1. What Growth Driven Design means?
Your company’s website is one of the most important assets for your strategy. If we consider the usual online consumer cycle, we will realise that your website is present in each and every one of its phases (awareness, consideration and decision). That means your site is where prospects are educated in options, where they evaluate their possibilities and needs, and where they convert from when they decide to make a purchase.
Even if your company’ sales person has also get in contact with this prospect, your website is part of more than 2/3 of the conversion work. So, do you really thing your website is adapting to your consumers’ needs? Is it enough to settle for changes every 2 or 3 years? It is really productive for your business to think about redesign in traditional terms? Don’t you think traditional redesign doesn’t fit the constant changes in current consumption habits?
Since website is your business’ main channel of conversion, its design and development shouldn’t only be a punctual work that take a few frustrating months to do. It should be part of a helpful and functional strategy within your marketing and sales methodology. It should certainly be an agile and adaptable process. A website should be considered within a Growth Marketing strategy, flexible enough to be optimized according to your buyer personas’ demands and needs.
Therefore, instead of waiting for months to define, design and develop your website, you must first launch and work with the most essential elements that allow and then make improvements in an iterative way. This Growth Dirven Design approach allows you to boost your prospects’ online conversion, which is why its lay out must be dynamic and open to optimizations as you test and analyse the efficiency of your website’s elements.
2. How is it different from traditional design?
If you follow a traditional web design methodology, once you launch your new website you will only be applying minor modifications along 3 years, such as adding, changing or deleting a service and / or product, improving some content here and there, etc. However, if you really consider your current marketing and sales needs and your business growth objectives, you will realise this approach is broken, it has become obsolete.
Traditional web design is usually a large project, a risky bet and a large investment of time and resources, which also often runs late and doesn’t guarantee results in consistent basis. If you think about it you will see that it’s an unpredictable methodology, a subjective design that is based solely on suppositions, since it doesn’t give a time to measure real data, the information you need to value web performance after its launching. And once it’s launched, how do you know it is the best you can get?
On the other hand, Growth Driven Design is an agile and adaptable system since it’s based on web performance analysis and the data you get from your buyer personas’ interaction with your pages. The data obtained from this analysis allow us to plan monthly optimization that help a business grow.
3. But, how GDD can make your business grow?
To date we have been more than familiar with terms such as UX (web user experience), but now we really need to understand our users, to know how they think during their sales cycle and what they need during this process in order to apply this knowledge in our web design so we can make our business grow.
Growth Driven Design (GDD) is a web design methodology that allows improvements and adjustments without investing a large amount of resources in changing the website. The idea is that you have to work you website in sections, analysing different elements performance and implementing updates in real time, when you need it the most by having in mind different phases.
If elements or pages performance is not optimal, on the one hand A / B tests can be carried out to help implement the right changes for instance. If, on the other hand, consumer trends vary you need to adjust design to promote the growth of visits and conversions. In short, this strategy allows you to adapt to the marketing and sales objectives, following a methodology of strategic redesign, launch, analysis and optimization.
4. How is the Growth Driven Design methodology?
Growth Driven Design is a smart new model to see web design and development. It’s a monthly investment that generates greater business growth since it incorporates measurement and optimization more efficiently, which improves the performance of the web and its elements. Unlike the traditional design, the Growth Driven Design has three important stages:
Etapa 1. Growth Strategy.
Today a successful website starts with a Growth Strategy. Its objective is to solve web design problems taking into account the main consumer and their buying cycle in the most empathetic way possible.
- Therefore, of course, the first step in this stage of Growth Driven Design is to devise the buyer personas (potential consumers) profiles that allows to establish a basis for the implementation of future strategies. And is that by understanding their needs, preferences and weaknesses, you can draw an effective route that forms the website, but also serve as a starting point for other marketing and sales tactics.
- The second step is to establish SMART objectives based on historical results obtained and the needs of the marketing and sales teams. Obviously, with clear and measurable objectives, it’s possible to propose a design focused on obtaining results. To set these objectives, you’ll need to perform a web audit in quantitative and qualitative terms that will help to improve contact points with users and their conversion.
- The third step in this strategic approach is to develop a wish list organized into ideas, such as a viable implementation plan with which to implement initial actions that are adaptable and can be adjusted as time passes and new data obtained is collected.
Stage 2. Launch pad.
Once the growth strategy to be followed is established, you need to start designing and developing a "launch pad" website that, while not ideal, should be flexible and adaptable, serving as a starting point to implement improvements once enough data has been collected from users.
This launching platform constitutes a saving in time and resources that will be destined to a later website optimization and that, in addition, allows you to launch you a web in time. But while the trend is to perform a fast launch, speed must not compromise the ability to provide value to the user.
In the traditional web design system, the launch is the end point of the project. In this case, it is the starting point with essential elements based on the main objectives, and taking into account the ideas of the implementation plan that can have the greatest impact. That is, prioritizing the website must have that can lead to greater conversions, and keeping the non-crucial ones for later optimization.
Stage 3. Improvement cycle.
Once launched the original platform you will begin to collect data on users behaviour. Their interaction with you pages will allow you to know what really interests them and which of the original assumptions and ideas were right. In this way you will have a guide of what to change to impact the site performance. In this moment you will need to determine which are the most important actions month by month entering the optimization cycle based on 4 stages:
- Planning: when you gather enough data which you will analyse to achieve a greater impact (for example: traffic, conversions, usability, etc.) and boost the current performance of pages.
- Building: moment in which action elements that can improve the results obtained are created based on the previous wish list. These elements should be considered as experiments and should involve both the marketing and the sales departments.
- Learning: crucial part of the optimization process since data must be extracted to assess what works and what doesn’t in order to implement improvements and repeat the cycle optimally.
- Transferring: essential to be in tune with the whole team, since your company objectives are the same, all that analysis knowledge that is extracted from the website must be shared between different departments to get the most out of it.
