Websites and Sales Pages - What's the Difference, and What Does Your Business Need?

One of the questions that come up all the time is what's the difference between a website or a sales page or a sales funnel? It's interesting how this gets confusing because I think a lot of people used to think that a website was the main thing that they needed. 

So, when you start a business for the first time, you say, well, I have to have a website because people are going to go and search potentially for what I do on Google, and then they're going to find me. That was a way of you being able to grow your business, you know, certainly about building awareness. But sales pages or sales funnels are something that have become certainly more popular in recent years and for good reason. 

Because you see a sales page is designed with a very, very single focus, it's designed to either sell a product, to have a very specific call to action from the page, or it's designed to build your email, your database, your list and quite often, if you have a look at a really effective sales page, it doesn't have any distractions, it takes that consumer, that prospect, that ideal customer through a journey all the way through the story, the narrative to that call to action. So, quite often you won't see any links out of there, any buttons to press, any other things that can distract that ideal prospect from doing the one thing that you very much want them to do. 

Now, if you think about that in contrast to a website, a website has lots of different things going on, it has an about us page, sometimes it might have resources, it has case studies, it has, you know, probably a range of your products and services. But if you look at it, it's got multiple pages, it's got multiple things that you can play with, and really, it's about engaging your audience. I often say that websites are best for credibility build. So, if someone wants to know more about you and to get a feel for what you do and have a richer experience, in many cases, a deeper experience, then that is what a website is designed to do. The problem with a website though, is it's not very, very good at converting, quite often, there are just too many distractions, people get there, they get confused about various things, they go off down rabbit holes and they often leave the website before they've actually done what you intend them to do, which is to kind of progress forward in some sort of relationship, commercial relationship, whatever.

So, the question that comes up a lot is do I need both? And my answer to that is it depends. It's not a straightforward answer. I have a website suyb.global which actually is a core website, but it has two very specific sales pages, sales funnels within the website. 

What I do there is I'm getting people to understand more about me, various services, various things we offer, but once they are clear that we can help them through that first, I suppose, the discovery of information, then we want them to go to the sales pages. If you're a smaller business and you can't afford a full-blown website because they tend to be more complex, then my advice is always to start with the sales page, because that's the thing that's going to get your prospect to understand more about you in a more precise way, and then get that call to action also very clear. So, think about this, there are a number of stages that someone has to go through. 

The first thing is, imagine that your ideal customer has no awareness of you whatsoever. I call them strangers, so they might hear about you, you might be on a podcast or some social media. The first thing they're going to do is seek you out, so you want to send them somewhere, so that stranger then becomes a visitor. Let's assume they go to a sales page, once they're on that page, as I said, that page has only got one task and that is to turn that visitor into a lead, so you want them to absolutely know what you're offering, and you want them to take the next step. Once they're a lead, and once they're on your database, then you have many more options about how you can communicate with them, you can engage with them, you can inspire them, you can have a call with them, all sorts of different things.

So, the most important thing is always to get that data. I often say that you build engagement through your top of funnel activity, through awareness and different things that you're doing, but you sell from your list. So, building a really powerful list that you nurture, that you do things with so that you can drive to commerciality, drive to close, it's really, really vital. 

So, as I said, no straight-forward answer, and it's a really, really good question. 

Do you need a website? 

Do you need a sales page? 

What's the difference? 

As you can see, the clear difference is a sales page is single-minded, a website has lots of things going on. In an ideal world, certainly, as your business grows and it scales, you should have both and you should have both working in the ways that they're designed to work. One is about credibility, the other one is taking someone through that journey, converting them, and then obviously trying to get them to become a customer at some point.  So, hope that was useful. If you'd like to check out how we do it, have a look at suyb.global and that will show you a website and a sales page working in unison.

Nick Bradley

Scale Up Your Business

www.suyb.globa