Most web design agencies take a fairly similar approach to their work. And considering a business’s website is by far its most valuable sales and marketing asset, that methodology is completely wrong.
Because it’s holding back your business growth.
Let me explain. The web design cycle typically goes something like this:
Your business needs a new website to replace one that’s become outdated. The web design company presents a pleasing UX design, sketches up some wireframes, does a spit-and-polish on your old website’s content, and pulls it all together in a template. Perhaps there is a bit of SEO tweaking to bring the “new” site up to current standards. A little testing (hopefully), and away you go. Everything seems fine, and you get some reassuring compliments. It’s definitely a step up from the old site.
So you go back to doing your business, just as you always have. The website brings in the odd lead, and seems to be doing its job. Over the next two or three years it becomes obsolete again and the process starts over.
What’s so wrong with that?
Nothing – if you’ve got no interest in growing your business or want to do all the work yourself.
But if you want a website that actively drives business growth and continually improves, becoming better and better every month at generating sales leads, captivating prospective customers and delivering an amazing client experience, there is a far better way to go about it.
It’s called Growth Driven Design (GDD).
Growth Driven Design is an entirely new process. It starts out with a fully-functioning "Launch Pad" website, designed for you based on a solid strategy and the 80/20 Rule (where we focus on the 20% of pages that will deliver 80% of results). From that solid foundation, all ongoing additions and improvements are guided by analytics and real-world testing.
So guesswork and settling for what you’ve got becomes a thing of the past.
From launch day on, every change to the website is centred on performance and strategy, with your business growth at the forefront of prioritization and decision making. So over time, you continue to improve your conversion rate, get deeper insights, and pull further ahead of competitors.
The Growth Driven Design methodology is a little complex, but as the client you don‘t need to understand all the processes, hierarchies and details – that is the job of your Growth Driven Design agency.
GDD can be a standalone process, but is also designed to take full advantage of inbound marketing capabilities, leveraging blogging, SEO, social media, email and marketing automation to deliver an even higher level of overall results.
As in inbound marketing, the Buyer Personas representing your ideal buyer profile are at the forefront in strategic planning and testing, and all content in GDD is tailored to the needs and pain points of those personas rather than merely spewing marketing hype and generalized sales pitches that don’t work on anyone.
Over the coming months, I will be blogging in more detail about the finer points of Growth Driven Design, and how you can leverage it for your business. Subscribe to our email updates if you’d like to join me for the ride.
And if you’re interested in knowing how Growth Driven Design can help transform your business, be sure to sign up for one of our free, one-on-one Website Planning Boot Camps – link below.
Laurier Mandin is president of Graphos, the Edmonton web design company, branding consultancy and digital marketing agency he founded in 1993.
