Is Your Website the Lobby of a Four Seasons Resort or a Holiday Inn Express?
Your website is your most valuable sales and communication tool.
So how does it make your clients and prospective clients feel?
If you’ve ever stayed at a luxury resort, you know what happens to your senses when you walk into the lobby.
You become primed and eager to spend money.
You’ll order drinks at the bar, room service, spa treatments, you’ll valet your car at the restaurant, order a bottle of wine, not shy away from dessert, and be disappointed when you have to check out. You might write a good review online and you’ll definitely tell all your friends about your memorable experience.
On the other hand, if you grew up going on lots of road trips like I did, you also know what it’s like to walk into the lobby of a Holiday Inn Express.
You’ll dread the gross buffet breakfast and the subsequent all-day stomach ache, feel guilty about the $100 you spent on the room, and want to take a shower the moment you leave. You’re more likely to leave a bad review if you leave one at all, and you’ll forget about the experience the moment it’s over.
Which one is your website? Which experience does it inspire for those who view it and you?
A website is your most important sales and communication tools for a lot of very tangible reasons. Most services-based businesses see a 35% increase in appointment bookings and consultations when they create or redesign their website. Service businesses also see an increase in unsolicited positive reviews and referrals and 38% of people say they’ll stop engaging with a website if the content or layout is unattractive.
All of those very real benefits of a well-designed website stem from the intangibles. The stuff that comes from having an exquisite website that can’t be measured in a statistic.
The stuff like reputation, credibility, legitimacy, and the memorable experiences clients have with you.
The stuff that makes up the difference between how you feel when you walk into the lobby of a Four Seasons Resort versus how you feel when you walk into the lobby of a Holiday Inn Express.
Both have beds, bathrooms, showers, food, a front desk, a place to park, and people to help answer your questions. Both might see similar traffic and number of check-ins and both likely handle hundreds reservations every month.
But we both know they’re not the same thing. Because the intangibles are what experiences are made of. It’s how a prospective client feels when they view your website; how they feel when they walk into the lobby of your business.
So, does your website get your clients primed and eager to spend money? Specifically, spend money with you? Are you offering a memorable experience that they’ll tell their friends about?
Or are you the dreaded buffet breakfast?
Think your website might be the lobby of a Holiday Inn Express?
Sealevel Agency® offers brutally honest red-pen markup website audits to make sure your site is the Four Seasons. Get in touch to schedule your audit. Without it, you’re leaving thousands of dollars on the table.
