UK marketers are increasing their investment into sales promotions, events and internet based marketing in a bid to guarantee post-Brexit success. With the levels of optimism at an all-time low, Brexit is driving down marketing budgets and restricting resources. Now, more than ever before, Growth-Driven Design is the key to differentiating your business in the advertising maelstrom
“After witnessing first-hand how ineffectual traditional methods of website design can be (thanks to my role as the MD of an inbound marketing agency), it was clear to me that the processes traditionally defining the way we build websites and maintain them were intrinsically flawed, and that a change in approach and mindset was long overdue. I knew we needed something fresh, effective and innovative, for not only our clients but for ourselves as well.” – Craig Wiltshire, CEO of Struto.
To get anywhere productive with a Growth-Driven Design website, you need to first begin with a wish-list. It’s what you build your Launchpad website with, and how you begin to incrementally improve your site as the data pours in. But, what is a wish-list exactly?
As part of the GDD process, the Growth-Driven Design wish-list is a list of website elements that you imagine your ideal website would incorporate. These can be functions, actions or design ideas – but they are items that you wish your website to include. Traditional website design attempts to implement all of the items on your initial wish-list, whereas GDD, as a segment of inbound marketing, puts the most vital items in place first, and then uses hard data to guide which items should be built next (and whether or not your first assumptions were correct).
Your GDD approach and wish-list should begin with some strategic thinking and assumptions of your market, which you can then research and balance against the data that you’ll collect. You’ll need to ask yourself all of the hard questions.
For example: Who are your buyer personas? What do they need? What do they want? What are you offering to them?
These questions should be answered as accurately as possible in your initial research phase, and a good amount of data from your buyer personas should back up these answers.
Now that you’ve answered the hard questions about what your buyer personas are looking for, you’ll have created a list of functions, actions and designs that matches your target audience. It’s time to re-enter the assumption phase.
Based on your initial research, you’ll need to assume which of these items on your list are of the highest priority to your prospects. A general rule is to draw up an 80/20 wish-list; select 20% of the items from your initial list that will provide 80% of the impact.
Now that you’ve created your 80/20 wish-list, it’s time for priority implementation and the building of your launchpad website.
Remember, GDD is all about moving forward according to what your user data reveals. So, you should constantly be analysing your website’s performance and how your visitors are responding to it with tools such as Hotjar, using this data to incrementally improve and build a top performing website.
So, that’s the ins and outs of Growth-Driven Design. Should you have any specific questions, please feel free to pop us an email or make use of our live chat option in the bottom right-hand corner of your screen.