You’re looking to build a new inbound marketing website, which means you want to create a website that is a content hub catered towards specific target audience personas that engages nurtures them towards purchasing. You want an inbound marketing website that brings you much more organic search traffic because of your content and defines you brand as a thought leader in your industry. You’ve put the long hours with your department to create a new inbound marketing strategy, you’ve planned your content accordingly, but now you need a website that integrates well with all your marketing efforts.
The reason for this is the traditional website design model is completely broken. Remember that your website is your biggest marketing asset because it is the first point of call when it comes to your potential customers when they want more information on your business. In today’s market any potential prospect has already moved through 57% of the buying process before they even make any contact with your sales team. Where do you think they are getting all the information from? Your website.
Many companies get bogged down in how their website looks but forget how their website meets their inbound marketing strategy goals. Think back to your last website redesign process. Was it a pleasant experience? The whole process took about three months and you were feeling burnt out by the back and forth with all the parties involved arguing about what the landing page colour should be. That’s because with traditional website design you’re building your site to last for 1.5 to 2 years in order to delay a future redesign.
Traditional web design has large up-front cost with a large time and resource commitment. It always includes subjective design decisions with no guarantee that you will see ROI in all the design choices implemented.
That’s why you need to look at web design as a continuous constantly updated process. Your website needs to built with growth in mind.
Persona Building:
Before you start directing your resources to building an inbound marketing focused website, you first need to create the persona of the type of person you want to be making contact with. The same personas that your sales team will use once they’ve used your site to inform themselves of all the details that they need to make a decision on whether the product or service your company provides is for them.
Personas are important because they drive design decisions you’ll make in the website building process by taking into account user needs and implementing them into the planning and strategy before you even begin to design your website.
To build a persona, use your already existing information that users to your website already give you. Quantitative research data you can use will come from a website and analytics audit. This type of information will let you know where your underperforming and how your current users interact with the website. A large amount of information can be pulled from this analysis because your site users are letting you know how your site works with the actions they take.
You also need qualitative user research, which means actively reaching out to users and gaining an in-depth understanding of what their expectations are for your website. This is all to build or add onto the personas that will lead the your inbound marketing web design goals.
This information is used to build and add onto your buyer personas. You’ll use this information to lead your inbound marketing web design to account for human behaviour and the person on the other side of the screen.
Growth Driven Design:
Growth driven design is built on avoiding the risks associated with web design, namely reducing the the time to launch and focusing on real time impact of your site, whilst continuously learning and improving, constant learning, researching and testing information on visitors to inform ongoing improvements that can be made to the website and using this information to inform marketing and sales strategies and tactics.
This is why with growth driven design you begin with what is a called a “Launch Pad Website”, basically a version of your website that is a substantial upgrade from your existing one, but is still a draft as you work on the final product. This means your when building your website you do not get held up in the minor details. This should be done quickly and shouldn’t be perfect as the aim is to gather data for your final website.
To build a growth driven website, there are four actionable steps you need to follow
- Plan: It’s in the name. You need to internally brainstorm and decide what your wishlist for your inbound marketing website will be. The first thing to include in your planning are things that are directly related to conversion rate optimisation. This includes updates to improve user experience, personalising the website to the user i.e. Adapting the site, calls-to-action, content offers, etc. to the specific visitor based on the data we know about them,, tailoring based on interests, persona, device, geolocation, referral source or previous actions on your site. Build new marketing assets into the website such as tools, in-depth resource sections, online training, directories, etc. — any item that will provide great value to both the end user and your company. Also included in your planning should be general website updates.
- Develop: Moving into the development phase of the cycle, since you now have the most impactful action items to work on it’s time to start implementing them on the site. This is where your team comes together and starts to complete each action in order of importance . Each action should be considered an experiment with nothing set in stone. To measure your experiments you setup metrics outlined for the action item. After your experiment is pushed live, you may want develop a marketing campaign (social, PPC, blogging, etc.) specifically to drive traffic to that section of the site so you can start collecting data. During the develop phase of the cycle you will build and schedule that marketing campaign while working with your marketing team.
- Learn: Every website or application has a unique subset of users that share common traits. It is a primary goal to answer certain questions about our unique subset of users. Let’s imagine that we have a fitness blog and want to know how to best engage our readers. We learn that our users want comfort food in the winter, but don’t want to gain weight during this period. We learn that our users are more likely to read an entire piece of content if our first paragraph contains less than 120 characters and is preceded by a full width image. We learn that our users are most engaged with our content at 5pm on weekdays. These lessons stack on one another and help us target who our users are and exactly what works best to engage them. With these lessons, we will know what to write about seasonally, how to format our content, and when to send out our newsletter.
- Transfer: The last step in the cycle is to now share any information that impacts how the business should operate or market to other parts of the company. Even though the data collected may be from an online source, a lot of it is still applicable to be used in the greater decision making frameworks of your business.
Conclusion
In conclusion, an inbound marketing website is essential for any business looking to attract and retain customers through effective and personalised marketing efforts. By creating valuable content, optimising for search engines, and engaging with visitors through various channels, you can drive traffic, generate leads, and ultimately increase conversions and revenue. So, do you have an inbound marketing website? If not, now is the time to start building one that truly reflects the value you offer to your customers.