January 12, 2025Amplify Your Brand: The Role of Awareness in Online Growth
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You know your business needs to grow online—but where do you start? Do you redesign your outdated website, or do you dive into marketing to bring in leads?
It’s a question we hear often, and the answer isn’t always straightforward. Like the classic “chicken or the egg” dilemma, it depends on which piece is holding your brand back from its next breakthrough.
How Trust Starts with Your Website
First, we need to unpack why you need a trustworthy, usable website. Just having a website isn’t enough—especially in today’s trust-driven digital marketplace.
A website is your digital storefront, and thanks to the pandemic, it might be the only storefront a business has. It helps potential customers understand who you are, what you offer, and why they should trust you with their business.
It is also a destination for your digital marketing campaigns to connect people with taking the next step to work with you.
People will judge your website within seconds based on a variety of factors, like page speed, trustworthiness, usability, and errors. You want to make the best first impression because it’s likely you won’t get another one.
Websites, in short, can make or break your ability to connect with and convert users.
The Two Essentials for Digital Success: Trust & Awareness
When clients ask us whether they should invest in a website or digital marketing first, we start with a better question:
Which one will build trust and earn awareness the fastest?
If your website isn’t trustworthy, your marketing won’t convert. And if you’re invisible online, your website won’t get seen.
At PHOS, we believe that by investing in both trust and awareness, brands win online. And it starts with knowing what’s holding you back—a lack of visibility or a lack of credibility.
What Happens When You Skip the Website Redesign
It can be tempting to invest in marketing first to improve your lead generation immediately. But a subpar brand or website could be holding your business back from the best possible results.
For example, take one of our clients. They chose to keep their current website, which wasn’t an ideal one, and instead invest in inbound marketing strategies. This resulted in their website failing on them, preventing them from running Google Ads for months, and harming their online presence.
However, we were able to turn this around. In our case study, we show you how a new website with PHOS, coupled with our marketing strategies, improved their conversions by 47% in just six months!
Is Your Website Holding You Back? 6 Red Flags
When we work with organizations to understand their most pressing digital needs, we’re evaluating their current website to see if they actually need a new one. The following are the most common signs that it’s time for a new website.
1. It’s Outdated
The most obvious consideration for a new website is how it looks. If it looks like it was built when the internet was first invented (three decades ago), I hate to break it to you, but you’ll need a new website.
A good rule of thumb is that you need a new website every 3–5 years. This accounts for changes in design, modern advances, and cleaning up the baggage that websites naturally accumulate over time (just like that one closet in your house).
Outdated websites do not communicate trust, and they can make users question whether you have the most up-to-date business practices.
2. Page Speed Is Terrible
The next obvious factor that could contribute to your need for a new website is the page speed. Page speed is important in two ways: 1) it impacts user experience, and 2) it’s a ranking consideration for search engines like Google.
As a society, we want things now. That’s why it’s no surprise that Amazon Prime is one of the most popular shopping websites.
So when your website takes multiple seconds to load, you’re likely losing out on potential customers who didn’t want to wait for your website to load. Depending on your industry and audience, you’ll want to prioritize a fast-loading website on multiple devices to meet people where they are at the most.
And even if a customer is willing to wait for your site to load, they might not even find your website if you’re not ranking in search results. Search engines prioritize fast-loading websites, so don’t leave your website to fend for itself.
More than 50% of users are likely to leave a website if the page takes more than three seconds to load. (Source)
3. It Isn’t Mobile Friendly
Speaking of being available on multiple devices, your website has to be mobile-friendly. One of the biggest mistakes you can make is designing a new website that looks wonderful on desktop but is a nightmare on mobile devices.
64% of total website traffic comes from mobile devices. If your website is unusable or broken on mobile, you’ll be turning business away.
4. You Can’t Manage or Update It
Another reason to design a new website is that you can’t manage your current one. Not being able to update, change, or use the backend of your website not only creates frustration for you, but it can also be frustrating to your users.
If information is incorrect or outdated, it erodes trust, making it harder for your users to trust your website, and could be the reason someone chooses not to work with you.
What good is a website if it can’t change and update with your organization’s evolution?
5. Low Conversion Rates
Many times, a website could be slowly cutting into your results. On the surface, you might think the website is usable and professional enough. But have you looked at your conversion rates?
Are people calling you from your website? Are your forms being filled out?
A declining conversion rate could point to your website not being designed or maintained properly to warrant continuous leads. Or something more sinister, like a broken form or dead links, could actively be preventing people from connecting with you.
6. Your Brand Has Changed
Lastly, brand inconsistency can be a costly thing to your digital success. If you’ve gotten a new logo or brand refresh and your website hasn’t reflected that, you could be actively detracting from your trustworthiness and creating brand confusion.
If you didn’t see your website on that list, you might be wondering, “Can I go ahead and focus on marketing?” Maybe. Let’s explore that next.
Does Your Website Build Trust or Break It?
As we mentioned above, if your site still looks like it belongs to the early days of the internet, it may be time for an upgrade. A good rule of thumb: websites age faster than we think. Every 3–5 years, a refresh can ensure your site reflects your brand’s growth and today’s best practices.
Think about your brand’s attributes, customer expectations, and price point of your services. Those are the things we’re taking into consideration when helping you determine if your current website can be leveraged in your marketing strategies.
Ask yourself the following questions to get an understanding of how usable your site is:
- Is your website user-friendly, but it’s not ranking in search engines?
- Do you have the ability to update it and change the content?
- Does it match your brand and messaging?
- Are you proud to put your name on it?
We’ve worked with many organizations to improve their results without redesigning their website. But this is because their current website does not erode trust, and we have the ability to make necessary changes or updates in order to best position it to support our marketing strategies.
The worst thing that you could do is invest in digital marketing and have your website actively detract from the effectiveness of your campaigns.
Find Out Your Brand’s Trustworthiness
If you want a more objective way to understand your brand and website’s current trustworthiness, use our Brand Trust Tool to see where you are scoring high and areas for improvement.
Still Unsure? Let’s Talk Strategy
Whether your next best move is a website refresh or a marketing boost, we’ll help you make that call with clarity.
Request an Audit from Our Team
Our team is happy to offer a complimentary audit to help determine if you should invest in a new brand or website before digital marketing. Or we can help you understand where your current marketing is falling short.
Request your free audit, and let’s make sure your digital presence is doing everything it should to build trust, generate awareness, and drive results.
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