Written by Shaz Memon
When I started Digimax at the age of 18, design was very simple for me. Design marketing material that clients loved. Back then, I was designing for print media, and then later this developed into designs for the web. The formula was simple: listen to the client, start designing and with some feedback, fully understand what the client loves, and deliver that.
The beauty of this approach was that you receive a 100% client success rate – at that time. This worked well for me for 15 years, but I didn’t understand one thing – why were these clients that were so happy with my designs and service not all returning to me at the time of a redesign and going elsewhere?
My clients have always expressed love for me, nothing but compliments for my approach and my ability to understand any business challenge and turn it into a strength. Going above and beyond was in my nature, and the clients were ecstatic most times with the output (personality depending!)… yet years on, they would generally not always come to work with me again as their first choice. Some would sail the sea and try a brand new company… which baffled me.
Surely, I should be creating clients for life if I am that good, self-aware, and not willing to stop until I get this design project spot-on.
Then I had a conversation with one client, and I immediately knew where I had gone wrong. The client said, “Shaz, don’t get me wrong, we loved your design work at the time. But as our business progressed, we realised our website wasn’t as effective as it once was or could be. We have done lots of trial and error to get more conversions from the website, to have people spend more time on the site.”
For a moment I was baffled, how can I be expected to know the answers to ‘trial and error’? Surely I will learn all of this if the client works with me to get where they need to go. But then at the same time, from reading between the lines – whilst the client wanted to have ‘control’ and tell us what they liked — they wanted to be led.
We ask experts for their input and advice all the time, and usually want their honest opinion and expertise to get the best out of the process. Yet, here what I was doing was asking for the client to tell me if they liked my design and they were trusting me to deliver not just a design that fits their brand perfectly, BUT also something that can perform for years to come.
I was still quite young, willing to learn but not mature enough in my business journey to know how to handle this piece of advice. My business had around 10 employees at the time – Designer, Coder, Marketer, Bookkeeper, Customer Service, Copywriter, Tester, Quality Control, SEO Expert, and Therapist. All these 10 employees were me, I switched hats as and when I needed to.
Years of working in the same way, by years I mean 10 years to be precise… still on my own (or with 9 other employees) I reflected and asked myself – if I am so good, why am I still working from a converted garage in the back of my parents’ house and haven’t been able to grow enough to hold down more than one employee? The problem was my mindset towards excellence, risk-taking, and business.
The businesses that grow are the businesses that provide the utmost value.
I realised that if I want to create a dental marketing company that truly serves the clients that trust me, I need to deliver an extra dimension to the websites. I need to know how patients use the websites, which features work and which don’t. It took me a further 7 years to work on a ‘success formula.’
As the team grew to 35 strong, everyone understood what the ‘success formula’ at Digimax was. It was anything that worked got ‘saved’ and anything that didn’t got scrapped. We learned what worked through running heat maps on websites, tracking enquiries, and running surveys with patients. With the emergence of mobile websites, and more users surfing dental websites on phones, this recipe started changing until we found the perfect formula of what works. Whilst we are still learning daily, 95% of the success formula is proven, tried, and tested to the point we proudly claim that Digimax produces ‘the most powerful dental websites in the world’. We feel we can make this claim as we have now 20+ years of knowledge and applied learnings that go into our websites.
When you buy a handbag, no matter the design of the bag, the bag will always have space to hold something, have a zipper and have handles or a strap. These are non-negotiables for a handbag that someone wants to purchase and use. No matter how much design evolves, if Prada went to their designers and said ‘Design a bag that the world has never seen before, it has to be completely unique’… I can almost guarantee the bag will have a handle, storage compartment and perhaps a zip inside. These are functional design basics.
Same goes for a car, the evolution of cars doesn’t need any explanation… but seats, wheels, and steering are non-negotiable.
So when clients come to Digimax now, and usually most clients want to see something that’s never been done before — we advise that the most powerful dental website in the world has some non-negotiables. Over 104 to be precise, and these non-negotiables will make your practice more money. These non-negotiables are proven to get patients to enquire with you once they land on the website, ensure the chance of them leaving the site quickly is low, and most importantly so that they spend the most amount of time on your website (Which is a Google Ranking factor! Read The ultimate dental SEO guide).
We ran a study and asked 100 patients what they look for when they visit a dental website from their mobile device. The results told us:
- A clear address or location at the top of the site.
- A phone number (without having to scroll or visit another page on the site).
- A ‘Contact Us’ button (without having to click a menu icon).
- The treatments that the practice focuses on clearly (without the user having to figure out the focus of the practice).
- Google reviews.
(dentistry.co.uk/2018/10/10/five-step-dental-website-design-guide)
Many dental websites, on a mobile device, are missing the above. This causes the patient to leave the website – for which the compound impact can be the loss of £100,000’s in revenue.
Like the above, we have many more points in our success formula, which can make the difference in an enquiry worth £5,000 coming into the practice or vanishing – purely because of the style of the menu, positioning of the contact button, or the layout of the site.
Sure, the Gucci website looks great, but they aren’t the same as a dental practice that needs to engage every single website visitor from the moment they land on their site. When clients contact Digimax for SEO services (organic Google rankings) and we haven’t designed the site to begin with yet the client likes their site, and we can clearly see the flaws that will limit their progress, and burn through their spend… I share this example:
Imagine you had a store on London’s busy Oxford Street. 1000 people walked in, and 975 people walked out within 5 seconds, what would you do?
You would:
1) Review your store layout
2) Review your design
3) Review your customer service standards
4) Review your pricing
5) Question your entire business!
Yet, most websites have this problem. When we redesign a website for an established dental practice, usually their enquiries go up purely because of the application of our success formula.
Sure, some clients say to us that we don’t like how there are some similarities on your websites. For example, we always include a treatment finder on our websites, we keep the contact button towards the top right, we minimise the need to open menus on a desktop, we have a contact form on every page so if a patient lands directly on an inner page via Google and skips the homepage then they still have a quick way to contact… if you add these together it isn’t difficult to see similarity in some aspects of our sites. The same way cars and handbags have some fundamental similarities – for us these similarities mean that you as a client benefit.
For us, it costs us the exact same amount of time, and if anything it’s easier for us to not have to follow a prescribed success formula. So sure, we can design anything we want to please you at this very point in time… but we fear you will become that client that doesn’t return to us… which is how this story started. So let us over-deliver to you by providing you everything and more we have learned, so you benefit and has actually been the open secret as to why we are the world’s highest-rated dental marketing agency. We give you what you need now and can see what will work for you for years to come so your investment is recouped many times over in a short period of time.
A ’told-you-so’ story: An investor and business partner in a dental practice once asked us to completely break the mould. This gentleman, with a successful background in finance and investing, insisted that the website should deviate entirely from our usual recommendations. We advised that while the site might look beautiful, it would likely lead to failed spend in SEO and PPC advertising as the website isn’t designed to convert like a Digimax website.
Six months later, we received a concerned call from the principal of the practice. The investor had stepped back, and they explained that the website had a high bounce rate, with patients leaving within three seconds, a high hit rate but low enquiry rate, and overall patient confusion about whether the practice offered standard dental services. Despite agreeing to break the mould, we felt guilty and responsible for the outcome and felt we should have refused the request. This would have saved the practice considerable money, and perhaps earned more respect for our approach.
Since then, the site has been redesigned and old design has been completely scrapped – even though it was a work of art. The site is designed for patients, and not the principal.
We firmly believe that success lies in balancing beauty, functionality, power, and business acumen. A Digimax website isn’t just a website; it’s the culmination of 20 years of reputation and learning, designed to make you a raving fan. This philosophy has been the cornerstone of our growth with clients.