Websites exist for the sole reason of attracting people to your business and converting them into loyal customers. But despite creating an engaging website, it still doesn’t act as the client magnet it should be. Wayne Mullins, the Founder and CEO of Ugly Mug Marketing, has the perfect solution to this problem. Joining Eric Anderton, he shares his 3:53 P.M. Formula in building an informative and eye-catching website that attracts potential customers. Wayne dissects everything you need to consider in the website-building process, from the right content to produce, the proper designing method, and the best way to align yourself with your target market.
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Wayne Mullins On The Best Formula For Making Your Website A Certified Client Magnet
“What makes up a good website?” It’s a great question. One that we’re going to answer with our returning guest, CEO of Ugly Mug Marketing, Wayne Mullins. I bring him back on the show because he knows what he’s talking about and his company has developed over 700 websites for a variety of different clients. He has deep insights into what it takes to construct a successful website that attracts the right people with the right projects to your company.
We’re going to go through a step-by-step formula that is very simple to understand yet it’s not easy to execute. The execution will be absolutely essential but in this episode, you will get that formula. You will be able to see how that relates to what your website is like and you’ll be able to put together an action plan to make some progress. Enjoy my conversation with Wayne and if you’d like to share this with other people, I would appreciate it. Share the interview and also give us a rating or review wherever you get this episode. Thank you for reading.
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Wayne, welcome to the show again.
Eric, thank you so much for having me. I’m looking forward to our conversation.
The reason I’m having you back on is that I appreciate the clarity that you bring to the often-murky world of marketing. I’d like to ask you this question. Why is it that people’s websites don’t work for them?
When we think of a website working, there are two things we need to think about. One is the technical side. “Does the website run? Can it be pulled up on a phone? Does it look great on a tablet?” All those questions, does it “work?” The reality is most websites work in the technical sense. The other side of this equation though is, does it work for what it was intended to do, which is helped you attract new clients. That’s what the goal of a website is. It is a piece and tool in your marketing toolbox. The sad reality is most websites simply don’t do that job. They don’t help generate leads. They don’t help bring clientele in.
Websites must attract new clients. It is a piece and tool in your marketing toolbox. The sad reality is that most websites don't help generate leads. Click To TweetIf I’m a contractor and I’m working on projects that are anywhere from one million to hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue and I’m thinking, “Is my website a tool to engage with people?” It’s not like Amazon, where they’re going to, “Click here now to purchase a $1 million construction contract.” Give me some insights about how a company like that should be viewing the conversion journey that someone might go on as they come to your website.
The first thing is this, we live in a world where if you’re looking to go buy a new pair of jeans or whatever it is you’re looking to go do, one of the places you’re going to turn to is this magical thing called Google. You are going to Google the name of something that somebody recommended to you. You’re going to go see what you can dig up or find that either validates or invalidates what you believe to be true about this company, this organization.
If your website or the presence you have on the web should not detract or distract from your reputation. If your web presence is not in alignment with your values and reputation that you have in the marketplace, in other words, you have a reputation for phenomenal quality and attention to detail and then someone pulls up your website and there are typos all over it or the pictures are all fuzzy and grainy, you’re miscommunicating.
What you’re trying to tell the marketplace is, “We stand for high quality. We have attention to detail,” but then what I’m seeing isn’t matching that. That’s why it’s very important that we pay attention to this tool in our toolbox because although it may not be the thing and the place, where our work comes from, it is certainly a tool that when put together well, we’ll help build our case. It will help build that trust in our company.
You’ve helped many people put together these types of websites in a variety of different industries. Is there a particular approach that you use when you’re engaging with a company to help them get that clarity on their website and achieve their goals?
For context for anybody reading, to date, we’ve built well over 700 custom websites. When I say custom, what that means is we start with a pen and paper. We start there. We don’t go find a template or the coolest new design out there and copy that or buy the framework for that. We start with the scrap sheet of paper. Here’s the approach we like to take when we begin this process. When you think of your website and if your website’s not producing the results that you think it should or if you’re going to redesign, rebuild a website, this is the formula that you need to remember.
It’s very simple. I want you to look at your watch or a clock, find the time now. Take a second and do that. What I want you to do is I want you to look at your watch, if you’ve got the old analog type, I want you to look at where the hands, the minute and hour hand would be if it were 3:53 PM. That is the magic formula right there. I will walk through briefly what that magic formula is.
The first three is this, in the world nowadays, science now shows that goldfish have longer attention spans than humans. I don’t know how they test this but that’s the rumor. What we know to be true on a website is you’ve only got three seconds to make that first impression and that is why it’s so important to pay a ton of attention to what is “above the fold.” In other words, when your web page loads, before anyone scrolls, that’s above the fold. You’ve got three seconds to either validate or invalidate the messaging that you’ve been out into the marketplace. It’s crucial. “What’s above the fold?” The first thing people see matters a lot. That’s the first three.
The five is what we would call the critical five. It doesn’t matter if your web page is 1-page long, if it’s 300 pages long, you’re going to want to ask yourself these critical five questions about every single page on your website. This is how we approach building a website. It’s that important. First of all, we want to ask, “Who is here?” Not who’s “on your website,” but who is specifically on this page on your website.
Can you give me an example?
When people come to your Homepage, they are looking to get somewhere. We like to refer to the Homepage as an airport terminal. It’s the hub. It’s not designed to keep people there. It’s designed to help people get to their gates as quickly and efficiently as possible. The gate is where the transaction and other interaction takes place. Your Homepage is the gate. The person who lands on your Homepage is going to be a different person than the person on your About page. The person on your Contact page is going to be a different person than what was on the About page.
What I mean by that is it could be the same person but as they move through your site, their mindset is in a different place. As they read more about your company, hopefully if your page is designed well, you’re building trust with them. They’re starting to like you more. There are maybe some social proofs intersperse throughout there that build your credibility. Their mindset is now different than when they were on the Homepage. Let’s say they go from the About page to the Contact page. We’re in a different mindset. We’re a “different person” at this point in the process.
That first question then is, “Who is here?” What is the second question?
The next question is simply this, “What do we want them to do? What is it that we want them to do?” and it’s very important that you get clear page by page. What we want someone to do on the About page is going to be different than what we want somebody to do on our Previous Projects page. That’s going to be different than somebody who’s on our Contact page. The what is going to be different.
You only have three seconds to impress a website visitor. Click To TweetThe next one in the critical five is, after, “What do we want them to do?” it’s, “How do we want them to do that thing?” Is it click on something? Is it watch a video? Is it fill out a form? What is it that we want them to do on that page? Is it we want them to go from the About page to then look at our Previous Projects? We want to think through what is it that we want them to do.
The next one in the critical five is, “When do we want them to do this thing?” The natural tendency is we think, “It’s immediate.” We want people to immediately do these things but when you step back and you think of your website as a marketing tool, we realized that we don’t necessarily want people to do these things immediately. We want to build trust and further engagement before they pick up the phone, begin calling and asking a million questions. We want to lead them through this process. Your website’s a sales tool and we want to use it as such. We want to answer the question, “When do we want them to take that action?”
When you said that what popped into my mind was this idea of a filter. How can you set your website up well so it filters the right people to contact you and filters out the wrong people so to speak?
It’s not a simple answer but I’ll give you a few things that help automatically filter on your website. One is messaging. It is so critically important. If you only do projects that are $300 million and up, your messaging needs to make sure you’re communicating in that way so you’re not getting a bunch of inquiries for people doing $5 million and $10 million projects. It’s a waste of your time and their time. Messaging is important. Part of messaging is both the content and the words used as well as the images that are used on the page.
We started off in, “Who is here? What do we want them to do? How do we want them to do it? When do we want them to do it?” What’s number five?
Number five is the money one right here. If you leave this with nothing else, if you get this one thing, it will not only change the way you approach your website but it will change the way you approach all of your marketing. That is simply, “Why should they do what you want them to do?” Not from your perspective. We know that you think your company is great. We know that you have a great reputation.
We know that we have “the best team in the business” but why should they from their perspective take the action that you want them to take? it’s about getting into their mind. It’s about understanding their pains and desires. Understanding why not from your perspective because we know that one already but from their perspective. It’s the most important question.
How do you figure out number five then?
The problem is we don’t take the time to figure it out, that’s number one. We make assumptions that we already know and understand our customers. The way that you do that is we use what’s called a customer avatar. We build out a customer avatar. We want to know everything about them, what keeps them up at night, what brings them joy, their family, kids, their grandkids, all of those things because what that helps us do, helps us see through their lens and eyes. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing but we become so jaded because we do what we do every day. It’s tough to flip the switch and be on the other side of that equation or view.
How do I find that out then? Does that mean I’ve got to pick up the phone and talk to them? What’s the best way to do that?
The best way to do that is, “knee-to-knee” sitting across the table from someone, knees touching and getting to know them. Everyone’s a little bit different in this. Some people tend to be more solely focused on business. It takes very intentional efforts on my part to lean into this other side or the more personal side of this. Again, I’ve said this before but people don’t do business with businesses. People do business with other people. We lose sight of that.
If someone’s coming to my website and they’re looking for construction services, whoever they are but how do I communicate that personal aspect of it through my website in such a way that I maintain my professionalism and yet still come across genuinely and directly to that person or my ideal client?
I’ve got the answer to that or what I think is the answer to that but it’s coming up in our 3:53 PM formula.
People don't do business with businesses. People do business with other people. Click To TweetWe’re at the point where you’ve described the three seconds, we’ve done the critical five, anything else you want to say about the critical five before we move on there?
That’s it. It sounds like a ton of work but what I can tell you is this, if you want your website to work for you, you have to work for it initially. The critical five is work. No doubt about it. It’s work but it’s worth it. It’s an investment.
Unfortunately, that’s why some people don’t do it, and I do think that they need someone like yourself someone who’s an expert in marketing to hold their hand through this, to help them get through the process because it does seem so overwhelming, particularly if it’s not your specialty.
I do agree sometimes having that outside perspective allows us to see things that otherwise we’d miss or take for granted and overlook.
Let’s move on to the next part of the formula. We’ve done the 3 and the 5. What’s the next one?
The last three is this if you or I go to any design school in this country or anywhere in the world, they are going to teach you what is called the three C’s of design. All designs contain three C’s. The first C of design is the Composition. The next C of design is the Contrast and then the final one would be the Content. If you or I were to go out to most designers, web or graphic designers out there and we think about the way they approach things, the way that most of them are trained to approach things is they want to be creative.
These are highly creative people. They want to design things that are different, unique, beautiful and stand out from the pack. What they by default do is begin their design process with the composition and the contrast. As a marketer, the most important thing about your website is the content.
What do you mean by content specifically?
Content specifically would be the words and the images that are used to convey your message.
Words and images to convey a message and then tell me what you mean by composition.
The composition is going to be the structure of the piece. To put it in building terms that would be the architectural blueprint or the schematics. That’s the composition of the piece. The contrast would be, what materials are we going to use that are going to add some contrasting elements? “Is the outside going to brick, metal or stone?” Those are going to be contrasting elements. The contrast would be paint colors inside. “Is it carpet or hardwood?” Those are going to be some contrast or the coloring.
Why is that important on a website?
The contrast is important because it’s going to give the website depth and a certain feel. Websites have a certain feel to them and that’s often picked up or determined by the contrast that is used on the page. What happens is when we go to a web designer or graphic designer for a poster or a booklet, whatever it may be, they don’t care about the content.
They’re going to layout the layout or the composition first. They’re going to figure out what colors can they use or you allow them to use, they’re going to use those colors and then what they’re going to do is say, “Let me figure out how do we squeeze in the content that you’ve given us now into what we’ve designed.” It’s backward. You must first understand what’s the message. “How much space do we need for the message? Is it a paragraph or a page?” Our design must support the message, not the other way around.
How can I clarify my message? What do I do to get to that point where I’m solid on the content?
We take all of the jargon because in the industry myself included that we get so hung up on using these terms and these words that mean a lot to us but mean nothing to everyone else out there. The way to get solid content and the approach we take is we say, “Draft out your content and we’re going to take your content. We are then going to give it to someone who has no clue who you are or what you do. We are going to ask them to read the page and rewrite what they think you’re saying in 1 or 2 sentences.”
I’m writing a blog post or an email to my list and I will use terms and jargon that I know they understand and part of the reason I do that is to establish credibility with them. In my mind, if I were to take that and to give it to somebody else and ask that test that you said, they may not understand all the jargon even though it’s not even that technical. Can you help me with that part?
As a general Rule of Thumb, my counter would be this you’re writing regardless of the niche or the industry that you’re writing for. In this case, we’re talking about construction. It should be written at about a seventh-grade level. All you have to do is google like, “What level is this writing at.” There are free tools out there, you paste it in and it will tell you.
We speak in certain ways, even within the industry that may be unique to the jargon and the words that you use. We want to boil it down to its simplest form. It’s not necessarily about removing words that are important, it’s about making what was a page into a sentence or two so that it’s crystal clear that the message is being communicated.
You have someone draft out their content and then have another person who doesn’t know anything about the industry, take a look at that and see if they can summarize it.
That doesn’t mean we’re going to take whoever this random person’s content is and drop it in. We’re going to use that to help refine the way we looked at the content. We’re going to use their feedback to help us say, “I overstated this by way too much. I went on way too long about whatever this was. Here’s how I can condense this down to its purest simplest form.” If you want to go study this, go study what apple does. Pull up their website and look at the way they communicate.
They’re communicating very technical things. Megabytes and gigabytes of RAM and I don’t even know all the things they’re communicating but they’re able to break it down in such a way that a layman can understand it. If you keep diving in, you can get all those big fancy words. You can find out the hertz and the retina display and all these things, it’s all there. They communicate in such a way that if that’s not important to you, it disappears. It’s not so long and heavy that you have to weed through it to figure out what speaks to you.
From a content perspective, what they see initially is fairly rudimentary but then they have the option to dive deeper if they want to?
That’s exactly it. It goes back to the airport terminal analogy. We want to get people as quickly as possible to the details thereafter.
If you want your website to work for you, you have to work for it initially. Click To Tweet3:53 PM, above the fold, the first three seconds is critical and then those five critical questions that you had and then the three C’s of design. Some people are googling their own websites. They’re looking at what they’ve got. They’re thinking about what you’re saying and they’re like, “There’s this huge gap here.” What are the first steps you would say to someone, “This is the first thing you need to focus on to begin the journey to make your website more attractive to the people that you’re looking to attract?”
The end of our 3:53 “formula” is this, it’s the PM at the end. P stands for a Picture is worth a thousand words. What that means is you need to hire a professional photographer. You don’t need to have your cousin’s nephew come out with her iPhone. You don’t need to have your foreman on the project running around with their smartphones snapping pictures. You need a professional photographer because a picture is worth a thousand words. Don’t forget it. I can’t stress that enough.
The M in 3:53 PM is that it’s important to remember that your website is merely a Means to an end. It’s not this thing that, “If we build it, they will come.” It’s merely a tool in our toolbox. We want to make sure that that tool is useful and it’s serving us well in its capacity. We shouldn’t expect things of this tool that it can’t do or can’t perform. That’s the 3:53.
Going back to your last question, “Where do I begin?” This is where we begin. Number one is I would have someone, an outsider who doesn’t know you, your business or your industry even, pull up your website in front of you and bring up the first words, adjectives that come to mind. What do they believe to be true about this company based on what they see? What comes to mind? “Does it look cheap or expensive? Do they pay attention to detail? Does it look outdated? Does it look modern?” What are the words they would use to describe the company behind that website?
What happens when you do that is it separates this thing called a website from what it’s doing, which is communicating something. It’s either validating or invalidating something. It’s a wonderful litmus test. Bring somebody in or pull somebody off the street. One of the things that we’ve done and we do on a fairly regular basis is we will go to places where our client’s ideal audience congregate.
Pre-COVID, for example, we were building a website for a cattle rancher. We went to a cattle auction and we brought some web concepts, print it out and we went around and said, we’re going to show you a few things here and we want you to tell us which of these is your favorite, which speaks to you and why. We got out there amongst the customers to understand what resonated and communicated with them.
I know my website isn’t doing what it needs to do, perhaps I’m thinking about a redesign. What should I stay focused on in terms of how long this is going to take and what my final experience or outcome should be?
My answer is going to be very similar to construction because something here is being built. As we know with construction, it often takes longer than we anticipated. That’s the reality of it. As you go through the process, most people don’t know what they want until they see what they don’t want. I’m sure a lot of people reading can relate to that. If you think about your customers or clientele, they often don’t know what they want until they see something, “on the wall,” the way the finish looks, etc. and then they say, “That’s not what I want.” The same thing is true with your website as you begin going through this process.
A typical website for us is going to take about 8 to 12 weeks to complete from start to finish. We’ve got some quicker than that and we’ve got much longer than that but that’s going to be a rough timeframe to think about. You think about a quarter on a calendar, a three-month period is what you want to think in the back of your head.
It’s ninety days. Please remind us where we can get in contact with you regarding help with website design and all these things we’ve talked about.
The simplest place is on our website, that’s UglyMugMarketing.com. There, we’ve got links to our social channels, email addresses, phone numbers and all that stuff there.
Are there examples of websites that you’ve built that they can take a look at and all that stuff?
You can click around there. We’ve got several on there that we’ve built. You can click through and take a look at them and how they function, what they look like, etc.
Wayne, thank you for joining me here. I appreciate you giving us some detailed and practical advice on how to improve your website.
Thank you so much, Eric. I enjoyed our time together.
Important Links
- Ugly Mug Marketing
- https://www.Facebook.com/UglyMugMarketing/
- https://www.Linkedin.com/in/FireYourself/
- https://www.Amazon.com/Full-Circle-Marketing-Wayne-Mullins/dp/057897651X
About Wayne Mullins
Wayne Mullins is a husband, father of four, founder, and author. Over the past twenty years, he has had the privilege of scaling multiple companies and has helped hundreds of entrepreneurs do the same with their companies.
His marketing agency, Ugly Mug Marketing, has won the praises of some of the leading influencers in the business world such as Neil Patel (Founder of Quicksprout), Chris Voss (author of Never Split the Difference), and Greg McKeown (Author of Essentialism and Effortless).
