and more importantly, we don't have any subscribers. So I really want to see, do a little experiment, I'm going to do 90 videos, in 90 days, and see what happens.
And we need to do it as a business exercise anyway. Now as a business, we are very focused on numbers, I personally hate what I call fluffy marketeers, who are very good at talking of what's going to happen, and having taken your money, and converted that into a sale for them, there's no delivery. We are really about the numbers, you know, how many numbers are you getting, how many calls are you getting, we are looking at Google analytics, how many hits are you getting on your website?
If you're getting the hits and they're not converting, what's wrong, because these are great indicators, these are great tools. This is not about being an ostrich, burying your head in the sand, and panicking, now I've got this website, nothing's happening. Be hard on yourself, and actually question, well, if it's not happening, what have I not got wrong?
There's something wrong, either my message isn't right, or the message isn't clear, I haven't done enough calls to action, I'm not engaging with them, or I'm just not asking what I need. It's really important that you understand where all of this fits. Now, we managed to hit, now, I'll be very honest, I think we had grand total of about 30 subscribers on our YouTube channel, just in the January of 2018.
But, by the end of those 90 days, I think it was actually close to a hundred days, Uzair had done the 90 Videos, and we had hit a thousand subscribers, that's not a very long time. But where we are today, I think we're at 11,000, or just shy, or just the other side of 11,000 now. Yes, it's taken two and a bit years, two and a half years now, as we stand, to get to that point.
But if we've never taken the first step, we'd never have got to where we are now, and it continues to grow. But more importantly, what that's done for our business, two things, the leads are inbound, and has led us to do some really interesting work, with some very diverse businesses around and the world. And as it happened, two great jobs, all to do with video marketing, tail end of last year, Uzair went to Hawaii, and California, st.
Louis, Chicago, there's a whole US string, where he needed to visit various clients, and set up campaigns, etc. It was easy just to go, partly because he needed to create the video footage, and also a second job, which was out to Dubai, some people's dream, but I'm not sure it was Uzair's, doing video footage, and then creating the campaigns for 30 theme parks, in Dubai, in 15 days.
I don't even know how to he did it, but like I say some people's dream, but I'm not sure it was his. But that's the kind of work, that we could never have got inbound, those enquiries came to us, If we hadn't have set up our YouTube channel. The other thing that YouTube channel has done, is allowed us, because you need a thousand subscribers to be able to do this, to go live, as I'm doing right now on YouTube live.
Because I'm sure some of you probably have done this yourself, very easy to go onto Facebook live, you click the button and off you go, but, and that has its uses, and that has it's benefits, but by going on YouTube live, we have a lot more control on our video. And like I say, this video being made right now, is already listed in our workflow as a job, it will go through all the processes, we will make further content from this video.
We are not just investing this time right now, and that's the end of that, there's actually a whole load of work that will go on beyond. And that's the problem with Facebook lives, your caught in that platform, you don't really have good accessibility to then re purpose that video, reuse that in other shapes, and forms, for your business.
So whatever time you've invested once to do the live, that's where it stops. That's another conversation I had with a lady, who was doing lots of YouTube, Facebook lives, sorry, at the beginning of lock down, she's doing slightly less now. I said, "what's happening with all those videos" Oh, nothing, they're just there. But you've put all that time, and effort into those videos, you should be able to reuse them and produce them again.
And again, very few things on Facebook live, actually need to be live, because unless you're standing at a football game, or something, and you want to broadcast something, you don't actually necessarily need to go live on Facebook. You're almost better off making your video, topping and tailing it, putting your logo on, sorting out any calls to action within the video, embedding it, etc, and then playing that on Facebook, because then you've got a lot more control to reuse it.
So yes, as I say, video already in our workflow, lots of process going on, I've just done a little screenshot to show you, that's big enough for you to see. Typically we've got dozens, if not hundreds of videos, all at different stages. So this is part of what we do, everything is systemized, whether it's a website build, or somebody's advertising campaign, or our own work, everything has to go through the system to make sure nothing gets missed.
So you, the end user, won't see the handholding process that's going on behind the scenes. That's our job to do that, but you can be assured that all the right things have been checked off as they need to be. There's a bit like going to buy a car, you need to know that the car has got an engine, but you don't need to know how that engine actually works.
And that's what we're doing, where we're doing the working of the engine. And finally, where does social media fit in all of this? Now, I'm going to make a little joke here, that the way I see social media, and yes, we are on Insta, Facebook, various other forum type platforms, like Quora, blogger.com, wordpress.com, whole mountain of social media presence that we have ourselves.
But it's a case of making sure you're properly dressed, before you start to accessorize. So the first thing we need is a decent foundation, our underwear, now we can do whatever we want, we can get dressed in the morning, but if we're not, we haven't got our foundation sorted out, nothing is going to work on top of that foundation, or lack of foundation.
And then the next thing is to make sure your essentials are in place, so the first thing you're going to do, is actually put some clothes on, and that's where making sure your bases are covered. Your website is sorted out, your there might be printed materials, your business card, all those kinds of things, your logo is sorted out, headshots are done, content is organized, get those essentials in place.
And then think about accessorizing, because it's very easy to go onto social media, it's a necessary place to be, It's great for your, we call them touch points, of where your audience is. But actually no amount of social media presence is going to help you, If customers or potential customers, can't see where to buy your product, or where to get your service.
Because don't forget if your audience is a hundred percent on social media, what happens if I use the example of Facebook repeatedly, if tomorrow Facebook changes a particular key aspect of their platform, that you are dependent on, overnight you've now lost your audience. And so by having your website organized, having your e-newsletter organized, I really urge anyone who doesn't have one already, make sure you've got a newsletter, e-newsletter subscription button on your website, on every page, even if you're not planning to use it.
Because back to the beginning of this conversation, if this lock down has not taught you the importance of your website, and your audience being in your control, nothing will. I have so many posts, many on Facebook, ah, for example, lots of garden centers when they were first allowed to reopen, give us a phone call, tell us what you want, and we'll take the payment over the phone, and get the goods to you.
Now, wouldn't it have been far more efficient to have, even if it's just a basic price list, up on the website, a basic form, or if you can't even do a form, do an email, please list the item you want, the quantity you want, and we will call you back, to take the payment. Instead of expecting someone to phone in and over the phone, try and work out what exactly they're trying to order, there's only so many calls you can make like that.
You get through a lot more calls, if all you're doing is taking a card payement over the phone. And so this is where people who, haven't invested in their online presence, in major panic at the beginning of lockdown especially, have had to do whatever they needed to, to survive. Now good on them for doing that, but if you were caught short and on the back foot during this epidemic, then, pandemic, even I should say, at least put it right now, nothing's ever too late.
So I think, well, actually I did neglect what I was doing online, I really should have these bases covered, It's not my thing, I will get it sorted out though, It's time to do this. That now is the time, it's never too late, start to think about what your presence looks like. And just to say that it's about finding the right balance for your business, sometimes you see lots of posts on social media, but again, if I can give one, I call it my little golden nugget.
Please remind yourself that social media, Facebook, for example, is not a search engine. If you have a situation, a challenge, a problem that you're trying to solve, you do not go to Facebook and put it in the search function. You know, I don't know, florist, you're probably more likely to ask in your own friendship groups, does anybody recommend a local florist?
And you'll get a whole load of responses, and that's fine, if that's good enough for you, but again, if it's a big purchase, chances are you'll want to verify and authenticate how good someone is, and that's going to go back to the website. You cannot do all that level of detail, I don't think through Facebook, so whereas YouTube and Google obviously are search engines, people go to YouTube to find a solution to their problem.
So it's really worth making sure your channel is sorted out. And I'm going to leave you, just coming to the end of the main presentation, with a question, a hard question for yourself. And that is "If you visited your website as a potential customer, go on to the other side, would you buy from yourself?" Now, no use asking your friends, or your family, they're not going to tell you the hard truth, they're going to want to be kind to you.
You need to do it for yourself, and be really honest with yourself, because pretend you don't know your business, you know your business, and what you're trying to tell people, but imagine, you know nothing, and you are just going to find yourself as a business. Would you buy from yourself? And for a lot of the times when I have that conversation, people will normally say, no, I wouldn't.
And that should be a big alarm bell, that actually I need to do something. So that's pretty much come to the end of what I was going to present today, I do hope that was useful. And thank you so much for staying with me. I'm just going to check and see how have we got any questions here.
Okay, so we've got an ecom question here. Yeah, so we've already responded, hubby's on it. We tend to prefer Shopify, we've had great results on there, on our campaigns that we've set up for people. You do need to look at all the other platforms as well, because sometimes there are features within there, without knowing what the exact products, and what you're trying to sell; It's a little bit hard to give you a very honest evaluation.
Please do get in touch with us separately, either privately, or by dropping us an email, and very happy to talk to you, and give you response and see what we're up to. And, I think we don't have any other questions, I think we can, double checking, round off. So thank you once again, do join us again, we are going live again later, every week day, five O'clock, where you will learn all about Google Ads and video marketing.
And of course you can ask questions as well, if you want to. So thank you once again for joining us, Thank you.
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