How to drive conversations and get more sales via your website with Ross Davies

Your Dream Business

English - December 13, 2021 00:00 - 57 minutes - 52.6 MB - ★★★★★ - 34 ratings
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Previous Episode: How speaking can grow your audience and boost your business

Next Episode: How to get your business systems and processes in place with Sonaya Williams

Today’s episode of the podcast is an interview with Ross Davies who is the owner of Strafe Creative, a digital design agency focused on conversion-led design. We talk all about websites and how people convert via your website, along with some changes we can all make to help increase conversions.

KEY TAKEAWAYS COVERED IN THE PODCAST

If you are a serviced-based or online business owner, you want your website to make someone feel comfortable to get in touch with you.Rather than just telling people what you do – you need to answer objections and make it obvious.Make it really clear what you want your user to do and when.Give website visitors a reason to click a CTA.Have tailored landing pages that are contextualised to where they have come from.It’s not just about signposting, it is about the destination you are sending them.We are sometimes so busy explaining what we do and building our credibility, we don’t consider the other reasons why someone may not sign up.Rather than avoid talking about other competitors – why not compare with what you offer.Build credibility with mini case studies and testimonials. Use credible logos!Don’t just ask for a testimonial – tell them what you want to push and how the testimonial could include triggers for this.Start to collate all the frequently asked questions you receive and then have a page on your website to answer all of them.If you have a product-based business – add testimonials from people who have previously bought from you, sell the process and what goes into your product, show the packaging and what is included, and answer objections that people may have.Think about upsells and things you could do to say thank you when someone buys your product such as a personalised video.Collect birthday data to be able to remarket to anyone who has previously purchased.

THE ONE THING YOU NEED TO REMEMBER ABOVE ALL ELSE…

Visually answer objections that may stop people from signing up – this will help drive conversions.

HIGHLIGHTS YOU SIMPLY CAN’T MISS

An introduction to Ross Davies 07:04How to encourage someone to get in touch with you 20:26Answering objections for service-based businesses 28:11How to drive conversions for product-based businesses 44:47

CHECK ROSS OUT:

RESOURCES MENTIONED

The Marketing That Converts Academy

Handmade gifts - In Craft Corner

Transcript

Hello and welcome to this week's episode of the podcast. So we're in December. Are you ready for, you know, the big day. I used to love, I do love Christmas stuff. I used to really go all out and ever since I had my own business, I do find myself like trimming down things that I just haven't got time and energy for and being crazy about Christmas is one of those things. So I have to say that mine is probably a lot of last minutes. Also we have a lot of birthdays in end of November, beginning of December, my daughters and my husband's and my stepdaughter's. So in our house, it's like you can't have those things you can't, uh, celebrate Christmas until those things are done.

So anyway, but anyway, I...

KEY TAKEAWAYS COVERED IN THE PODCAST

THE ONE THING YOU NEED TO REMEMBER ABOVE ALL ELSE…

Visually answer objections that may stop people from signing up – this will help drive conversions.

HIGHLIGHTS YOU SIMPLY CAN’T MISS

CHECK ROSS OUT:

RESOURCES MENTIONED

The Marketing That Converts Academy

Handmade gifts - In Craft Corner

Transcript

So anyway, but anyway, I hope you are far more organized than I am, which I suspect you are, which is good. So this week we've got a really good interview. My lovely friend, Ross has come onto the podcast to talk about websites, but not websites from a building website or what you should have on it. We're specifically looking at how people convert on a website.

And we used, me as an example, and we used one of my members as an example, who has a physical product. And he just gave such good ideas, like things that maybe I hadn't thought about things that were super helpful, things that are like fairly easy to do with some changes that are more about texts or images or buttons that actually are not that difficult to do.

So I think no matter where you are in your business, whether you have someone do your website for you, like I do, or whether you're doing it yourself, I think you're going to get lots from this. Also because he's a very dear friend we have quite a laugh, which I always enjoy, like laughing. It's one of my favorite things and he was good, fun to interview.

So let me do his bio. Ross Davis is the owner of Strafe Creative, a digital design agency focused on conversion lead design. He loves to find new and innovative ways to improve processes, whether that's in way he runs his business or the design process with his clients, identifying objections and issues in any process can help streamline it and it's the systematic, did, could he have chosen like a more difficult bio for me to read, like all the big words, systematic approach, which has led him to some fantastic client results.

Ross is also the author of the Paper Plane Plan which delivers into growth hacking for service industry. And he's a proud husband and father and a huge baseball, basketball fan and loves Thai food.

There we go a little bit of the info about Ross there. So. We have such a funny story to tell you about his book. It is hilarious. And like I said, this is going to be really good. I don't want to say anything else about it. Some really good tips. You probably going to want to have a pen and paper handy. Uh, some great stuff in today's episode. So here we go.

So I am very pleased today to welcome my very dear friend Ross Davis to the podcast. Hello Ross, how are you doing?

Ross: Well hello, I'm great. Thank you so much for having me cause like we're used to senior Institute professional lemo. I loved it, it's great.

Teresa: It's normally when the times we hang out normally involves some drink somewhere, that's normally.

Ross: From a professional point. Like we'd been in event, we'd been there then, or you'd been talking about and then drink.

Teresa: Then we drink. So I start off professional and then it starts to slide as the day goes on.

Ross: Goes on to downhill.

Teresa: Oh, my bad. And she says, if I could remember Ross, I'd be confident of it. That

Ross: There's no difference. That's fine. And that's proper. That's all right.

Teresa: I love it. I love it. So Ross and I lots of time together. I think at first was it Atomicon? No, here it was.

Ross: It was Atomicon.

Teresa: The first time we hung out properly. You know, the first time this was brilliant. Right. This was so good. Didn't I have your book.

Ross: Yes.

Teresa: Right. We've got to tell that bit, right? This is brilliant. So I had never met Ross and someone had said about this book and I had got the book and I'd taken on holiday. While we were on holiday, my husband and I were having a photo shoot and I thought I'm going to do some, have some books in the, in the photo shoot. So I'm holding a Gary V book which is quite unusual because that's not really after reading it I realised, he's not necessarily for me, but anyway, and I give my husband your book to hold as a prop. Obviously I'd take there to read and we have these photos done. And then, uh, I meet Ross and Ross is very sweet to me and was like, oh my God, I get to meet you.

Ross: You're fangirling.

Teresa: Which is so, so great. And I sat there and Ross gets on stage to speak and he brings up his book and I'm like, 'Hang on a minute. I recognize that book.' So I then sit through the rest of this talk, scrolling through my phone, trying to find.

Ross: So you wasn't listening.

Teresa: Sorry, I wasn't paying attention because the, the excitement of, oh my God, this is brilliant. And by the time he'd finished, I'd sent him a picture of my husband. And one of the pictures were holding the books in front of our faces.

So you can't even see it's us and genuinely, it could look like me and Ross.

Ross: In the light. Yeah. It just felt like we were on holiday chillin.

Teresa: You were reading your own book.

Ross: I very egotistically reading my own book. Like this is great. What a read.

Teresa: Who wrote this be, he is amazing. Honestly, it was so funny. It was like, it was a sign. We were meant to be friends and then.

Ross: Super excited as well by that.

Teresa: And we had, so that was actually MarketEd.Live I liked, that was the first time I went on, then Atomicon, and then Atomicon we ended up, you very sweetly walked me back to my hotel because I was staying somewhere from different from where we were and we had some drinks and it was great. And then, uh, the next time we met up and I had raved to my husband about you.

And you know, when, like you think, oh, I hope cause my husband came to, it was Cambridge social day. My husband came and I thought, you know, when you rave about someone and you think, I hope they see what I see. You know what I mean? Cause you just don't know sometimes.

Yeah. He thinks you're funny. You better make him laugh. Anyway, my husband just adored you.

And when I said I was interview you today, he was like, 'No way.' So excited, so excited. So anyway, that was our little story about how Ross and I met. Ross, normally I start this podcast by asking you to introduce yourself to my audience and tell my audience. How you got to do what you're doing today.

Ross: Yeah. So I'm obviously Ross I'm the MD of a company called Strafe Creative. Where a digital design agency. Some maybe means that we're doing things between kind of branding, web and digital. So it might be platform work, UX work, or, or an app or something along those lines. That's kind of where we, where we kind of do it. And I guess we've been running for 11 years now. We started this off.

I think the big thing for us, that we were trying to create work that not only looked aesthetically beautiful, but also the converted and drove sales. And we did that for a couple of years when we first started off with it. Wasn't all of a sudden this term like appeared, could like CRO, so conversion rate optimization, and we didn't have a name that we know is layouts.

And we started reading about, and I was like, we do this. Like we never gave it a cool fancy name. This work about analyzing our traffic is moving on the site and then tweaking the site to increase the likelihood of the user doing the thing that we want to do. We've been doing that for a while. So we kind of got to get a little bit ahead of the curve on some of those things.

And I remember, yeah, we got to kind of talk about it. And I guess we were only intentionally relatively experts. And I feel because we were already doing it before we realized it was the term. And that's when you, when we met, that's kind of how I've always been talking and that's kind of where I was going. So it doesn't always need to be as technical as it was that there's obviously some really great lessons and wins that every site can possibly do. But yeah, that's kind of the main part really.

Teresa: So before, obviously 11 years, you obviously started pretty much straight out of school I imagine Ross.

Ross: I'm not that young. Sadly. Maybe I look young, but yeah, there's a couple of years typically as the industry. And then yeah, we set up about two years, two years after that.

Teresa: I think it's your maturity maybe.

Ross: Oh thanks. Yeah.

Teresa: They're going to get really, yeah, they're getting it so sad or just us laughing for this podcast but, you know, we have fun. So I hope you enjoy it. And so, yeah. Would you always been in a marketing space or a web space before that?

Ross: No. So I did science-based design engineering at university. And, um, I know that sounds super fancy. And a lot of it was to do with like basically designing progress products with ergonomics in mind. So designing it for the user and how things should be held and moved and how someone interacts with it. Um, and I guess it was, uh, taking that thought process and how people use stock book, pieing it to a digital space.

That's kind of what we started doing when we first set up in this, this makes me feel old as a kind of tell this story, but, um, This was like at the height of Dragon's den. So obviously for anyone, oh, you know, shark tank or wherever they are. Yeah. So, so our idea was I was like, I'll design the products.

And then my business partner was going to do brand. Um, the way I did our big USP was going to be, not only could you have the product, you could have everything. See if the go-to Mercury, you could go to Jack and Stan and you could try and get on it. Then we realized nobody wanted products designed by a student with no experience in the real world.

Surprisingly but they were happy to pay for branding and web and slowly over the first year or two, we dropped product and we just have these focus on what we did. And that was where I guess my learnings and lessons from when I didn't university and education supplies. We started to apply those, those learnings to digital. And that's, that's kind of where we started really. So live with it for.

Teresa: So where you learn these are?

Ross: No, no. So straight after university, um, I worked for a company called Jagex who navigate for the RuneScape. The mighty RuneScape, uh, which was this huge game that no one ever heard of in the UK, but was absolutely huge in America and China little places. And they had like 10 million active users or something back in the day before, um, online gaming was really such a thing.

So I did that for a few years, but then we always had me at Patrick Metta University. We always had this idea of setting something up. And we just said, I think you probably know this about me. I'm probably overly logical sometimes, but we have this suspicion one day in the pop obviously. And it was something along the lines of neither of us have wives.

We don't have any kids. We don't have house payments. Worse case if this goes completely tips-up. And we can just move back home and we'll be debt, but we're just, weren't even a year at Uni. So we were already in that and quite a lot of our friends really live it out. So we were like, let's just do it. Let's just set up and just see what happens.

And, and we'll go from that. Right. So incredibly, like I say, my head very logical, so like worst case, if it goes wrong, we're in that, but we're already in debt so crack on. And that's what we did. And then we have this little tiny, prominent Nottingham City Center where we did absolutely everything from. Um, and then we got our first office, which was honestly, it was an actual cupboard so much, so that.

Uh, me and Patrick sat next to each other where you couldn't open the door. Unless I moved my, my, my, uh, chair out of the way, it was very cozy, but again, it was like 150 pounds a month or so in mental with everything included only like, um, we have an office space and obviously all we did was we had a meeting room that we could take people to. They never saw the office.

Teresa: You couldn't have got three people in at once.

Ross: You could physically live on three people that we couldn't get to. It was just like a running joke that we had was like, oh, we can't physically hire people, even if we wanted to. Sit you here. And that was, that was where we all started. And, yeah. So there's now 19 of us.

Teresa: That's amazing.

Ross: So yeah, so a big difference. I still don't necessarily feel responsible enough to have those people working for us, but the team is absolutely amazing. And, uh, yeah, it's relying on those guys on this.

Teresa: They full-time employed that team?

Ross: Uh, so 16 of them are, uh, and then three of them are...

Twitter Mentions

@ross_davies