748 Ari Krzyzek:

Our business websites are our calling cards, often the front door into our solutions and the value we provide to our customers, and yet many brands and businesses struggle with everything from their messaging and user experience to their SEO.  Today we talk to branding and conversion expert Ari Krzyzek [shure-sheck] about the common mistakes many people make with their websites that costs them in lost conversions and customer engagement.

MELINDA

Hi, I’m Melinda Wittstock and welcome to Wings of Inspired Business, where we share the inspiring entrepreneurial journeys, epiphanies, and practical advice from successful female founders … so you have everything you need at your fingertips to build the business and life of your dreams. I’m a 5-time serial entrepreneur who has lived and breathed the ups and downs of starting and growing businesses, currently the game changing social podcast app Podopolo. Wherever you are listening to this, take a moment and join the Wings community over on Podopolo, where we can take the conversation further with your questions, perspectives, experiences, and advice for other female founders at whatever stage of the journey you’re at! Because together we’re stronger, and we soar higher when we fly together.

Today we meet an inspiring entrepreneur who helps Fem-Tech startups, direct to consumer companies and women-led brands transform their websites into platforms that convert and unlock business opportunities.

Ari Krzyzek [shure-sheck] is the CEO and Head of Strategy at Chykalophia (see-ka-lo-fia).  Ari serves as a branding expert, UX consultant, and professional peer in support of fellow female entrepreneurs with her business and also through the #1 ranked private business incubator in the world, 1871 Chicago, and Chicago’s global healthcare startup incubator, MATTER.

Is your website converting? Does the messaging resonate with your target customer? Are you engaging customers in a community that adds value for them? And is your website easily found when people are searching for a solution you provide?

These are some basic rules of the road for any business and yet many entrepreneurs and business owners struggle to present a clear message that engages and converts.

Ari Krzyzek is the CEO & Head of Strategy of the branding & digital marketing agency Chykalophia ( see-ka-lo-fia). Her agency helps businesses who want to achieve their goals with their brand through strategic positioning. They attract ideal clients for the project by working on the digital marketing strategies, brand strategy & design, and escalate client’s website for success. She also hosts the podcast Halo FemTech, focusing on tech applications for women’s health and wellness.

She has over 10 years of branding and design experience in multidisciplinary projects, ranging from graphic design, packaging, to digital & UI/UX design. She has transformed businesses visions into a tangible form that help set their business apart from their competitors. As her diverse client roster attests, the one constant in her work is spot-on design for major impact every time.

Continuing her creative exploration, she enjoys peer collaboration, as well as guiding & mentoring women entrepreneurs. Accordingly, she founded Creative Women’s Co. to share her expertise and facilitate meaningful exchange among enterprising peers in today’s vast marketplace. She’s also a member of committee leaders in Women Tech Founders Chicago, mentoring other entrepreneurs at 1871, and she’s also an advocate for creative women entrepreneurs in the Chicago creative ecosystem.

Today we talk about branding, messaging, community building and much more, so let’s put on our wings with the inspiring Ari Krzyzek, and be sure to download the podcast app Podopolo so we can keep the conversation going after the episode.

Melinda Wittstock:

Ari, welcome to Wings.

Ari Krzyzek:

Thank you Melinda. Thank you for having me.

Melinda Wittstock:

What inspired you, Ari, to really focus your business on women led businesses and also fem tech brands?

Ari Krzyzek:

That’s a good question. People ask me a lot about this question and one of these days I will definitely put that into my about page. But here’s the thing. I grew up in a very practical culture back in Bali, Indonesia. I was born and raised there. Growing up, I didn’t really see a lot of role model around women entrepreneurship or career for women or advocating for women growth in general beyond being seen as a wife or as somebody who would take care of the kids and things like that. And the big thing that people don’t know is that my upbringing brought me a lot of different moments where I just need to find out where can I find the resources I needed to grow as a woman entrepreneur. And when I did decide to leave Bali and move here to Chicago, Illinois, at first I was really scared, to be honest with you because it’s a whole new different environment.

I don’t know anybody here, but yet I was welcome in such warm by a lot of the women entrepreneurs here in Chicago and area. So that was the start when I realized how powerful it is when fellow women entrepreneurs or fellow women business owners support one another. I didn’t gain any mentorship when I was in Bali, but here there’s just so much resources. I did not originally targeting women exclusively, or even women brands when I started my career in my business. But because of a lot of the support, because of a lot of growth that I have gained from the support from mentorship or even people opening doors, giving me introductions left and things just grew and my business grew. And in a way it just feels to me that whenever I do decide to work with fellow women entrepreneurs, as I would fellow business owners, we click in a sense that we can see each other’s vision, we can see how we collaborate.

And in a way that collaboration just feels rather exciting for me. So I continue to this day on to support other fellow women entrepreneurs with their visions, bringing their vision to life, their business or their brand, and also expanding the growth for their business. But when I do also look at it really closely is that why can’t we work with fellow woman entrepreneurs in supporting them in their growth? Because I feel like it’s finally the time that we have so many business owners out there who are women who are starting things from scratch, who are seeing the bigger pictures and trying to create an impact. So I want to be one of those people who can help them get there.

Melinda Wittstock:

And so what are some of the biggest issues that your clients have. Start to paint for me the before and after picture because you come in and you help them with their websites, whether it’s helping them to drive more conversions or sell more things or be more discovered, all the different things. So what are their biggest problems?

Ari Krzyzek:

Yeah, the biggest problem that they have over and over come to us with is that this big thing about not having the right skills and knowledge around branding or around user experience or even technology in general. They just want to do their thing. They have this big vision. It’s like I want to make this a reality, but I lack this skill, that skill. And I needed someone who can really help guide me in giving me the resources I need so that I can make the right decision. I can put things in the right place and create a really good foundation from pro. So for example, some client come to us because their website was broken in a way that it was not billed properly. You can always hire anybody else to do your website. You can get people as cheap as what, $5 an hour over Fiverr to get your website up and running.

Or you could even do a Squarespace website rather quickly and then ta da you finish with your website. But if you’re planning to do something that is more comprehensive, for example, maybe you want to be a community and you want to offer membership, you want to really have this exclusive content for just your members. Some of these different DIY options might not be the right fit. And even if you did start with those longer term, it will cause a lot of issues and problems for your business and also for your brand. That exactly one of the issues that one of our client had in the past, and it came to us because they’re just done. They just don’t want to manage the website because they would rather spend their time working on building more relationship with the members, getting more conversion for people to become members with them and really devoting their time in the business development side.

So rather than just like, okay, how do we figure out how to fix this website that is broken and it has 404 error on it or a lot of this different thing that does not work, that could easily add up to not only distress, but also a lot of your time being taken away from business development. So me and my team would come in, really fix up a lot of different things for them, ranging from really looking at what do we really want to do for our users on the website? Does it make sense to have what we have on the current website? Is the current website actually convert? Converting anybody who is coming to the website and are interested in becoming member? What stopped them in becoming a member? Is it because it’s not clear, the information that they have on a website?

What’s need to happen? What change do we need to make in order to fix up a lot of different issue? So when we do finish with that particular project, what happened is so exciting because they just don’t need to worry about all the technology glitches, all the nerdy pieces, it all got taken care of. And what’s more important is that they were able to really tell what’s important from the brand’s perspective, the messaging that they could have to connect with the right audience and really getting that conversion they want for, well, at the end of the day, it’s about getting more customers and for them it’s getting more members and building a really tight membership for your community.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah, I love that you really focus on the membership because marketing increasingly is becoming, and I think the best marketing has always been conversation. I mean, you really want to be in conversation or co-creation with your customers. So just hanging your shingle or a website as a sign, “Hey, look at me, we do this”, just isn’t enough. And so what are some of the tools on the community side that you do you build? Do you have a specific software for that or you just leverage other tools and work those into the website? How does that piece work?

Ari Krzyzek:

That’s a good one. I think with the range of technology we have today, there’s just so many different plugins, different applications, web application, we have a lot of options. But I would say depends on what you need. Some people actually are probably going to be okay with having their community on Facebook groups. If that works for you, hey, that’s fantastic. But for some others you might need something a little bit more comprehensive, something more custom. And you really want to control all the data, all the access, and you might need to create something from scratch and fully custom development for that. But for other people as well, they want something in between. They don’t really want to use Facebook, but they also don’t want to spend too much money in reinventing membership app or things like that. And they could use a third party. So there are so many different ways you can do this, but it will then come to what the business goals really are.

So for example, let’s just say that you don’t have a ton of money, which is fantasy, perfectly cool, but you also don’t want to use Facebook just because maybe people are getting off of Facebook and your target audience are not using Facebook anymore. You wanted some place where you could house a lot of different members but also still connected to your website. You could use a third party. There is this app called circle.so, so that’s one way that you can use that particular plugin to then, sorry, it’s not actually a plugin. It’s a separate web application, but you can have interconnected automation with your website into that particular app. So there’s just so many different ones out there.

There’s also, you’re probably familiar with an app called the name escapes me right now, but I can’t remember the name of that particular app. But there’s also mobile apps that can do similar things like this. But honestly it will come down to what’s the goal for your business and also what do you want to do in terms of handling this different connectivity between your the app that you were wanting to want or the website or any other items around your marketing?

Melinda Wittstock:

And so tell me about your business then. Do you do actual coding for people or are you doing a done for you or are you teaching people or some sort of combination?

Ari Krzyzek:

I don’t code, but my husband’s long time business partner, so ahead of our company, we have a few different team. We have content design as well as development team. So each team has its own specific skillset. When we do finish with our design, we pass it to our development team and they will take on all of the other development or coding related activities for the project.

Melinda Wittstock:

So if a website really needs to get beyond WordPress or SquareSpace as you were mentioning before, and it needs a lot of custom stuff and then there’s all kinds of integrations with different email and social and this and that, your team handles all of that?

Ari Krzyzek:

Correct.

Melinda Wittstock:

And so getting back to the main problems, often when I talk to people who are marketing experts on this podcast, it comes down to a lot of their clients, and this is true of a lot of entrepreneurs when they start their businesses, they say things like, “This is for everybody.” And of course it’s not. The more narrow you can get in your marketing or really understanding your avatar the better. Do a lot of your clients come to you with a lack of specificity of who they’re actually marketing to? Do they really understand their customers?

Ari Krzyzek:

Simply because here’s the thing, we always have that problem. And I would say our client, not all of them, has this clarity. And I think the part of the reason why they come to us is because we need to really understand where do things need to change? Is it part of it because we don’t understand fully who our customers are? I mean, some people come to us because they already have everything nailed down to a T. Maybe they already have KPI plans, they have very detailed information about who their target audience are while others, they still trying to figure it out. I mean, for a start, they might know, okay, we’re targeting women between let’s say 25 to 45 years old, but that is still very broad. Can we get more specific towards who are these women? Where are they in their life right now? And what solutions relevant for them and what are their even challenges are? Does it make sense for us or really targeted them or is it really the right type of audience we want to target?

So I think in a way, not all of them knows these answers. Some of them have a sense of idea, but we come in to really brainstorm together and really look at, here’s are all the things that you currently have about your brand, about your marketing pieces, or where do you really want to go in the next five years? How are we going to get there and what pieces do we need to put together as your brand foundation? That’s something that we also deliver for them.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right. That’s interesting, because it’s one thing to have a hypothesis of who your ideal customers are, and it’s a whole other different thing to know. And so over time you want to get to know those people and we come back to community because that gives you a sense of what the real problems are and really creating something that’s more of a conversation. So you get to actually really validate your ideal customers and then hopefully they’re so happy with you, they become viral ambassadors for you.

So presuming somebody really does know their core target audience, say even down to what’s their three o’clock in the morning thing that wakes them up and what’s their real pain point? And then the next things are making sure that the copy, I guess is speaking to them that the branding is speaking to them that all these things are working. Where do you find that some of your clients have the biggest challenges and how do you deal with those?

Ari Krzyzek:

I think the biggest part where they feel really confused about is, okay, you have all the different information about your branch, you have your marketing copy, maybe some even tone of voice and stuff like that. You have so many different pieces, but when you put things together, what does that look like? So let’s take an example of your homepage for the website. The simplest way for us to really understand a brand or a product or services is now to go to the website. We just want to know, okay, what is it exactly? Tell me more. But when you do often go to different website, I mean good website obviously have this taken care of, but those who don’t really have an idea about how to put all this information together on a website, they’re going to be missing a lot of different important information for users.

Ari Krzyzek:

Let’s take an example for you, Melinda. When we go to a website, we want to really understand, okay, what is this website all about? And then after that, can we trust this brand? Is this brand even legit? What is it going to do for me? How does it work? So there’s a lot of these different questions that we have in the back of our mind when we see a new brand, new product, new services, and we are trying to reassess whether or not, number one we need it, does it solve our problem? And how does it work? What do I need to do next If I feel like this is the right solution for me, what do I need to do next? Do I go by? Do I go sign up? Do I book? What is it? So putting all of this information together was one of the number one challenges for them because they have all different pieces, but they just don’t know now how do we put everything together so that we can actually gain conversion?

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah, I mean there’s so many moving pieces to all of this. And so when your clients start working with you, tell me about your process and how you figure out what they need and when they start getting results and the type of results they get. Like I mentioned before, what’s the before and what’s the after? What are the results you’re driving for them?

Ari Krzyzek:

One of the client that we have, and recently we got in contact with her because she just has so many different updates, so many much growth in this past three years since we did her website. So the first time when she came to us, she just wanted one thing, she just wanted a better website. And that is very broad as like, wait, what do you mean? Is the current website not working? Does not do specific thing that you want it to do? But after talking with her, the biggest thing that she really wants is that to have a proper website that works, that could convert, that could really impress investors or in a potential clients and things like that. So her business is really around delivering specific technology. So she is in a B2B market, but her website at that time was not really compelling. There’s just so many different information and it almost feels like you got loss in it trying to understand, okay, answer the first question, what is it about?

I don’t understand. And when we really reassess a lot of this different information that she has on the website, it was very clear that one, a lot of those not necessarily needed information has to go. We strip a lot of different content that confuse people. So we get into a very straightforward information, What do you want to know? Here’s the information, here’s what we do. Maybe certifications or even social proof, how it works, how you can get in contact, what do you need to do next? All those different information are then front and center for her target audience.

After three years with that website, she has gone, oh my goodness, her growth gone through the roof. Her business in the past two years has been named in 5,000 companies in pretty much last year and also this year. She kept getting ton of praises from investors or even clients like Nestle or bigger 500 fortune companies praising her website because it’s so easy to digest. Everything is professional and it really communicates the value that it delivers. It’s just to kind of sum up real quick, your website can really do a lot of heavy lifting for you if you plan it correctly.

Melinda Wittstock:

You have a really intriguing name for your company. It’s pronounced see-ka-lo-fia (Chykalophia), but it’s complicated to look at. What does the name mean? How did you settle on that name for your business?

Ari Krzyzek:

This has a really interesting story and for some people they might find it interesting, some others might find it okay, you could have pick a better name, which I completely agree. If I had a chance to do that in the past, maybe I wouldn’t be using the same name. However, it finally has come full circle for me how everything to come about and things like that. Chykalophia was a name that I completely made up before I even had the company. And this is me at the age of maybe I was 18 at a time, 18 years old in a biology class simply because I got super bored and I was challenging myself because I want to be all these different scientists making different names for biology creatures, the worms or all of different things. Oh, this has the phia at the end. And I thought myself, okay, these people can make names.

Why can’t I make name? So I feel like in a way you might hear me just challenging myself and I feel like this is part of my character throughout the whole time. I always like to challenge myself and I think of a name and it just become this name, Chykalophia. I create a little doodle around it and cool design. And I start asking a good friend of mine who at the time really loved doing screen printing. I give him the design and told him, Can you please create this and then transfer it over into my black canvas backpack. So he did it. I wore it super proud and fast forward until I get to high school, sorry, finishing high school and then getting into the art school. I carry the name, I use it all the time as my screen name for all of my design work, all that different things.

And even until I get to freelance design, I use the same name. So people just know me and this brand equity just kept building up and they know, okay, Chykalophia is Ari, Everything else that under Chykalophia is actually run by Ari, created by Ari, designed by Ari. And finally when my husband asked me, Okay, should we join up together and create company together? Would you want to keep the name Chykalophia? What do you think? And I said, Sure, why not? So this name just has evolved so much and become really big part of our lives and also our company for this past, goodness, we’re been in business 11 years, so 11 years plus whatever, how many years I have before that. But yeah, that’s a story. It just continue evolving.

Melinda Wittstock:

That’s really, really interesting. I mean, you’re really describing the entrepreneurial journey. You have these intuitive moments of inspiration and then you set out in your course really not knowing everything, right? You’re sort of a little bit blind. You’re going to learn along the way. And the entrepreneurial journey is not for the fainthearted for that reason because there’s so much uncertainty and there’s so much that you can’t control. And you just have to be in a mindset of continually learning through all the things that don’t work or the little failures, some small, some large potentially. It’s just kind of part of the program. Were there any kind of moments Ari, on your journey, building your company where you’re like, Oh my God, how do I make it through? Or am I good enough for this? Can I do this? What were some of those moments for you?

Ari Krzyzek:

I can think of a couple. 11 years is quite a long time, and when we started the business, my husband and I were honestly glorified freelancers to say the least right? Under the LLC banner. That was us in our first two years of business. And we get into the business not knowing exactly what needs to happen, what do we need to prepare, business one on one, networking events, it all add up. And goodness, I felt like I was not prepared. And the big thing that happened in our first five years of building the business is that I had to step away to go work for somebody else. I ended up working for Sears to really help channeling some of these marketing money into the company and also finally do the actual networking. And I would do that during my lunch hours when I was working downtown in Chicago.

And in a way I felt like I didn’t know what I needed to do, but I figure it out along the way. I mean, the journey is not smooth sailing, which is, I don’t think everybody has a smooth sailing unless you really get into that, that’s fantastic. But it wasn’t for me. So after four and a half years working for Sears, I finally realized I need to pick between having a newborn and then also focusing on my company, or do I just want to get the easy route and work for Sears? I was like, Yeah, I’m not working for Sears anymore. So I decided I’m just going to figure out what’s going to happen with the company, joining my husband full time. Haven’t looked back since then. Hopefully you don’t need to. But it was such an interesting moment because you know, have options, whether or not you want to stay building your career in a corporate America, or do you want to really pursue your entrepreneurial spirit in your journey, building your own company, helping specific people that you truly want to target.

So I have a choice to make and I felt like my heart is calling me to do the thing that I’ve been always wanting to do, to work with other women because that’s where I feel the most fulfilled. But also in a space where I can also see my kid grow. So in a sense, there’s always challenges throughout the years figuring out who we really want to target or managing or taxes. I mean there’s just so many different things, but time and time again, whenever I get a chance to connect with other woman entrepreneurs seeing their big visions, but lacking this team or knowledge around technology, UX or branding, it really get me excited because I know I can get them there. And when we do actually work together, it’s just a great synergy to have and I think that really fuels me.

Melinda Wittstock:

That’s fantastic. So Ari, what are some of the best ways for people to find you? I know that you have a podcast Halo Femtech. Talk about that a little bit.

Ari Krzyzek:

Yes, Halo Femtech is a collaboration between me as well as Kung Pik Liu, she’s from LA and she also has her own design agency. We’re both really attracted to FemTech simply because not only we get to work with other women, but we’re also the fem tech consumer, right? Femtech is female health and wellness technology. And these past few years it has been really getting excited in this particular market because the solutions for women’s health and wellness has been amazingly creative. I’m going to say that because you can find a lot of different solutions for you, for your body, specifically made for women’s body, right? Long are those time when people only think that women are smaller men. It’s like apparently that’s how we were being seen in the medical world. But Femtech are changing a lot of those. We are now seeing so many different solutions for our body, our needs our health. So I’m excited for that particular industry.

In the Halo Femtech podcast, that one, we wanted to really spotlight investors in, Femtech, women founders in Femtech, but also experts in FemTech who are chiming in into the future of Femtech and what solution can it truly deliver to help close the health gap for women.

Melinda Wittstock:

Fantastic. So everybody check out Halo FemTech wherever you listen to your podcast. But I’d recommend of course that you listen to it on Podopolo, my platform and invite you to join there to Ari, because we offer all kinds of monetization tools for podcasts to grow their reach and their revenue and grow their audience and be more easily discovered. And it’s a personalized listening experience where people can interact with you directly. And on this episode, we can add you and we can continue on the conversation beyond this episode. I want to make sure too that people know how to find you and your business. Anyone out there that really wants to take their website and their conversions and their community and their branding to the next level. What’s the best way?

Ari Krzyzek:

I’m on LinkedIn these days. You can find me on LinkedIn or go straight to my website. C-K-L-P-H.com.

Melinda Wittstock:

Okay, fantastic. And we’ll have all of that, of course, in the show notes. And so check it out. Ari, thank you so much for putting on your wings and flying with us today.

Ari Krzyzek:

Thank you, Melinda.