How Are You Not Using Growth Driven Design?

Use Growth Driven DesignHello Mr. Prospect, this post is directed towards you.  You’re thinking about doing a website redesign huh?  That’s really great, your site is getting a little long in the tooth.  That image slider was super cool… 36 months ago.

A Very Common Mis-Step

Here’s a common mis-step I see from companies like yours time and time again.  You think that redesigning your site and marketing your company online are two different things.

Too many companies (believe me, way too many) decide that they want to refresh the look and feel of their site, they find some design inspiration, get a great development company, invest thousands and thousands of dollars into the project then they finish the site. Whew!  “Great job team!”

But then all you hear are crickets

You hear the silence of no traffic to your new site.  Or at least not any more than you had before.  What’s the solution?  “Well now that we have a site, we need to start MARKETING online.  Then everyone can see the fruits of our hard work.

But here’s the problem, you needed to think about how you were going to use your site for marketing SIX months ago, when you were in the design phase of your sexy new website.

Inbound Marketing and Website Redesign are Inextricably Linked

Your success in online marketing is based on the foundational concept of creating great content that attracts visitors and entices them to share their contact information with you so that you can continue the conversation online.  We typically do that through email communications, customized content and social media.

If you’re creating all this great content doesn’t it make sense for it to look like it was created as PART of your website rather than it looking like something that was bolted on later?  It makes it very difficult to make your site look beautiful if your blog and content offers are afterthoughts vs. incorporated into your redesign.

Enter Growth Driven Design

The fundamental idea behind Growth Driven Design is that you build what we call a launch pad site.  In many cases, the launch pad site strips away many of the bells and whistles of a full website redesign and allow you to focus on surfacing high value content to your visitors quickly and without a lot of noise.

If your offers resonate with your users, you stick with them and add more.  If they don’t convert, you develop new offers with different angles until you have some campaigns that really resonate with your target personas.

Once you know what resonates with your visitors…

then you can continue to utilize the concepts behind Growth Driven Design to evolve your website, by focusing on creating the kinds of content that your best prospects find interesting and engaging.

It’s not a two step process

If there’s one big takeaway here its this: Redesigning your website with a goal of driving more leads or increasing sales is not a two-step process.  It’s not 1) Design 2) Market.  Your team needs to think long and hard about how (and who) you’re going to be marketing to during the design process and you’ll end up with an infinitely more powerful lead machine.  Using the growth driven design methodology will also help you to not make any major mistakes while your new site is evolving.

Download the Growth Driven Design Ebook Here