Every time your website visitors stay on a page for longer than 15 seconds, click-through one hyperlinks, or (hot-diggetty-dog!) tap on a CTA, they're voting for you. They're saying, "I liked this and I want more." Each time they bounce off a page quickly, have zero click-throughs, or fail to follow up on a CTA tap, they're saying, "Um, no thanks. I'm not finding what I want here."
This information – website visitor behavior – is extremely vital to your website's (and your company's) success, which is why growth-driven website design is proving to be the best inbound marketing practice yet.
Increase Your Website's IQ Using Growth Driven Website Design
When is the last time you redesigned your website? If you haven't yet, we predict eyes are rolling, you're groaning, feeling guilty and thinking, "I know, I know, I need to but...." If you've recently completed one, you may feel a bit queasy as you remember the time, energy, and dollars you poured into the thing – and you don't even want to see the words "website redesign" again. Ever.
We understand completely. The reality is: inbound marketing is a living, breathing, evolving entity and even pros like us continue to learn about it on a daily basis.
Here's what we've learned recently: traditional website design - performed every 2.5 to 5 years - is not the most efficient means of optimizing your website (so sorry). There's a better way to do it and continue to do it, in response to your buyer personas' wants, needs, and pain points – month after month after month. This improved method is called Growth Driven Website Design, and it is easier, more fluid, and considerably more effective than the older, dumber way.
Differences Between Dumb Website & Smart Website Design
- Cost — The dumb way requires huge chunks of money up front. And, because the process is so cumbersome and difficult to predict, the project often goes way over budget, leaving you feeling duped and your website designer feeling guilty but having no other choice. When the new website is up, the marketing coffers are spent, and you no longer have the means to make the updates and changes that are recommended – nay, necessary – to help your new website perform better. Now you're broke, resentful and frustrated.
The smart way requires a smaller, initial investment and budgets a predictable monthly retainer that is used to provide the analytic data that continually guides all future improvements and persona-tailored tweaks. This allows your website to naturally improve its performance the way you wanted it to in the first place.
- Finish vs. Start — With the dumb way, huge quantities of time are spent trying to do business as usual while deciding on this font over that one, these colors over those, rewriting content, uploading the old content you want to save, and so on. At the end, you wind up with a finished site that feels pretty stagnant even if you're frequently blogging. But at least you're "done," right?
The smart way launches a clean, brand-oriented, attractive website that's considered the Starting Line. From here the marketing, sales, and website team work together (hurray for team work!), continually updating and tweaking things based on what we're constantly learning about buyers and website visitors. In this way, your website evolves fluidly and along with current/prospective customers' needs.
- Infinite Wish Lists — Dumb website design took your wish list, crunched it into the budget, and spit out which items would fit and which wouldn't, resulting in a website that had (hopefully) most of what you wanted but certainly not all. Maybe next time. Argh!
The smart way implements the core features of your wish list and then keeps the wish list posted on the drawing board so you can continue to build from it. Your wish list is there to help you grow your website based on the qualitative and quantitative data the website team continues to analyze. Plus, you get to infinitely add new items to the wishlist, items that don't have to wait another 5 years to be implemented, in response to popular blog or social media topics that teach you more about the concerns and/or interests your target markets have.
So, get smart already. If you're due for a new website design, talk to website design firms who are fluent in growth driven website design. If you've recently completed a re-design, that's fantastic. You've reached the "starting line." Get that crumpled-up wishlist out of the trashcan and pin it back to the cork board. You're in prime position to continue the growth driven website design process.
