After contracts, correspondence, waiting, and parting with some hard earned cash, you expected your web design to bring about results. Yes, your website looks more appealing and professional than before the redesign, but what about conversion? What about lead increases? Why aren’t you seeing more results?
What you and other frustrated businesses are missing is Growth Driven Design.
The Future of Web Design
Growth Driven Design, GDD for short, is beginning to replace traditional web design. It’s main focus is continuous improvement based on real data. There are no more guessing games and gambling.
Instead of speculating, “This color and formatting looks nice. I think my target audience would like it, my web designer does at least.” You can make decisions confidently, “From testing last month we can see that 91% of our leads responded more positively to the design and content we tried. Let’s move forward in that direction.”
What the Process Looks Like
This is a brief look into the Growth Driven Design procedure.
- Goals and strategy. What changes do you want to see? This is time for defining what is most important and the buyer personas you are trying to reach.
- Auditing. A website audit will be conducted, including analytics to learn why users are “bouncing” (leaving your site) and what brought them there. This research will also discern what devices users are viewing your website on, and important visitor demographics.
- Action and impact discussion. After reviewing the data, you and your designer will determine what’s more important. What changes will bring you closer to your end goal?
- Launch pad site. Based on discussions and best practices, your web designer will launch your initial site. This is a starting point for data collection and improvement over the next 11 months.
- Using data. By utilizing data derived from your site, you will learn which pages and content are most popular with your buyer personas. Is a majority of your traffic leaving after viewing a certain page? Maybe that page needs to be changed or is not providing information they anticipated. Successful campaigns and content can be created after learning which approaches bring results.
Why Now?
Since the internet is now so invaluable to virtually every business, websites are becoming a top focus for investing. Newspaper ads, TV and radio commercials were effective back in the day. Gradually this kind of marketing is fading out. While there’s still plenty of buzz around Superbowl commercials, most businesses can’t afford the massive $5 million bill.
Consumers are getting rid of cable boxes and replacing them with Rokus and Smart TVs. They prefer to watch Netflix episodes to avoid commercials. So if everyone is turning off cable, radio stations, and using newspapers strictly for puppy potty-training, where do you reach your target audience? The internet of course!
As big, successful companies realized this, most of their marketing funds were channeled into internet marketing. With research, they have found how effective the GDD process is, and now even small businesses are adopting it.
Why Isn’t Everyone Doing It?
You may be questioning why it’s not more common if it’s really so effective. Well there are a few simple answers to that.
- It’s more common than you think. Maybe this is the first time you’ve heard of the term ‘GDD’, but if you know what to look for (or what not to look for) you’ll see how common it is. Have you ever noticed Amazon’s website overhauls? No, because they’ve been making small changes continuously for years. Walmart has been hugely successful, but seems to neglect an online presence. Even with the combination of in-store and online sales Walmart is worth about $230 billion, with Amazon now surpassing them at $250 billion with strictly online sales.
- Many businesses don’t know about it. If you only research web design when it comes time to redesign your site every two years or so, it’s very likely you’ll be out of the loop on GDD. The concept of GDD has been around much longer than it’s title.
- The idea of ongoing payments. While the initial “launch pad site” is typically quicker and cheaper to create than a traditional website, the thought of monthly payments is enough to drive away some businesses. By not researching GDD, they unfortunately are stagnating growth and staying in the dark.
This Sounds Risky…
Many of our clients feel as though they are stepping into the unknown, and are concerned about risks involved. They don’t want to waste their money, and rightly so. GDD actually minimizes risks that are found in traditional web design.
Instead of a sudden two month long site overhaul, your launch pad site is up quicker and for less money. What happens if your traditional website design is ineffective? Tough luck, you’ll have to dish out a considerable amount for another redesign. With growth driven design, tweaks are expected and a part of the plan.
The only way to make real improvements and learn from mistakes, is to be aware of what the mistakes are. Is it more risky to invest blindly and hope for the best, or see facts and data to prove what changes should be made?
