When designed properly, your website can be the most effective marketing tool you have. It will also generate more leads for you. It’s also your best salesperson available 24 hours a day to potential customers. It is therefore even more important to create a good first impression as this will be where people first learn about your business.
In fact, 88% say that they are less inclined to return to a website after a negative experience. The majority of companies do not understand the potential and value that digital marketing can bring to their website, or simply don’t want to spend the time and money to redesign a site to make it as effective as possible.
Website redesign can be expensive, stressful and require a lot of time. The average website redesign costs between $5,000 and $100,000.
Your new website may not perform better than the one you currently have. These projects are often over-budget and scoped, and they rarely launch on time. You’ve missed the mark when it comes to ROI.
There is a way that you can reduce the stress and costs. Enter Growth-Driven Web Design, a smarter approach to website design.
What is Growth Driven Design (GDD), and why should you care?
Growth-Driven Design (GDD) is a data-driven and agile method to redesign your website and improve your marketing results. It uses a smarter approach to the traditional website redesigning process in order to minimize the risks and problems.
This method takes advantage of data, which is something that’s rarely used in traditional website development. The Growth-Driven Design method creates websites that are more responsive to your potential buyer, and generate more leads and more qualified prospects for your sales team.
Growth-Driven design method
Growth-Driven design focuses on rapid launch and continuous improvement in stages. Your website shouldn’t be static. In a traditional project, the front-end work is devoted to creating the layout, copy and design. Once a website has been built this way, it can take a while before the company decides to revisit it and make changes.
The site is constantly optimized and updated using real user data. This improves the user experience, and helps them to become a customer.
Traditional Website Design vs. Growth-Driven web design Traditional Website Design
The traditional web design poses an unnecessary risk to your business. The projects are expensive, take a lot of time to complete, and often go over budget. This is due to scope changes, delays, and other unforeseen circumstances. When a project is completed, companies often pat themselves on their backs for a well-done job. But the truth is that it’s hard to predict how much ROI a website project will bring.
It’s even worse when there is a mentality of “leave as it is”, which makes all the effort and hard work for nothing. You could end up with a website with minimal changes and mediocre improvements that costs a lot of money. It’s like buying paint to fix the structure of a home.
Traditional website design can negatively impact your business for a number of reasons.
- The design was not data-driven – what stakeholders want is not necessarily what professional designers recommend.
- What may seem like a cool feature, or an UI, may be frustrating to the user and lead them to look for a competitor.
- Your site could make it difficult for your team members to discover potential leads and convert visitors into leads.
How to redesign websites in a better way?
Growth-Driven design mitigates and, in some cases, eliminates these risks. GDD sites are more efficient, even though they take longer to create. This is because the launchpad design can be quickly created. Launchpad instantly improves the user experience of your website without waiting 6 months or more for a traditional project.
The launchpad is not a finished product but it allows your team to add features and conversion points using user data. Updates to old content have proven most effective for 51% of businesses.
Growth-Driven Website Projects are data-driven and not based on assumptions that are often incorrect. They allow you to optimize your website over time, improving your customer journey and increasing your sales pipeline.
A GDD website will also spread the costs over time, so that you won’t be burdened with an expensive upfront investment which may not yield a return for many months (if at all). With Growth-Driven Design, your website will not only become a source of leads but you can also determine its ROI.
What is Growth Driven Design?
Three stages of growth-driven design
The Growth-Driven Design method has three main stages. The three major stages of the Growth-Driven Design methodology are: strategy, launchpad development, and continuous improvements.
The Strategy Phase
The strategy phase is crucial because your website’s purpose is to educate and engage your audience, and to create traffic that will generate qualified leads for the sales team. The strategy phase’s goal is to determine your audience’s problems and how your website could help them. This will allow you to create a website which captures more leads.
You’ll want to consider your ideal client, their goals and challenges. How can you make it easier for them to find the information they need on your website?
It is important to conduct user experience research (UX). This will help you to understand how to design the best journey for your audience, not just what your employees might think. You’ll need to identify the pain points, needs and motivations of your audience in order to create a journey that is ideal for them.
Next, create buyer personas. This is a fictional representation for your ideal client. You will not rely on what you believe consumers want. Instead, you’ll interview your users and use the data they generate to create an ideal customer you are trying reach. You will be able to understand your customers’ problems, their uniqueness, and how your website can help them.
This helps you determine how to directly address the challenges on your website. You may believe you know your customer well, but you might be surprised at what you learn.
You can use this insight to create a buyer journey, which includes the before, during and after a customer interacts with you.
Define your website’s business goals and key performance indicators (KPIs). These goals must be SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and timely), so you can accurately calculate the ROI of your website. You can use all this information to create a design for your website that will benefit your ideal customers who are actually using it. After you’ve created a strategy to reach your target audience, you will need to concentrate on specific elements of the website. Included in this are your website’s architecture, SEO (Search Engine Optimizing), important sections and pages, branding, integrations with other sites, and much more.
You will create a wish list for your website to complete the Growth-Driven design strategy phase. Consider ideas you can implement to help achieve your business goals and add value. Include design elements, features, modules and integrations.
Launchpad Website Design
Launchpad websites are the second step in Growth-Driven design strategy. This stage can be confusing for clients due to the differences in website designs, but it is still an important one. Your team can reduce the stress that comes with a website redesign by using data.
GDD is not a traditional web design. Instead, the goal of GDD is to create a website that is faster and more functional than your existing site. Launchpad is the base on which you will build your new website during the phase of continuous optimization. You can quickly set up a test site to collect data and gather feedback from users without spending a lot of money or time.
The data you collect can be used to inform future design decisions. Launchpads allow you to quickly build on your existing site and improve it. This means that the time to value is much quicker than a typical six-month+ web build.
This process is not “connect the dots” because your website will be different from any other website. Working with professionals, like those in a HubSpot agency partner, can alleviate this concern. They can determine with accuracy the best course of action to take for your website.
Continuous Improvement
Continuous improvement is the third step of Growth-Driven design after you have determined your strategy and built your launchpad website. The biggest difference between GDD website design and traditional web design is this. You don’t just leave your website the way it is and hope for best results. Instead, you start identifying high-impact changes based on user data that will increase your leads and revenues.
It may seem easy to focus on the most important areas, but it can be challenging. Use the agile process to keep on track.
Plan
A website performance roadmap will help you to identify the actions that are most likely to have the biggest impact on your goals. The most difficult part is to stay focused on your data. There will always be a lot of things you can work on.
Build
Create the most important items on the performance roadmap for your website in a focused sprint. Include experiments to test the effectiveness of these items.
Learn
Review the experiments you have been running on the launchpad. Utilize your research to inform future updates of the website. This is the most crucial step in the process of continuous improvement because it will allow you to better understand your audience, their needs, and your business goals.
Transfer
Last but not least, you need to apply the lessons learned from your experiments in the larger business. Your website’s insights can help inform your entire business and improve your other aspects of your business. In this way, your website can not only be a lead generation engine, but also an information-gathering tool.
The Benefits of Growth Driven Design
For many reasons, Growth-Driven Design can be a more impactful and effective way to create a new website compared with traditional website design.
Take a Smarter Approach
- Launch quickly and improve continuously
- Spread out your investment and measure the ROI
- Build your website on budget and on time
Enhance User Experience
- Changes based on data and real-time user interaction
- Reduce bounce rate and increase traffic
- Trust your brand by increasing its trustworthiness
Increase Conversions to Optimize Results
- Conversion points can be added and optimized
- Test messaging and value propositions
- Improved month-over-month
- A/B test variables
Invest in Business Value That Lasts
- Increase customer interaction and sales opportunities
- Get insights that will provide future value to your business
Results Driven Website Design
Traditional website design processes produce poor results. Traditional website design processes may result in a beautiful site but are often based on a narrow understanding of your customer and many (often incorrect) assumptions about building a successful presence online.
The growth-driven approach allows your website design to be guided directly by the actual visitors of your site and potential customers. This improved method of creating websites reduces the frustration and risk associated with conventional website projects.
Growth-Driven marketing
Growth-Driven Design not only improves your website’s performance, but also the performance of the entire business. GDD websites provide valuable learning opportunities that can be shared throughout the company. These insights can help improve marketing campaigns, customer service, sales conversations and new product development.
Are you ready to begin your website design?
Consider your current website. Does it perform optimally? Are you sure that the ROI is successful? Has it changed since the last few years? Growth-Driven Design is a better alternative to traditional website design. It allows companies to launch their new site in half the time and generate more leads.
Chattertools, a growth-driven agile website design agency located in New Jersey that provides the best talent available remotely. We use GDD to achieve great results for our clients and continuously improve their websites. Contact us to receive a Growth Driven Design proposal if you are ready to start a new site that will bring immediate value to your sales and marketing teams.