Sacramento Sports Massage is in the business of providing assistance to people who are, typically, dealing with discomfort. It provides a therapeutic massage experience that tailors to individual issues/goals.
A search for the right partner concluded in the business choosing Integrated Designs to design and develop a digital platform that could respond to modern therapy needs and behaviors.
We partnered with Sacramento Sports Massage to design and develop a responsive website to meet the needs of modern physical therapy patients. As its digital agency of record, we extended the tech-forward experience to mobile in 2017, launching a new website.
I am very happy with how the website turned out. It ties in with my workflow perfectly!
Website Project Scope & Challenges
Project Background & Description
Sac Sports Massage was lacking an online presence although it was a functioning business for some time. Current clientele and new prospective clients alike consistently communicated a desire for a website to visit. Originally, the business had planned to launch a website under square due to budgetary constraints and ease of setup. The website launch under square was ultimately unsuccessful due to square’s limitations.
Having received quotes from other web design companies in the area, the business was careful to communicate a need for a very simple design. One challenging aspect of this project was the agreed upon timeline of thirty days when taking into account the coordination of a collaborative effort on marketing collateral for the project in the form of media.
To put it simply, the business wished to have a three-page website that looked equally good on smartphones as well as desktops (and everything in between). They needed a contact page to gather leads. Lastly, they needed a booking system that worked synergistically with their current appointment workflow.
Client’s Project Goals
- Simple Aesthetic Design
- Thirty Day Project Completion
- Three Content Pages
- Home Page
- Contact Page
- Booking Page
- Integrated Booking System
Internal Project Goals
- Speed
- Accessibility
- Content Parity
- Device Agnostic
- Future Friendly
Development Process & Insight
As the project called for a responsive web design (websites that automatically resize depending on the device it’s being viewed on), we embarked on market research to see how a customer might land on a website looking for massage therapy services.
The data shows that, in terms of time spent on devices, people are spending much more time on mobile versus desktop. But that doesn’t give you the whole picture in regards to lead acquisition for any business. For example, it is no secret that most people (over 80% in fact) perform their search for food services on mobile devices. However, a minority of people (less than 30%) look for banking services primarily through mobile.
We used Google’s Consumer Barometer to perform industry-specific analysis of the market here in Sacramento relative to the massage therapy industry. As we have learned, context is everything.
The results were helpful in providing the first steps toward developing the framework for the website. We learned that roughly 64% of people looking for massage services in Sacramento, CA began their search using a mobile phone (either through a Google search or a Yelp search). Further, we confirmed the general consensus that this is an upward trend.
The Web Design Solution
At our Sacramento Web Design Firm we have been designing both responsive websites and adaptive mobile (one desktop version & one mobile version) websites for several years now. In all honesty, both options have their merits and their appropriate place in creating a digital strategy. A separate mobile website gives you the opportunity to tailor content and even interactions to the context of your users; a responsive website allows for better content parity for users, a single website to maintain, and, usually, a substantially smaller budget. Unless we have a compelling business reason to build a separate mobile site, we prefer to save our clients money and give users a consistent experience across all devices. So, we opted to build a responsive website with specific framework details optimized for mobile devices. To further drive the point home, Mashable has a great explanation for the mobile first design philosophy that drove their redesign.
There are a plethora of details, when it comes to web design, besides making a website look pretty. If you are looking to hire to have your current business website redesigned, or will be taking on a DIY project to design your business site yourself (kudos to you for being so brave), this section serves to provide some insight toward the design decisions we made and our design values. Our hope is that after reading this you can understand what we chose to do, and the specific business reason why we made those choices. Feel free to take some of these concepts and philosophies to incorporate them into your own website design. And, if you need any help, contact us no strings attached.
A Minimal Homepage Aesthetic for a Minimalist
Designing a homepage is a tricky endeavor. Although every business should have a specific avatar of their ideal customer, the homepage will be delivered to a diverse audience. Visitors from a diverse audience could be on your website for a multitude of reasons; we need to ensure the website is executed well.
There is a strong pull to want to design homepages to attempt to convert every single visitor. But, although it may sound counterintuitive, creating a homepage that makes a strong effort to convert all visitors has statistically proven to convert at a lower rate overall. It is akin to the old adage, “You can’t make everyone happy.”
We highly suggest you narrow your focus to your ideal customer. And, by doing so, you will be able to craft messages that are much more powerful and convert at a much higher rate.
Hero Image & Headline
The first thing a visitor sees when they come to a website is content above the fold (anything they can see before having to scroll). An attractive image and powerful headline are the bait that lures visitors to the hook so that you can catch leads and grow your business.
The headline, “Feel Like Yourself Again…” is a promise to potential customers that resonates, because it communicates a solution to a physical problem they experience chronically. Every time you get up from bed and experience an immediate sharp pain to your lower back, your ankle, a knee, etc. you wish for relief, and, intellectually, that relief is easy to understand if not even easier to forget. But, more powerful than the relief from pain is the idea to suggest a promise to soothe the emotional pain that accompanies physical shortcomings. It’s a big idea.
In business, every great promotion has, at its core, a single powerful idea.
Unless your advertising is built on a Big Idea, it will pass like a ship in the night. It takes a Big Idea to jolt the consumer out of his indifference – to make him notice your advertising, remember it, and take action. Big Ideas are usually simple ideas. – David Ogilvy
To find the real reason customers buy is to find the emotional core of the promise you need to make. Although there are several approaches to writing copy that sells, there are also times when a simple, direct, promise is the best way to go. After meeting with Martin of Sac Sports Massage and pouring over their testimonials, we knew it was a promise he could deliver as he had done so over and over again.
Features Tell, But Benefits Sell
There are several different routes you can take a visitor through once you have drawn them in with your lead. Few approaches are more effective than telling your visitors what they can expect from using your product/service. You might be a charming person with a great sense of humor, but, we have to be honest with ourselves here, the only reason a customer seeks you is to to solve a problem for them. They want to know what is in it for them if they give you their business. So, unless you have a very good and well thought out reason, consider communicating the benefits of your product/service to your customers before you go into the details of your brand story (interesting as it may be).
We choose to illuminate three easy to understand benefits on the Sac Sports Massage Website:
- Better Mobility
- Better Life
- Better You
Each communicated benefit is supported by features that reinforce the intended effect of the benefit. When writing for your business, keep in mind that, “Features tell benefits sell.” Features are nice to have up front, and, certainly, some customers will want to know the features of your product/service. But, we advise you to allow your benefits a more prominent positioning in your copy.
Why?
Well, not only is feature-only marketing ineffective, but, more importantly, the best benefits connect deeply with your customers most burning desires. So, when you tell a customer that a massage therapy session is 60 minutes (a feature), they may think to themselves, “So what?” However, if you tell them that they can go back go dunking on Kevin at the community center the next day, they may think to themselves, “SIGN ME UP!”
And, of course they would, they like dunking on Kevin. You like dunking on Kevin. We all like dunking on Kevin! Right?
Calls to Action
We believe all homepages should have calls to action. To be clear, we mean that every home page should have at least one call to action and nothing more. Having more than one call to action will split up your visitors’ traffic journey and dilute the effectiveness of every single call to action on the page. Not only are multiple choices detrimental to people, but marketing studies have shown that you may lose sales if you give customers too many choices.
Sheena Iyengar from Columbia University set up a table laden with jams outside of an upscale grocery store in Menlo Park, CA. Over a period of two consecutive Saturdays, research assistants dressed up as store employees and offered samples of either 6 or 24 flavors of Wilkin and Sons Jams, a British jelly purveyor known for exotic flavors.
Prior to this study, the common marketing theory was that more choices are better for customers. People like more options, so providing more flavors should lead to more sales.
The results from this study proved otherwise.
During the time periods when 24 flavors were offered, 60% of people stopped to sample the jams, compared to 40% when only 6 flavors were offered. These numbers seem in favor of more choices, but the important question is this: which group purchased more?
Of the customers who sampled 24 flavors, only 3% purchased, but of the customers who sampled 6, 30% did the same.
If you run those numbers based on 100 people, 60 would stop when 24 flavors were offered, but less than 2 purchase (1.8 to be exact). When 6 flavors were sampled, 40 stopped at the table, and 12 purchased.
For the Sac Sports Massage website, we chose just one call to action – to book a sports massage therapy appointment. That’s the sole purpose of the website: to be a marketing asset that aids in delivering leads to the business.
Although we had one call to action, we did take care to repeat the call to action in several parts of the homepage in ways that made it stand out from the rest of the page content.
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The Results
A thorough critical analysis will be done to measure the quantifiable metrics specific to the Sac Sports Massage business upon gathering enough data to review. Anecdotally, Martin has communicated that he has noticed a spike in call backs and inquiries since launching the website.
The objectives of the web design project were met. Martin has a brand new website that gives his business an elegant yet spartan aesthetic which will help him acquire a higher percentage of leads and grow his business.
