Growth Driven Design Methodology: Increasing Lead Generation

What gives?

You are apparently barking up the wrong tree. 

It could be you're fixating too much on your Facebook ads or continually stressing out on your LinkedIn Pulse campaign. As you dig deeper into the issue, you will come to terms with the truth that social media, SEO, or your PPC campaign has nothing to do with it. Truth be told, these variables are not the real offenders behind your current lead generation woes.

Your website, perhaps, is responsible for your brand's failure to rake in leads.

Growth Driven Design Methodology: Lead Gen

Websites, circa web 1.0, used to act as online brochures. Or perhaps a sleeker version of a Yellow Pages listing. Fast forward to today, a website's overall design and architecture has turned into a trusty, reliable lead generating source. In fact, lead generation, nurture, and conversion should be every website's goal. Gone are the days of keeping a website because it's how things should be in the digital age. You've got to have a sharp, concise reason it's there in the first place.

How is this possible?

The secret lies in growth-driven design.

What's a Growth-Driven Design?

The standard way of redesigning websites involves tearing down everything to make way for a supposedly new website look and feel. But in between points A and B, there's the long waiting time (could stretch to a year) to deal with. Not to mention the huge up-front payment required to kick off the redesign process. 

While all these pitfalls may justify that it's worth it once the redesign is done, you are wrong. Your website (and your lead generation strategy) could be going downhill from here.

You see, new changes happen almost every day in digital marketing. Hence, you've got to be constantly on the look out for these updates, and reconfigure your campaigns and efforts based on these constant shifts. A traditional redesign doesn't take this into account. 

Growth-driven design does.

In contrast to the old-fashioned ways of a standard website redesign, growth-driven design grows with your brand. It is equal parts flexible, intuitive, and analytics-driven. In hindsight, it's a smarter way to give your website a makeover.

The approach begins with a launch pad that only takes 6 to 8 weeks to build. And it's not just based on assumptions. It's backed by data, and it continuously evolves with data too!

Also, you're not going to pay huge up-front costs to have your launch pad go live. The total costs you shell out for a growth-driven design project is flexible and totally up to you.

Does Your Company Need Growth Driven Design?

Your website is the number one salesperson on your team. It is your product evangelist, your customer nurturer, and education advocate. It should attract qualified leads, and then help them to make the right buying decision for their needs.

All of this should be done in a way your customers want; not the way you want.

But how do you get your website to be that effective?

How do you get your website optimized to deliver what your customers want, when they want it, in the way they want to get it?

Answering those two questions can take all day. But let's just answer it with one quick statement: you don't by leaving your website static and stagnate.

Growth Driven Design in Practice

The way you do it is a process over time. It's smart evolution; also known as, Growth Driven Design.

Growth Driven Design takes the traditional "one-and-done" website redesign method of the past and turns it on its side. No longer do you have a long drawn out process to build an insta-obsolete website that starts the stagnation process at launch. The concept of growth driven design is always to be evolving the website to match consumer behavior and your customers' buyer's journey.

Growth Driven Design is the proven way to build a remarkable brand experience where your customers interact with you most; on your website.

But not everyone is sold on the idea. The concept that "my website is never going to be finished," is scary to some people. The truth is, these people are the ones who are fighting change. This change is happening with or without you.

HOW TO KNOW IF I NEED GROWTH DRIVEN DESIGN

Here're some telltale signs your company needs to embrace Growth Driven Design.

You Need More Leads Through Your Website

Companies big and small, from large enterprises to brand new startups are finding the same thing; at the end of the buying decision is a human. That human doesn't always buy based on facts. They buy on trust.

Your website's purpose is not to pitch your product or services. It's to build trust with your prospective customers. If you can do this effectively, you don't only attract customers, you create brand advocates.

Brand advocates are what turn a business into a success story.

The problem is, static websites are too often associated with bad user experiences. If a potential customer is annoyed by your website, you most likely will not have a chance to build trust.

Your Lead Conversion Rates are Low

Growth Driven Design allows you to monitor how your current leads are interacting with your website; identifying the problem areas where they find frustration or dead ends. These are the places where potential customers bounce away to visit your competitors. Rarely, do they ever come back.

Why would you go back to a place that frustrated you the first time?

Once these problem areas are identified, they can be swiftly fixed using proven testing methods. Once the problem area is not a problem anymore, you move on to the next. And it never ends.

Growth Driven Design is about constant improvement. It's about measuring results, learning from them, and evolving to improve them.

Constant, sustainable growth.

Your Leads Are Not Engaging With your Website

Do you find that your pages have high bounce rates? Are there a lot of visitors to your home page, but few of them are staying on your website or becoming leads?

Most of the time, the value of your content doesn't matter if the user experience of your website is annoying. What good is an excellent resource, if it takes a professional explorer to find it?

Growth Driven Design gives you the ability to see which pages are broken and fixing them to flow in a natural buyers' journey.

You Want to Deliver a Remarkable Brand Experience

This is the biggest one of all. The only companies who are readily embracing Growth Driven Design are those who are dedicated to delivering a remarkable brand experience to their customers. These are the companies we love to work with because they are as invested in their website as the agency they hire to design it.

When a company is determined to offer their customers the best experience possible, their website becomes instrumental. The information quality is better. They take the time to learn about their potential customers, to offer them value before the sale, and provide them an easy way to make the best decision for themselves.

These companies understand that trust is far more powerful than communicating features. They understand that pleasant interactions are more rewarding than high-pressure selling. And they realize that offering a remarkable brand experience online is the one, flawless way to explode their company growth.

A Quick Look at the Lead Generation Process

From an inbound marketer's perspective, Hubspot's Annum Hussain defines a lead as a person who has indicated interest in your company's product or service.A lead could be a reader of one of your blogs or a user who got one of your online coupons. 

There are four elements to the lead generation process:

• Landing Page
• Forms
• Offer (value)
• Call-to-Action

Now, did you notice what these elements have in common? All 4 leads to your website. This explains why your website redesign could make or break your lead generation strategy. Every channel (blog, email, social, video) that you employ to direct your prospects to the landing page ends up on your website.

GDD's Influence On Your Lead Generation Campaign

Brands who have successfully integrated growth-driven design into their marketing campaigns typically go through the testing-and-tweaking cycle for approximately 11 months following the launch pad date.

Within this period, you get an inside look on how users are navigating your website through heat maps, A/B testing, etc. You identify which areas are performing great, and which sections your users don't care about. 

With data at your side, you can promote the most important parts with design tweaks, ensuring that your users are happier and more apt to proceed with the buyer's journey.

Changes could be as minor as tweaking your Unique Value Proposition (UVP), or as major as redesigning the header to be less distracting. For example, your split test on a landing page revealed that using the word discover in your call-to-action yields more newsletter sign-ups than click here. With growth-driven design, you can apply the change ASAP while you may have to wait for 6, 7, or 8 agonizing months before the landing page gets a makeover in a standard redesign. Imagine the hundreds or thousands of possible prospects you've lost with the non-converting landing page.

In a nutshell, your website becomes an evolving asset that collects user data for you to analyze. Updates are smoothly implemented with the help of a redesign team whom you can count on. 

The good news is that their services are already included in the monthly retainer package!

Take the Lead with Growth-Driven Design

Marketers should not overlook the fact that lead generation depends heavily on user experience and a website's information architecture. Without growth-driven design, lead generation is at the mercy of a rigid structure that could handicap any marketing efforts to boost lead generation and conversion. It's high time you see your website as a lead-generating machine that needs a tune-up now and then.