3 Ways Growth-Driven Web Design Will Improve Your Business

Well, two years have gone by, and it’s probably time to redesign the website. The site looks outdated, it’s not generating qualified leads, and the information on it is no longer accurate. Does this sound familiar? This approach has always seemed to make sense to businesses, and for years, this is how a website redesign was approached. However, there is a much better, smarter process for businesses to pursue instead, and that’s growth-driven web design.

Growth-driven design is a process that reduces the headaches of traditional web design and maximizes the results of a website. It’s a new way of thinking that can be implemented by any organization to help generate revenue, convert leads, and provide a better user experience that is driven by data, not opinions.

But before we jump into more about growth-driven web design, let’s look at a few reasons why traditional web design has hurt so many businesses:

• Traditional web design is very risky. It involves a significant upfront investment from an organization, it requires a shift of resources, and demands an extensive amount of time.
• It can never be everything your organization actually needs. When the new website is finally launched after months and months of work, there is no way to tell that it is the absolute best result for your organization. This is because the redesign was dictated by internal opinions not data from users.
• Traditional web design is based on assumptions. Websites are often static for two to three years without constant optimization or attention. When it finally comes time to take a look at rethinking the website after years go by, it’s difficult to determine what went wrong.

So, how is growth-driven design any different? Implementing this new process helps organizations avoid complete website redesigns every few years and instead, emphasizes the necessity of continual evaluation, testing, and optimization of a current website. Here are three ways that growth-driven design will change your business:

1. Growth-driven web design will help drive and evolve the strategy of your business.

A well-researched strategy is the single most important part of a website. But what does a strategy truly involve? To start, it takes developing a clear understanding of your business objectives and how you are working to achieve these with the website specifically.

To determine these goals, everyone at your organization needs to be on the same page. These goals should include revenue for specific areas of your company, customer lifetime value, and where your business is moving (or trying to move). After these are determined, clearly outlined, and shared with the entire business, then it’s time to discuss what you are doing today to achieve these goals and what the results have been.

Next, it’s essential to understand your users and target market. Creating fictional representations of your organization’s ideal customers will help increase empathy, form a common language, and evaluate ideas. To do this, you should talk to as many people in as many departments at your organization as possible to gather different perspectives on your target market. Then, compile a clear list of these individuals and pair these with your goals.

These personas and goals should be constantly evolving, not visited just once or twice a year. As you gather more data, use it to improve.

2. Implementing growth-driven web design will produce a better user experience.

Developing a clear and actionable understanding of how users are behaving before, during, and after engaging on your website is critical to the success of your organization. So, how do you gather this information?

To start, using Google Analytics will give you a great perspective on user behavior with access to page views, bounce rates, traffic patterns, devices used, time on pages, etc. While this data is extremely valuable for the optimization of your website, it’s also important to remember that data from Google Analytics is anonymous. Using a marketing automation platform, such as Act-On, will allow you to take a more in-depth look at behaviors of specific users or accounts including page visits, engagement with content or emails, and lead scores. This data helps you understand both what needs to be improved upon as well as what’s working really well on your website.

You can also take this a step further and unlock even more customer insights by using a tool like User Testing or Hotjar. These programs allow you to view videos of your users’ experiences on your website to determine which areas on your website are confusing, which convert really well, or which don’t engage a user. These tools also allow you to create conversion funnels to discover opportunities for improvement and prevent users from leaving your site.

3. Growth-driven web design will generate more qualified leads for your organization.

Now, I’m not talking about a few leads here and there. I’m talking about optimizing every single page on your website from a content, design, SEO, user experience, and code perspective to generate more organic traffic and qualified leads than ever before. Every page on your website should have a way to capture user information, whether it’s a contact form, email subscribe popover, content download, video turnstile, etc.

As an example, before implementing growth-driven design tactics on ERC’s website, our site generated a significant amount of leads; however, we only converted about 12% of this potential business. The majority of these leads never returned our phone calls or responded when we sent them additional information. This stood out to me as an opportunity for the website to not generate more leads, but instead generate more qualified leads.

After implementing growth-driven design tactics on ERC’s website about a month ago, every single page on our website is now optimized based on user data and keyword research. In these past few weeks, we have generated more qualified leads in all of our service areas than ever before, and we can say this because these leads have actually returned our follow-up communications, converted into revenue for our organization, and even returned to our website to purchase additional services.

An organization’s growth-driven design process needs to be constantly evolving in order to experience continued success over time. Consistently optimizing a website is often a significant behavior change because it is a process that needs to be executed weekly. It involves many internal conversations, analysis of user data, and continued research. This certainly takes a significant amount of time, but the time is extremely well spent.