Fed up with long website development times? Learn how your business could benefit from a growth-driven approach to website redesign.
Your website isn’t performing to the standard you’d like it to. You are not generating leads or business enquiries. No one is interacting with your content. Your website has little-to-no traffic and the small amount of traffic that does come through doesn’t stick around. You are perplexed by the situation — and you have tried numerous ‘solutions’ to rectify the problem, with no success. You have taken the decision that, ultimately, your website needs to be overhauled and redesigned.
But this time you don’t want a website that’s static and hard to edit without coding knowledge. Rather, you want one that is easy to manage and grows with you and your business.
You want a website that is:
- Secure
- High impact
- Attractive
- Mobile responsive
- Orientated around your ideal prospects
- Consistently generating high-quality leads
You want a new website that will act as the key component in your marketing activity. But you need it now!
And you don’t want to wait six-to-nine months while it’s being created, because you can’t bear the thought of putting up with your current website any longer. So, you want a new website as quickly as possible. You also don’t want to spend +£50,000 on creating it. You would prefer to pay a monthly fee over the next 12 months, which would allow you to spread the cost, but also ensure that it is updated and added to over that period.
So what do you need? Growth-driven design!
With the traditional website redesign, constructing your website was - and still is - a complicated and time-consuming process. It could typically take anything from six months to a year, or even more. And in this period of time, your existing, unsatisfactory website is still there, giving out the wrong messages and not contributing to lead generation for the business.
And, even when the new, replacement website is finally launched, it is then typically left unattended. It receives no major updates to its content, layout, navigation or usability, as the business focuses on ‘other things’, having solved the ‘website problem’.
Or, worse, you want to make edits and improvements to your site, but doing so requires specialist development resources to carry out even the most minor of adjustments.
Today your website is the nucleus of your marketing activity - and without regular maintenance, enhancement and support, it will fail to reflect the business’s up-to-date positioning and messaging.
So what can I do?
Today, thanks to the data, analytics and marketing tools available, marketers have more power than ever to make informed decisions about their website and marketing activities.
A clear understanding of web analytics and marketing automation will enable your business to develop an ever-improving website, one that captures prospect information and delivers enquiries to your sales team. One that grows with your business and transforms and builds as your business does.
This is the idea behind Growth-Driven Design, in that it utilises the data that has accumulated about your website visitors’ behaviour - the pages they like, page performance, what content people engage with on your website, and what they ignore. It enables you to create a streamlined, prospect-orientated website that continually grows and provides up-to-date relevant high-quality information.
We will highlight why your business needs a growth-driven approach to website redesign and the rest of your marketing activity. You’ll also learn how Growth-Driven Design compares to traditional website redesign.
How does Growth-Driven Design work?
With a Growth-Driven Design approach, instead of reconstructing the entirety of your unsatisfactory website and spending a significant amount of your budget over a long period of time, you instead launch your website from a point of MVP - the minimum viable product.
This is essentially the most practical and effective website for your business to launch within the shortest period of time. Your MVP website then becomes the foundation of your new website model. This MVP website consists of your highest-value pages: the pages that have driven and will continue to drive, the majority of your traffic and your overall lead generation activity.
From this point on, you agree with your website team, subject matter experts and management department that you will add new, high-quality pages in increments over a period of time to your website, instead of trying to redraft it in its entirety in the space of a few weeks - which is usually impractical and unachievable for most businesses.
Step 1 - Goals
Firstly, what are the goals for your business? What are you trying to achieve by redesigning your website?
As with any marketing or sales activity, it needs to be grounded in context— and that’s why you need a SMART goal (one that’s specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and timely), as it will help you to understand what you truly need to do, as well as to measure your progress in the future.
Step 2 - Buyer personas and existing user research
Once you have established what you want to achieve with your website redesign, you need to address the kinds of people that will be visiting your website - your buyer personas.
This part of the process is absolutely fundamental, as your buyer personas will permeate all your business’s marketing activities. Think about what problem your business is trying to solve and the pain points that your buyer personas might have, as well as their demographic, occupation, industry, job title - all of these variables will enable you to make a more granular, forensically accurate buyer persona, which in turn will enable you to create a website that’s tailored to a specific audience.
Also, for the contacts you have generated already, take some time trying to understand who they are, what they do, why they do what they do and the general day-to-day business problems they face. Your existing contacts database is a valuable and incredibly lucrative source of information, as it will provide you with standardisation of the types of individuals that interact with your business, something which you can use in developing and validating your buyer personas.
Step 3 - Analyse your existing website and select your highest value pages
You will likely have collected some form of data in regards to your business’s website. This data will provide a platform to work upon and serve as a benchmark for future activity, so you can see how your current website compares to your new growth-driven website. It’s also a good idea to commit to comprehensive website analysis.
This audit should investigate page performance, content performance, page views, conversion ratios on each page, and traffic to particular areas of your website. Also consider SEO elements such as keyword rankings and backlinks. This information will help you determine what is working and what is not working, allowing you to select your highest value pages and improve them.
Step 4 - Determine the function of your highest value pages
The pages you have chosen, your highest value pages, all need a call-to-action, something that encourages visitors to convert, download a piece of content, or contact your business.
At this point, you need to agree with your team on the functionality of each of these pages - will they focus on: Once you have established the core functionalities of your highest value pages, you can determine how best your business can engage with your target audience and influence their decision-making process.
Converting visitors to leads? Delivering useful and relevant content? Engaging with your business in regards to a solution?
Step 5 - Your MVP Website
When it comes to your new, Growth-Driven website, forget about ‘perfection’ and 'completion'. In reality, your website is never truly complete; it’s a piece of your business that you continually improve and add to.
However, at this point, you want to launch the most feasible, practical and effective website in the shortest period of time, so that your business has an active - rather than static - presence online. This website is your minimum viable product (MVP). You must accept that you will likely launch your website with only 20% of its overall pages. The idea is that the pages you identified previously as your highest-value pages (HVP) are the pages you launch with, your core service offerings and the pages which drive people to your website and deliver conversions.
These pages will help you to learn more about your audience as well: their behaviours on your website, what content works, and what design and layouts are appealing. As for the pages you have not launched with, assess whether they are an absolute necessity or whether they will have any kind of impact on your website’s traffic, lead generation, conversion activity and other elements.
If not, you should discard them and replace them with pages that work. Remember, your website will never be perfect – and perhaps to some extent, thinking that it ever will, is complacent. Always strive to improve the lead-generating nucleus that is your website.
Step 6 - Data Collection
To measure the success of the project, you’ll need a data collection tool like Google Analytics. The data you collect should reflect your original SMART goals.
For example, if one of the KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) for your MVP website was to generate 25% more conversions from a specific page, your data recording and reporting should be set up to capture that information.
Thankfully, this is entirely possible with marketing tools, such as HubSpot Marketing Hub. This process is absolutely vital to the future growth of your website, as it allows you to understand what worked, what didn’t work and how visitors interact with your website.
Step 7 - Remaining pages and growing incrementally
As mentioned, your website will never be perfect and you should use the data you collect from your MVP website to address the rest of your website. The pages that remain should be refined and adjusted based on the information you have been collecting.
Your marketing and sales departments should regularly come together to assess the efficacy of their Growth-Driven website. Once they have, ensure they agree on what pages should be added next, and with what purpose and function.
Even as you exit the MVP phase and begin to construct your full website, you should streamline the process and grow in increments. At no stage should you attempt to add every single page at once, as this will make it difficult to measure what is working and what isn’t? It might also not be feasible for your team, as they may have other commitments.
Consider organic search when prioritising which pages to build. If there are common pain points that your potential customers are searching for, what could your website provide to help them? Keyword research can uncover the most searched terms, and assess the competition already on search engine results pages. As your site begins to grow and target more of these keywords, it draws in relevant traffic from a wider net of searchers and fills your pipeline with potential leads.
Step 8 - What you need to do
Regularly share what you have learned and discovered from your MVP website with your marketing and/or sales departments. Evaluate your performance vs. your original goals. Continually refine the website based on user activity. Add new, high-quality content and assets on a regular basis. Use the data you have acquired to develop further and learn what you could do better. Repeat this six-point cycle.
Spreading the cost
One of the spin-off benefits of this approach is that the cost of your redesign can be spread over an extended period. Our clients enjoy the benefit of not paying a one-off lump sum for the development of their website, but a monthly fee spread across a typically 12-month period (this is very appealing to many companies - especially their finance managers!).
If you want to learn more about Growth-Driven Design, our team of website consultants are experts in the science of website construction and redesign utilising the GDD approach. We have developed a streamlined, efficient and effective GDD process that continues to work for us and our clients - and it will work for you too if you require an expert in a website redesign.
If you’d like to discuss your website requirements with one of the teams at Huble, please feel free to get in touch.
You can learn more about GDD in our Growth Driven Design webinar. Or download this guide for free.
