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Most sites talk at customers, but the best ones guide them. James Hipkin helps us break down how to move from inside-out messaging to outside-in pathways, pass the “six seconds to stay” test, and measure what actually drives decisions, so your website becomes the strongest leg of your growth strategy.
Your Website Has Six Seconds. Here’s How Not to Waste Them.
Let’s get one thing straight: if your website takes four seconds to load, you’ve already lost.
Not “lost some of your visitors.” Lost. As in, more than half of the precious six seconds you have to engage someone is gone before they even see your homepage. And that’s just the beginning of what most businesses get wrong about their websites.
James Hipkin has been building digital marketing strategies since 2010, and he’s seen the same problem over and over: businesses that invest time and money into beautiful websites, clever copy, and sophisticated campaigns—but still can’t figure out why people aren’t converting.
The answer? They’re doing inside-out marketing in an outside-in world.
Inside-Out vs. Outside-In: The Critical Difference
Here’s what inside-out marketing looks like: You’re standing on your rooftop shouting about how awesome you are. You’re talking about features, attributes, and all the things that make you proud of your business.
“We use the finest millstones!” “Our process is certified organic!” “We’ve been in business for 75 years!”
The problem? No one cares.
Outside-in marketing flips the script. It starts with a simple question: What problem does my best customer have?
James worked with a flour mill that was doing exactly this—talking about grain quality, millstone craftsmanship, all the features that made their product exceptional. Sales were stagnant. So they went back to the drawing board: they talked to their customers.
They discovered two distinct groups. Beginner bakers who were intimidated and needed hand-holding through the basics, and artisan bakers who wanted to geek out on the science of flour and water ratios.
The mill redesigned their website with two “people like you” pathways—one for each group. Within weeks, sales jumped 150%.
Same product. Same quality. Completely different approach.
The Three-Legged Stool of Marketing Strategy
James uses a framework he calls the three-legged stool. Actually, it’s got four parts—the stool has three legs and a seat.
The seat is your SMART objective. Specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. Pretty standard stuff.
Then come the three legs:
Leg One: Marketing Strategy (the who and the why). This is the piece most businesses skip. They jump straight into tactics without understanding who they’re actually talking to and why those people are in the market. Without this leg, you’re just shouting at the world and hoping someone cares.
Leg Two: Marketing Plan (the how and the when). This is where everyone lives—executing campaigns, posting on social media, running ads, sending emails. All the doing. But without leg one, you’re running in circles.
Leg Three: Measurement. Are you tracking what matters? Not just vanity metrics, but the stuff that impacts your bottom line?
Most businesses have legs two and three. They’re executing like crazy and maybe tracking some metrics. But without leg one—the strategy—the whole thing wobbles.
Six Seconds, Six Ways to Engage
James has a mantra: six ways to engage website visitors in six seconds or less. That’s not much time, so every single element has to work.
1. Page Load Speed
The clock starts when someone clicks your link, not when your page appears. If you’re using three or four seconds just to load, you’ve burned through most of your window. Optimize your images, minimize your code, and test your load time religiously.
2. Brand Consistency
When visitors land on your page, they need to instantly recognize they’re in the right place. If they clicked through because they heard about Rich Brooks, but land on a page that says “flyte new media” with no context, confusion sets in. Confusion kills conversions.
3. Benefit-Oriented Messaging
This is where inside-out versus outside-in really matters. Don’t tell people what you do. Tell them what problem you solve. Give them a reason to stay that’s about them, not you.
4. Clear Navigation
People need to know where to go next without thinking about it. If they have to hunt for the next step, you’ve lost them.
5. Social Proof
Millennials and Gen Z don’t respond to authority the way Boomers did. They want peer reviews, testimonials, proof that people like them found value in what you offer.
6. Mobile Optimization
If it doesn’t work flawlessly on a phone, you’re toast. No exceptions.
The Two Digital Assets You Actually Own
Here’s something James drives home: there are only two digital assets a business truly owns—your email list and your website. Everything else is rented land.
Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google—they’re all great channels. But they can and will change the rules on you, and they won’t ask permission. Remember when organic reach on Facebook was a thing? Yeah.
Your website is your home base. It’s where you control the experience, the messaging, and the journey. That’s why getting it right matters so much.
Using AI to Understand Your Customers
James recently partnered with a colleague who normally conducts $50,000 customer research studies for major brands like Wells Fargo. Together, they developed a process that uses AI to make this kind of deep customer insight accessible to smaller businesses—for about $2,500.
The key is a carefully crafted interview guide. Garbage in, garbage out, so they put most of their energy into developing questions that uncover meaningful insights. Then they have clients conduct six to ten customer interviews.
A custom GPT analyzes the interview transcripts and generates objective customer avatars and journey maps. The insights can be transformational.
James worked with a mid-sized bank in Indiana competing against Chase and Bank of America. The insights from these customer interviews completely revolutionized their approach. They changed staff training, redesigned in-store signage, and are rebuilding their entire website based on what their customers told them they needed.
Measurement: The Leg Everyone Forgets
Measurement sounds boring. It feels tedious. But it’s where the money is.
James tells the story of a chief marketing officer who slashed 80% of her Google AdWords budget. Her CEO freaked out. But here’s what happened: conversions didn’t change at all.
Why? Because AdWords was just scooping up demand that was being created further up the funnel. The real work was happening with other channels—the customers were coming anyway.
Then she tried the same thing with Meta. Lead flow disappeared. Conversions tanked.
The lesson? Measurement tells you what’s working and where in the journey it matters.
James managed Toyota’s digital budget years ago. The media team was celebrating 1-2% improvements in click-through rates. Great work, he told them. Then asked: “Has anyone looked at the landing pages?”
Blank stares.
They ran A/B tests on the landing pages. Within six months, conversions increased by nearly 60%. Not by tweaking ads or buying more media—by fixing what happened after the click.
Start With Your Best Customers
If you want to take one action today toward a better website, here’s what James recommends: talk to your best customers.
Find out what matters to them. What problem were they trying to solve when they found you? What made them choose you over competitors? What keeps them coming back?
Your best customers are heavy category users. They know your products, they know your competitors, and they’re with you for a reason. If you can figure out what that reason is, you can use it to attract more people just like them.
It’s not complicated. But it requires shifting from inside-out to outside-in thinking. It means stopping the rooftop shouting and starting to solve real problems.
Because in a world where you have six seconds to engage someone, every single one of those seconds has to count.
Transcript from James Hipkin’s Episode
Rich: Since 2010, my next guest has built his client’s business with digital marketing. Today, he is passionate about websites and helping the rest of us understand online marketing. His customers value his jargon-free common-sense approach. He explains the ins and outs of digital marketing in ways that make sense.
Today we’re going to be rethinking our websites and how they impact the customer’s journey with James Hipkin. James, welcome to the podcast.
James: Hey, Rich. I’m really happy to be here.
Rich: James, you’ve said that most marketing problems aren’t about execution, they’re about a lack of strategy. So what do you mean by that?
James: Okay, so when I audit marketing programs and websites and campaigns, this is the most common problem I see is an absence of strategy. And the analogy that I use is the three-legged stool. And the three-legged stool actually has four parts. There’s the seat, which is the smart objective. And a smart objective, is it specific? Is it achievable? Is it relevant? And is it time bound?
And then there are three legs. The first leg is the marketing strategy, and that’s the who and the why. And that’s the piece that’s often squishy. Then there’s the marketing plan, which is the how and the when, and everybody’s enthusiastically executing all kinds of stuff. But if they don’t have the first leg, the who and the why, then they’re just standing on their rooftop shouting at the world at large.
And then the third leg is measurement. Are they actually measuring the stuff that matters, the stuff that impacts, the stuff that really, et cetera? Especially during a recessionary or economic downturn, spending is not what will kill you. Waste is what will kill you. And without measurement, you don’t know what’s working and what’s not.
So that’s why I say that the most common problem I see is an absence of strategy. That really, people don’t understand who they’re talking to and why they’re in the market that they’re in.
Rich: All right. I’m not sure if this ties into that, but you often talk about inside out versus outside in marketing. Can you explain what that means and the difference between these two approaches?
James: Sure. Inside out is what I just alluded to a second ago. The business owner is standing on his rooftop shouting at the world at large about how awesome they are, right? Talking about features, talking about attributes, talking about the things that they do.
Outside in is the why leg in our three-legged stool. That’s, what is the problem that your best customer has? What is the journey that they are on? What are the processes, the questions, the obstacles they need to overcome? That’s outside in marketing. And it’s even more important today than it has been in the past.
Back when we were marketing to boomers, boomers didn’t grow up digital. They were willing to take guidance. They were willing to take advice. They were willing to be instructed. Millennials and Gen Z, no. That repels them. They don’t want to be instructed. They want information. They want to make their decision based on their research. They’re much more influenced by peer reviews and testimonials than they are by authority.
Rich: So what are some signs that we might be stuck in an inside out mindset and not realize it?
James: Stalled growth is a pretty common characteristic. You’ve gotten to a certain point, you’ve got a quality product, and you know your business really well, and you’ve got interpersonal relationships with customers, and it’s gotten you to a certain level of success. But as you’re trying to broaden your messaging out to the audience people, if people aren’t up taking that messaging and joining in what it is that you are doing, that’s a pretty good sign that you’re just adding to the noise.
Rich: Just to anchor this for us, do you have an example or two of a business that has made the shift from inside out to outside in, and maybe what happened because of that?
James: There’s a couple of examples. I can give you a B2C example from our own client base. We work with a flour mill. They make stone ground organic flour. A very high-quality product. Chefs all across San Francisco use this flour, but all our marketing was talking about the quality of the grain, the quality of their millstone, all of these things that were features.
And they came to us and said, look, this is not working. So we went out and we analyzed their real audience, and we discovered that there were two cohorts that were really important to them, beginner bakers and artisan bakers. And the beginner bakers had a whole set of problems that they were trying to solve. And those problems were quite distinct as compared to the artisan bakers who were very experienced, and they were more interested in the science behind the flour and water and all kinds of things.
I’m not a baker so I’m not really qualified to talk about this, but the concept was we shifted their marketing around, we redesigned their website, and we created two people like you pathways, that called out to these subsegments and invited them to follow a pathway to a landing page that would give them more information. And within weeks we saw 150% increase in sales.
Rich: Awesome. Yeah, that totally makes sense, where you’re really helping each one of those groups on their customer journey.
And it also is a good segue, I want to talk a little bit about website, something that you’re an expert in. It’s often been said that you only have a few seconds to grab somebody’s attention online. So what are some of the things that either you did with this client or other key elements that a website needs to do so that they can engage visitors quickly?
James: Yeah, that’s a great question. Because you hear a lot of noise about “you don’t need a website anymore”, “you can do this with a landing page”, or et cetera. The reality is, there are only two digital assets that a business owns, their email list and their website. Everything else is rented land, and they can and will change the rules on you, and they’re not going to call you up and ask you if it’s okay.
Optimizing your website so that it brings value to your customers is key. My little shtick here is, six ways to engage website visitors in six seconds or less. That’s a lot of things you need to do, and six seconds isn’t very much time. And oddly enough, the first couple of ways are not the sort of thing that people think of instantaneously.
Number one is page load speed. The six seconds doesn’t start when the page appears. The six seconds starts when the page is asked for. And if you’re using up three and a half, four seconds for your page to load, you’ve just burned more than half of your time.
The second question in the consumer’s mind is, am I in the right place? And that’s where consistency, brand colors, messaging. If they’re looking for Rich Brooks because they’ve heard about you through networking or your podcast or whatever, and they get to your website and it has some name on it and a logo that they’ve never heard of before, suddenly they’re thinking about, am I in the right place? You don’t want them thinking about those things. You want them to instantly recognize; I am in the right place. Because what they’re looking for is what they’re seeing.
And then the third piece of it is, and this is outside in, versus inside out. Give them a benefit-oriented reason to stay. Lead with their problem. Tell them that you understand their challenges. There’s a very well-known and frequently utilized copywriting framework called PAS. And PAS is an acronym for problem, agitate the problem, solve the problem.
And that structure is a very outside in structure because you’re not leading with “we are awesome”. We’re leading with this is the problem you have, and this is why it’s painful to you. Now let me tell you about my solution. And so often I see websites and it’s like this big headline around, we’ve been in business for 15 years. That doesn’t solve my problem, right?
The next thing is, give them a reason to believe. I can’t tell you how frustrated I get when I see testimonials stuck in a carousel at the bottom of a page. One powerful testimonial, reason to believe high up on the page is going to do a lot more for you than six buried in a carousel at the bottom of the page. Or use a creds bar, or you’ve got a small bar right immediately below the hero section that has logos from clients that you are working with. Now if they’re recognizable in your industry, that’s going to be powerful.
I have one client who is a very senior consultant and coach. And one of his logos in his creds bar is the Apple logo. Do you know how hard it is to get permission to use Apple’s logo on your website? Do you think that’s going to give this guy some credibility, a reason to believe?
And then the next one is, make their pathway clear. And this is where it gets a little controversial. I’m trying to get people to stop saying “call to action”, because “call to action” is inside out Boomer marketing. It’s marketers shouting at customers and telling them what to do. Customers don’t want to be shouted at and they don’t want to be told what to do. And especially Millennials and Gen Z.
Now what you want to create is a people like you pathway that calls out to subsegments in your audience and invites them to learn more by following this pathway. Functionally, a pathway and a call to action is exactly the same thing, but the mindset shift is really important. You’ve shifted from inside out marketing to outside in marketing just with that.
Rich: So James, can you give me an example? Like a call to action might be, “use our calculator to find out your savings” or “talk to one of our service representatives today”, something like that. So what might take its place with a more of an outside in mentality.
James: What might take its place might be… I’ll give you an example of another client that I’ve worked with. She was a professional public speaker. People would pay her $10,000 to come to their event and speak. When we analyzed her audience, she really had three audiences. There were the event project managers who were booking speakers. There were HR professionals who were looking for professional communicators who could come in and help their executive leadership team be better communicators. And then there were senior level executives, mostly women, who had suddenly found themselves on stages and didn’t know what to do, they were looking for coaching.
Now, other than the gender being basically the same, all women, there was no similarities between these three groups. So we created three pathways on the website. The first pathway called out to event project managers. Are you an event project manager? And there was a picture of an event and a harried headset on person, event manager. And then there was a couple of sentences that talked about what they could expect to learn. And then there was a button that said, “click here”.
Then we did one for HR professionals, “Are you an HR professional, do you have an executive team that can’t communicate?” A couple of pictures, a woman in her office surrounded by files and computers, and then a couple of sentences, and I named it and put a button. Then, “Are you a senior level executive?” So there was a senior female executive standing on a stage looking terrified, right? So we created three pathways.
And it worked like gangbusters because it really, when somebody selects a pathway, two very important things have happened. They’ve told you exactly who they are. And they’ve given you permission to give them more information. That is so much better than regurgitating everything you can think of onto the homepage and hoping that they’ll sort it out.
Rich: It also feels like it’s one of those little yes’s that lead to bigger yes’s. Yes, I am the harried event planner. So once I’ve committed to that path, I’ve committed to the fact that I’m interested in learning more, to your point. , a great point.
James: Exactly. They’ve given you permission to tell them more about it.
Rich: Now James, the two examples you’ve given us so far are the mill, and then this coach/ speaker. Both of these people seem to have a pretty good senses of who their audience is. But let’s be honest, I’m sure you’ve worked with a lot of clients who may not be quite as crystal clear on who their audience is. And they may not have the budget to do some deep customer research.
AI is becoming a tool that a lot of us are using these days. How might you recommend that we use AI to better understand our audiences if we don’t have the budget to go do deep research on our own?
James: There’s a couple of ways. One of the things that we will do is Reddit can be an excellent source for customer sentiment. You have to be careful when you’re using resources like Reddit, but it’s a bit like doing political research with telephone surveys. So who you’re really researching is the small percentage of people in America that still have phones, right? So you want to be careful, but it is a good place to reach the sentiment.
So if you can find the subreddits, like for example, with our bakery client, the reason we discovered what to talk about to those three cohorts was we went into Reddit and we said, over the past 12 months, what are the common problems that people are facing? And that gave us a really good handle on the challenges that these different groups are facing.
The other thing you can do is, and I know this is a bit shocking, pick up the phone and call your customers. You know who your best customers are, call them up and talk to them. They’ll tell you if you ask.
Now, you can get slightly more advanced. There’s a concept called the ‘customer avatar; and the ‘buyer’s journey map’. Back when I was managing multi seven figure budgets, we’d had the resources to spend $50 grand to go out and do this kind of focus group research, and the quantitative research, and smart people who are analyzing it, et cetera.
What we’ve done with AI is I partnered with an old colleague of mine who actually does the $50,000 studies for brands like Wells Fargo and people like that. And she and I partnered, and we put a lot of energy into developing an interview guide that a client can use to interview their clients. And this interview guide, it’s the old garbage in, garbage out thing. So that’s where we put most of our energy, was in developing the interview guide.
We also developed a custom GPT that we will analyze the recordings, the recording transcripts of the six to 10 interviews with customers and generate an objective customer-based avatar and journey map that a marketer can then use. And it’s, the insights can be powerful.
We did this study with one of our clients who was a bank Indiana. And they’re trying to compete with Chase and Bank of America and all the big banks. The insights that got out of this study revolutionized how they’re thinking about their go to market. They changed their way, they’re training, their staff changed, the way their in-store signage was being developed. We’re in the middle of redesigning their website right now, because it just opened up a whole avenue of positioning for them that they hadn’t considered because the customers told them.
Rich: Yeah. One of the legs that you mentioned of your stool is measurement. And measurement is one of those things that people either love or avoid at all costs. A lot of small businesses skip it because tracking either feels overwhelming or they’re not sure what to do with it. What do you feel the key metrics are that matter most when evaluating your own marketing success?
James: That’s a more complicated question than it might appear. The knee jerk reaction is conversions, and clearly conversions are very important. But I mentioned before the importance of the journey.
There was a thread in LinkedIn that I said saw recently, and I actually quoted from it in an article I just wrote a couple weeks ago. This woman, it was a chief marketing officer, so she was describing the story of how she canceled her Google AdWords budget. She didn’t cancel it completely, but she slashed about 80% of it out and the CEO started freaking out. Why have you done this?
And she says the thing is, we took all this cost out and we didn’t change our conversion flow. AdWords was scooping up the interest, and that was being created further up the funnel. We were getting that anyway when I did the same thing with the Meta budget. Our lead flow disappeared and our conversions dropped off the table. So measurement is really important. What you’re measuring and where you’re measuring it can lead to a lot of powerful insights into what’s working and what’s not working.
From my own past, I remember I was managing the digital budget for Toyota, and the media people were working hard and getting 1% and 2% increases on different things, in their click through rates and all this sort of thing. And they’re getting very excited about this. And I looked at this and I said, “That’s awesome. Congratulations, that’s great work. Has anyone looked at the landing pages?” And blank stares. So we went and looked at the landing pages, and just subjectively we said these are awful. And we started doing A/B split testing on the landing pages to try to figure out how can we optimize these to perform better. And within six months, we’d increased conversions by close to 60% through measuring and optimizing the landing pages.
So measurements, yes, I know can get tedious. But my God, it’s powerful. And remember it today, this is not about reducing spending, it’s about reducing waste. And how do you know what’s wasteful if you’re not measuring?
Rich: Amen. Alright, if we wanted to take one clear step today towards a better website, where would you suggest we start?
James: I would suggest you start by getting into a conversation with your best customers. Find out what matters to them, and then adjust the messaging on your website to reflect that. Because you know your best customers, chances are they are heavy category users. They’re very knowledgeable about the category. They’re knowledgeable about your products. They’re knowledgeable about your competitors. And if they’re there with you, they’re there with you for a reason. If you can determine what that reason is, you can use that to attract other people who are like your best customers.
Rich: Awesome. James, for people who want to learn more and check you out online, where can we send them?
James: I’d love to talk to business owners, I’d love to help them achieve more with what they’re working with. If you go to VIPchatwithjames.com, you can get 30 minutes on my calendar. We’ll have a virtual cup of coffee, and we can talk about your business. We can talk about your marketing, we can talk about the things that you’re doing and the things that you could be doing. I’ll learn something. You’ll learn something. It will be a positive thing.
Rich: Excellent. We’ll have those that link in the show notes. James, thank you so much for coming by today and talking about websites and the customer journey with us.
James: Hey, Rich, it’s been a pleasure. I hope it has been useful, and these are simple things, but they matter.
Show Notes:
James Hipkin is a website strategist who helps businesses turn their sites into clear, measurable customer journeys. Since 2010, he’s focused on strategy first, then execution, explaining digital marketing in practical, jargon-free terms. James is known for his “outside-in” approach, six-second engagement framework, and measurement mindset that cuts waste and lifts conversions. Grab a spot on his calendar for a strategy call.
Rich Brooks is the President of flyte new media, a web design & digital marketing agency in Portland, Maine, and founder of the Agents of Change. He’s passionate about helping small businesses grow online and has put his 25+ years of experience into the book, The Lead Machine: The Small Business Guide to Digital Marketing.