What is Growth Driven Design

Your website is your No. 1 sales rep, your top marketing asset, and the centerpiece of your digital marketing presence.

More than that, it’s typically the first place prospects visit when they want to learn more about you, your product, or your services. In recent years, this has become even more true, as most prospects have usually moved through 70 percent of the sales process before they even want to talk to someone.

And where are they performing most of their research on you during that 70 percent? Your website.

Even though we understand how invaluable our websites are, however, the traditional website process by which the majority of them are created is more than a little flawed.

How the Traditional Website Design Process Feels

At IMPACT, we have led scores of website redesign projects for organizations across a wide range of industries -- finance, nonprofit, healthcare, and cyber security, to name a few.

Virtually every single time we ask a client about their last redesign project, we get the same responses, across the board:

But that’s their experience. What about you?

Take a few minutes to consider your last website redesign project and ask yourself the following questions:

• If someone were to ask you about your experience, how would you describe it?
• What did or did not work with the process?
• How much effort, energy, and time did it take before it finally went live?
• Was your project on time? What about on budget?
• Have any improvements been made since you launched it?
• How excited are you to do another website redesign?

If you’ve ever been through a soup-to-nuts website redesign, there’s a good chance you didn’t totally enjoy the process. Sadly, we’ve all become complacent and resigned ourselves to the fact that website redesigns are just a big headache, and that will never change.

In reality, they’re only so painful because of the approach we choose to take with them.

Where Most Website Redesign Projects Go Wrong

You Need a User-Focused Strategy

Long gone are the days where making your website “look good” or refreshing it with a bit of modern flair -- like parallax scrolling -- is enough.

You need to be thinking about one group, and one group alone: your users.

You need to create a site that is not only easy for them to use, but also makes it simple for them to find the information they’re looking for quickly and without having to think. Most of all, you need clear calls-to-action that encourage visitors to convert into leads.

That’s why you need a user-focused strategy as the foundation of a new website. You can’t “wing it” and expect to come out with the needed level of focused analysis and planning. Of course, you’ll still need to wait until your site launches to test the efficacy of your strategy -- but that’s why considering your website “done” on launch day isn’t a smart move, because you can’t leverage post-launch data in your design.

You Also Need the Right Team

While it might be very tempting to leave all of the hard work to your marketing director, you’ll end up failing to serve the needs of your other teams -- for example, customer service and sales. That’s because an effective website that sells for you can’t exist only as an online brochure.

Instead, your website needs to do all of the different things the employees of your organization do. To accomplish this, you’ll need to involve and solicit input from different teams and players across your business -- not just marketing. We know that this takes buy-in and a lot of time, which are often in short supply, but the effort you put in will be worth it.

You Have to Know What You Want

It’s 100 percent normal to not know what you want out of a new website until you see it start to take shape. We know, from experience, that you may have a clear vision of what you want at the start, but that will often change.

We can’t count how many times a redesign project starts out as, “We just need to modernize the look and feel of the site and all the information on it can really stay the same,” and then turns into, “We need to totally overhaul the site, change the content and rethink how we’re doing this.”

And that’s okay. It’s no one’s fault, and it should be expected. You’re going to be excited and inspired by your strategy. The problem is when these changes happen after you sign your scope of work agreement and contract, because your new ideas will cost more money, since they will be outside the original scope.

Speaking of which...

Scope Creep Is Frustrating & Breaks Timelines

Scope creep is the kiss of death for any project, website redesign or otherwise. When it happens on a website project, specifically, you’re guaranteed to blast through your original timeline and run over budget.

We all know how fun it is to spend more money on a late deliverable -- especially to the tune of 25 to 30 percent more -- but when it comes to websites, there are usually added layers of frustration baked in.

For example, what if your website was slated to launch in tandem with a new product reveal or a major industry conference? What if you have seasonal business spikes, and you miss the opportunity to launch during a low-traffic period, before the tide rolls in?

You May Not Understand the Effort Required

This may not be true for you, but when some companies approach us to redesign their website, they don’t realize that just because you hire someone else doesn’t mean you won’t have work to do.

The best web design agencies support their clients with strategic guidance and analysis, as well as the cutting-edge designers and developers to build out the site. Those are the areas of expertise they are supposed to bring to the table.

While somewhat hyperbolic, we often joke that, “Content is where website project timelines go to die.”

But there’s a kernel of truth in there. When website projects aren’t completed on time, the No. 1 reason is that a client hired us to build their website, we told them it would take three months, and then it takes weeks longer to get their portion of the copywriting responsibilities (interviewing, editing, or writing) across the finish line.

You, however, are the experts in your own industry. So, they will rely upon you, to some degree, for content creation. Maybe just as subject matter experts who provide their insights to copywriters, or perhaps for the copywriting entirely, where the agency is there to optimize -- that’s usually up to you, and is often determined by the type of agency you choose to work with.

The Moment Your Site Launches, It’s Old News

When you go through a typical website redesign project, it’s easy to pat yourself on the back on launch day and congratulate your team (and your agency) for a job well done.

Here’s the thing, though. Websites built with a traditional process are kind of like cars. The minute you drive it off the lot, it depreciates in value.

You have to perform maintenance. You need to fix things when they break. And -- if you’re like a few of the guys on our team -- you’re probably going to invest in projects to improve or customize your investment.

So, if you stand up a traditional website and then walk away from it, you’re going to miss out on opportunities to optimize your site performance and organic reach, or to improve the user experience, based on how well your users are (or aren’t) interacting with your new website.

Website Redesigns Are Still Worth It!

Okay, we know that we’ve made it sound like website redesigns are a waste of time, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.

Your website is like a smartphone. With all of the rapid advancements in technology, you need to upgrade your phone every two years. The same holds true for your website, and you should expect to redesign it every 18 to 24 months.

You read that correctly: You need to redesign your website every 18 to 24 months.

That timeframe sounds completely insurmountable when you lay it against the backdrop of a traditional website redesign process. That’s exactly one of the pain points that growth-driven design seeks to address.

Growth-Driven Design Is Smarter Web Design

If we look back at what we’ve discussed regarding the pitfalls of traditional website redesign processes, it follows that we need to look at how we redesign websites from a completely different angle.

You need a superior process to rebuild your site that avoids all of the risks we’ve outlined and results in a lean, mean, peak-performing website machine that helps you grow your business and produces the results you want.

That process is growth-driven design. It reinvents how we think about, approach, and build websites.

The 3 Core Values of Growth-Driven Design

Minimize the Risks of Traditional Web Design

The growth-driven design approach avoids the risks of traditional website building by existing as a systematic approach to shorten the timeline to launch. It focuses on creating tangible impact, and continuous improvement and learning.

Always Be Learning, Improving, & Iterating

As a growth-driven design agency, we are obsessed with researching, testing, and learning about our client’s visitors. This obsession is what enables us to inform how we continue to improve their websites, so we can create a site for a client that is a peak performer.

What You Learn Helps Your Marketing & Sales Teams

Here’s one of our favorite parts of growth-driven design. If we all agree that websites are much more integrated with your sales and marketing strategies than ever before, and you understand the heart of growth-driven design is that obsession with research about your users, imagine what insights you’ll be able to extract from those efforts that you can share with marketing and sales?

How Does Growth-Driven Design Work?

Unlike the traditional process, a growth-driven design website build has two phases, across a full, year-long cycle.

Launch (Phase 1)

This initial launch phase has a very short runway and is typically completed in about 60 to 90 days. During this phase, your web design team develops an essential website strategy for your “launch pad website.” That strategy also includes the creation of a “wishlist” of features for the site.

The GDD Cycle (Phase 2)

Once the launch pad website launches, the remaining 11 months of that annual cycle are dedicated to iterating, improving, and fine-tuning how well your site performs. There are four parts to this process: planning, developing, learning, and transferring knowledge.

Now, let’s get our hands dirty with a deep-dive into each of these phases.

The launch phase of a growth-driven design website has three critical stages:

• Strategy development;
• Wishlist creation; and
• Launch pad site goes live!

First, You Still Develop a Strategy

One of the aspects of the traditional site build process that is spot-on is that you start with a strategy, so growth-driven design begins the same way!

The goal of this stage with GDD is to forge a rock-solid foundation with six core components:

What Are Your Goals?

The goals of your growth-driven design site strategy will be unique to you, and will be determined by your answers to the following questions:

• What are the performance goals you are trying to achieve with your website?
• How have you performed historically, and where would you like to improve?
• How will what you do impact your marketing team’s goals?

Your Buyer Personas

Your website needs to feed your organizational objectives, but it needs to lead with the priorities of your buyers.

So, if you haven’t already, you need to develop detailed buyer persona profiles, which are fictional representations of your ideal customers. This is a non-negotiable step. Seriously, if you aren’t willing to commit to crafting research-based buyer personas, you should stop reading this guide right now.

Growth-driven design only works if you’re laser-focused on your users and their needs. You can’t do that if you don’t take the time to learn who they are, what they want to achieve, and what’s standing in their way.

Okay, for those of you who are still on board and don’t have buyer personas already, we have a resource to help you create them, without having to start from scratch:

Quantitative Research: Audit Your Website

With your buyer personas in-hand, your next move is to dive head-first into your data. This will involve a quantitative audit of how your website performs right now -- from what is (and isn’t) working, to where your users are dropping off or bouncing on your site.

It’s through this research that you will identify areas where you can improve your site.

Qualitative Research: Talk to Your Users

Once you’ve identified those opportunities for improvement, you need to pick up the phone and talk to the people you’re trying to reach -- your users.

Your goal for these conversations should be to learn more about them -- who they are, what they need, what they’re lacking, and how you can help them better. Moreover, you’ll be able to validate the assumptions you put into your original buyer personas, and you’ll probably gain additional insights to include in those profiles.

Fundamental Assumptions

Now that you’ve put in the work to learn and research, you can develop what are called fundamental assumptions.

Here are a few examples:

• Value propositions for each product, service, or offer;
• The different devices and locations that will be used to access your site; and
• What information your users are searching for on your site.

You will use these assumptions to explain user behavior and motivation, which will heavily influence the next step -- global and page strategy -- as well as how you continue to work through the growth-driven design cycles.

Global & Page Strategy

Finally, it’s time to put together your strategy in two parts -- a global strategy for the entire website, and then a page-level strategy that focuses on each high-impact page on your site. Both strategies will need to incorporate all of the steps we just outlined, since they both need to lay out how to best engage and drive action from your users, so you can reach your goals.

Next, You Create a Website Wishlist

Using what you learned during the strategy phase, your next move is to bring your team together to brainstorm every single innovative, impactful, and creative of what you want to see on your site.

The only way this works, however, is that you begin the brainstorm mentally with a “clean slate.” Meaning, you need to leave your current website in your rearview mirror. More to the point, you can’t innovate a new digital future for your brand if you’re constantly tripping over what you’ve done in the past.

Focus on your goals. Imagine what you could accomplish if time, money, and development skills weren’t impediments.

Here are a few ideas to help your team get started:

• Key site pages and sections that can have a real impact;
• Resources, assets, and tools for marketing;
• Specific features, modules, and functions;
• Design features and elements; and
• How the experience will change based on device, location, etc.
• Your brainstorm should last a few hours, and you should come away with 50 to 150 (or more) new ideas for your website.

Keep in mind, of course, that you won’t act on all of these ideas right away, but the creation of this wishlist at the start is essential, as it will be used in two ways:

• Initial action items to be implemented right away on the new site; and
• An agile list that will be added to (and subtracted from) over time, as you iterate and take action.

Finally, Create & Publish Your Launch Pad Site

Going back to the traditional site build mentality, the launch of your website is the finish line. In the world of growth-driven design it’s just the beginning.

The launch pad website is the starting line for your brand, from which all other growth-driven actions and iterations will be born.

Here’s what you need to keep in mind about your launch pad website: It should go up quickly, and it will definitely not be perfect. The goal of this step is to avoid analysis paralysis regarding site structure, features, or content.

The goal is to distill your launch pad site down to the essential 20 percent that will have the most impact, and to launch it fast, so you can get to work on learning about your users and improving your site.

Run an 80/20 Wishlist Analysis

Okay, so launching your launch pad site is kind of the last step in this phase -- but not really. There is more to it than just hitting the “go” button.

Back when you created your wishlist, your team created a long list of action items you would love to see on your website. Before you keep moving forward, you need to evaluate and prioritize what is on that list. Which action items should be tackled first? A chatbot feature or a new site page on an up-and-coming service?

There is one question you can ask your team that will instantly prioritize your wishlist:

Then, look at your 20 percent list and refine them further by considering whether each item is a “must have” or a “nice to have.” If it’s the latter, guess what? That “essential” item goes back to the 80 percent list.

With what still remains on your 20 percent list, your next question to ask of each action item is simple:

“Is this action item necessary for the initial launch pad version of our site, or will the world go on if it doesn’t get built-in until two or three months down the road?”

Your commitment to this level of honest analysis and evaluation will be instrumental to your success with growth-driven design. The point is not to create painful, unnecessary conversations, but rather to position yourself for success with a lean launch pad website, and retrain your team on how they think about your website and what needs to change.

Create Hypothesis Statements for Core Action Items

Next, you need to create a hypothesis statement for each of the action items that didn’t get voted off the 20 percent island in the last step.

The purpose of each hypothesis statement you create is to clearly define how each action item ties directly back to the goals you are trying to achieve, your personas, and the measurable results you anticipate the update or change will have.

Here’s an example:

Below each statement, there are four items that need to be filled in.

Expected Impact

The quantification of impact should be a single number. That number should be based upon the value your visitor will get from the action item, as well as the impact it will have in moving you toward your goals.

Effort Required

This should also be a single number. In this case, the resources and time needed, as well as the difficulty or complexity of each action item.

Metrics Measured

What’s that old saying? You can’t manage something you don’t measure. The same is true with growth-driven design. You need to determine what you measure to test the action item and evaluate whether or not your hypothesis is correct. The more specific, the better.

Definition of Complete

How will you know if an action item is complete? Lay this out explicitly up front and eliminate any ambiguity that may crop up later as you review how effective and efficient you were.

Now, It’s Time to Build Your Launch Pad Site

You’ve got your list of mission-critical action items. You’ve got your strategy. Now, it’s time to run all of that through the standard website process.

This should include:

• Messaging and content;
• Site architecture and user experience;
• Alignment with your inbound marketing strategy;
• Wireframing and design;
• Site development and quality assurance; and
• Setting up data collection tools and accounts.

The final step -- setting up your data collection -- should be defined around:

• The goals you laid out in the strategy phase;
• Every single fundamental assumption; and
• The hypothesis statements of your action items that are going live on the launch pad site.

This step is so important, because it’s how you will learn about your visitors, identify opportunities for improvement, and test your theories.

Okay, take a breath. Your first growth-driven design phase is complete, and you did all of that in just a couple of months, because you’re awesome.

Now, let’s get back to work.

Welcome to phase two of growth-driven design, which focuses on two things -- making continuous improvements on what you’ve built and your buyer personas.

Improve, Iterate, Experiment, Learn

With your launch pad website in place, your first priority is to continuously improve it. You’ll accomplish this through on-going cycles of iteration, experimentation, and learning. Yes, you still have that wish list of action items, but it is through this cycle of improvement that you will continue to update it.

Focus on Who Is Visiting Your Website

We’ve said this before, but we’ll say it again: The whole reason behind how you continue to improve and refine your site begins and ends with the buyer personas you defined as the ideal customers who are visiting your site in the first place.

That’s why you always need be asking yourself, “How is what we’re doing on our website providing value to our users or relating to them?”

If you can’t answer that question at any point, you need to stop what you’re doing and re-evaluate what steps you’re taking.

With a mindset that embraces these two truths, you’re ready to start your GDD cycle, which has three parts:

• Plan;
• Develop; and
• Learn.

Step 1: Plan Your GDD Cycle

During the planning phase, your focus will be on identifying the most impactful action items at that exact moment and creating a strategy to implement the top items in the current cycle.

Here’s how you do it:

Performance vs. Goals

Evaluate how your current site is performing, and then contrast those results against the goals you want to accomplish. From here, you’ll know where your opportunities are for improvement.

Additional Data or Research

If you’re entering a new cycle from a previous one, there’s a good chance you’ll have additional research you’ll need to conduct in order to clarify which action items should be added to your wishlist.

Learn from Sales & Marketing

Your marketing and sales teams will have key takeaways to share if you’re coming from an old cycle and going into a new one. These conversations hold within them nuggets of wisdom, which can be translated into action items in your growth-driven design program.

Next, you will take all of the insights, research, and intelligence, and synthesize it through another brainstorming session to determine if there are any new action items.

Typically, your action items will fall into one of the four following buckets:

A great example of a marketing asset is IMPACT’s Knowledge Center, shown above.

From there, our visitors can download ebooks, guides, checklists, and templates, and gain access to our anthology collections. For the user, it’s a wealth of knowledge. For us, it’s a visitor-to-lead conversion machine.

Also, keep in mind, there are going to be general website updates that will come up from time to time, and these tasks can -- and should -- be added to your wishlist.

Prioritize Your Wishlist Action Items

With your refreshed list of action items, you will assign a high, medium, or low level of priority to each, based on how much impact they will have on your goals and what value they will bring to the user.

Plan Your GDD Sprint Cycle

Finally, you're ready to select the items you consider to be the highest priority that you want to implement this cycle.

The number of items you select will be dependent on how long your cycle is. In our experience, however, we recommend you choose fewer items and focus on doing your best with those. And hey, if you happen to check them all of early on in the cycle, you can always return to your list and add a few more, like the rockstars you are.

Step 2: Develop Your Site

Now, it’s time for you and your team to get down to business with the implementation of those action items and bringing them live onto your site.

You should treat each action as if it were a science experiment, where you track the actual outcome of what you’ve done against what you anticipated would happen. (This is why setting up those nets for data collection was so important. You can’t validate what you don’t track.)

It is during this phase that you should work with your marketing team to develop any campaign strategies and assets that will promote what you’re working on.

Step 3: Learn from Your Changes

Once you’ve taken your changes live and allowed some time to go by for data collection, it’s time to evaluate the performance of what you’ve implemented and learn what you can from it. Put another way, you’re going to review how your website visitors are interacting with your site.

This is where you dust off the hypothesis statements you created earlier for each action item and ask yourself the following:

• Did our change have the desired effect? Why or why not?
• What did you learn from the results about your visitors?
• Of those lessons, what was a surprise or something unknown to you before?

Once you’ve learned whether or not you were right with your initial hypothesis and documented the insights about your visitors that came out of the experiment, you’ll want to share these insights with the rest of your organization, so they can also learn and take action.

If you store these findings in the same place with a clearly-defined structure -- an intranet, internal wiki, etc. -- you’ll create a wonderful source of business intelligence for your entire company. Especially if you or someone else wants to review trends over time or review the outcomes of previous tests.

For your team, use what you’ve learned to identify patterns about your users and innovate other ways to improve your site.

For example, let’s say you create two versions of a landing page -- one includes testimonials from clients, while the other only showcases logos of clients you work with.

Afterward, you see through the data that. your visitors took more action on the page where testimonials were present. From that, you can learn your visitors react more strongly where they can see the positive outcomes of your work, not just your portfolio of clients.

In addition to making site changes, you can also coach your sales reps to include more testimonials and case studies in their process.

And Then You Get Back on the Rollercoaster

Growth-driven design is based on the repetition of this cycle. Each cycle will bring with it better results and outcomes as you continue to learn more about your visitors.

So, the more you continue this process, the more you can transform your website in a way that sparks growth.

We know that the traditional website process is painful in a way that many businesses simply accept as “the norm” for how website builds are supposed to go.

We also know that this pain is avoidable if you take a hard look at how you approach your current website and how you plan to approach future redesigns.

While we can’t tell you whether or not growth-driven design is right for you -- that’s an internal conversation you need to have with your team -- we can tell you the companies that are embracing growth-driven design have seen huge results and are enjoying increased flexibility with their website.

The choice is yours. You can grow as a marketing leader and a brand with a smarter website approach -- and growth-driven design can help you do that.