A growth-driven website design strategy begins with goal assessment and planning, but it allows for the fluidity required of a dynamic digital marketing presence. That means you can get started now, and let your website grow in stride with your business. Create and adapt content calendars and updates according to course corrections, traffic data, new development modules, and the latest technological opportunities to interact with your audience.
Anticipate your audience’s current and future consumption trends
How do your users consume information? Chances are, their preferences include video and infographics and the ability to access your content from any device. This rings true across age demographics, including the tech-savvy boomer generation. At the same time, your audience wants answers to their queries as quickly as possible, with the least amount of effort.
These demands require responsive websites with lightning-fast loading speeds and clean navigation menus. Your website’s framework and design should serve as a platform to support emerging trends including programs that serve personalized content, allow for on-demand video consultations, and present real-time data feeds.
Get to know your target audience
Who are you trying to reach? Develop a buyer persona–a detailed profile outlining your ideal customer’s lifestyle, pain points, consumption habits, and buyer cycle milestones. You’ll want to do the same for your brand persona. This is the fun part since everyone at one point or another aspires to write the Great American Novel or a blockbuster screenplay.
So which actor would you cast in your audience’s lead role? How about your brand’s spokesperson? Just as real-life people do, your buyer persona will grow and change. Treat them as friends and stay in touch.
Let user behavior influence your digital media strategy
Growth-driven website development relies on feedback and user-generated data helps you adapt your design and content to “nail it” with your audience.
A/B testing monitors visitors’ responses to landing page design, conversion prompts, and content and real-time metrics allow your site to present your visitors with solutions matching their queries and navigation path. The more you know about your website users, the better your site will serve their needs.
Capitalize on your current content assets
You might need to rebuild your website from the ground up, but your content and web copy may have a second chance at life. Rejuvenate your content assets and hold onto hard-earned SEO with a few tweaks and upgrades. Use user-generated data to help you decide what content promises to go the distance.
- Update data and source material with the latest research
- Convert old but relevant blog posts into ebooks and other lead magnets
- Add fresh new images, video, and infographics
- Mine and condense existing content that’s retained its relevance and value
- Identify and build on themes that generate customer interest and social media shares
- Add links to relevant new internal content, and create outbound links to outside sources that reinforce your message
- Give your best content another round of promotion on social media, including Medium and LinkedIn
- Reformat posts to appeal to Google Snippets–the coveted pole-position at the top of search engine results pages
As you plan future content, choose evergreen topics whenever possible, and maintain a schedule for adding new and revising existing material. Have you seen blog taglines with “updated on (last week’s date)”? Fresh content improves SEO and encourages your audience–including writers seeking authoritative source material–to regard your articles as current and quotable. Markup code embedded in your new and revised content alerts search engines and readers that your website is the go-to resource for information on your industry niche. Growth-driven site design includes content management systems you’re likely to use, breathing new life into your digital asset investment.
Structure your content for user relatability, UX, and SEO
If your content was a tree, what kind of tree would it be? If you’re not familiar with that cliche’ conversation starter, imagine a pillar-shaped tree trunk with sturdy limbs. From these, branches create a network of twigs and leaves.
That’s a great way to think of the content cluster strategy. Clustered content uses a central web page or blog post as an information-rich overview of important topics. Anchor text within various sections link to separate posts covering subtopics in deeper detail, and within these, links return traffic to the core “pillar” pages. This strategy bolsters your claims to keywords related to the primary topic and helps your audience easily find information relevant to them.
How do content clusters enable website agility and growth? They’re easy to plan, write, and integrate into your growth-driven site as you develop new markets, products, and services. Creating clustered content as packages channels your efforts and research time toward one specific subject at a time and lets you (or your outsourced content writers) “get ‘er done” with efficiency, consistency, and tailored appeal. After all, you adjust your tone to suit specific audiences, don’t you?
Once you have a strong pillar page seeded with a few supporting articles, you can add new subtopics and clusters as time and trends dictate. Before you know it, you’ll have a ready-made, comprehensive collection of useful information to convert to ebooks..
Conclusion
Growth-driven design strategies require a shorter timeline to launch and are scalable to your budget–a huge plus for startups, rebranding, and small businesses.
Incorporating a growth-driven design strategy is the most efficient and economical way to develop your digital marketing roadmap, whether you’re starting from scratch or giving your existing website an overhaul. A growth-driven design strategy delivers the best user experience and is ideal for staying current with SEO.
