Episode #256: How To Make Sure Your Website Attracts & Converts Clients with Krista Walsh

Is your website a brochure with your services or is it an active salesperson that attracts and sells to your ideal clients for you?

Most wedding professionals treat their website like a digital brochure and that’s part of the reason why they aren’t booking as many weddings as they would like.

When you treat your website as a member of your sales team and use it to attract your ideal clients, qualify them, and get them to the point where they’re 90% sure they want to work with you and only you, it becomes a revenue-generating powerhouse.

How do you make sure your website is attracting AND converting clients for you like this? Listen to this episode to find out!

In this episode we’ll cover:

• What copywriting is and how it differs from content writing
• The mistakes people make with DIY websites and how to fix them
• How to make your website a sales tool that works for you
• The importance of understanding your ideal client
• What to include on each page of your website
• How to write an About page that isn’t just a bio
• How to decide whether you need a single Service page or several
• How to shift your focus onto benefits to make more sales
• The common mistakes wedding pros make with their website
• They myth that your work will speak for itself and what to do instead
• How most people DIY their website backwards
• What Krista’s copywriting process looks like

How To Make Sure Your Website Attracts & Converts Clients with Krista Walsh

Today I’m joined by Krista Walsh, who is here to talk all about website copywriting and strategy for wedding pros, which is super, super important. It’s how we make sure your website actually attracts and converts clients.

Krista is a copywriter which is somebody who essentially writes the words for marketing. So anytime you see marketing, whether it’s like an advertisement, websites, email funnels, a copywriter can write it.

There is a difference between a content writer who also might write for marketing purposes versus a copywriter, which is what Krista does. A copywriter is really in that sales zone. So getting people to take an action, usually one that’s attached to a financial investment, versus a content writer goal might be like writing email newsletters or blog posts where the goal is really to build your brand or nurture an audience and less like driving a specific action at that moment.

Something we don’t really think about especially at first with our websites is like what is the action that I want someone to take at this point? That is incredibly valuable because it makes your website much more actionable.

The Biggest Copywriting Mistakes Wedding Pros Make

One of the biggest mistakes Krista sees creatives make on their website that they’ve created themselves is this idea that the website is just there to house all of my stuff so I’m going to share the nuts and bolts of all of my services.

I’m going to welcome people to my website. I’m going to share a little bit about me and I’m just sort of going to put it up into this container of a website and hope people reach out to book a sales call with me or like purchase my services or whatever your business model is.

If you’re thinking about your website in terms of we actually want it to be a sales tool like we want it to be converting and driving leads into our inbox or onto our calendars, it’s important to be more intentional than that and think about what is that action that we want people to take and how can we structure the site around that?

How can we write every section of your website with that goal in mind? It’s really cool when you see this in action. It’s kind of hard to hypothesize how that might look like on your website but when you see a really well-written website, a really well-structured website that clearly leads you to the next step that does a lot of the selling ahead of time.

It creates, in my opinion at least, a very good client experience because by the time someone reaches out to you, they’re like 95 percent of the way there. They just need to make sure, you know, you’re a good personality fit.

A lot of creatives worry about this because they don’t want to feel salesy but when your website copy is done well, it actually feels really reassuring for people. They really feel like you’re taking them by the hand and just sort of like leading them through these actions.

By the time they get to that call, they already know how your service works. They already know they want to work with you. They likely already know the ballpark of your prices or maybe your exact prices. And they’re looking for a gut check or logistical questions they need to ask.

When we’re first starting, when we create a DIY website, it’s kind of like a static brochure in our minds, you know, like it just exists to house this information and then you get on these calls with people.

But then you’re spending your time on calls with people who don’t know what your service entails. They aren’t necessarily qualified. They may be completely blown away when you give them a price.

I meet a lot of wedding pros who are in that situation where their website isn’t selling for them. So they’re really having trouble converting people.

In the wedding business ecosystem, there is the metaphor of my website is an online home or is my online home and Krista thinks that leads to the mistakes. It feels like the purpose of your website is just sort of to house all of your services to make people feel welcome and then just sort of hands off, let them choose their own adventure through the various rooms of your website.

But there does need to be more of a strategic sales process that went into that so that your website becomes a lot more active and less passive. That’s the major differentiation is switching from that like very passive mindset to your website being like an active salesperson in your business.

The Biggest Website Mistakes Wedding Pros Make

Krista has an event where she invites people to have their websites reviewed and she has done this for a whole host of different businesses who would show up at all different stages.

No matter the business, Krista was saying a lot of the same things over and over again.

One of the first ones that Krista sees a lot is making your website about you or about your company too much. So obviously our websites are about us. That’s not wrong. People are going there because they want to learn about you. This mistake might look like jumping right into talking about your company.

Like here’s why I’m so passionate about wedding planning, or here’s why I love being a florist or like, here is what my mission statement is, you know, as a DJ or as a caterer, whatever. Or doing stuff like getting right into the nuts and bolts of how your services work, like you’re listing all the deliverables.

All of that is really like the lens is turned onto the company and it’s off of the person reading. Zoom out of this idea of my website is about me and realize that your website is in service to the people reading it. So try to step into your target client’s shoes and imagine what they’re thinking when they come to your website.

Like, why are they there? A really safe bet is that they’re on your website because they’re actively looking for somebody who offers what you have to offer. So they’re likely comparing you to another wedding planner or another photographer, or whatever your business is. So what can you say that helps them make the decision?

Like, is this person, is this company the one who can offer what I need for my day? What makes you different? How can you make a really strong, unique, emotional connection with them that shows that you actually understand what’s going through their mind at this stage versus saying stuff like, you know, here’s my mission statement, or here’s why I’m so passionate about what I have to do.

This is something that comes up a lot inside The Wedding Business Collective. We talk a lot on this podcast in my membership, about being the go-to person for somebody and making it just punch you in the face obvious when someone lands on your website, like you shouldn’t even have to scroll to see, okay, this person is for me or this person isn’t for me.

And the thing I think a lot of people don’t realize is when you do that, you get ahead in the comparison game. All of a sudden there’s literally the same copy and paste, you know, sort of websites you’ve seen for every other wedding planner. And then there’s yours, where you’ve positioned yourself as like the wedding planner for this type of person.

Krista says another common mistake is not being specific and who you’re actually talking to. It can feel scary to get specific about who you’re talking to because you don’t want to alienate more people.

So you wind up hedging your bets and sort of just like say some generic stuff about, you know, this could apply to anyone who’s having any type of wedding, like any type of couple. When you do that, what happens is you end up doing exactly what you’re talking about, which is sounding exactly like everyone out there, you end up not speaking to anyone specifically at all.

And if you’re DIYing your copy, it also makes it actually harder for you to write because you’re sort of like trying to write to this like super vague blur versus having a specific person in mind and just writing to them. So Krista’s advice is to take the risk and get specific about who it is you’re talking to.

One thing Krista does when doing client projects is interview their past clients. When she gets down to writing, she will often choose one or two of those people and actually have them in mind and like act like she is writing this website for that person because it imbues your copy with this powerful specificity that allows people to be like OMG this person is like speaking to me.

This makes it harder for your potential client to compare you directly to your competitors and make decisions based on price.

The Importance Of Headlines

Let’s talk about headlines because this is arguably the most important real estate on every website page is that headline. Usually what happens is that people will read your headlines first. They’ll kind of like jump around just reading the headlines.

And then when they get super interested in working with you, then they’ll like to go back and read the little body copy on your website and all of like the nuts and bolts kind of information. But you have to have those headlines there to even like get people to feel like it’s worth reading the rest, right?

So the biggest mistake Krista sees with headlines is throwing them away. A good example of this would be like on your homepage, your headline is like, welcome to then your business name and that’s your whole headline.

Another headline mistake would be like a throwaway headline on individual pages. You just make your headline the page title. So on your about page, the headline is just “About”. The headlines are there to give the information that people are looking for.

So Krista usually encourages people to either do one or two things with their headlines. The bottom line is, we want them to be meaningful and meaty.

So one way to do this would be to write like a newspaper-style headline. You know how, like, newspaper-style headlines are essentially giving away the gist of whatever the rest of the article says in the headline.

So whatever the section that you’re writing about is about, Just put the gist into a headline. The second option would be to write a headline that’s more like a clickbaity headline. So the goal of like a clickbait headline for that type of article is to get people to be like, “Oh my gosh, what?” And then they’re really interested in reading the rest because their curiosity has been piqued.

The goal is to make them meaningful and make sure that you’re using that real estate well.

Sometimes website builders will have you type the page title in on the back end of the site and then it’ll actually show the page title on your website. Some of them you type in the page title and then it’s just for the website schema, like it doesn’t actually show up for the user.

That’s something you’ll want to pay attention to. If your page title is showing up on your actual website, that’s okay as long as you have like an actual headline too. So maybe it does say like “about page” smaller at the top, but then it allows you to have like an H1 below it that has your actual headline.

You really don’t need to, remind them with this giant headline that that’s where they are. Use that real estate to have a hook.

What To Include On Your Homepage

Let’s talk a little bit about homepages because I see a lot of people get really hung up on this, like what to include. And it often becomes kind of a mess. So in terms of how you like to structure homepages, what do you like to include?

The first thing is the meaningful headline and we’ve already talked about what that means. Without scrolling down the page first, there needs to be something that says, you know what it is you do what you know what makes you different from other people in your industry, um, or perhaps something that calls out the specific problem that your audience has or is speaking to their state of mind at this moment.

It’s important that it’s not just an image. A lot of florists, definitely photographers, just have a giant image. The idea is, wow, my, my work is so special that people are going to be able to get it without me having to say anything.

And your work is absolutely special. The problem is the people who are your clients, particularly if you’re in weddings, the people who are your clients, they are not in your field so they really have a hard time knowing how you’re different based on your images.

I don’t necessarily understand what makes a photograph good. That’s hard for me to discern just by looking at photographs because I’m not an expert so I do need somebody telling me what makes your images so great or the experience so great for me as a layperson.

The copy does have to give people a nod of what’s going on behind the scenes. For example, maybe they even do just see your images or they see images of the beautiful wedding you planned or anything like that and they are intrigued by it. They’re drawn in by the image but without copy, you’re not setting an expectation.

They might like your work, but they need to be told like why it’s valuable so that they’re prepared to pay the four-figure investment. We forget that a big part of sales is getting people over objections that hold them back, that give them anxiety about, you know, spending $5,000 on their photography.

When we’re talking about objections, Krista frames it more like questions and it can be really powerful if you’re a copy or your website can answer those for people and make them feel safer and confident knowing they aren’t wasting their time.

By utilizing your copy to do that work for you, you get to just answer the last-minute questions and make sure like genuinely that they’re a fit. And you get to tell them like, Hey, I think this is perfect for you. Or, Hey, I don’t think this is perfect for you.

That feels better from a client experience side of things to feel like they’re making that decision for themselves versus you telling them.

When they’re reading your website copy they’re processing that they’re making decisions about how they feel about what they just read, whether they agree with it, whether they disagree with it. So in a lot of ways, they’re convincing themselves to work with you and you are not involved in this.

Writing Your About Page

Writing about yourself can feel cringey so start with a meaningful headline like Krista’s and also make sure that you are reiterating what it is you do before you get into something like a story.

So one of the mistakes Krista sees is that the about page is just like a short. origin story paragraph with like a photo of the founder. So yes, people want to know about your story, but your about page is a great place to validate that somebody is in the right place. Because if they’re going there, they are interested in you.

They’ve read through your homepage, at least they might’ve read through other pages and now they’re kind of like, okay, but what about this company? It’s a great place to like validate that they’re in the right place. So you say, here is what I do. Here is the benefit for you before you go into something like an origin story.

It is not a bio that that’s such a simplistic way of saying it. Your about page does not equal your bio. It could be important also to share the why really quickly before you jump into that story.

The next little section will be like, kind of like a why statement. What is your big impetus? This is where you can kind of get kind of philosophical, you know, I think a lot of creatives and wedding pros probably have something that is driving them and this is a really great place to share it.

A lot of people in the wedding industry are focused on that big picture, but we just don’t talk about it as much. Like photographers are focused on documenting things so that, you know, your kids, your grandkids get that same experience as you did going through grandma’s old pictures, getting to see what you looked like when you were young and what your wedding was like and being able to capture those memories. And it sounds cheesy, but that is what a lot of people are about and it’s what is valuable and important. And there’s a fear of losing that.

A lot of people want to make sure they’re hiring a photographer in this case who is going to capture everything because I only get one shot at this. And that they’re somebody who is going to fit the vibe of their wedding, like their guests, their family, because the photographer is so visible and is so interactive with people that I think it would be weird if there was an energy clash too.

There is an officiant in The Wedding Business Collective and her whole why and positioning is she’s first generation Cuban-American. She is an interfaith minister, but she knows how to write a ceremony that will make you and your partner happy as maybe not religious people, but will also make abuela happy who wants some of the tradition in there.

She can just come at it from like, I get it. I know what’s going on. Don’t worry about it. I’ve done this a million times. If you’re trying to balance all of the different, uh, maybe conflicting desires about your wedding and you see that, she’s your person.

Everyone else could do the job, but this person is going to do the best possible job for the specific thing that I’m looking for.

Writing Your Service Page

Krista says it really depends on your website strategy whether you need one service page or multiple pages. Whether or not you should have different services pages really depends on what that user journey, and what the strategy through your site needs to look like.

That depends on what your services are. Krista has a single service page for her signature offer that makes up 80% of her revenue. The other options are more of a downsell and don’t have their own dedicated pages.

But she worked with an illustrator recently who had three different services that all made up kind of equal parts of her revenue. So it wouldn’t make sense to get rid of two of them and just have one. So since she had those three equal services they did the traditional homepage.

The next step would be for someone to go to the services page and then it introduces those three services. The goal of that services page is to help people make a decision as to which specific service is for them. And then they would click out to that service page and then there’d be an action on that page.

A big problem with why a lot of our websites don’t sell is we’re not giving them the space to do it. A lot of times I see people, you know, they’ll have like 5 different services that are possibly geared toward different ideal clients and they’re all on the same page.

Like if you’re a planner, your full planning package and your day of coordination are probably for different people who want, you know, different sorts of things. They have different problems. They have different priorities. They’re spending different amounts.

So what I see a lot is we’re creating like kind of a grid and we have a bunch of things and like each one has a paragraph and then the call to action and my instinct at that point is always like, I know you’re not giving it enough space for your words to work their magic and make them want it.

Another option that could be really relevant for a lot of wedding pros would be the signature experience type of business model. So again, this is for somebody who has mostly 1 thing they offer. So, you know, if you’re a wedding planner and most of what you do is like the full wedding planning thing, you could have a website journey that starts at home and then you take people to like an experience page.

Because that’s probably a question they have where you really get into like the luxury of like, what is the experience like? And then maybe you take them to the investment page where they get like the nuts and bolts of that. And then they go to the booking page. So you could stretch it out over these pages.

I’m glad Krista said that because we don’t do this, like imagining out loud enough in our copy. It really hurts the person reading it because you’re not helping them paint a picture of what’s possible. When you do actually write that, which I know can feel weird, and I know it can feel like fluffy. Like, imagine if you don’t have to worry about anything, and this specific thing, and this specific thing.

But… You know, the person reading it is like, well, that sounds nice. I’m into that. I’m going to keep reading.

I think, you know, we don’t give enough credence to the benefits. What I see a lot of people do is just like, oh, a bullet list of features. And to differentiate those for everyone, if you’re not familiar with those terms, the features are like the nuts and bolts of what come in the package and the benefits are what each of those things do for the person.

So, you know, 10 hours of photography coverage so we’re there from you and your partner getting ready to when your dad starts busting out his dance moves, that’s what they’re getting out of it. That is always a sticking point among websites I review in The Wedding Business Collective

We’re focusing too much on the features and not enough on the benefits so it’s no wonder people aren’t converting. Especially when it comes to weddings, this is something people do like once, maybe twice in their lifetime. So they are not probably coming in with a ton of past experience knowledge so that they’re probably not coming in like looking for like, I need I have like a checklist of features that I need my like vendor to have right?

That’s probably not what’s happening in most cases. They really need to be sold on you first and be sold on the end results first, and then they can care about stuff like features. And even then, when you announce them, like, it’s probably helpful for most people, if you explain why the feature is important, like, why the hell did you include that?

Why do you need a second shooter at your wedding?

So many websites only have the packages and the features and then it’s like, book a call if you want to talk with me. Which essentially assumes that your target client is coming in with like a checklist of features that they’re looking for.

Instead, they’re thinking, are you the right person for me? I’m really glad Krista explained it that way of people don’t come in with this checklist of things because there are different types of purchases we make.

There’s like when we buy a car, when we buy a new laptop, there are certain things we’re looking for. Like, okay, do you want a hard drive? Do you want a solid-state drive? How much? What size laptop do you want? What operating system do you want it to run on?

You’re going to have those things, at least some of them, nailed down. But people don’t come into purchases like this with those specs. Just imagine like the kinds of things you say on sales calls. Like, I’m sure like you on your sales calls you’re like getting into the nuts and bolts. That’s not the first thing you talk about. You make that connection first, you see where they’re at.

And then much later on, you bring up like the actual deliverables, right? Krista thinks of your website as a process and this is such a new idea for most people who aren’t involved with building websites because like we were saying at the beginning, people think of it as just this static brochure sort of thing, but it’s a journey.

It’s a path that you’re taking people through and if you’re not thinking about that path your website isn’t going to sell for you as well as it could.

Working Backwards With Your Website

In the process of DIYing your website, the process is backward. Like usually what most of us will do is maybe we’ll buy a template first or we’ll use a Squarespace template or whatever, just based on what you like about it.

Then you’ve got all these random boxes for that. You have to like type in your copy and that’s the process. It’s really hard to create an effective website that way because you’re sort of trying to squeeze words into random places. It’s hard to wrap your head around what’s happening for the user when you’re doing it that way.

So Krists recommends starting by thinking of what’s the user journey you want people to go on. What is the end goal? Start there. Is it booking a call with you for what service?

And then, and then move backward. Like how do they need to go? Do you have multiple services that you really need to help people confidently choose which one is for them? Do you have one service that you really need to help people feel confident that your one service is worth the investment? What is happening for them?

Create this, like, flow chart in your head or just like jot it down on some paper of like the home page to next page to next page to action, whatever that needs to be. And then go looking for a template. If that’s the direction you’re going, that sort of matches that flow chart.

Then fill it out with words. So at least it sort of comes together cohesively for your goal, which is to drive leads.

Even if you are somebody who is ready to pass it off to an expert designer, a copywriter, having thought through this yourself will just like set you off like ahead of the game. Most designers definitely do this. The strategy piece is part of the work for most website professionals.

But if you come in and you’re like, this is the flow I want and they’re able to like, look at that and tell you like, yes, that’ll work perfectly. Or like, maybe let’s adjust this one thing or whatever. You’ll feel a lot more confident in those conversations.

Not having expectations clearly set, you know, not knowing what we even want as an end result winds up in us being unhappy with the end product.

Krista’s Copywriting Process

So skipping through the onboarding process, let’s say somebody is working with her already. So it would start with a pretty simple questionnaire.

Her goal with her clients is to have to write as little as possible because many of them are coming to her because they do not want to write at all. It’s just foundational information on that form so we’re not wasting time on a call with that.

Then she does a 90-minute in-depth discovery call with the client or the client and their marketing team and that’s where she asks more detailed questions.

They hash our strategy What do you want people to mainly do? One of her recent clients is an esthetician. She was telling me she is booked out in advance so is your main goal really to get more people to book with you, even though they can’t book with you for six months? And she’s like, no, I actually want most people to be buying my products, not booking me.

So this is why we need to shift the website strategy to encourage people to buy the products as the main goal. And then as a secondary action would be get on the wait list basically. So after that call, she gets to interviewing their clients.

Krista records those interviews and gets the transcripts so she can use those interviews to do voice-of-customer research which is a process of looking for patterns and what people are saying. So, understanding what the headspace was before they booked with my client, understanding how that mindset changed as they went through the experience, understanding what that decision process was like, like what kinds of things were they looking for.

What made them ultimately book with my client over a different option? All of this really juicy information could be a total blind spot for the founder of the company. You’re kind of like inside the bottle looking outside trying to read the label.

Krista does the other parts of her research, like competitor analysis, looking at different websites, and then moves on to creating wireframes and the messaging that goes inside them. So she is creating the layout of a website page.

What she delivers to people is like, okay, here’s what the navigation is going to look like, but here are the pages that people are going to get. Then on the homepage, here’s the headline. And then we’ll have a background image. And the next section is like three boxes in a row and then those are filled in with the actual words because I think it’s really hard to understand your website copy without looking at it inside the layout.

Otherwise, you know, it’s just kind of like, what am I looking at here? I don’t really understand. Then Krista has some review calls with her clients. Since she doesn’t want them to have to do a lot of writing she just gets on a Zoom call and they go through everything together and decide on the changes that need to be made.

That may be something they do a few times but it’s an iterative process of you’re starting, like you said, when most people finish, like, what, where do we want to go?

What do people care about? What do we need to address in the copy? Then you can write the copy. Then you can go put the wireframes of the website together and start piecing it together. I think one of the most valuable things people can take away from this is that the way most people approach building a website is backward.

So many people also find Krista because their designer is like, “okay, where’s your copy?” Designers need to know what copy they have so they can design around it and know what the message of the site is so it can flow and bring the message to life instead of trying to squeeze it into a preset design.

Krista does try to work with people who have the design done and need copy but it is approaching the website backwards. It can be feasible for a lot of websites though, especially if they’re flexible and adaptive with the layout.

She’s had a few people who went with truly custom design and had it custom-coded so it wasn’t on a website builder. The problem with that is if you want to change anything, like even the text on your website, if it’s custom-coded, you have to hire your developer to do that for you. It gets just really pricey really fast. Krista doesn’t think anybody needs a custom-coded website today but that’s a word of caution.

I really hope this episode has got you thinking differently about your website, differently about the purpose, the function of your website, and what it can actually do for you.

Of course, I would love to hear from you, what did you learn from this episode? What are you going to put into place in your business?

Shoot me a DM on Instagram I’m @evolveyourweddingbusiness over there and I love hearing from podcast listeners and hearing what you actually took away from this and what you’re going to do with what you learned.

If you would like even more help with this, with making sure that you are attracting the right ideal client and that they are landing on your website and it is a, oh hell yes, this is exactly who I need to book, come on over to The Wedding Business Collective and I’d be happy to help you with that!

About Krista

Krista Walsh is a website copywriter and strategist for client-based businesses, which means that she writes your website so that you not only attract more clients but also the right clients, the kind who are confident they want to work with you — and won’t settle for anyone else.

As a result, your website goes from “existing” to a lead-generating machine working for you around the clock. And you can get back to focusing on your craft, business, and impact!

Krista’s clients have gone on to book 4-figure services straight from their website without sales calls and rank in the top 5 of Google search results for competitive search terms.
Outside of her work as a copywriter, Krista enjoys watching TV shows about suburban moms who get in over their heads and end up living lives of crime.

Website: www.kristawalshcopywriter.com
Instagram: @kristawalshcopywriter

 

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Links & Resources:

The Wedding Business Collective
Episode 94: The Problem With Ideal Clients
Episode 249: Behind The Wedding Business with Mercedes Ibarra of Rev. Mercy Ceremonies
Episode 127: How Copywriting Can Help You Book More Weddings with Ashlyn Carter

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