Welcome to Consulting Website Design 014: McKinsey part 2.
In today’s episode, the consulting website/pages we’re looking at is McKinsey’s article page, services page, and contact page.
(Slides)
Transcript
I’ve written about McKinsey’s website before, and I think it’s the best consulting website design on the internet.
And even though McKinsey is a huge firm, there are many lessons that independent consultants and boutique firms can learn from looking at their website.
In episode 2 of Consulting Website Design, I talked about McKinsey’s homepage, and the point I was making was that 80% of their home page and nearly all of the links take you directly to their articles.
In today’s episode, I’m going to walk you through how their articles lead you to their services page, and then finally, their contact page.
So here I am, on McKinsey’s homepage — I’m going to click this article under “Most Popular” — “Why Digital Strategies Fail.”
Now once I’m on the article, the first thing you’ll notice is just how well-designed this page is. We have an original, relevant graphic, very nice, easy to read typography and text, some more graphics to supplement the article, and their calls to actions are very tasteful and non-disruptive.
Your prospects are going to be much more likely to stay and read if the design of your content is easy to digest.
The longer they stay, the longer they have the opportunity to explore your expertise — and Google will actually rank your content higher the longer users stay on it and read through it.
And you’ll notice how the article is full of these little links — called internal links — that will take you to related articles. Not only does this provide a more enjoyable reading experience, but it also keeps prospects on your site longer.
So McKinsey also has a subscribe button, which helps grow their audience…but what I want to talk about more is this “Would you like to learn more about Digital McKinsey?” call to action down a third of the way down the article.
Given that the topic of the article is on digital strategies, and they can assume that the reader is interested in digital, it makes sense for McKinsey to introduce this call to action to learn more about this part of their business.
So let’s click through Digital McKinsey…
And you can see that this is really a services page. And unlike most consulting website services pages, they’re talking to you and demonstrate their case studies instead of a laundry-list of generic services. It’s a really, really nice services page that’s connected to some of their thought-leadership.
And of course, if you click on one of your goals, let’s say Turbo-charge marketing and sales, you’ll get yet another, great landing page with relevant copy, related insights, and at the bottom, a contact action.
Finally, on this contact page, we have their lead-capture mechanism. But as you can see, the path to getting here was very deliberate, logical, and connected to your interest as a reader.
Now obviously an independent consultant and small firm probably don’t have the resources to have a separate page for every single aspect of your services…
But you absolutely can implement a similar path for your prospects within your articles.
I think this quote by Jon Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing gives an excellent overall summary of content marketing, especially for consultants:
Done well, marketing via content can eliminate the need to sell. In fact, no one likes to be sold anything, but they do love to buy. Your marketing materials can do the job of selling if you focus on creating a set of materials that provide an education for readers—an education that compels them to buy.
When you have great content like this and it’s connected to the other pages of your consulting website, by the time prospects have read it and are reading about your services or are filling out your contact form, they already see you as the expert practitioner — and that’s half the battle when it comes to sales, meaning your content can do that half of the sale for you.
Action step
Today’s action step is to take your most popular piece of content, which you can find in Google Analytics, and then use that piece of content to start linking to the other parts of your website.
Link it to your other relevant articles, your services page that is focused on the topic of the article, and even your contact page. Your goal here is to keep your prospect reading, keep them interested, and draw them in towards taking that next step.